Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 753: Takeaways from a Wild Game One

Episode Date: October 28, 2015

Ben and Sam discuss several aspects of a classic start to the World Series.

Stop this game, it's gonna end. Oh, stop this game, it's such a touchy, touchy thing. Oh, stop this game, it's gonna end. Good morning and welcome to episode 753 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 you doing?

I'm all right. Got any hot takes on the World Series commercials of this year yet? Not really, no. I missed the Viagra ads last night. It was strange to see baseball and not see those. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the genius of a World Series ad doesn't usually reveal itself until a few days in when you've seen it a million times

and more to the point when everybody has made their jokes about it and you couldn't possibly hate the ad more than you do as a joke generating machine. Yeah. You saw the Chobani one? Yeah, the one where the guy's playing guitar in the dugout? Is that the one? Yeah, which already I've always pronounced it Cobani. So I'm already learning.

I mean, it worked, I guess. But to me, this is the closest thing to the Microsoft tablet, the what's-his-ERA-against-lefties thing, where most, I mean, everybody tries to, not everybody, but as we've talked about, it's very common for advertisers to try to get uh a baseball element into their ad and most are content to simply have a pun or to use a baseball term a superlative baseball term or a celebratory baseball term uh the most kind of obvious one being hit a home run or it's a home

run knock it out of the park knock it out of the park. Knock it out of the park. Right. Things like that. And that's like some guy like crosses that off the list. Like there's like a to-do list. They're like you got to say the name of the company three times. You got to have a baseball reference. You've got to get the thing to the broadcast networks. And that's pretty much your job. And so they cross off baseball reference and they're done. Make sure the generator doesn't explode so that you don't get to see your ad.

Yeah, yeah. And that's true. Yeah, so I don't know if they put that on the list. No, probably not. Going forward, they will. All right, so – but every once in a while, there's a company that tries to really capture the sport and support and get the sport as part of the plot. And it's surprisingly difficult, it turns out, to do this. Like, that Microsoft tablet ad was good, like that was a good ad for the most part, except the ERA against lefties thing, which isn't a thing. And unless

we think that it was satire, which I don't think it is because scouts aren't notable for being microstat obsessed. It's interesting because they obviously had somebody on there who knew enough about baseball to make this thing close. And yet nobody to say, oh, well, that's actually not a baseball thing. You called them points instead of runs, basically. That's what we should refer to these as. This is whenever a commercial goes deep into baseball, but calls them points instead of runs, basically. And which, by the way, I don't think we've ever talked about points versus runs on this podcast. No. I don't know if it's been, I'm just going to drop it in here then right now, because I feel like, I don't know if it's been, I'm just going to drop it in here then right now because I feel like, I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but it was a great revelation in my life when I was thinking about points versus runs. And I realized that the difference between

points and runs or points and anything else is if the score is basically a symbolic measurement system, so you make a basket and you get two unless you get further out and it's three or whatever, then that's when you call it points. So you get X points for a touchdown. You get X points for a field goal, for a free throw, for whatever. But then if the thing that you're doing is itself simply the tally,

so if football were scored only on touchdowns and it was whoever had the most touchdowns wins, there wouldn't be this whole point system. You'd just call it touchdowns because it's essentially one. And so runs are runs because there's one and goals are goals because there's one. And that's a simple thing that probably everybody has thought of. And yet, it took me late into life before I realized that's what's going on here. And every time I think of it, I feel a little bit of happiness. Yeah, that's a good point. No safeties or field goals in baseball.

