Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 734: The Most Important Player on Every Postseason Team

Episode Date: September 29, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Clayton Kershaw, Jake Arrieta, and Jerry Dipoto, then pick the player each playoff team would be most screwed without.

Yeah, I'm lost without you. It's all coming to me now. Yeah, I'm lost without you. All I do is look around. Yeah, when will I confess? Good morning and welcome to episode 734 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi, Ben. Hi. How are you?

Doing a little play indexing. Yeah? Yeah. I don't know if this is a fun fact or not it's a fact evan nova yankees pitcher pitched in his 16th game of the season tonight last night if you're listening to this on tuesday and he lost that game and he now has 16 decisions in 16 games so i was curious to see how often that happens or what's the most games that a pitcher has pitched in and had a decision in all of them. And it turns out that Ivan Nova is doing something we haven't seen in quite some time.

He has the most games in a season with a decision in every game since Gary Nolan had 16 in 1969. So he's tied for the most since world war ii cool i think that we did a play index on this one time oh uh on i think we were looking for most decisions in a season so not you didn't have to be perfect but most decisions i think i did a little play indexing tonight as well oh yeah found a little fun fact what's that tj house uh-huh made four starts this year okay all in april and uh in those four starts he allowed as many runs as zach granky allowed through july 25th that's impressive he allowed 19 by the way he allowed 19 jake arietta has allowed nine in the second half jake arietta's second half is unbelievable yeah i don't really recall a pitcher being this good i mean there hasn't hasn't been one it's not

that i don't recall i've seen a ton of stats about how, you know, he has the lowest second half ERA of any starter who's made at least 10 starts and he has the best 10 start stretch of anyone since Bob Gibson. And it's just crazy. There's like a new ESPN stats and info packet on Jake Arrieta every day with some crazy new stat about how good he's been. I actually think that Kershaw was better during his stretch this year than Arrieta is. And I don't know if the ERA might not have been as low. I mean, Kershaw also had 100 plus inning stretch with an ERA under one. But I mean, I just think Kershaw's dominance. So, let's see.

Kershaw, I'm going to go from May 26th to September 2nd. Okay. Which is 18 starts. And I didn't, those might not be the best. I could probably have done it better if I'd made it shorter. But, 18 starts, 1.26 ERA, 135 innings, 178 strikeouts, 18 walks. And, I mean, you know, he basically went 18 starts. He was striking out 10 a game and walking one a game,

pretty much on the nose, for 18 starts. It's Rich Hill-esque. Yeah. So let me see. I could probably even do better. Hang on. Let me see the best I can do. We did this already this year.

We had this exact, basically, conversation. Kershaw had a 90-inning stretch where he was at 1.1 ERA, and in 12 starts he had 120 strikeouts and 12 walks. Basically the same thing. So Arrieta, yes, also very good. But, you know, like he's been era good he's been he's been amazing across the board but he's you know his fit during this time is probably like two and a quarter or something like that and it's mostly the lack of home runs that have

even kept that absolutely low. I mean, he's been really good, but he's striking out a batter an inning. He's walking a batter for every four or five. It's good. It's great. Garbage. He's not, I don't know, he's not quite doing what Kershaw is doing, especially considering that the ERA gap, I mean,

his ERA is.8 in 100 innings so that's really good like but the era gap is not massively different i don't think uh he's got an era of 0.9 in 125 innings let's say 0.89 in 141 oh we were wondering if we had anybody that we could get to 162 innings with a sub. That was what we talked about with a sub Gibson ERA. I don't think you can get Arrieta there yet

and he no, you can't. If you go to 158 innings, it's now 125. You can't get Arrieta there, unfortunately. But very close. He's like 18 pretty good innings away from having a Gibson, a qualified Gibson. I think he's allowed as many home runs in the second half as he's hit.

Yeah. Two. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah. That is pretty good. It'd be better if he hit more. That's true.

He's not hitting that many, to be honest. No, although he hit one opposite field. That was impressive. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about something. I noticed that Chris Singleton on the Sunday night game on the radio side was talking a lot about the ability of Francisco Cervelli to get strike calls for his pitchers. And this is what we call framing.

It is. It is not what Chris Singleton calls framing. He uses a different term for it. He calls it presentation. And he said the word presentation about, I don't know, 30 times. So it wasn't an accident. It wasn't like he just got tired of saying framing and he mixed it up.

