Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 757: World Series Lessons Learned

Episode Date: November 2, 2015

Ben and Sam say goodbye to Grantland, the World Series, and the 2015 season.

Pick up a pen, start writing. I want to talk about what I have learned, the hard-won wisdom I have earned. As far as the people are concerned, you have to serve. You could continue to serve. One last time, the people will hear from me. One last time, and if we get this right we're gonna teach them how to say goodbye good morning and welcome to episode 757 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 ESPN. Hi, Ben. Hello. How are you? Okay. Tell the listeners where they can read all your takes on this baseball game. They can hear my takes right now. I will very quickly say thank you to everyone who reached out over the weekend and said nice things about Grantland and about me.

And Sam and I both thrive on compliments. So getting lots of compliments was almost worth the website ending, but not quite worth it. So I am still employed at ESPN and I will be writing somewhere. And once I am, you will know where that is. And I won't bore everyone with too many thank yous, because if you follow any Grantland writers on Twitter, you've already read them 10 times. My editors, Mallory Rubin and Mark Lasanti and Ryan O'Hanlon and Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessy, all the other writers were nothing but nice and supportive and encouraging and great to work with. And really, I mean, the place let me continue to do this podcast the whole time I was there and let me spend a summer working with the Stompers and writing a book about it. And not a lot of employers would have permitted that. So I'm grateful for that and for the fact that they let me write about movies and TV and video games and music, despite very little prior evidence that I could do those things.

So really the best testament to the site is that everyone who worked there just hopes to work somewhere else half as good again. So it's going to be missed and we're all very sad to see it go. Well, Ben, I will, I guess since I haven't told you this, I mean, I think that it's not just that Grantland is the best collection of sports and other, but sports writing that I think has ever been put together. But I believe it is the best that could possibly be put together. I don't think there was actually a way to improve it by even 1%. And so for the rest of my life, it will be the best collection of sports writers and sports writing that I ever saw. She's a little extra upsetting, because if the best possible collection couldn't work, then what can?

No, I know. That's what I told people who asked me this weekend. That was my thought, too. It's somewhat depressing that there is no way to succeed by being better. There are ways to succeed. Lots of things succeed, and maybe there's a better business model, or maybe there's something that could happen. I mean, you could replay various aspects of Grantland's journey along the way, and maybe it's thriving in a slightly different way.

But it couldn't have gotten better and succeeded. It wasn't that it lacked. And, I mean, when you're a content producer, that's where your mind goes. You think, well, how can I make this better? And making it better wouldn't have helped. Right. So, yeah. Possibly could have made it more appealing, but not better.

Yeah, but then it wouldn't have been the best. And it wouldn't have been better. Right. All right. Tough weekend, though. End of the diner, end of Grantland, end of baseball. All hitting at once. Yeah, two of those make you sad.

My girlfriend cried at the end of the diner. But not at the end of the baseball. No, she was probably not displeased about that. Right. I mean, you know, the end of baseball for you and for I is not that big a deal because we're living in a baseball space pretty much all the time, even in the offseason, and you hardly even notice whether there are games or not games going on. Yeah.

Instead of writing about this baseball, I'm writing about a different kind of baseball because we've got a book to. All right, so a couple of quick things. Let's see. One is that I believe that I have figured out why it is Chobani and not Kobani. It seemed to me that it should be Kobani because like the Greek letter chi is ch. It makes a k, hard k. But I've done some research, multiple layers of research, and I've discovered that the root word of the company's name is Turkish.

And in Turkish, it's actually C-O-B-A-N is the root word. And in Turkish, the C makes kind of a J sound, Joban. And so the root word would be pronounced Joban, so Jobani. That probably also explains why the guy doesn't take a batting helmet because there's not a lot of baseball in Turkey. All right. Secondly, this is old, but when we talked about whether the Royals' bullpen last year, which was called HDH, had any specific significance to those letters, it was pointed out that HDH has some echoes in the songwriting duo, Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Not duo, trio. One of the maybe two or three great songwriting outfits in history. And so there's an HDH there. And, of course, Herrera, Davis, Holland is in that order, also HDH. And Holland, Greg Holland, there's even a Holland in both of them. And so that's plausible. I'm not rejecting that out of hand, but I've never heard anybody call Holland Dozier Holland anything but Holland Dozier Holland.

Holland Dozier Holland, it is the phrase. And I don't know that anybody ever called Holland Dozier Holland HDH. I don't know that it was ever abbreviated that way, even in print. And so that makes it a little harder to accept. So I'm rejecting. I'm accepting the plausibility but rejecting the likelihood. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a reference to some other trio.

They're their own trio. Yeah, but why? I mean, you could do that for anybody. Why didn't we call them HMD this year? Why didn't we call it CDM for the Nasty Boys? Well, they had the Nasty Boys. I guess the Rebels didn't have a cool nickname. But the Nasty Boys is just words chosen to sound cool.