Exactly. You've got to score a run. You've got to score a run. Or you could take John Boyce's suggestion from last night and just touch the plate and call it a home run. Call it a home run, yeah. I forget what we were talking about oh yeah so points runs uh so the one in the in the co bonnie cho bonnie uh commercial is that the guy's eating yogurt and then it's his turn to bat and he's he's so into this yogurt he takes one

extra bite and then puts the yogurt away and it's just like like a chill, casual, it's almost a Corona ad, but for yogurt. And yet, when he gets up to bat, he's wearing a hat and he doesn't grab a helmet. And all it takes is just grab a helmet. You don't have to rewrite the script. You don't have to get extras to get to have helmet there's not like a helmet guy that you have to like staff yeah or anything like that there are helmets in the ad there are pictures that like there are there's actually a helmet rack right that he does not pull from and um and just like that this commercial is now garbage and uh and i'm a

fayet only uh eater i am i am a fayet only eater i will say because kobani won't sell a friggin unsweetened whole milk yogurt and that's what i want to eat but beyond that the helmet plain yogurt is gross uh well non-plain yogurt is dessert. That's true too. And so I, I like plain yogurt. I, I mean, you got to have texture. So I have it with granola and, you know, I make my granola and I put it in the yogurt and that's pretty much what I eat 300 days a year. So these ads should have, so we've talked before about how movies and TV shows should

have common sense consultants, just some normal person who's going to sit there in the writer's room and make the objection that every audience member is going to make when the thing eventually goes to air. So you're saying that there should be a baseball consultant and you'd think there would be a baseball consultant. There probably is a baseball consultant. Maybe it's just the same baseball consultant for every company and he's really bad at his job. Dude, you guys, we will do it. Ben and I will really bad at his job dude you guys we will do it ben and i will do it we will look we will take a little money for this but we will do it and we'll probably talk about how we're doing it and you'll get all this free publicity that

chobani is currently getting yeah just by having us do it i would love to review your commercial for you so please reach out podcast today's whole choice.s.com, promo code BP and let's get it right. Enough of this, okay? Okay. I feel, I don't know if this counts but I feel like, I don't know if this is something that a baseball thing would notice but do you remember the one where Joe Torre goes out and relieves, well he relieves Mariano Rivera of his taco because he's too full. And I feel like the big problem with that one is that Rivera hadn't actually taken a bite yet. He was just unwrapping his dinner.

And I feel like that would be not facing the minimum of one batter before another pitching change can be made. Yeah, that's true. I don't know if I would have called that one out or not. But anyway, all right. So speaking of common sense and enforcing logic, Ben. So let's talk about Esky Magic. And specifically let's talk about the decision to continue throwing him first pitch fastballs to start the game. Yeah.

The decision to continue throwing him first pitch fastballs to start the game. Yeah. This is the back story, of course, everybody knows, is that Alcides Escobar, when he swings at the first pitch of a game, the Royals in the dugout all celebrate because they've got it in their head that this is a guaranteed win when he swings at the first pitch. And he does swing at a lot of first pitches. And in particular, this postseason, he seems to be swinging at more and more first pitches so first of all he's basically all of them now he does pretty much but they're also all pretty much yeah in the strike zone he's been getting pretty much all

fastballs in the strike zone and yes he swings all of them so first question ben yeah is is esky changing his behavior in pursuit of this magic do you believe do you believe that he goes up there swinging more because he wants to guarantee his team win probably yes but i think someone someone asked him about it i forget who and i mean maybe many people have asked him about it but i read someone asking about it and he just made the point that he keeps getting fastballs over the middle of the plate. Like, that's what people throw a lot of the time on the first pitch of the game. And I sent a request to Rob McEwen to ask about this, and maybe I'll have the answer by the end of the podcast. We'll see.

But it certainly seems that first pitch of plate appearances, and particularly first pitch of the game, people are just kind of getting it over and yeah even even now like we've talked about all the advanced scouting and all these complicated things that you know like pitch outs and change up tells and guys throwing to a certain base when the ball is hitting a certain place these are all very complicated things that a normal person might not notice and this is the most obvious thing of all time everyone watching knows about Escobar swinging at the first pitch and yeah yet still what would you what would you throw him well so this is my question this is where I'm I'm leading with this if you know he's gonna swing at any fastball pretty much yeah um then it does kind