He refers to this skill as presentation. And I wonder if you think that that's a better phrase. And I guess more than that, if you think that framing is itself a bad phrase, a loaded phrase, a phrase that would be better to be replaced. I've heard presentation and I think it's good. I like it. So many syllables though. Twice as many syllables as framing. Who has time for all those syllables? I know that

some people don't like framing. They prefer receiving or because framing has the connotation that you're trying to make something that's not a strike a strike, which is true sometimes, but not all the time. Sometimes you're just trying to keep a strike from being a ball. So I think there are advantages to other terms. Framing also has a crooked meaning, a dishonest meaning, and not the same. I mean, what you're doing is not sending an innocent man to jail for a crime he didn't commit. However, they both involve

essentially lying about the acts or lying about, I don't know, lying about the legality of something. And so there's a kind of a way that I don't know if it does or not, but you could see that that might subtly promote the idea that this is actually a dishonest thing. And I know there are some people who will comment in an article that you write about framing that they kind of disapprove of it, that they think that what we're basically describing is not cheating, but also not really good, not by the rules. So yeah, maybe a less loaded term would catch on i don't know sure all right presentation okay i see you've resumed your quest to get people to

spell jerry depoto correctly now that jerry depoto's back in the news for being hired as mariners gm wherever jerry depoto is or wherever people are spelling his name, there's Sam Miller reminding them that the P is not capitalized. Yeah, it's not every single time, but usually what will happen, like I don't want to make anybody look bad, but today I was seeing the normal amount of capital P DePotos, and then I noticed a tweet from one of my writers doing it. And it wasn't deliberately a subtweet or anything like that. But it just, I felt like I had not been doing enough lately.

It had been probably two years since I had brought this important news to the public. So I just thought that it was time to have a little refresher. I think it's the DePodesta effect is responsible for this. Because we're used to calling deep adesta depot and deep adesta has a capital p and he's a prominent baseball executive i think there's a carryover effect to jerry depoto yeah it could be i um the other thing about Jerry DePoto is that as a player, it was capital P. Like back then, I don't know if it's just that he wasn't in control of his brand the way he is now or what. But if you look back then, all the references to him as a player were capital P. And in fact, for a while, it's not anymore.

I just checked. It's not anymore. But for a while, baseball reference had capital P checked it's not anymore but for a while baseball reference had capital p for his player page but lowercase p for his manager page and so i sometimes uh i actually think that i got in an argument about this with jason one time where i wanted i was pushing to have a reference to him as a player be capitalized or like it might have been an article about him being a gm and it said like as a player depoto had you know for this many teams or something and i wanted in this article of all lowercase p's exactly to have one capital p because as a player he was capital p depoto at this depoto never played if you. Yeah, he's like the subtlest Stefan or Kel change ever.

Just drop the P. Old new guy. All right, Gerard, by the way. This is another thing about Jerry. Gerard is his first name. Gerard with a G. Oh, wow. Jerry with a J.

See? Parks and Rec character. Gerard DePoto, the player with a capital P. Jerry DePoto, the GM with a J. See? Parks and Rec character. Gerard DiPoto, the player with a capital P. Jerry DiPoto, the GM with a J. All right. Ben, how are you? Okay. Any banter?

We've been bantering. Okay. I don't know if you noticed. Today I wanted to ask you about the most important player on every postseason team. The reason I want to ask you about this is that Yadier Molina is, he's out for the regular season. We don't yet know what his availability will be in the post season. However, he's not playing right now. And there's, when this news came out a week or so ago, there was a round of discussion in the public about whether Yadier Molina was in fact the greatest player in

the history of the world, the most valuable player in baseball, or just a guy with a three war or whatever, or something in between, whether he's overrated, underrated, or perfectly rated. And for instance, Molly Knight had a tweet at the time that he was disabled that said, If Yachty Molina is out for the year, then RIP to the Cardinals. Hashtag RIP. No player more valuable to any team than he is. And then she continued, This isn't a dig on any other player or team. Yachty controls the game better than anyone.

Toys with hitters like they're marionettes. And you, of course, have been a, maybe as much as any person in the world, have been responsible for the inflated value of the Molina name, maybe? Arguably. That's my part. Yeah.

