Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 748: The Endangered Diner Edition

Episode Date: October 21, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Ben’s endangered diner and position player pitching, then answer listener emails about shutdown innings, evaluating GMs, and more.

I have a torch, I have a torch, I have a torch, I have a torch You can really get it on, you can really get it on I was at an all night diner, the signs of Triple S but they were talking about root beer I'm just sitting down thinking about nothing, looking at the skin, breathing up the oxygen Good morning and welcome to episode 748 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Hello. So what type of plane was it?

Smaller than a 747. Yeah, I figured. I haven't been than a 747. Yeah, I figured. I haven't been in a 747 in years. I always enjoyed it, though. You know? Like, do you know when you walk on? Can you identify your plane? Well, you can tell a 747 because it's got the bump in the front with the upstairs.

Uh-huh. Very distinctive. Is that as far as your knowledge goes goes or are you a fleet fanatic? No, I'm not a hardcore plane guy, but I've been in a lot of planes and I have probably wrong ideas about which models I prefer. I might just start listening to everything you say and imagining that it is somebody from the 1940s bragging. I've been in a lot of planes. I wonder how many things you say every day would fit this character that I'm now inventing of you,

of like an American just coming out of the Depression, bragging, like who moved to California or something and is bragging to your friends back home. I don't know. What else do I say to your friends back home. I don't know. What else do I say that would fit the character? I don't know. I'm going to have to start paying attention. Okay.

Good question. That might be it, but it might not be. I like Douglas DC-3s. Those are my favorite planes. Okay. All right. So my diner is closing. Oh, God.

That's the exact opposite. This is now – this is 10 years earlier. This is the same character except 10 years earlier bemoaning how bad things have gotten. Yeah. This is rough. This diner actually is – So can I – you won't do service to what you do with this diner. Okay.

So let me tell everybody that I don't think I've ever laid it out. Maybe I have. It's okay. People don't listen that carefully. We repeated ourselves yesterday. So Ben has a diner near his house that, as everybody knows, he goes to a lot. And I've eaten there. I ate a meal there with Brad Ancrum and Tommy Bennett and Ben about four years ago, and it was fine.

It was on an episode of Elementary, which is a show I care a great deal for. It was referred to on Seinfeld. That bumps it a little bit. Now, here's the thing, though. Ben doesn't go there a lot like a lot of people go places a lot. He's not a regular. Every single day, every single day, every day, Ben goes to this diner and orders a vegetarian omelet, a chicken wrap, a salmon Caesar salad and soup, which is like $45 worth of food. salad, and soup, which is like $45 worth of food. Every day, he spends $45 on this food, takes it home, eats everything but the wrap, and then two hours later, he eats the wrap.

That's what he eats. That is his entire consumption of convertible energy each day. Okay. Well, that's not remotely true. What do you mean? This is how you described it to me multiple times. What did I miss? You got the meal right. It's not nearly every day. You implied to me that it was. Was it at one point every day? No. It's probably the one place that I eat more often than any other place, but it not an everyday thing how many days a year maybe like 50 oh that's see that's much lower than it was implied to me by you by you yeah i don't go there that much but it's it's a block away and it's open 24 hours

and i'm open 24 hours often so i go there and it's uh you know it's hell's kitchen it's the extreme west side so it's not the best place for places to eat and so i'm gonna be sorry to lose it but it is i go there often enough that if it's the right time whoever's there knows what i want yeah Yeah. So I have passed that baseline level of going there. So I'm sad. That's, by the way, I would say that bragging about your diner, knowing your order, fits 1940s boasts.

Yeah, that's true. Okay. Small town diner. All right. So since this is a casual episode, now you're going to hear me making coffee. Just so you know. This is that casual today. Just like going to the diner so they're closing but is it not a chain

like it's not a chain now and as you know I have no problem with chain diners as we discussed that too but it's not a chain when it goes it's the last of its kind Wow so if you're in New York and you want to make it to the Market Diner, go sometime soon. Are they building something there or is it just... Yeah, they're putting up an apartment building. Wow. It's very sad. It's been there since the 60s in one form or another.