of make sense now he might swing it at any pitch period i we don't know he might but i don't think he would i mean he hasn't literally swung at every pitch and yeah and let me i'll look up the stats but it's it's pretty universal lately okay but if you're facing El Cidus Escobar, and you don't believe in Esky magic, you do believe in El Cidus Escobar as a major league hitter, who has a career slash line of 262, 298, 344, and he's leading off the game, and you're partly, I mean, partly the reason that that first pitch is grooved is because in this kind of game theory uh there is a feeling that most leadoff hitters don't like to swing at the first pitch although that that's

actually not totally it's not that predictable i mean billy burns swung at half of the first pitches he saw this year uh to lead off games and uh escobar was the second most but after him there's a lot of guys who were swinging at like roughly a quarter or so so it's not like you don't get a free pitch exactly there are a lot of guys who will swing if you lay one in obviously at least to keep you honestly but uh to keep you honest but um but part of the reason that you figure that that pitch is right down the middle too is that the pitcher is just trying to establish his place on the mound in that day that he wants to get up there pump a strike in so that he knows that he's got it it's like it's like if you're in a shooting slump and you just want to make a layup just so that you can feel the bottom

of that basket again and it's not you're not you don't have a slump obviously on your first pitch but you want to kind of establish like okay this, this is my plane. This is where I'm throwing the ball. And maybe Escobar is, especially because Escobar is not really a threatening hitter. Escobar is just a whatever. He's just a guy standing near the plate. It's like you and the catcher in that first pitch. And whether Escobar swings or not is somewhat irrelevant, particularly if you kind of don't mind him swinging. I mean, like, so you get a first pitch out from a guy who's not a very threatening hitter. That seems pretty okay. Now, obviously, if you can steal a strike that he absolutely can't hit, that's even

better. If like you, if you knew you could spike at 52 feet and he'd swing anyway, then you definitely would. But presumably you do have to execute a realistic pitch. And so if you throw a fastball and your goal is to have it on a corner, knowing that he'll expand a little bit, that seems like a perfectly good strategy to me. If you throw a slider with the same intent, it seems to me there's a pretty good chance he's going to take that slider. I don't know.

I don't know how far Esky is ready to go with this. But then now you're potentially down 1-0. And so I kind of get the, like in the third level of this decision-making process, I kind of get going just throwing a fastball straight at him. And it's worth pointing out that Matt Harvey threw a fastball yesterday that Escobar swung at. He missed his target a little bit. It got more plate than you probably need to get at this point in Escobar land. And also it was a routine fly ball that two outfielders could have easily caught.

And the fact that it was a run is just – two outfielders could have easily caught yeah and the fact that it was a run is just well it was an error it was a it was a ridiculous error it's a it's a ridiculous error that doesn't really tell you anything about the strategy of pitching to him i mean good get the get the can of corn fly ball from from escobar on the first pitch like that's a that's a huge win there's one pitch and Harvey's already got one out that's a pretty good start yeah so he's he's swung at 10 of 12 in the Royals postseason games first pitches of the game and 11 of them have been fastballs the only non-fastball was an R.A. Dickey knuckleball. So no one has really tested how far he'll take this yet. And I don't know. I mean, yes, it was not directly down the heart of the plate. Probably should have been

farther outside. But it wasn't a total meatball. And it was hit fairly hard hard but it was not in a area where Escobar tends to hit the ball all that hard and that's I mean he's not a guy who can hit the ball all that hard I mean that that that is definitely Escobar getting good contact like that's about as good as he's going to hit it and it's 15 feet short of the warning track and you know if like it's it's not really that threatening right yeah i mean i think it's probably a aside from the mystical elements it's probably not a bad strategy for escobar to do this right because he is not your typical leadoff hitter he's not gonna walk he's like there's no chance that he's gonna walk Essentially so there's Not much benefit to going deep Into the count unless

There is some benefit to the team Seeing the guy's pitches or whatever But I would guess that that's Maybe a little bit overblown And so if he's not going to walk Then he might as well Swing at the first pitch when people might not Be expecting him to