And so you could have given them a cool name. It's not like the Reds signed a gang of boys that called themselves the Nasty Boys. They weren't like workshopping this act in their garage and got discovered by some baseball exec. And they're like, what do you call yourselves? And they're like, the Nasty Boys. by some baseball exec, and they're like, what do you call yourselves? And they're like, the Nasty Boys. This being 1940, when the Nasty Boys played.

Anyway, so I still feel like there should be significance. Otherwise, what's the point? All right, lastly, we've talked multiple times about Trout's punctuation. And I don't think I mentioned this, but I actually, one time, Mike Trout, in his rookie year, did a ESPN chat, and I was watching closely at the time to see whether he would use the extra space before punctuation,

and he did not, which might go to the it's his phone defense. Or dictation. Yeah, or it's his phone defense. Or dictation. Yeah, or it's just that somebody, oh, well, wait, are you suggesting that it's dictation on his phone? I'm suggesting that he dictated his chat responses.

I think that is, yeah. I think it's more likely that he didn't type any of those words. Yeah, and similarly, he recently, quote-unquote, wrote something for the Players' Tribune, and his unique punctuation was not preserved in that article. There's editors there, though. Yes, right. So they did not capture his voice. Yeah. All right. You got anything? Well, the World Series ended. Guess we should talk about that. Nothing else, though. Okay.

All right. I think that Hosmer would be safe about, I'd say, 85% to 90% of the time against Duda, and 75% to 80% of the time against the entire league's first baseman. That's my hot take. And it seems to me I would have thought this would be more controversial. I mean, for goodness sakes, the Alex Gordon, should Alex Gordon have gone play was fairly controversial until Jeff Gordon, Jeff Sullivan put it to rest. Jeff Gordon, Jeff Sullivan put it to rest.

And that was much less, it seems to me, debatable than this. So why do you suppose it is that so many people this morning feel the need to point out that Hosmer, in their opinion, bungled things and got bailed out by Duda? I don't know. opinion bungled things and got bailed out by Duda. I don't know. I had heard things about how this is reflective or emblematic of just the Royals' aggressive style. Is he not being celebrated for his aggression or aggressiveness? Are people actually saying that he made a mistake? Do you think the he made a mistake response outnumbers the it was gutsy, aggressive baseball and they took advantage of the other team's weakness response? I think that there are, yeah, maybe there are three reactions.

One is it's just a good play and it is nothing specific about Devil Magic or Duda. It's just a good play. Or, you know, it has nothing to do with the Royals' advanced scouting report, which now we're hearing the Royals were told to run on Duda. It's amazing. They've got an advanced scouting report. A lot of their advanced scouting reports just seem to be pointing out. Extremely convenient.

Not only extremely convenient, but pointing out who is and isn't a good defender. Their scouts know that Lucas Duda is not a gold glove first baseman. Every time they advance a base on anyone, it's because they were told that that guy didn't have a great arm or something. I mean, that's the bare minimum of advanced scouting. That's what advanced scouting is. I'm sure that the Mets were told certain things about the Royals, and the Royals probably just had fewer vulnerabilities and certainly fewer defensive vulnerabilities.

But, you know, telling guys to run on people who have weak arms is like advanced scouting 101. Yeah, it would be like if the Mets won, and after they were like, our scouts told us Hosmer bats left-handed. Yep. So we put in a lefty against him. So anyway, I forget where I was in this conversation,

but it was just a good play, and it was good instincts, and the details in it made it even a better play, but it was a good play. That's where I stand. I, but it was a good play. That's where I stand. I think it was just a good play. And then there's the, on the other side, there's the way that the royals have become the new cardinals and everybody hates them for their devil magic,

although also everybody loves them. Even the ones who hate them for their devil magic love them, it seems like. But there's the idea that Hosmer actually screwed up, that it wasn't good base running, and that he didn't force the mistake so much as the Mets made a mistake and bailed him out. And that if you ran this World Series a thousand times, Hosmer would have run himself out of that game more often.

And so we shouldn't hold him up to a thousand glowing profiles this morning. I mean, that's what it's always about, right? Nobody hates Hosmer for making a mistake. Nobody ever hates a baseball player for making a mistake. We're always responding to the media. It's all the arguments, it seems seems like pretty much are about the media and so it started when joe buck i mean it started immediately after joe buck called it brilliant base running like it was immediately like like i forget who but somebody's like they there was mocking of joe buck and somebody had a funny tweet

about eric cosmer like driving off a cliff and landing in a pile of money bags and Joe Buck going, brilliant driving! And that sort of idea that he's getting credit from dummies who are kind of missing the play. I don't think they are missing the point of that play. But anyway, and then there's the one in the middle, which is that, yeah, this is probably a bad play, but the Royals got their magic, their good magic, their esky magic, which isn't quite as accidental as we've always thought it was. And in fact, this is consistent with what they've been doing all postseason long, which is kind of turning their flaws or what we see as their flaws into strengths because of the relentlessly aggressive and competent way that they