Frank Sinatra used to go there and I go there. But that's not enough to save it. Anyway. So Cliff Pennington pitched in a playoff game that was weird that was the first time a position player has pitched in a playoff game so that's a milestone in position player pitching yeah that was a weird game too because that I mean I almost wonder if this was semi-intentional but I it probably wasn't but I mean the blue jays that was just as bad a game as you could could have i mean they just got completely walloped they it got it got ugly i would say like it wasn't just this game wasn't competitive as this game was it

was less competitive than the score was which is its own kind of damning indictment like it never even though it wasn't really a blowout. The score was 14 to 2, so. No, no, but I'm saying for most of the game, it wasn't. It was like 5 to 2 or something through 6, right? And yet the Blue Jays had no threats, no particular good takeaway even through that. It was already a dispiriting, half-hearted, walking dead kind of loss. And then all of a sudden, they just get completely stomped on.

And it's humiliating and embarrassing and the whole country is watching them just get trashed. And then Cliff Pennington comes out and the dugout is like laughing and giddy and smiling. And all of a sudden, it sort of removed the perhaps extreme disappointment and anxiety that a team might feel going down three games to one against the defending AL champions in a blowout loss like that.

And they were like laughing and joking. It was like, we're going to see Cliff Pennington pitch, which isn't even that exciting a thing. Like, it's not like Cliff Pennington is like each row. Like, finally, for years, we've wondered what it would be like if cliff pennington pitched in a playoff game wasn't that at all and yet they were they seem to be having a good time he threw 91 though he did that was impressive as joe lemire pointed out he threw harder than chris young has thrown all year yeah what do you think the average velocity would be for... Let's go by position.

If every player who started 50 games at each position this year pitched, what would be the mean velocity for each of those positions? Well, you'd have catchers, third basemen, and right fielders, I guess, would be your top tier. You think third base over shortstop? I don't know. Maybe there's not much of a difference there. I don't know.

So catchers would be number one, maybe? I'm not so much asking you to rank them. I'm asking for numbers. Just numbers. So, well, the top tier i would guess i mean there are a lot of guys who have good arms but have no mechanics or anything but if you just wanted to throw one pitch they could probably average i want them to pitch and i want them to face a batter or at least three batters so not enough enough that I'm going to see a fatigue set in,

but enough that they have to repeat it. Well, I think if you took the top couple positions as an average, I think they could pitch to a batter at an average speed of 87 miles per hour. Okay. Go through the eight positions in baseball that aren't pitcher and put a number on each position for what the average player at that position can throw from a mound with a windup. All right.

Catcher, 89. Third base, right field, 87. Third base, 84. Shortstop 83 Centerfield 80 And then I don't know what do we have left Left field and second base and first base

So I'll say left field I mean I'm already Probably too low already I think I'm too low But if I said What was I down to like 80 or something For center field That's'm too low. But if I said, what was I down to, like 80 or something for center field? That's probably too low already. But, you know, subtract a couple miles per hour for each of the remaining positions.

So I think there would be a spread of, say, from catcher to second base or whatever would be probably like at least 15 mile per hour spread. I don't know that 80 is necessarily too low. Maybe not. I mean, you know, you have your Johnny Damons and your, you know, Bernie Williams is out there. So I don't know. It just seems like. Well, what did TJ hit? TJ was like 74, right?

Oh, our third baseman on the Stompers? Yeah. I don't think so. I think he was lower than that. He was effective effective but i don't think he threw that hard i think there'd be a a big spread but i bet like the lowest possible position i mean what would second what would be the weakest second base what would or first base one of those yeah i think probably first base so first and second would both be weak we also our catcher who we who had a good arm parker he said that uh he wouldn't be able to really crack 80 and he's a catcher and

he's got a pretty good arm now an indie ball arm right low indie ball but i mean don't you think that parker's got a better arm than most second baseman in the majors yeah i think so anyway i think that short stops would be the, the fat, I bet short stops might even top catchers, but maybe not. Maybe they wouldn't top catchers, but I would put short stops over right fielders and third baseman. Okay. All right. What do you think the range would be? Like 76 for first baseman. Ah, that might be a little low for an average, but yeah, like 70, seven high seventies. Nah, I'll go 76 for first baseman and 88 for shortstops, 89 for shortstops. That doesn't feel like a big enough spread, does it?