And it's worked out better than you could have expected, but I think it's not a bad strategy. Yeah, this seems to be a situation we've talked about before, situations where both sides of the ball can be behaving rationally, even though they're seemingly doing things that feed to the other. And the analogy that we've given is when you're pot committed in poker, and so you might call a bet, it might make perfect sense to call a bet, and it also makes perfect sense for the guy to make the bet,

which is a weird thing to think about except that there's various other factors before and after that decision that affect your choice. And this seems to be a situation where, in a general larger sense, it probably does make a lot of sense for pitchers to pump fastballs right down the middle on the first pitch. And it probably also makes a lot of sense for leadoff hitters to swing at those fastballs. And they're pursuing different aims that overlap in some parts and don't overlap in others but um uh but yeah i mean i i think that there's something sort of charming about esky's aggressiveness being a quality in this situation uh because uh he is one of the few

hitters in the game who's going to kind of thwart the pitcher's intentions of just laying a fastball in there. But he's also non-threatening enough that pitchers should probably just ignore it. And for the most part, go ahead and lay a fastball in there. I mean, not right in there. So if you're Jacob deGrom tonight, you're going to stick with the fastball but throw it six inches outside? Going to stick with the fastball but throw it six inches outside? I'm throwing a fastball that I'm aiming for one inch inside, like one inch from being outside.

So still a strike? I'm throwing a strike, yeah. I don't think I am. Yeah, I mean I'm going, I don't know. Look look i don't want to fall behind 1-0 and i mean i think it's worth the risk falling behind 1-0 on escobar i'm not i'm not that worried about it i would i would give it a shot and try to i mean there's a very good chance that he's in swing at almost everything mode right now so i might throw him a breaking ball, or if I think that he'll recognize the breaking ball and not swing at that,

I'm throwing, like, a considerably outside pitch. I mean, he swings. Like, Jeff Sullivan did an article on the balls that he fouled off against Bartol Cologne in the 14th inning or whatever it was, and as Jeff pointed out, he did a bad job deciding to swing on those pitches. And then once he'd made that bad decision, he did an excellent job of fouling those pitches off anyway. But Jeff has a still of the slider that Colon threw to him.

And, you know, he's in protect the plate mode, but that was like a full plate outside. There was no plate he was really protecting there. So he's a guy who'll swing and right now he'll probably swing more than he would normally. So I would explore the studio space right now. I would throw it far outside. How have you had time to read other people's articles? They had time to write them. I don't know how you wrote one i know and that's why i didn't read anybody else's well i didn't write one so i read you just sat around reading letting the world feed you yeah okay uh all right so that takes care of that uh

it really did feel for a large part of the game for like a third of the well in retrospect like a quarter of the game that i was going to get away with having my topic decided for me yeah on the first page of the bottom of the first yeah and i was so excited and i'd done research i was prepared and i'm gonna get out of here i'm gonna i'm i'm gonna be home in time to see my wife and kids and And then and then everything got reset. Yeah to such a degree that you so many times Yeah, you couldn't there was nothing there was nothing that happened before the end that you could even jot down a note about that Was useful it was quite a game. So what else do you want to talk about in that game? Oh Man, I mean it was over five hours and it didn't feel like it. I mean, it felt like it in a good way.

It didn't feel like it was dragging at any point, really. Maybe for the four minutes or so that we couldn't actually see the game. But even that was entertaining. Okay, let's talk about the decision to pause the baseball game. Okay, let's talk about the decision to pause the baseball game. This, presumably, what the explanation, as I understand it, is that they lost replay capacity, and they were trying to decide whether they could go on with a baseball game that didn't have replay capacity. Yes or no, pause the baseball game.