play and people in the middle really like that about the Royals and they like that's one of the reasons this team is very fun there's a a bias toward action on the Royals part and we like that um so uh but even in that one even in the middle one you're not giving hosmer credit necessarily for being smart you're giving hosmer credit for being part of a swarm of bees that is in a way uh in unable to defend against, and yet also not necessarily... Like, they're not individually excellent. They're just... It sort of takes the individual excellence

out of some of these plays and turns them into, you know, like a big pack of red ants that beats you but have brains the size of red ant brains. Or, yeah, or it transfers the credit to the coaches who instilled that mindset in these blank slates or David Moore who recognized this sort of player and put a whole team of them together, that kind of thing. this sort of player and put a whole team of them together, that kind of thing. Or even worse, it gives the credit to the media guy who writes about how he likes this kind of play and doesn't like Adam Dunn.

Yeah. So we got a listener email from Dan in D.C. who asked about the Duda play, and he said, Eric Hosmer scoring on Lucas Duda's errant throw to the plate in Game 5 got me thinking, are most teams far too cautious in such situations? It seems like most first basemen would have trouble with that throw, but I can't imagine most teams sending the man from third there because the downside is too great.

Similarly, the Royals won the deciding game against the Blue Jays because they sent Lorenzo Cain in a situation almost no other team would have. This reminds me of a current debate in football where statisticians state the team should go for it far more on fourth down than they do now, but coaches thus far have not changed much and continue to consistently punt, apparently out of fear of failure. So are these isolated instances, or have the Royals exposed a widespread inefficiency wherein teams leave runs on the board because they are too cautious? So I guess you would say yes.

I don't know if it's widespread, but to some extent, yes. Yeah, I mean, well, I think certainly in this case, if you look at it, the math basically says he had to make it one out of three times. at it, the math basically says he had to make it one out of three times. And I think there's some debate about whether he would make it one out of three times, as noted, but I think that he would have made it much more. And so to criticize the decision or to act as though it was accidental, right, does seem to take away the relatively basic math that is required or you know the intuitive math that i think everybody is out there has some sort of math clock ticking in their own brain that they know without having to actually access it directly and i think that he uh there's, I think the fact that Hosmer wasn't afraid of what would happen if he were thrown out is potentially an underrated aspect of this. That the Royals do play as a team that says, you know, we're not going to treat one failure as worse than one success.

That we're not going to have that fallacy where people don't want to... What is the one, the classic one where if you... Risk aversion. Yeah, like if you give people, like if you ask people to bet like, you know, a dollar on a coin flip. Right, you ask them to bet a dollar on a coin flip and they'll win $2 if they get it. And the odds are obviously that they should do it.

And still a large number of people don't do that. It's bizarre, but they treat a loss as more damning and more damaging than a win is bolstering. And something about the Royals does seem to, at least it emerged in this postseason in a series of plays, that they were kind of fearless. And that's a cliche, and it goes to a lot of the things that are unprovable that people say about the Royals only because they won. And it's a results-oriented and i recognize that um but as long as we're talking about it uh yeah some of these plays do seem like plays that not every player would make and i don't know if that's because not every team gives their players the kind of empowerment to make those plays and to to make their own decisions all the time and to do kind of crazy things.

And that might be a case where the cliche about a team feeding off itself, which I almost always, always, always just throw out. I don't really think teams feed on themselves that much most of the time when it comes to whether the offense is clicking or whether the pitchers are driving each other or whatever. But the style of play, if you've created a culture where the behavioral norms make this less risky for you and you can do the more rational decision for your team's good instead of worrying about what it's going to be like walking back into that dugout, then it maybe does free up some of these decisions. Yeah, and I don't know what the legacy of this Royals team will turn out to be.

It seems like there are many different legacies that it could be, and maybe it'll be more than one. I don't know whether it'll be the importance of building from within and having guys come up together and build that kind of camaraderie. Maybe people will say that. Maybe people will say that. Maybe people will say speed and defense. Maybe people will say a good bullpen. Maybe people will say contact hitting.

But it seems like one of the ones that is kind of coming to the fore is just being well coached or being smart or having good fundamentals or not making mistakes. And the Royals do make mistakes. I mean, they made some pretty big mistakes in this series even. Just, you know, the Eric Hosmer error or Alex Rios forgetting how many outs there were. Both of those at the time seemed like potentially pretty crucial mistakes that could cost the Royals the game. And it didn't. Neither of them did.

And so now we probably won't remember them. We'll remember the Mets' mistakes instead. So even the Royals weren't perfect, but it does seem like they play pretty smart. And that's kind of a tough thing to quantify. So it sounds sort of insubstantial, but there's probably something to it. I mean, you watch them play, and it definitely seems like, I don't know whether to call them clutch, or we can say in retrospect that they were clutch.

I don't know whether that's an inherent quality of the Royals, but they certainly didn't choke. We can say that much about them. They didn't make mistakes that were so costly that they lost the game. They seemed to take every advantage that they could when it was given to them. They didn't make mistakes that were so costly that they lost the game. They seemed to take every advantage that they could when it was given to them. And those are qualities that maybe it's kind of hard to build into a team, but they did it. Yeah, a lot of those qualities are exactly what people said about the Angels from about 2002 to about 2006. I mean, they were the contact team.