And so I don't know where you currently stand on Yachty Molina. We also, not just his regular defense, not just his framing, which at various points in his career has also been good. We also have had Harry Pavlidis on here to talk about how the value of catcher's game calling is now close to within our grasp or perhaps within our grasp as analysts. And I believe Molina also does very well there. So anyway, question kind of that started this is, is Molina in fact the most valuable player on the Cardinals? If you were the

Cardinals and if an evil villain came to you and said, 24 of these ballplayers can be yours, but I'm going to take one, who would you want him to choose? Would you want him to take, or I guess maybe the better question is, if you were the Pirates and you got to take a player, who would you take off the Cardinals? So the most controversial team to do this for would be the Cardinals, I think, because of the Molina factor. And so first, let's just start. Who do you give up, Or who is the last person you give up if you're the Cardinals?

Is it Molina? Or do you actually think that he's just a guy who's worth a couple of wins? Well, it was definitely Molina up until this year, I think. And this year, maybe it's a little bit closer. I mean, Molina, the last few years has, I think, been one of the best players in baseball, maybe even an MVP candidate if you factor in all the non-war things. Yeah. Well, in 12 and 13, he was, yeah, I mean, even if he never framed a pitch, even if he were just a normal catcher doing normal catcher things.

He was already an MVP candidate for those two years. He was a great hitter. He was great by any, even the most, even the least generous interpretation of him saw him as one of the great, great, great players in the game. And there is a, I don't know, there's a little bit here where, so the nickels law of catcher defense which you know but maybe some of the listeners don't know is an old baseball prospectus trope that went that the um the public opinion of a catcher's defense is inversely proportional to his offensive abilities so the worse you were as a hitter, the more flowery things people would say about your defense as a catcher.

And of course Molina was a great hitter for a few years. But there is a weird way where now he is again not. He reached his peak and now he's declining and doesn't seem to be a very good hitter anymore. And it's kind of now almost that it seems like the really exaggerated stuff is being said about him yeah there's always been a tendency to just go higher on how much he's worth like no matter what if you as soon as you put a number on how much he's worth and you could say he's worth 10 wins or something yeah someone will one-up you like you could you could say he was worth half the cardinals wins

or something and someone would tweet at you and say you're on you're not counting all the the leadership and all the intangibles like you could just name the cardinals win total for that year and say he was worth that many wins and someone would go higher so there is always a tendency i think to do that and people cited like era with and without melina a lot when he got hurt yeah and those stats are always sort of iffy especially if you're doing one season particularly because he catches almost all the games so you're talking about 10 games of tony cruz or something usually in the other group but there was an interesting stat david schoenfield i think had a sweet spot where he went back like six years yeah yeah and it was

a pretty big sample because even though tony cruz plays like 20 games a year, if you go back six seasons, I think he went. The Cardinals over that span were, I think, 585 at the time with Molina and something like 495 without Molina. They were a sub-500 team in games that Molina didn't play or didn't start, which is a pretty big gap. And it was something like 200 games, I think, almost, or 180 games or something in the non-Molina sample. So that's big enough that you can kind of buy it. I don't know whether it's actually making a sub-500 team into an almost 600 team.

It can't be that big, but i buy that it's big but that includes the time when molina was the best hitting catcher one of the best hitting catchers and now that he no longer seems to be and even some of his defensive stats while still good have taken a little step back i don't know if he's that type of transformative player anymore okay so to answer the question by the way he went down on september 20th yeah and i think the cardinals are yeah i think they're like eight and two or something like that since then yeah so i don't know if i had to take away someone five and two they're five and two think, the thing is, I don't think he's the best player on the Cardinals right now, but the drop-off from him to Cruz is still pretty significant.

Like, if you say that Jason Hayward is the best player on the Cardinals, or Matt Carpenter is the best player on the Cardinals, or Matt Holliday is the best player in the Cardinals or Matt Holiday is the best player in the Cardinals maybe their backups are better than Tony Cruz is so you know like if you have Holiday and Borges and Piscotty and Gritchuk and Hayward and all these outfielders and you lose one of them and maybe they can kind of handle that so I don't, who would the backup be for Carpenter? Because Carpenter has probably been their best hitter. And if it's going from Carpenter to our old favorite Pete Cosma or something,

that would be a pretty giant gap. Okay, so what's your answer? I suppose my answer is Carpenter. Do you think that Molina's particular skill set is one that is worth more in the postseason? Can you think of any reason why? Like, for instance, if he's the pitcher whisperer, maybe that's more important in games where the pitchers are totally amped up. On the other hand, maybe you could say, no, he's only going to be catching the aces for the most part, and John Lackey doesn't need Yadier Molina to tell him how to be cool.