I mean, we've now played a season with this sort of replay two seasons replay is a part of the game and i mean there are rules about it managers are thinking about it if there's no replay it changes player behavior it does change player behavior and not only that but there's a reason why we have replay. We don't want World Series games to come down to Don Dankiger calls. So there's a chance that that could happen. So you want to avoid that if at all possible. So if there was a realistic chance that the replay would be restored in a few minutes, I think it's fine. How long would you wait? I'd wait 10 minutes.

I mean, you know, we wait like two, three minutes most of the times that there's a replay review. So I'd wait 10 or so for an actual, you know, the function to be restored. I can understand why Terry Collins was upset about that and why you wouldn't want your pitcher to be sitting there while you're waiting. But I think the greater good for baseball is to have replay and so i'm i'm okay with waiting yeah i mean if everybody i i think if everybody understands that there's no replay that the replay is not currently live then then i say go ahead i i have no pause. I wouldn't keep it from him or anything like that. Then what if you have, in that five minutes, you happen to have a blown call that changes the game? So you do. I mean, look, we're not...

If replay were actually perfect, then maybe you could convince me, but we have blown calls on replay. We have replay blowing calls from time to time. Much rarer, though. Much rarer. In a five-minute span of a World Series game, that's also probably unlikely to be the five minutes Don Dankinger runs

onto the field and tackles somebody. It doesn't... I'm willing to risk that the umpires who've been doing this forever with sometimes comical results but usually generally acceptable competence

will hold together for five minutes. And what if it's longer than five minutes? Then that makes it even less likely that you're going to pause it. The more exposure you have to actual human element, the more you need to keep going with it. So maybe there's a mistake. Fine.

It's okay. It's okay. We've survived them. You aim not to have them, but if the cameras are down, the cameras are down. And to me, having a baseball game just stop and everybody sits there, I don't know. There's just something that feels... I don't know there's just something that feels I mean everyone it stops but no one

I mean the vast majority of people watching couldn't see it anyway which is I think I mean people had a very cynical you know oh baseball is enthralled to TV and advertising and everything but I mean to me I wanted to see the game.

I was sitting there for the out that we missed, wishing that I could watch the game. So who's hurt by this? The people in the ballpark, which is a tiny minority of the number of people watching the game, and maybe the Mets, maybe Matt Harvey, who has to stand there and wait for the cameras to come back. Otherwise, who's the victim?

I don't know how to describe who the victim is because it's completely abstract and like postmodern or something. And I don't want to get all like totally theoretical. And I don't even really know exactly what it is i feel object myself objecting to but it just feels like the the idea when we watch baseball is there is a baseball game going on because people love to play baseball and we get to tune in and watch them. We get to observe them. All right, Ben. Yes. Hi. I'm back.

Hi. Sorry. Do you realize we were just in a conversation about an interrupted broadcast and our podcast was interrupted by a lack of Wi-Fi and now I have to be in a different location with a different sound and everything. This is the international feed. Yeah, I was just talking to Baskergin and Smoltz

while you were walking to the library. Yeah, there's going to be slightly different sounds because now I'm in the outdoors. But anyway, what I was saying is that... Oh, man. I went on for a long time, too. But anyway, what I was saying is that it changes the nature of it where now if you stop the game and wait for us, now it changes it to a game that I have commissioned that exists because I said feed me entertainment. And that's not a big difference. It's not something that I think about. But to me, it's to some degree, it makes it less a little,

I think it maybe makes it a little less enjoyable because it puts too direct a point on the commerce involved. And, you know, I mean, look, I don't get some great romantic rush when I hear George Will talking about the beauty and all that of the baseball game. And yet there is some element of the enjoyment of it, I think, is that there is a beauty to the baseball game, something that goes way back in our psyches and in the way we've always enjoyed it. I don't know. It's not a problem exactly, but I think that just aesthetically and emotionally, given the choice, I think I prefer to think that this is a game that goes outward from the players, that this starts with a bunch of six-year-olds who love playing baseball the way I do and just never had to quit and kept on going against each other and invited me along, rather than thinking about it as something that goes inward from a corporation and advertising agency that saw money to be made by staging fake sports.