They were the first to third team. They were the lights out bullpen, put together relatively cheaply team. And they were not the walks and the home runs team. And it really became clear after around 2006, 2007, 2008, that this was not something that you can just decide as a coaching staff or an organization or anything, like that this is the style of play you're going to be. It turned out in retrospect that a lot of that style of play was something inherent in some of the guys on the team and that was suited to the skills of a lot of the guys on the team. And I don't think necessarily that you can put together a team of players who play a particular way intentionally because there's just not enough players available and it's

just too hard to get players to come to you, and you can certainly skew toward a kind of player that you prefer to other GMs. But your players are, in a large sense, going to dictate the style of play that you play. In a huge, huge, huge sense, going to dictate the style of play. And the Royals, I think because they were really young, some of these things, particularly the speed and the pressure they could put on the defense, were suited to them. And some of the styles of player that they have were suited to this. But I don't know that this is something that the other 29 teams can go into this offseason saying, we're going to put together a team anything like this.

It's great when it happens. And a lot of baseball is, well great it's great when it happens and a lot of baseball is uh well it was great that that happened and it was great that happened with the royals they were a really good team that had some really good skills and seemed to fit together really well yeah and it's possible to overstate how well they fit together or the effect that they produced in tandem, like the idea that the Royals' aggressiveness forces teams to make mistakes. I mean, it's hard to disprove. It could be true in certain cases. And I guess, you know, the more balls you put in play,

the more errors the other team will make just because there are more opportunities. But if that is something that people are ascribing to the Royals, I think it's not necessarily something we need to ascribe to the Royals in that, as Dave Cameron pointed out, they reached on error, I think, twice more all season than the average team. So this wasn't something that they were doing constantly throughout the year and separating themselves from every other team. And the Mets make errors. That's a thing that we knew about the Mets coming into this series. We talked about it in our preview or in the preview I wrote. It was something we talked about that the Mets weren't strong up the middle and the Royals would put a lot of balls in play and that maybe that matchup wasn't great for the Mets. So the fact that it worked out that way doesn't necessarily mean there's something inherent

about the Royals that made it work out that way more than it would have worked out for some other similar team. But, you know, it was, I guess you give them credit for taking advantage of the mistakes that they were given. So the reason that I think that it's underrated how or kind of underappreciated how hard it was to get Hosmer and how likely it was that he was going to score is that everybody sees the screen grab and they see the ball at the catcher's glove, the time that it would have

gotten to the catcher's glove, and then they see Hosmer and he's like 12 feet away. out into the catch glove and then they see Hosmer and he's like 12 feet away and I think that you there's not enough appreciation for how fast a guy comes into home like this is not like sliding in a second where you have to stop uh and so he's at a full sprint uh and he closes those last 12 seconds in like a frame like it's it's almost immediate that he's on home plate after after that and you don't really see the momentum in a screen grab, obviously. And the other aspect of the play is that the guy has to catch it and he has to turn. He has to turn and tag. He has to bring it down and turn and tag. You cannot put the throw on the runner from that angle. There's just

not any lane where you put the throw on the runner. This is not like throwing a guy out at second or throwing a guy out at home from left field where the ball can hit the target and just be there right away. And he's got to tag blindly. He's got to turn and swipe. And that's really hard to do even with a good throw. Now, a perfect throw, I agree, a perfect throw gets him. And there are perfect throws. But like most people who are listening to this won't have read what I wrote about this, but I looked at a similar play that Adrian Gonzalez made coming home

on a runner that he didn't get. And he makes a good throw. There's a way that that throw probably could have been better too, but Adrian Gonzalez is an above average first baseman. And if that's his throw, you maybe can consider that to be the median throw. And Hosmer is fairly close. He is not behind my comparison runner by more than a step and uh like that step like i said it comes fast it

closes fast and hasman was going in head first uh the other guy was going in feet first so he's probably even coming in slightly faster um and uh and you know like i'm looking at that and thinking that uh with a good first baseman like Adrian Gonzalez, the most probably I'm going to give him is a 50-50 chance of getting the runner. And with Duda coming at a much harder angle than the Adrian Gonzalez play, with the runner coming right in his path and having to drop down and throw a little bit sidearm to get it around there. And yeah, it being Duda, everybody knows it's Duda. And Hosmer needing only a one in three chance to make it.

It just seems like very obvious to me. Now, maybe I'm wrong. A lot of things have seemed very obvious to me and turned out to be either not that obvious or flat wrong. But I have a hard time thinking it's anything but a clear run situation, running situation. And still many players might not have done it just because of the momentousness of the situation and the pressure and the risk and

you know how bad it would have been if he had been caught so you can still credit him for that but just all credit not not blame for making a decision that was bad but worked out well anyway. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And should we discuss the other decision that you wrote about? Yeah, the decision. Not the decision to let Harvey stay in, but the decision to ignore the decision that had already been made. Yeah.