But I guess we're talking about averages. Yeah, that's about what I was thinking, so it makes sense. All right. So Zach emailed us about something in response to your play-in-deck segment from yesterday on guys who hit a high percentage of their home runs. Solo shots, and I had heard about this but forgot about it marwin gonzalez on the astros has 24 career major league home runs and all of them are solo homers and obviously didn't meet the baseline for your play index which was 50 solo home runs but he's half the way there and he hasn't hit a multi-run homer yet. Yeah.

So good for him. It's a good one. It's the Webb Albers of hitting solo homers. It is. There's no way that survives, right? No, it can't last long. How many years would you allow Marwin Gonzalez to stay in the majors and have it be 50% likely that that stat survives?

It's like two months, right? If he plays two more months, you would probably figure it won't survive? Yeah, I mean, he hit 12 home runs this year in 370 plate appearances, so he has some power. I don't know how much he'll play next year but but yeah i wouldn't bet on that continuing past like like whatever the percentage of home runs that are not solo shots which i don't know if you know but i mean you know i guess uh three quarters of them over or how what percentage about half about half are solo and about half come with men on them so a little slightly higher are solo, but not by much.

Okay, so I wouldn't really bet on him going more than three homers without doing one. Yeah. Anyway, fun while it lasts. Joe Sheehan made an interesting point in his newsletter yesterday about the way that we think about starts in the playoffs, or not even just in the playoffs, but even in this enlightened age when we don't really pay that much attention to pitcher wins,

even when Chris Young came out of the game yesterday after four and two-thirds and said he's totally fine with it because pitcher wins are stupid, which was nice to see, I suppose, we still kind of react very differently depending on what the score is when a pitcher leaves the game. And Joe is comparing Marcus Stroman and David Price and their starts in the current series. And Stroman pitched to six and a third, and he gave up four runs and 11 hits, and he walked a guy, and he only struck out one guy, and he gave up four runs and 11 hits and he walked a guy and he only struck out one guy

and he got a standing ovation when he walked off the mound whereas price pitched six and two thirds so he went a little bit farther than stroman did and he also gave up four runs on five fewer hits and one less walk and he struck out seven more guys and yet david price is kind of i don't know a choker or he fell apart or boojays fans probably are not having the same feelings about david price that they are about marcus stroman right now and that's pretty much entirely dependent on how many runs the boojays scored in the games that they pitched that's a really interesting point i do think that there's kind of been a collective delusion about how well Marcus Stroman has pitched of late,

and particularly in the postseason. And yeah, I hadn't even really thought about that. But yeah, you're right. Yeah, Joe's right. Yeah, and even like the two Jake Arrieta starts, his most recent starts, like they were just about exactly the same. Like one was five and two thirds, one was five, one was five hits, one was four hits.

They were both four runs, two walks, and either eight or nine strikeouts. But the Cubs scored eight runs in the first game he pitched. And I guess there was some surprise that he just allowed runs at all, because we hadn't seen that in a while. But he still won the game and no one said Jake Arrieta is falling apart or anything but then the second game the Cubs scored one run and Arrieta lost and suddenly people were talking about fatigue and velocity loss and is he okay and it was also sort of score dependent. And he gives a couple other examples. But that's clearly still a thing, I think. Even though we don't think about wins and losses so much,

the amount of praise or criticism a pitcher gets is definitely dependent on how many runs his team scores and what the score is when he leaves the game. I think that the standing ovation part I'm okay with because it's partly just a way for the crowd to release its excitement about being ahead in the game. It's not necessarily – it's close, but it's not necessarily an individual-specific celebration. And there is just something about saying, hey, our starting pitcher is leaving and we're winning. This is awesome news. But when it comes down to letting a guy get through the fifth or I don't know. If you start making decisions based on it, then that's really problematic.