Yeah, I'm okay with it. I don't mind. I think of it as being staged, I suppose, for our entertainment, and it is entertaining. And TV is the reason why we can watch the game without being in Kansas City and buying a ticket. And I'm okay with that. And the game got great ratings. Lots of people wanted to watch it.

And I'm happy that they were able to watch it. And baseball is as big a business as it is and has survived into this era because TV is important and because TV allows lots of people to watch it. And everyone knows how valuable that is. So I'm okay with it. I don't really look at it as like a cynical, like they're going to lose out on advertising. I look at it as lots of people who wanted to watch the game. So they wouldn't have been able to. One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to quit being so obsessed

with being at things or being kind of involved in things. Involved is the wrong word because it's an illusion. But if there's a protest going on over... I remember there were Ferguson protests last summer. And I remember staying up for a couple of hours watching the footage,

which was very compelling that people had their drone cameras out on the scene and I was watching this live footage. And that was cool. And it was significant and meaningful. and I'm glad I watched it. And I have no regret about watching that. But I also realized after the fact that my part in that was nothing. I was simply consuming it as I would entertainment or some sort of emotional stimulus.

And that, in fact, I didn't need to be there. The world's history and the world's events were going to go on without me. And I feel this way about a lot of things. Like you don't really need to watch the game for the game to happen. And whether you watch it or not doesn't affect whether you can be happy about the result.

And I'm glad that I get to watch the baseball game and I'm happier that the power does not regularly go out. I go and suggest that the power should go out. But for these five minutes, I think it was okay for me to think that somewhere out there baseball was going on whether I was there to observe it or not. It made it slightly less about me, the observer,

and slightly more about the point of the game, whatever that point is. I don't know what that point is. Anyway, it's weird because if this had gone on for two hours, what would you say? You wouldn't say don't play the game for two hours, would you? No. And I mean, I don't know if the the what if the power had gone out before first pitch would i have said forfeit or you know postpone the game to the next day or something i i don't probably not because that would affect the series in a lot of different ways and so maybe it wouldn't be that important but i i think it's just like i mean if they really did do it because of the replay then

i think it's like any other time an umpire is out of commission. Because the replay is essentially another umpire. I mean, it literally is. There is another umpire in the replay place watching the replays. So if an umpire on the field gets hit by a foul ball or gets heat exhaustion or whatever it is and can't go for a while, then you stop the game until the umpire's ready and this was essentially the same the the replay ump was hit by a foul ball basically and he wasn't ready to watch the game and so they stopped it i'm fine yeah if he i guess it partly depends whether they knew how long it was going to take how confident they were that they knew how long

it was going to take yeah i mean if the umpire has to leave the game, sometimes they do play with three umpires, or in this case six. Maybe they had really good information. Maybe they knew with almost 100% certainty, oh, it's just a matter of shutting down and restarting. That takes six minutes. In which case I can see saying, oh, well, we can wait six minutes. I'm not sure what they would have done if it had been 35. Anyway, let's talk about one other thing from this game, and then we can move on to the next game tonight. Not on this podcast, heavens.

We're not going to talk about that game, I mean, in our lives. Let's talk about Lorenzo Cain bunting, which was Lorenzo Cain bunting. which was Lorenzo Cain bunting. It was not Ned Yost calling for the bunt. There was much made of this decision to have him bunt in the moment. Even though Ned Yost is a caricatured bunter, he's actually one of the least bunty managers in the game and bunts less than, for instance, a number of stat head managers like Terry Francona and a couple of others who bunt more than him.