Now, I guess we could talk about the decision to let Harvey in. Every game, every single game, that is the managerial decision we could talk about the decision to let harvey in every game every single game that is the managerial decision that we talk about now do you leave the starter in for this extra batter or not every single game that is where we are in analysis right now uh and do it so much every time yeah they really did like they did it on saturday with Steven Matz, even though he hit. And they had to have him hit as well and then left him in and he didn't get another out. Well, how about leaving Volquez in? Yeah, in game six, yeah.

In the sixth inning, in the fifth inning. Was it the sixth or the fifth? Yeah, game five. I mean, that might have been a top two or three bad leaving a pitcher in move all year. I mean, all postseason. Yeah. So, I mean, if the Royals had lost, we'd be talking about that right now. If Ioannis Espinous had not been one-legged by the end of his at-bat,

we might have been still talking about it because he might have driven in another run um anyway uh how egregious was or maybe not egregious what would you have done just just taking out the whole second aspect of this if you're terry collins sitting in the dugout at the end of the uh in the middle of the eighth and trying to decide what to do with the ninth what are you doing i think the mets would have been more likely to win with familia starting the inning but i think it's a very small advantage i think harvey i mean even the fourth time through the order or whatever it was is still very good and familia had pitched a couple days in a row i don't know whether that

affects him at all but i think you know har Harvey's still good enough that the vast majority of the time he gets out of that inning and maybe a slightly vaster majority of the time Familia gets out of that inning but I think it's small and I think if he had taken him out after the leadoff walk it would have been less egregious but yeah it was obviously the way the decision was made was worse than the decision yeah i probably leave harvey in with a two run lead and like the thing about it is that the we know the third time through the order penalty but if you look at the fourth time through the order, the numbers are really phenomenal.

And that's because pitchers only get the fourth time if they're pitching really well. And Harvey was pitching really well, or usually because they're really good too. Harvey's really good. He was pitching really well. I know that there's a school of thought that even pitchers who are pitching really well

are no more likely to pitch better going forward. I know. I know and you know. I'm not saying anything. I'm thinking it, but yeah. And yet, it does seem like there's a

risk to bringing in a new guy. Even your closer, there's a risk because you haven't seen him throw a pitch from a mound that day yet you don't know what he's got and you pretty much know what harvey's got and so just on the on the chance that it seems like a disaster is slightly more likely if you bring in a new guy uh and also you know i do kind of want want to let Harvey finish it if I can. I think it's good entertainment. Like as a manager, I would probably get wrapped up in the story sometimes too.

And Familia had pitched two days in a row. I agree. I don't know how much that matters, but I bet it matters some. Although he ended up pitching extremely well for two full innings. But you don't know that going in. And so with a two-run lead, it seems like very defensible. And I would have sent him back out there with a one-base runner. Yeah, I mean, leaving him in after the walk when he looked very wild and excited.

Yeah, it wasn't a good walk is the problem. I mean, I could even see giving him a two-base runner leash, but it has to be the right first base runner. And he did not. I mean, I might have pulled him mid-batter. I mean, seriously, like, why not? Like, you can do that too. The rules allow it. And I would have probably, well, like it, it, it, why not? Like you, you can do that too. The rules allow it.

Yeah. And I would have probably, well, not after he yelled at me on TV, I wouldn't have. Yeah. Well, between that and leaving Cespedes in when he couldn't move, which I, you know, putting in a pinch hitter at that point down 0-2, the guy's probably not going to do anything better than Cespedes did anyway. But the fact that he couldn't get down the line at all, like even if he had made contact, put the ball on the ground, he would have had no chance whatsoever to get to first base or put any pressure on. So that seems like another case where the player just talked the manager into something or the manager allowed himself to be talked into something.

And it almost, I mean, it makes me wonder whether you should just like designate a total stranger to make moves in a game because they won't be bound by this like pressure of having a relationship with the person that you have to maintain for the future. Do it by drone. Yeah. Do it by drone. I mean, well, no, really, one of the things that's great about replay, and I don't know that it changes the rule, any rules or any decisions because of this,

but it creates a real feeling that the guy who's making the decision is not going to be thinking about, oh, is this the home team? How mad are they going to be? Has a guy been yelling at me all day? Has a guy been spittling on me all day? Am I afraid of this player? Do I have it in for this player? It's just a dude 3,000 miles away or maybe 12 miles away, but in an office who's making the call. And all of that stuff that you don't want influencing the call is stripped away and

i actually i think that's an uh it has been a great aspect of the replay system is just giving it to an umpire who i feel even more certainty about his uh objectivity and ability to make a objective ruling and yeah is that you could so anyway that that is not in a way i guess collins tried to have a buffer between him and harvey by designating or danny worthen to tell him and i mean maybe that's what they do in every single decision i don't know that there was anything strange about this particular decision but that at least establishes some slight remove between the manager and the player, except that it's always completely obvious who is making that decision.