And with Arrieta, partly it's I think that – I think there was a little bit of concern after the first one. Yeah, maybe a little. And, of course, now there's two. There's more concern now because there's two. He had his two worst starts in four months, back to back. Yeah, okay. Well, it's something I will be keeping in mind. Are you worried about Arrieta?

Also, there's the velocity. His velocity was down, and his manager didn't seem to be all that thrilled with how he was throwing based on the decisions he was making and the words he was saying. So are you worried about Arrieta? Not really. Harry talked about it a bit on Monday's show, and Harry is better at diagnosing pitchers than I am probably, and he wasn't worried about it

he thought he was actually too amped up as opposed to too fatigued so I don't know how many pitchers how many starting pitchers currently in the postseason would you rather have a start a game for you than Arietta right now so you've got nobody on the royals you've got nobody on the blue jays unless you think price still and then you've got you've got them yeah maybe de grom maybe cinder guard but not by a clear margin and not harvey i don't think so i mean the fact that you're considering this suggests that you you also have changed pretty strikingly your assessment about arietta because if i'd asked you two starts ago it would have been cranky kershaw arietta and then like a huge tear right probably i mean we talked about how arietta versus cole is a pretty healthy mismatch and Cole is might be better than anybody left in the postseason

at this point DeGrom's probably better probably but that's why I said might yeah I guess it has changed my mind slightly I'd probably still take our yeah okay well so I didn't hear it but what's the two amped how does that work because his his average fastball was two mile two and a half miles an hour lower or two miles an hour lower than against the Cardinals, and like a mile and a half lower than against the Pirates, and basically a mile to a mile and a half lower than his norm, which that sort of fluctuation in one start isn't necessarily anything. But how did that square with the two amped uh explanation he thought he was rushing through his delivery and that the biggest problem was his command and yeah okay okay yeah makes sense all right so we're gonna just answer a few questions that we didn't get to answer yesterday but i would still like to answer so i I'll start with, well, let's start

with Michael, who basically just wants to know why we hear about shutdown innings at this time of year. Why post-season broadcasters latch onto this idea? I think that you hear regular season announcers talk about shutdown innings a lot. Shutdown innings are pretty constant in my life. I don't hear them much in December and January. I will say that. But, I mean, even like I know I've, for instance, the Giants announcers, Kruko and Kuyper, talk about shutdown innings and have for years.

And I even love those guys. Uh-huh. I feel like I hear them a lot more now. I don't know, maybe it's just the local broadcasts I'm listening to or not ones that talk about it, but once you get to the playoffs, it's every game, it's every other inning just about. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure. When do you think you first heard of the concept of a shutdown inning?

For me, it was not long ago. I feel like there was one postseason, maybe two or three years ago, where all of a sudden shutdown innings, I mean, maybe I had heard it before, but I remember just not knowing what it was at one point, just hearing it and not recognizing it. So it's definitely not something that I've been aware of since I started watching baseball. I don't know if it has existed in some form. Maybe it has, but there was a time not long ago when I was introduced to the concept. I feel like every time a stat head invents a new stat a non-stat head also invents a new stat yeah it's like an arms race between the the good things you can say and the dumb things you can say yeah there's this perfect equilibrium and if we all just shut up then the whole world would go silent and we would just sleep very peacefully. So I don't know. I mean, I guess I get the appeal of, as a broadcaster,

it sort of gives you some stakes for that inning or it gives you some extra suspense for that inning. Is it going to be a shutdown inning? It's something, I don't know, it's something to say. You're just desperate for things to say well postseason is also much more momentum focused than right and it fits with that i mean that's what a shutdown that's all that a shutdown ending exists as is potentially a way of looking at momentum right it's the idea is you is you've taken this extremely valuable thing, which is momentum.