However, we all remember last October, bunt-tober. So it made some sense that he would have a random weird decision to have Lorenzo Cain bunt, even though Lorenzo Cain never bunts, doesn't bunt for hits, doesn't bunt for sacrifices, and is a very good hitter capable of hitting the ball very well. doesn't bunt for sacrifices, and is a very good hitter capable of hitting the ball very well. And afterward, it became clear that Lorenzo Cain had called his own bunt. This happens sometimes. You find out afterward that the player bunted on his own. And I want to know what you think about this. Why would a player bunt on his own? What is different between bunting on your own and ignoring a bunt sign on your own and what is it that is so hard

about either talking to the guy talking to your manager before you go out there and going hey you want me to bunt or right or the manager yelling out after the first try yo dude no and doing that thing with your you know like with your hand on your neck like cutting it off like do not do that yeah like why do they let why do they let players just decide to bunt yeah there's there's a probably a scene that you can read in our book next year where something like this happened in a stompers game like something inexplicable happened and it turned out that it was the player deciding to do that thing and we were thinking why was he allowed to do this thing and it just seems like once a player starts to do something on a baseball field it's like

well you're committed you've crossed the Rubicon and you just have to let that player do that thing so I don't know I don't know if he was given a don't bunt sign or a stop trying to bunt sign or what, but it is weird that a player would really ever decide to do something so significant on his own, particularly Lorenzo Kane, who has never had a sacrifice bunt. It just seems strange that a really good hitter, maybe the best hitter on the team, decides to bunt for like the first time ever at this crucial moment and maybe that's playoff pressure getting to a player in a way not that he was scared but just that it made him do something that he normally wouldn't have done and that probably wasn't a good idea to do so i don't i don't know i mean he obviously thought it

was very important to get the runner over and this was his way of trying to do that. Yeah, love me some Ned Yost, but I think that you could maybe even argue, I think it's not that hard to argue, that allowing Lorenzo Cain to bunt on his own is actually more damning than if he had called for the bunt. If he had called for the bunt, it'd just be like, oh, he's got this sort of weird strategy that we think is outdated, but that kind of also in some way fits baseball history and orthodoxy. But allowing a player to do a thing you don't want

him to do when it seems fairly simple to not have him do the thing you don't want to do. I mean, obviously if Ned Yost wanted him to sacrifice bunt, he knows how to make that happen. It's not like, like there's no guesswork necessary here. And, um, and I don't know, I mean, maybe, I guess you want to leave some, maybe some flexibility for a player who just simply doesn't feel like he's going to get a hit for one reason or another to do what he can to improve his team's situation anyway. So his swing felt off or something, he said. Yeah, yeah. And so you leave a little, maybe you leave a little room there,

but it just feels like there's something troubling about the inability for Ned Yost to stop this bad runaway train that he could have. Sort of similar to leaving Volkaz in as long as he left him in, or as long as he has in previous games too. You just kind of let things happen. That's what he does, and usually it works out. That's true. All right.

Any last thing you want to talk about? Yeah. Well, I just want to mention that since we talked about and everyone talked about the fastballs the mets fastballs versus the royals contact hitters i didn't expect to see such a huge shift in the way that the mets pitched to the royals but that's what we seemed to see last night matt har Harvey threw 37.5% fastballs last night, which was his lowest percentage ever in a start. And he didn't seem to have his best stuff. I mean, his fastball was down. I don't know whether that was intentional or not, but he wasn't throwing as hard. And he

only struck out a couple guys. And I don't know whether that was just his stuff not being good or the fact that he was forced or encouraged to go outside of his usual game plan by the royals strength and i'm sort of surprised that that happened because there was a terry collins quote before the series about how pitchers pitch to their strength and that's normally what you hear people say that you go with your best thing. And if the opponent's best thing happens to be the same thing, then that's too bad. But you still generally stick with what you're good at.