John Lackey is Mr. Cool. Or you could, I don't know, maybe you would argue that, I don't know, it's the best umpires are selected for the postseason, so maybe framing isn't as much of an issue. Or maybe you could argue, although it's not a big deal with Molina because he catches almost every day, but in the postseason he will catch every single day, and so you're going to get 15% more Molina than you would normally get in the regular season, something like that.

You could argue certainly that we know that run scoring goes down in the postseason. You're more likely to have closer games. You're more likely to have games where one run or 90 feet plays a crucial part. And so then maybe his, first of all, just simply the fact that he can cut down the running game helps, but also maybe an extra strike here and there matters more in that type of game, or maybe it doesn't.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe he's a little bit more valuable. But you're still going with Carpenter. You would say that if Carpenter were injured, you would tweet hashtag RIP. But with... Yeah, well, just looking at the depth chart and seeing Pete Cosma and Greg Garcia as the backup infielders, that would be a pretty drastic drop.

I guess I'll go with him. Speaking of injured, pretty indispensable Cardinals, the Carlos Martinez injury is kind of a killer. It hurts a lot, and we're not talking about pitchers specifically, is kind of a killer or it hurts a lot. And we're not talking about pitchers specifically, but if anyone hasn't seen the video of Pedro Martinez talking about Carlos Martinez in August and talking about how he's worried about his shoulder

because of his delivery, it's pretty interesting to go back and look at that now. And Pedro's sort of mentored the younger Martinez a little bit. There was a video of him talking to him and instructing him a little bit, I think at the All-Star game. But it was an interesting segment, and I don't know what exactly the root cause of Carlos Martinez's shoulder problem is, but if you didn't think Pedro was a genius and a national treasure,

then this is just some more evidence that he is great and that everyone should listen to him always. Okay, name another player on the team. Also, speaking of another potentially injured Cardinal, did you see the Steven Piscotty video tonight? No. Yeah, it was bad. It was like one of those sports videos that you have to attach a warning to if you're going to link someone to it or just tell them not to watch it.

It was like the Jason Kendall ankle video level almost of uncomfortable to watch. And apparently he's okay, which is incredible because if you watched it it looked like he was just totally blacked out he collided with peter borges at pretty much full speed and center and it looks like maybe a knee might have hit him in the head or something and he was lying there with his arm splayed out not responsive at all and he was taken off the field and it was scary looking but evidently he's okay all the tests were negative i don't know if they did test to make sure he's human because it looked like he must have had a concussion for sure and possibly something more serious but evidently not so that's good news okay good now this was our first example of uh talking about

a video on the podcast that nobody could watch and also i couldn't watch no one should watch yeah all right name another playoff team new york yankees all right should we just go by league no i don't want to do all of them we'll just name a couple we're doing all of them i changed my mind we're it's we're not gonna do all of them that'd be boring it's like there'd be like 12 teams and we're already 28 so that's what i'm saying just name a team whatever it doesn't matter all right so new york new york yankees all right well clearly the answer is derrick cheater right wouldn't it be amazing if they if derrick cheater like if they had secretly stashed derrick cheater and they could just bring him back it would be weird all right who uh who on the yankees are you keeping if you

can only protect one person from the evil devil well so we're not including pitchers because i guess yeah yeah yeah we are yeah sure oh okay well if we were including pitchers i might just go with like the ace for every team i'm not i'm not sure that's maybe that's the answer i mean that's what we're gonna discover yeah well for the yankees i might go with batantis honestly i think he is gonna pitch so much in the postseason if they you know get beyond the wildcard game, that that would be a real weapon. And it seems like Joe Girardi is good at managing a bullpen and getting the most out of his best relievers. And he's continued to use Batances a lot and in good situations, and he's continued to be very effective. And Andrew Miller is obviously a big part of that too but if i had to pick one person in the postseason it might be

batantis i mean i guess you could say tanaka since they are going to be in a wild card game and you need to win that one game to have a chance to advance to any other series so the ace the guy who'll be pitching that game is maybe the most indispensable but i would probably take batonsis over anyone in their lineup at this point yeah he uh the crazy thing is that batonsis is like half a win from being the team leader in warp yeah which is like a reliever right that's crazy that's insane that's an insane thing uh and in fact the leader is mark tashara and who they're not gonna have and uh r.i.p r.i.p yankees they lost their their best player yeah uh greg bird is good i'm a big greg bird fan yeah well so i mean you could like on a per plate appearance actually he's not to share