You finally have taken it. Now, are you going to keep it or are you going to – is it going to be like one of those fumbles where the defensive lineman picks it up and has never held a football before and immediately loses it again? Yeah. And now the other team is running – the offense is all of a sudden running for a touchdown. Or are you going to hold on to it? Are you going to nurse it?

Are you going to be able to ride this little wave for the rest of the day? And you hear the idea of momentum on different time frames pretty much constantly throughout the postseason. You have the momentum of the season going into the series. You have the day-to-day momentum of it you have the question of whether sweeping a team gives you too much time to lose your momentum before the next series starts um and you have the within game momentum and so it makes sense that they're just they're like this idea that we need to talk constantly about the postseason as a, you know, as a wave that is, that some team is riding to the finish, that we're going to get more and more specific in where we

look at it. And now we've reached the innings level. Eventually we'll be at the subatomic level. And in between, we'll have the within innings we'll have the within an inning momentum uh and then we'll have the within an in bat momentum and eventually we'll see into our own souls right it's such a strange idea i'm i'm pro shut out innings i like shut out innings shut down nobody's nobody is saying is saying, I think that, look, it's a dumb banality. It means it doesn't really mean all that much. It's not really particularly a skill separate from all other baseball skills. And so, yeah, just don't say it.

That would be fine. You're not really adding anything. But they're not really subtracting anything either. They're filling your ears with words that don't move you but it's like that it's not really like they're saying anything controversial you actually do want to go out and pitch a scoreless inning and you could argue that you could argue i don't there's no evidence for this, but based on the way baseball players feel and storytellers in general feel, there's added value to it in this situation where maybe momentum is about to tip one way or the other.

And I don't know, as a reflection of how I think that the players themselves feel sometimes, a reflection of how I think that the players themselves feel sometimes. The dispiriting way that a pitcher maybe can't protect a lead, it kind of brings you into the ballplayer mindset or into the dugout mindset, but it's fairly harmless otherwise, right? Well, everything on a baseball broadcast is harmless. So I don't know. Russell Carlton wrote about it a couple of years ago and found that there was no real significance to it. So it's just a, I don't know, it's just a strange mindset where you repeat this thing over and over without ever checking to see if it means anything, if it tells you anything. I wouldn't want to do that. I don't know. Like the first question I had when I heard it the first time was, does this tell you anything that a shutout inning doesn't? And it doesn't. I don't know why it's this time of year, but you're probably right. It's a momentum time of year.

Yeah. If you could compare like the players' brain chemistry, what they're feeling when a pitcher allows a run in a shutdown inning as opposed to some other inning i bet it would be the same yeah if you could look at the you know the dopamine or the opposite of dopamine or whatever it is yeah i think you're right i think i'm gonna i'm gonna join you on this side actually i think you're probably right it there is something that there there is something distracting about focusing so much attention on things that aren't true. And I guess maybe it isn't quite totally harmless. And you're right.

Because it's not purely descriptive. They will show a guy's performance in shutdown innings. And the implication, if you're showing that, is probably that it's not completely random, right? Because if it were, then why bother showing it? Yeah, you're right. Okay. I 100% agree. All right.

Okay, Brady says, do projection systems factor in postseason performance when projecting next season? Not that they'd inappropriately leverage the postseason numbers or anything, just that there'd be more data to collect from. And they don't. But it would probably be good if they did. Not that good, but it would probably help, I think. If you could include an extra month of information on some guys and an extra month of performance against really good pitchers, I don't know what the maximum that you would move a projection is. I mean, what would Daniel Murphy's projection shift if you could include postseason? Probably like two points of true average or something going into next year. Maybe slightly less, but yeah.

There's no reason for a projection system to ignore it other than that it's somewhat more complicated, right? These numbers are in different data fields, and now you've got to merge them. Right. And you'd have to adjust for the quality of competition. Yeah. And it would only be some guys getting that data and other guys not getting it. So I don't know that it would be worth the processing power but if you could design an ideal projection system that took into account everything

then you would certainly want postseason in there yeah i i'm i can't remember who it was but a couple years ago i did a post after the postseason that looked at which players' season lines had most changed throughout, if you include their October stats. And there were a few interesting shifts in the way that you would view a player. Like, for instance, Mike Trout probably, if you'd had this, Mike Trout probably would have won the MVP because Miguel Cabrera wouldn't have won the batting title and therefore not the Triple Crown. And I forget who else. Bumgarner's year last year, if you look at ERA Plus, was like 115 or whatever. But if you include October, then now all of a sudden he's got the sixth best.

It's a totally made-up number, but the sixth best ERA Plus in the National League. And all of a sudden you see a pitcher who really is at a at a higher level than his regular season stats alone would have shown so there's a couple of players every year where their stats in the postseason give you uh added to their regular season give you a fuller picture of their true talent level and uh and and uh but in practice it's the exact opposite is the problem. They tend to get overvalued, and generally there's no real threat of a player's extreme postseason performance going overlooked or underweighted. Yeah, well, we talk a lot about how much players move their contract expectations.

In a short sample. We talked about it with Johnny Cueto yesterday. And John Heyman reported this morning that the Mets are now planning on offering a qualifying offer to Daniel Murphy, which you would think would not have happened before this postseason. So that means that either they think he's better than they thought he was a few weeks ago, or they think that someone else will think that he's better than they thought he was a few weeks ago and would therefore pay him more.

So that means that the Mets believe that this moves the needle on Daniel Murphy's projections or that someone else will believe that. So maybe a projection system would show that too. So like Jose Valverde, the year I did this, his ERA for the season went from 378 to 502, if you include the postseason. And that's a totally different season. And Ryan Vogelsang went from, I'm going to talk about wins for a second, but went from 14-9 to 17-9, which is a pretty big difference in what we think about as pitchers. And Robinson Cano's OPS dropped from like 930 down to like 870. That was right before he hit free agency, and that's a pretty big difference.

All right. that's a pretty big difference. All right. Lance in Dallas says, as a Rangers fan, it was hard to listen to your episode on the last game of the LDS or read or watch any postgame coverage. Most people are looking at the seventh inning from the Blue Jays' perspective, which they should, but it was just another creative and brutal way to end the season for Texas. Looking at the last six years in particular is a lesson in historic misery. 2010, dominated by Giants pitching in five games. 2011, game six, David Freeze. 2012, collapsed to the A's and dominated by Joe Saunders in wildcard game. 2013, lose play in game against David Price's Rays.

2014, the most injury-plagued season ever. 2015, the seventh inning. You could almost utter that terrible couldn't script this cliche, but really, how could anyone have? My question is whether you guys can think of any other specific fanbase or franchise that has suffered as inventive and tragic a resume over the span of six years. Throwing in the fact that the team has never won a World Series in its history, I'd argue that recent Rangers fans might have the strongest claim to suffering ever. I'm going to say no. No, they don't have the strongest claim to suffering ever?

Yeah, I'm going to say it's not that strong a claim to suffering. Suffering's the wrong word, and it's an exceptionally specific time frame to set your limits around. So in those two senses, there is a knee-jerk reaction to not want to give this guy that much credit. Yeah. Can you really suffer when your team has been to the World Series a couple of times and missed the playoffs only once and got arguably lucky as heck this year to make it and so it's all but it depends what you remember and what you focus on and in if the question is the hardest ways to lose i would probably rather be the i mean obviously i

would rather be the rangers than the 1990s and early 2000 pirates that that was suffering like that i can't imagine being a pirates fan during not quite that whole 20 year run but like 12 years i think is probably the most brutal way to be a fans a team's fan since the mid-century phillies yeah however if we're talking about competitive teams, teams that were World Series contenders, we all talk about how the playoffs are a crapshoot. Broaden out from, say, beyond six years and say, in the wildcard era, is there another team that has been more frustrated by the playoffs or a crapshoot format? And I would probably still pick the a's yeah over them uh and you can not only the a's

just generally like it's they've been there a lot they've had great teams they've had they've built great teams and then they've lost on crapshoots but i mean they you could also name specific like oh my gosh moments in their history like i said I think that last year's wildcard game was even more than this year's seventh inning. The flip is an oh my gosh. But I mean, they're what are they like? What is the stat? They're like oh and 12 in in clinch games or something like that. Like they've they've been on the cusp so many times. And there's no real reason to think that a team would be so good in the first couple games of a series and then just constantly unable to close it out. So I, and I made that stat up by the 0-12, by the way, but it's something.