I think it was a bad—even if he does that every single time, I still—and I don't know. Maybe he and Collins hate each other, and maybe Worthen and Harvey are best friends or something. But I think it was the wrong decision to have Worthen tell him because then you let Harvey get momentum. Now Harvey is charging you. He's coming at you with steam. And if you go over, and so now at this point, everybody has seen him approach you and somebody is losing face in this situation. And you can imagine that Harvey now is even more committed to not losing face in this situation.

And he becomes more imposing and intimidating. The other thing is that Harvey is now standing up. And Harvey has got, what, nine inches on Collins? Maybe more. And so I actually think that even if he does this every single time i think colin's got to go over there and put his arm around him and say this is my decision this is what i'm doing and that's who he's got to hear it from i'm not sure that he doesn't make the decision stick if he does it that way and it's it's i mean the the decision that all the familia decisions were were weird

in this series i guess every every decision involving Familia was kind of controversial in this series, at least after game one, maybe. So, I mean, the decision to pitch him Friday in the blowout, I don't know if it quite qualifies as a blowout, but close to a blowout was obviously debated just because you have two games coming up the next two days and what Collins said that he's a big guy and he's strong and he likes to work and they wanted him to be sharp and and he wanted to pitch so if that's the case that's fine and if he can throw 11 pitches without being compromised for the rest of the series then I have no problem with it except that obviously Collins felt that he was kind of compromised by it,

or it did change how he handled him the next day when he started the eighth inning with Tyler Clippard instead of George Familia. And it's so strange. Like, I mean, no one watching would make that decision. It's so weird how we're still often so disconnected from managers. We're watching the same game that they're watching, and they've been managing a long time, and either they should have changed our minds by now and convinced us that the way that they do these things is right, or we should have changed their minds by now. It's weird that there's still such a disconnect between the ways that they make these moves and the ways that we think they should make these moves.

And you would think that if you were Terry Collins, I mean, I think he said in a press conference maybe after the Friday game, or I guess it was maybe after the Saturday game, that he had been killed earlier in the postseason for using Familia for six outs. And I don't know who killed him for that. It seemed like everyone was loving the Juris Familia Mariano Rivera act. I mean,

maybe he read the one article that took issue with that and he internalized that, but it seems like no one would have blamed him for bringing Familia out in the eighth and potentially everyone would have blamed him for bringing Klippert out out so you'd think that even if he was only thinking about his own reputation let alone what would make the mets more likely to win the game that that is not the decision that he would have made so i don't know how things like that happen it's just mystifying to me and i don't know you know maybe they would have lost anyway obviously the Mets kept making mistakes and Daniel Murphy's not good at defense and that's not Terry Collins's fault and so the impact of the Mets players making errors or not getting hits was far greater than the impact of

Terry Collins making suboptimal decisions I mean the Mets had four hits in 12 innings yesterday, and it's hard to win a game when you have four hits in 12 innings. So that's the real reason that they lost. But all these little things didn't help. So we talked about what a team might take from the Royals or what the sport might take from the Royals. But the Mets were also a very good team that went very far and had overachieved expectations

and came down to basically a World Series where they very easily could have won it. They could have won it by now. They could have won in five. As John Thorne tweeted, right, that if games were eight innings long, the Mets would have won it by now. They could have won in five. Yeah. As John Thorne tweeted, right? That if, if games were eight innings long, the Mets would have won in five. And it's not like the Mets had a bad closer. The man, the Mets had like one of the six or seven best closers in baseball.

That's a trick I do, Ben. I say six or seven. It implies that I've thought about this. It's really between four and 18. I have no idea no idea like i like i'd have to sit down and think about this for a long time and if i said one of the five that would sound like a round number and you'd think i just made it up if i said sound six that would sound pretty good like that would sound like i tried and even though i didn't but if i say six or seven it's like i can't i did it not only did i do this but i thought so hard about it that I'm leaving. Anyway, they had a really good closer. Nobody would say that any part of the Mets' roster problems were their ninth inning guy. He was dynamite.

Or their rotation slash aces. Yeah, but I'm saying to Thorne's point that they're a team that does win games when they take them to the ninth better than almost anybody in baseball. So it's not like you could then say, oh, yeah, but they sucked in the ninth. What the Royals did after the seventh inning was insane. I mean, there's some ESPN stats and info stats that I will cite. there's some ESPN stats and info stats that I will cite. The Royals only led for 13 innings in this World Series, and the Mets led for 24 innings.