still ahead of him and so is mccann yeah i the yankees don't really have anybody who feels extremely valuable brett gardner is probably underrated as a very valuable part of the team no i didn't say very valuable i said extremely valuable like sorry like on the extremes like they don't really have one ace where you're like i can't lose him they have a whole bunch of pitchers who you're like can't lose any of them because they don't have enough good pitchers and yeah i mean they're a depth team i think batantes is a good one i don't know how much it matters that they have another guy who's like in some ways just as good or almost as good i don't know if batantes is any less valuable i guess he's probably somewhat less valuable by the presence of Andrew Miller and vice versa.

Because even though there's enough high leverage innings to go around, they are slightly less high. I mean, you put your best pitcher in the highest leverage as much as you can by definition. And so one of them is going to be getting second tier high leverage innings, but they're still going to be really high. I'm working on an article for later this week. I think it'll be up Thursday about some award races and just going as context sensitive as you can. So looking at win probability added and not

just win probability added, but the games in which a player had his win probability added. So, you know, if you were playing a division rival or something, then it matters more. So just going as far toward that end of the spectrum as you can, as opposed to the end of the spectrum where you just say Bryce Harper is the best player and he gets the MVP award, even though the Nationals won't make the playoffs. So if you do that and you just go completely context sensitive, the last time I updated the stats, which was last week, Batonsis would be your AL Cy Young winner. Yeah, there's no, that is a stat.

There's no RIP guy for the Yankees. Yeah, well, most teams don't have an RIP guy. No, well, right. There's no such thing as an RIP guy. Right. Like I think other than Bonds on those horrible Giants teams, there's never in history been an RIP guy. However, the Yankees have even less of an RIP guy than most. All right. Name another team.

Well, Blue Jays. I suppose Blue Jays, you just take the guy who's probably going to be the MVP, right? I don't know, Ben. I'm not sure. I don't know. You either take the guy who's probably going to be the MVP or the guy who very well might be the Cy Young winner. So they have a lot of really good players to choose from. So you can take Donaldson or you can take Price. I don't really have a strong opinion there. I might take Price. There's some recency bias here. This is obviously not the most likely outcome.

But a pitcher can do what Madison Bumgarner did. But there is no hitter equivalent. Like you can get hot. You could be hot. You could be as hot as you've ever been. But you can't play twice as many games yeah you just you can't you can't do it you get to play the number of games that you always play and so it's i mean i feel like it's probably right to take price over donaldson if you could

i mean i don't know again i don't think it probably matters that the Blue Jays have, like, other really awesome hitters behind Donaldson. It feels like it doesn't matter as much, but that's a fallacy. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. Donaldson, yeah, neither one of them is in any way a fluke. You'd be going from Donaldson to, I don't know, Chris Colabello or Matt Haig or someone. It would be a pretty steep drop off. Chris Colabello has the same on-base percentage and only 60 points of slugging from Donaldson.

Did you know Chris Colabello is hitting.322,.370,.514? I didn't know it was quite that good i knew he was having a good year that's really good uh i should just bench donaldson yeah so i would protect david price i think that's right okay all right name another team the mets might be an interesting one. Okay. Because the Mets have a lot of aces. So I don't know whether you'd take one of the aces. Well, like we talked about when we were doing the Harvey discussion, one thing about the Mets is that they're going to put a pretty good pitcher in the bullpen or out of the rotation.

Probably two pretty good pitchers, you know, depending on what you think of John Neese's semi-resurgence. But they could throw six guys into game four and not have you think it was outlandish. And so that kind of takes away the importance of DeGrom or Matt Harvey a little bit but i mean unless you think that cespedes is just not actually gonna play that well like how do you not take cespedes like if you the reason that you wouldn't take cespedes is well i had 2000 played appearances before two months ago and i had a pretty good idea of who he was and it was a good player but

not an rip player and that you're smart enough not to get swayed by two incredible months it's just a pretty good reason yeah no fun though no in fact uh on a per plate appearance basis i think conforto has been more valuable than cesspit is yeah it must be close it's very close On a per plate appearance basis I think Conforto Has been more valuable than Cespedes Yeah it must be close It's very close Like basically tied I think Conforto is slightly ahead

Maybe it's Addison Reed David Wright on a per plate appearance Addison Reed has not allowed a run as a Met On a per plate appearance basis David Wright is pretty close to it August 30th deadline David Wright They have DeGrom. August 30th deadline. Yeah. David Wright.