It's something like that, yeah. And so I would say the A's have had it harder than the Rangers. Is there another team? I mean, the Yankees won that World Series. Otherwise, it'd be pretty miserable for them since 2001. But I'm not in any way into the Yankees. Yeah. The six-year time frame is tough because so much of how painful it is to lose has the weight of history behind it. So obviously, the inclination is to say the Cubs or the Red Sox or something,

but over a six-year span, maybe you couldn't come up with a six-year span that is quite so painful, except that every loss that those teams have is made worse by the decades and decades of losing that preceded it and so maybe you could say it's just the you know i like the indians or the indians probably haven't made the playoffs enough in a six-year span for it to be painful so maybe maybe depends how you think about disappointment because the fact that the rangers were in the playoffs at all this year was a nice surprise for them and so you kind of weigh that against the disappointment of losing and maybe it takes away from it a little bit the seventh inning was so strange on both sides i don't know how it feels for a rangers fan but it

was just so wacky i feel like it would be less painful that that happened just because it was so strange on both sides and it was just barely even baseball i think that uh the padres have had a pretty frustrating not just in terms of not winning much lately but even if looking at just the crapshoot nature, I think you could make the case that it's been a pretty tough time to beat the Padres in the wildcard era because they have essentially been completely demolished every time they've made it there. Like, they haven't even had the A's situation where they get so close.

Like, they've made, in 96, they made the playoffs and got swept in the division series in 2005 they made the playoffs and got swept in the division series in 2006 they made the playoffs and got uh they won one game they had the tag play the matt holiday tag play in the 163rd game in 2007 and missed the playoffs because of that. I mean, that's one of like the all time. I mean, to me, that's up there with AJ Pruszynski's dropped third strike against the Angels thing for most memorable season turning umpire calls. And then the one year that they were successful,

they went to the World Series. They were probably the most dominated World Series team in my lifetime. Either them or the 89 Giants, I would say, just in terms of complete dominance within the series. Yeah. So, like, that was, in a way, that was almost kind of like, I don't know, sort of humiliating.

And they still are mad about some strike call during that series. Like, it's been 17 years or whatever, and they're still talking about, like, one strike call to Tina Martinez. So that just gives you a sense of, and not that they should or shouldn't be, I'm not begrudging them, they're a chip on their shoulder, but that just gives you a sense of what it's like to be a Padres fan, that your most successful season in the wildcard era, you're still holding on to a borderline strike call against tina martinez that's like a frustrating way to live

like that like the giants for instance we're holding on to dusty baker giving the ball game ball to russell ortiz for years and years and years and now nobody cares like that season is like just part of what got him there it's all good uh and the padres haven't had that so i think that uh i'd go a's and then rangers and padres both have uh legitimate gripes but if you're talking big picture then yeah too in our lifetime it's either the pirates or the cubs or can't really say the royals anymore yeah pirates are cubs and pirates pretty bad too to get to have three wild yeah i have to go through the wild card game three years in a row. Yeah, that's rough.

Did they have home field in all three of those? So they would have, I think they had home field in all three, right? So in the old format, they would have been in the division series automatically all three times? Right. Yeah, that's tough. All right. Last one from Darren. When a GM is hired mid-year or at the end of a year, when does the clock really begin?