So if you want to go by, I don't know, time of possession or something, the Mets would win if you just look at how often the team was winning. And the Royals scored 51 runs in the seventh inning or later, which was 15 more than any other team has scored in the seventh inning or later in a single postseason. And their offense, their breakdown between the first and the sixth and the seventh and extras, the first six innings of the game, they batted.222 with a.269 on-base percentage and a.362 slugging. 222 with a 269 on base percentage and a 362 slugging and seventh inning on they batted 325 with a 392 on base and a 485 slugging or you could cite their run differential which was negative 16 in the first six innings of these games and plus 40 from the seventh inning on which is the opposite of what you would expect probably in the postseason with most teams, since teams are bringing out guys like Herrera and Davis, except of course the Mets were not,

other than Familia. So maybe this is what you would expect a team to do against the Mets, given how good their rotation was, but it's still surprising the extent to which they came back over and over again. So what I was going to ask, yes, very good points. What I was going to ask about this is what would people take from the Mets? Especially, I mean, because we should take, we should basically take, as much as we're going to take anything from one team's postseason run or season, that we would have that discussion about the Royals, we should essentially have the same discussion about the Mets. They did essentially the same thing. So is there something that you would take from the Mets,

or do we not have to even contemplate that question because we're so hung up on only celebrating one team? Well, I guess one lesson would be that there's no such thing as a definite division winner. And even a team that everyone thinks is going to be a juggernaut and roll over everyone, which is the 2015 Nationals, might not end up that way. And so there is a point to competing. I mean, when the Mets made their trades at the deadline or, you know, there were points where the Nationals had pulled ahead by a few games. And given how much better we thought they were than the Mets, once they went up a few games, it seemed like, OK, well, this was fun. But now they're going to turn this into a double digit lead by the end of the season. And instead, the opposite happened and the Mets were way better in the second half.

So there is at least the precedent for that you can get yourself in trouble a lot of times counting on something like that to happen but that's at least a reason for hope for many teams is that it well i mean a lot of people stylistically i mean they people will just draw the you know get four aces yeah i mean the you know... Get four aces. Yeah, right. I mean, the percentage that people cite, like 90% of the game is pitching or 87% of the game is pitching. This is more fodder for those sayings? Well, I'm like, you could argue that this is a team that depended on young pitching, right? This is a team that depended on young pitching, right? And the way that young pitching has historically worked, you could imagine three of these four guys being horrible or injured

or their career's over or never developed a change-up or anything, and the Mets having won 64 games this year. You put all your eggs in the young pitching basket, and historically that's been risky and scary but maybe it's not anymore i mean that maybe that could be something you could take that it's safer or that or maybe all these guys have had tommy john surgery but that's the point tommy john it's tommy john is the thing that keep you know that that it we live in an era now where you get tommy john and you come back that it's not about avoiding injuries

it's about coming back from injuries and none of these guys had shoulder injuries and um so they they you know each of them punted a year and uh came back well when you did that series this spring on every team's money ball at BP and Will Woods wrote the Mets entry and he basically said that the Mets money ball or Cindy Alderson's genius was just stockpiling pitching yeah and obviously it's really hard to just get that kind of pitching talent in the first place that might not be something that other people can reproduce but once you do end up with this crazy pitching depth everyone was saying Alderson should trade these guys for bats.

He should trade John Neese. He should trade Zach Wheeler, whatever it is. And obviously they kind of came close to doing that at times, but he didn't do that. And you could say that that's the smart thing, that these guys do get hurt a lot. And Zach Wheeler ended up getting hurt. And the fact that he had held on to everyone I mean even John Neese had a role an important role in the World Series so it served the Mets well that they held on to him so and you know they were able to call up guys like Conforto who hit and get

right back and trade for Cespedes and do these things anyway they still needed hitters but just holding on to all the pitchers that you have because you can count on some of them getting hurt is smart. Yeah, for a long time, the Giants would do the opposite. They would always have pitching prospects and then they would always trade them. And that was the other way of dealing with risk. You either have to get a ton of them or...

Like the Cubs way of building a team, just not yeah i mean not developing pitchers just yeah somehow managing to trade for other teams cast offs and making them into aces yeah i'm not i'm certainly not arguing that teams should uh take the lesson from this season being uh let's go get four well four if you count wheeler four like top 20 in the game pitching prospects and then have them all be awesome along with a like ninth round college shortstop and have him be awesome too um but it's not quite it's not quite i mean and there's probably good articles to be written i guess about the mets and

whether there was something sustainable about it whether there was something more than random chance and good luck that led to uh them having these four incredible young pitchers are we calling de grom young is that okay can we call them wrong i mean a lot of these guys are not super young cinder guard is young and Matz is young. Harvey and DeGrom are on the border. 25 and 27, something like that? 25 and 26? Yeah, Harvey is 26, I think, and DeGrom 27.