They have DeGrom and Harvey and Syndergaard who are all, I don't know if they're quite interchangeable, but they're all really, really good. And if you lost one of them, it would be bad, but it wouldn't be R.I.P. No one would say R.I.P. about that. If you lost Cespedes, people would say R.I.P. I don't know whether they'd be right, but they would say it. Well, it was pointed out a few weeks ago that the last three teams or all three teams that have traded away

Cespedes were in last place. Yes. And so there is a Ghani Jones kind of aura around him right now. If you were to lose him, yeah, people, a sudden people would be talking about what an idiot Billy Bean is again for some reason. They talk about Billy Bean. Yeah, I'm okay with going with him. All right, another team.

Dodgers. Okay, Dodgers. So I asked this question on Twitter recently. So I asked this question on Twitter recently. So Clayton Kershaw has like a 2.1 FIP, and he is healthy, and he is available. Zach Granke has like a 2.6 FIP, and he is healthy, and he is available. Now, if you didn't know either of their ERAs, how much higher would Kershaw's ERA have to be for you to choose Granke over Kershaw right now? Like a run and a half?

So if Kershaw's ERA were 3.1 right now, you would, as an analyst, as an objective person, you would think that Granke is a better pitcher than Kershaw? No. Even though, yeah, thank you. Retracted. And I've already given you his FIP, too. Like, the FIP is the real FIP. Kershaw's got the baseball's best FIP.

Yeah. And is Kershaw. And has a, yeah. So maybe three runs? I'll give you Granke's ERA. So you can know that Granke has a 1.63 or whatever ERA. Right. So if Kershaw's ERA is 4.6.

Yeah, so if he has a 4.6, then I'm guessing he's going to have to have given up lots of home runs. So you could make the case that FIP is not accurately capturing what he's doing, like the Lincecum kind of case. I don't know why Kershaw would fall into the same category as linticum but let's just say he did so yeah if his fit were over four maybe then then probably i would i would accept that maybe fit wasn't capturing something yeah i think that his era would definitely have to be over four and i'd have a hard time if it was over five. So around three runs seems right to me. You'd have a hard time starting five ERA Clayton Kershaw over 1.6.

Is that cranky? He's got the FIP, and he's been doing this for a very long time. I mean, even without the FIP, I still... Even without the FIP, if I didn't tell you his FIP either, and all you knew was his ERA... Same premise, except you know that Greinke has a 1.6 ERA and a 2.6 FIP. Kershaw has a 4.6 ERA, and you don't know his FIP. But he's healthy. You do know he's healthy.

Who do you pick to start a team next April? Or who do you think, I mean, Pocota would like Kershaw more even without, you would, even without knowing the FIP, you would probably bet that Pocota would like Kershaw more. You'd pick Kershaw. Yeah. So. Okay. So are those guys both good enough that either of them is an RIP player? If they're two of the three best pitchers in the National League, maybe either one of them has RIP potential. One of them won't throw as many innings, probably.

You can't have two guys go bum-garner. Yeah, that's true. Although you can have a shilling, Johnson. Yeah, you could. If you had, yeah, you couldn't quite. I think it'd be impossible. But you could get close. Well, there are no RIP guys.

But Kershaw is, Kershaw is the, see, some people are right now yelling that Kershaw sucks in the postseason and the Cardinals have his number. So putting that aside as nonsense, Kershaw is the closest thing to an RIP guy in baseball right now, right? Well, yeah, probably. If I had a team that had Kershaw and Trout or Kershaw and Harper, I would rather have Kershaw for the postseason than either of those guys. Yeah, that makes sense for postseason. So he is the ultimate RIP guy. The Dodgers would be fine without him like they would they wouldn't be fine they'd be a lot worse but they'd still be a above average

team yeah not an above average playoff team though all right one more cubs oh okay i was gonna pick no okay well rangers you can pick one too rangers. Rangers. Rangers. All right. Beltre. Yeah, Beltre hasn't been that great this year. He doesn't have power anymore. He started slow. Yeah, he doesn't have much power anymore. By warp, he's half, roughly half of what Shinsu Chu is. And I don't know if in this scenario you get to still have him be around.