And Matt Harvey's good at throwing pass balls. And so he didn't throw very many. And I wonder whether that's something we'll see for the rest of the games in this series and what the effect of that is. Obviously, a lot of these Mets pitchers have good secondary stuff too. It's not like they're helpless without their fastball, but at the same time, they throw lots of fastballs throughout the season. So they clearly feel that that is the best strategy for them and they are not pursuing it or

Harvey didn't pursue it at least. And maybe that has something to do with the fact that he wasn't super effective. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't particularly sharp either. Yeah, I sort of was guessing that it was more that, that it was more that Harvey didn't quite have the fastball or the command or the juice. And so that's why he, got it has to be a combination of both because the the extremeness of yeah of it is it has to be probably a little bit of both but yeah it's uh you're right it's almost like if a guy uh tries to beat the shift to go against the shift like lucas do that sometimes the defense will no not like lucas do today well he beat it

without trying to do anything different. Exactly. That was going to be, by the way, that was going to be my... After the reset, after I couldn't use Escobar as my lead, until Gordon's home run, I was working on a piece about Lucas Duda going through the shift. And now I can't use that either. Anyway, if a player tries to go

against the shift, the defense will sometimes say, or at least our defense did, will sometimes say that you've already won because you've taken the hitter out of his game. And now he's doing something unnatural, something that goes against his own strength. And the Royals, if the Mets really, I don't have the math, I haven't looked closely enough, but my suspicion is if the Mets throw the Royals fewer fastballs, especially significantly fewer fastballs, that's a big win for the Royals. Because it's not like the Royals, yes, much has been noted about the Royals being better against high velocity than most teams are, but they're still bad against 97 mile an hour fastballs. Those are still really

hard pitches to hit. And it's not like they're hitting, unless 97 mile an hour fastballs. Those are still really hard pitches to hit. And it's not like they're hitting, unless you can correct me, it's not like they're crushing guys who throw 97. Guys who throw 97 have a big advantage over the rest of the hitters. It's just slightly less against the Royals than it would be against like the Cubs. But that they should still probably stick to their strength against the Royals. And if they start trying to be, somebody compared Matt Harvey last night to John Lieber, which is funny, if they're trying to pitch like John Lieber, that probably is good.

The Royals are better against John Lieber types than they are against Matt Harvey types, I think, I believe is to be true yeah they're a good fastball hitting team but they're a better well they're a better hitting team against bad fastballs than they are yes good fastballs yes yeah so anyway there there were so many things in this game it was so long it was so rich we can't talk about all of them and everyone's ready to move on to game two anyway but if we wanted to we could go on for a while i mean just the strange mix of emotions of watching edinson volquez and knowing something that he might not have known and trying to tell whether he knew by just watching him it was really weird i don't i can't think of a

comparison really of watching a game under those circumstances because when someone's family member dies and then they pitch then you get the whole you know they're pitching through it and it's heroic and chris young pitched the day after his father died and and then it's very inspiring and everything but this was totally different This was he might not even know and it just felt almost uncomfortable watching knowing without him knowing maybe. So that was strange. And there's just so much to it.

Chris Young was incredible again. And Chris Young and Cologne and John Neese and Danny Duffy, all of these starters who were not particularly imposing, just looking lights out as relievers and making me think that no relievers are actually good at baseball anymore because any starter can come in and be the best reliever in a game. So I don't know. There's just, there's so much to it. The David Wright steal attempt, which was kind of the equivalent of the Kane-Bunt attempt in that it was sort of a strange decision that a player evidently made.

There's the Cespedes starting decision, which wasn't something I questioned, I don't think. I think Cespedes catches that ball nine times out of ten, 95 out of 100. Maybe Ligaris catches that ball in that particular case, but Cespedes is not a bad center fielder. I guess you could say that he should have been DH-ing, and Conforto could have been in left, and Lagares could have been in center. Maybe they'll switch to that going forward. But anyway, so many layers to this game.

Royals making errors, which never happens. I feel like just doing the chris farley paul mccartney interview tactic and just asking you if you remember that time when that thing happened there's so many things to get to we can just end it there i guess everyone saw the game everyone knows how crazy it was and in all the ways that it was crazy yeah good game great game all right so let's hope that the forthcoming games can compete in some way with that one and we will be back to talk about those too you can send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com you can join the discussion in the facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

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