Technically, it should be the day the GM starts, but certainly those results are no reflection of their performance. What is the general rule for you for when you start holding a new GM accountable for wins? Does it depend on when the hire was mid-year or in the offseason? If it's a mid-year hire, then I don't know that that would change the timeline really, because you can't do all that much before the year is over anyway. You can start planning and you could get your sea legs and that sort of, you know, get adjusted to the job. But you can't really make wholesale roster changes before the end of the season anyway. So I don't know that that would change that much, maybe a little bit. But he's basically asking what the plan should be,

like Dayton Moore's five-year plan or seven-year plan or whatever it is. What should the plan be what's the length the most reasonable length for a new gm who takes over depends also obviously what team he's taking over if he's taking over a team that's a complete tire fire then you give him more years to get it back on track but also i think there's a there's kind of a an analogy between fip and era here where i wouldn't really look at his wins as the way to assess him for a very long time because there's so much luck and variability in whether good moves turn into wins and there's so many different cooks too

that you could look at as earning or costing you those wins. So like for instance, I wouldn't necessarily look at a pitcher's ERA over the first two months at all. I would look exclusively at a pitcher's FIP. But over the course of a career, all right, fine, now I start to move away

from FIP and toward ERA. So for a GM, like I would say that I would assess his moves on an individual basis, and maybe by the second one, I would start feeling some feelings about him. And by his first offseason, I would feel like I would have a pretty sound profile of him. But whether I would judge him on his team's record in the following years uh i might go upwards of like seven seasons before i was really confident using just wins and losses relative to my expectations well i think the astros and cubs have given us the standard that

we should judge future gms by or at least that it would be fair to judge future GMs by, because Jeff Luno was hired in October, or no, Jeff Luno was hired in December of 2011, and Theo Epstein was hired in October of 2011. Teams that were bad and they had to completely rebuild and go through a period of being terrible. And then they both built their teams into playoff teams with good farm systems and really optimistic outlooks by 2015. So a future GM can't really claim that he hasn't had enough time if he's had that amount of time. Because those guys did essentially the hardest job. They went from bad to nothing, the worst to among the best in four years or less than four years. I mean, it depends what your goal is, though, as a franchise. I mean, is it the hardest job to go from bad to good the way they did it? Or is it the hardest job to go from bad to good while also, you know, maybe your ownership wants quicker credibility?

Maybe your fan base, for some reason reason requires quicker credibility maybe you're a different team in a different state of uh of your franchise and winning the first world series in 50 or 100 years isn't quite the end-all be-all and so it's not quite as important that you uh sacrifice everything for three or four or five years to get that first world series i mean i'm not sure that like for instance i we weren't judging aj preller harshly for his tactics uh as of the end of march because it was a different goal the franchise had different goals and so it will now probably take aj preller longer to build an extreme superpower house dynasty if that's what his goal is but although you could say that he set the goal or he helped i mean we don't know obviously the real answer here is we don't know because we don't know and we don't know that his goal was a bad goal it could have worked there was a 30 i mean

you know they had a better chance of making the playoffs as of march 31st than a lot of teams that made the playoffs and it could very easily could have worked. They could have won a World Series. And so I don't necessarily think that you knock a guy for having a different approach to building that team necessarily. I mean, each team has their own goals for how to get there and their own priorities for what else matters beyond the simple binary

won a World Series or didn't win a World Series way of judging a team's existence. So that's not knocking what Astros did. It's not knocking what Preller did. It's not knocking what Dayton Moore did. It's not knocking what any of them did. It's saying that you can't judge any GM, I don't think, by the standards of any other single GM because they take different paths intentionally. And they avoid other paths intentionally. And none of them is wrong or right.

Okay. Well, maybe we could say that if you do decide to do the teardown and rebuild, then at least we have the baseline for how long that should take if you're good at it. we have the baseline for how long that should take if you're good at it. Now we know that, you know, four years after taking over, a team can go from mediocre with no future to absolutely terrible to really good with a good future again. And you're right, if the ownership doesn't let you do the teardown, and instead instead insists that you sign some, you know, decent free agents so that you can just stay respectable, which might make it harder to be really good down the line. Then maybe you get a longer period. So it depends. Yeah.

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