I get the feeling that Beltre is like one of the, at least I think it's perceived as such and convincingly enough that I believe in it, that Beltre is an elite chemistry guy. Yeah, there could be a placebo effect with certain guys also. Yeah, that's true. Especially with Molina. If everyone on the Cardinals believes that Molina is an RIP guy then yeah maybe he is closer to one than he would be otherwise so it seems like your choices are for the in for the Rangers are basically

Chu who is the actual leader by warp Beltre who is the perceived best player and might still be and also what we just said or cole hamels who is you know the ace and the ace of a staff that has not many pitchers yeah and who is not anywhere near the warp leaderboard for the rangers but would be if he had been there all year beltray had a 685 ops in the first half 841 in the second half coming into monday and still elite defense yeah like 841 is is good but it's also it's in texas and you have to regress that some because the first half did happen. And he's probably like a... I mean, at this point, he's been a slightly above average hitter this year, and I don't think it's that controversial to accept that.

He's 36. He's been on this earth a long time. Yeah, I have a hard time naming Shinsu Chu as an RIP player. Yeah, me too. I'm not going to go with him. So yeah, maybe Hamels just based on the pitcher in the postseason throwing a higher percentage of innings effect and the fact that the Rangers don't have the greatest pitching staff.

So sure, Cole Hamels. I mean, yeah, the Rangers pitching staff is really, it's kind of, I don't know, it's bad enough behind Hamels that they could actually need him to eat innings, which isn't something that you normally hear in the postseason. But, you know, it's not that good. Yeah. So, all right, Cubs, we can do the Cubs.

Cubs is Arrieta, right? It's got to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's an easy one. you know it's not that good yeah so all right cubs we can do this arietta right it's gotta be yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's an easy one what about pirates is it cole or is it mccutcheon or is it cervelli could be cervelli presentation is fantastic yeah i i don't i think that i would go mccutcheon yeah mccutcheon Cole. The wildcard game sort of skews things, because if you know you're going to be in the wildcard game, and you know that a certain guy is going to be your starting pitcher, just that alone, regardless of what might happen later in the postseason, Garrett Cole has the ability to affect the Pirates World Series odds

maybe in that one game more than anyone else would in the rest of October? It would essentially be like if you had a pitcher who could start all seven games of the LCS. Yeah, right. So yeah, that's probably true. He will definitely, no matter what happens to the Pirates, he will almost definitely lead the team

in World series win probability added or lost now it's not like without cole they would have nobody good liriana is really good but yeah he's not as good as cole so that's reasonable okay royals last one roy Last one, Royals. Oh, yeah. After the Yadier Molina, that was the one I was thinking the most about. I'd say Wade Davis. Hmm. And it's either Wade Davis, Johnny Cueto, or Lorenzo Cain, right? Yeah.

So I guess the reservation with Davis is that maybe he doesn't have as much multi-inning potential as Batonsas does. I mean, he does have some. He did do that. He can do that. But yeah. And also the Royals' other alternatives are better than the Yankees' other alternatives. Right. So I don't know if I would go with Davis. I think I might say Keane.

If Cueto, if I were more confident in Cueto, you might say Quaedo because the Royals rotation is a little bit shaky too. Although Ventura has been better. But given that Quaedo has not been super reliable lately either, I think I might go with Kane. Yeah, I would definitely go Kane over Quaedo at this point. And you're probably right. Okay. Okay. All right.

And Astros, I'm going to say Keichel. Over Correa? Ooh, actually. you're probably right okay okay all right and astros i'm gonna say keitel over korea who actually well man keitel's really good i'd go korea keitel you have the the same wild card game argument that we were just making for cole versus mccutcheon but yeah i guess i'm okay with Correa over Marwin Gonzalez. That's a pretty big gap. All right. We have covered probably every team. Apologies to AO wildcard contenders who we have not talked about. Mike Trout for the Angels and Miguel Sano for the Twins, just for completion's sake.

So we've successfully discussed a premise that neither of us believed in for quite a long time r.i.p this topic all right we'll probably do an email show next so we could definitely use some emails please send us some emails podcast at baseball perspectives.com you can of course ask each other questions at any time in the facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild rate review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. I appreciate some of the recent reviews I've noticed and support our sponsor, the play index, go to baseball reference.com, use the coupon code BP and get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We'll be back tomorrow.