Last thing I want to ask you, Ben. We talked about Daniel Murphy's value and how it had changed or what his price tag would be and how it had changed with his incredible first two series and rob arthur asked a question that i was going to address here which is whether he has given all of that back and even before yesterday i actually thought that i already didn't think that he had added much to what he would earn and i think that the air didn't think that he had added much to what he would earn and i think that the air that the air in particular in game three but also just his general you know failure to be good at defense

because i think there was there were a couple of other plays where his sort of questionable range came up actually probably would do more to move his value down than anything he could do with the bat in 50 plate appearances could do to move it up. And that just got reinforced. I mean, there was a... I think that the weaknesses that you show in postseason, and I'm not talking about character weaknesses, but the weaknesses that show up on a team in postseason and then get exploited become really stick to you much more than your good your good performances do and like i i don't i think an example that i think about is the cardinals with uh pete cosma a few years ago

2012 when they lost to the giants and it like they'd been playing with Pete Cosma for a while, and they were a good team. And then Pete Cosma just went out there, and you were like, wow, they've got Pete Cosma in their lineup. Can you really win with Pete Cosma? And of course you can win with a weak spot, but it just felt like the Cardinals did lose that series at the time because the bottom of their lineup was so bad that it was just unforgivably bad and so that

was interesting and then they went out and they signed johnny peralta i think some of these years might be wrong but uh they went out and they signed johnny peralta for what a lot of people thought was a lot and but it was probably somewhat a reaction to realizing that you are to some degree you are the weakest chain in the link and i don't know that there are i think there are probably teams that would have considered daniel murphy as a second baseman before this, and now will think, I'm going to have such an exposed weak spot going into postseason. I cannot let that guy play second base for me in the postseason. And it's not because he's a choker. It's because he's not good at defense. And so probably it becomes much harder for him to position himself as a second baseman or even as a versatility guy.

He's a third baseman now, maybe a first baseman or even as a versatility guy he's a third baseman now maybe a first baseman and that's it that's all i think anybody's going to consider him for to be honest yeah because even the plays he made were just scary looking like there was a couple last night that he did make like there was one where he just sort of scooped the ball into his body like he just did everything he could to ensure that it didn't go under his glove. And then there was another one where he did just sort of stick his glove out and it looked like it could have easily gone under again, but it didn't. So, yeah, it was it was very shaky. And he hadn't looked that bad defensively earlier in the postseason for the most part, I didn't think. But, yeah, it was definitely exposed.

But yeah, it was definitely exposed. I mean, it was not a surprise to anyone who watched him regularly or looked at the stats or paid a lot of attention all year. But just to see it come up at such crucial moments, it does sort of drive it home. If you were thinking about signing him and just saying, oh, well, he hits six homers every six games, so we can live with it. After he stopped hitting six homers and started making errors, it was a lot easier to convince yourself to do that, I think. So yeah, I would say, so the question is, did he undo all the good that he did in the first couple rounds? And I would say probably yes. And you are arguing that he probably even did more than that he probably is less earning potential now than he did before the

postseason started i think it's possible i probably the highest bidder will end up paying him whatever the highest bidder always would have paid him and so i'll i'll probably say that in the end he'll get what he gets but let's say there were 30 30 Daniel Murphys and every team had to sign a Daniel Murphy. I would bet that the median offer would go down. Yeah. Well, it's, I mean, someone tweeted at me today to ask, like, why the Cubs hadn't intentionally walked Daniel Murphy during their series, even after seeing the World Series, which is the answer. Because that's also daniel murphy and he does that too so you would think that i mean this is just another go-to example and i know

there's there's like this movement to say that you know the utter dismissal of hot streaks was premature and wrong and that sabermetricians are kind of taking that back a little bit and maybe that's true to a very slight extent like mitchell lichman i think has a study coming out in the hardball times annual about clutchness and how there's maybe some effect to it but it's tiny it's like a single digits you know after like a super hot, it's still your maybe single digits of WOBA or true average or whatever better than your baseline. So it's not like you would change your behavior against that guy. And I mean, we saw that again. We saw that with Cespedes, who went from second half hero and people arguing he should be MVP to just Cespedes again. And Daniel Murphy going from

hotter than anyone has ever been in the postseason to not hitting. And maybe some people will say it's because of the layoff, the long layoff between series. And if they'd started the World Series right away, he would have hit eight more homers. But I think this is just another go-to example of the fact that there are hot streaks but hot streaks end at unpredictable times okay well that's the season I've been doing a little bit of linguistic research

and I'm also going to have to explore a little bit more what the chi in Greek actually because I might have been wrong in my initial assumption it's hard to say because the the chi in greek uh is has been pronounced uh different ways in ancient and modern times and is even pronounced different ways now in modern times at depending on you so i had to figure out what a voiceless palliative fricative is

i i think i remember i think I remember. I think I remember. A Greek diner is still in operation that I could go down and ask. But in the meantime, that'll be it for this and now the off-season begins. Please, if you want to, go read what I wrote at BP about this article.

I got four hours of sleep last night so that people like you, not you, but people like you listening could go read it. It's free. It's on the site. And it has more of this discussion that I didn't get into here. And that's going to be it. All right.

So thanks for listening to us all postseason and all regular season. And you can continue to listen to us because unlike smart podcast hosts, we don't stop when the season does. So you can send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives dot com and join our Facebook group at Facebook dot com slash groups slash effectively wild. Please rate and review and subscribe to the show if you've enjoyed what we've put out this year and support our sponsor as well. we've put out this year and support our sponsor as well. The play index at baseball reference.com. Use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription.