Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 971: Drought Talk

Episode Date: November 2, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Aroldis Chapman and answer emails about title droughts, the Cubs and consecutive pennants, scoreless streaks, World Series strategy, the recent rarity of Game Sevens, playoff ads, and more.

🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 971 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by our supporters on Patreon and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Hey, how are you? All right. So we are recording this in the hours before Game 7, so we're not going to talk about Game 7. We're going to steer away from anything that won't be relevant after Game 7, when many of you will be hearing this.

Do you want to say anything about Game 6 no i think i'm uh i think i'm fine okay well we we talked the other day i don't know whether it was on this podcast or on the simulcast about how francona seemed to be using andrew miller in a game where it wasn't totally necessary. And then we also, I think, by the way, we also did have the same conversation with Dave Robertson, Kenley Jansen in the LCS where he left him in for like a, yeah, there was a six, nothing lead after he came in and the Dodgers scored a couple of runs. Yeah. So I guess this is the new thing.

We've now gone all the way toward using your high leverage relievers that now the complaint isn't not using them enough, but is using them too much. Is that where we are now? I don't like it when you put it like that. Rephrased in a way that makes me look smart. How can I do that? I don't think you can. Yeah, I guess we are. I mean, I don't know.

Look, these things, as always, depend on things that we don't know. For instance, maybe it is conventional wisdom that, for instance, pitching 60 pitches over two days is, you know, much different than pitching 60 over one day. And so it's not like every one of those bullets he threw takes a bullet away from tomorrow. Maybe throwing 20 pitches is really only the equivalent of like, you know, say an extra five pitches the next day. And so maybe Madden thinks, well, I'm not going to throw him for more than three innings anyway. I've seen him come back from outings the next day and he's just as strong. And, you know, by whatever biometric measures we're using, he's just as effective and there's

no real harm to letting him go today. And so, you know, like there's, I just sort of feel like you're always better off assuming that there is an argument that maybe isn't being shared with you when you're assessing what reasonably smart and competent and incentivized people are doing. So I'm not in any way ruling out the possibility that there's a strong argument for it. People are also not infallible. Even smart people are not infallible or even close to it. And on a very, very basic level, all the question is, is it does the percentage that Chapman helps today outweigh the percentage that using him today hurts us tomorrow? And when you're already at 97% to win the game, well, the, the most he can add is 3%. And it seems, and really probably not even, I mean, he's probably not even adding that because of the 3% chance that he could fail. Some part of that 3% would also be true if Chapman's in the

game, he could have a bad day. He could end up throwing a 35 pitch eighth inning and giving up three runs. And now you don't even have a closer and it's all of a sudden it's a close game and so on. So it's not even 3%. Maybe it's 1%. And so then do you cost yourself a percent tomorrow? Well, which is now today, most likely you probably do. It seems like on the surface, it seems like, how could you not? But, you know, again, maybe, maybe Madden already thinks, well, look, I, well, look, I'm not going to get more than 40 pitches out of him anyway, because then I really worry about his effectiveness. I'm not worried about the effect of these pitches on his 40 tomorrow. It's not going to change the way I use him one iota, I guess is what I'm saying. If that's the case, then I guess, why not? I mean, you still risk him rolling his ankle.

You still give the other team a look at him and so batters who will face him today got to face him yesterday and you still it's sort of an awkward situation because you probably would actually rather him not come I would not want him in a five run game because if things start going wrong you're stuck with him it's a lot easier to pull Mike Montgomery when he doesn't have it or to pull Pedro Stroop when he doesn't have it and to get a new guy on the mound and, okay, it's not your day. Let's get another guy in who it is his day. It's a lot easier to do that when it's not Chapman. When it is Chapman, if it starts getting close, well,

your backup plan was Chapman. And so now you're really sort of stuck with a guy who maybe didn't have it that day. And so, I mean, there's all sorts of reasons that it didn't feel necessary and it did feel possibly harmful. But again, like, I don't know. I think I'd rather think about game seven right now. Yeah. Personally. Yeah, I don't really have that much to add to that. So we can just answer some emails.

So Brett asked, will baseball be worse off if and when we don't have the Cubs and Indians title droughts? After them, there is a whole cohort of professional sports organizations in the major sports with nothing since the mid 60s. With all the 60s expansion teams in sports and the leagues being 30 plus teams now, there will be many streaks that are long but not exceptional compared to other streaks. I believe only the NFL Cardinals goes back before 1960, and they spread their streak over three cities. I guess the presence of two streaks shields baseball for a while. While the Cubs' streak is longer, maybe I should root for them to win, as they are more likely than the Indians to win again in the next few years. But the Cubs has the magic of being over 100 years.

Part of the marketing of baseball is the national pastime with a long history. These streaks help remind everyone of the role baseball once played in the country well that's a nice last sentence yeah right i mean yeah i like that like yeah if you told me that the uh cavaliers had a had a long streak i don't know if they did but presumably they did i'd be like yeah how long could it be basketball was like a fringe sport until you know practically i was alive so but with baseball it was like the biggest right like the when the cubs won the world series last it was probably on the front page of the la times that's how far back it goes sure all right uh i i uh don't want to answer this question

because i was just reminded i had a i had an article when it seemed like the cubs were gonna win this series because they were the better team and they had just won one in Cleveland. I thought, what am I going to write about when the Cubs win? And so I had that in mind. And then when the Indians took the 3-1 lead, I switched over. And so now I've been in Indians mode with a half written piece. And now that it's back to the, you know, being, I don't want to talk about this question. You know being I don't want to talk about This question It's relevant Okay well I do think

I mean I don't think this has been that great A series aside from the Intrigue of the two teams that are Playing in it if there's a classic All-time game 7 that could Totally salvage it but to this Point I think the only really Good game in this series has been

Game 5 right like just on an individual game by game basis. Game three was fantastic. Game three. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it was one nothing. Yeah.

There's that. I don't think this series on a just individual game level has been all that great, but I think the fact that it's the Indians and the Cubs just kind of on its own almost makes it a great series because you know that one of these teams winning is going to be a really momentous historic event. So when there's no potential for that sort of end to a drought anymore, then yeah, I think baseball loses a little something.

I don't know if that's worth saying that a certain fan base should continue to be tortured and suffer forever so that the rest of us can have this sort of intriguing storyline going on. But I think, yeah, I mean, I think something goes out of baseball when we lose a really historic streak that is still ongoing. But on the other hand, whichever one ends is going to also be a really cool moment for baseball. So I think baseball wins either way. It's not going to significantly impact the sport if there's no long drought. I don't think anyone's going to stop watching. The game is, the sport goes on for, you know, eight months of the year, basically. And it's not like we're all on the edge of our seats the whole time, because maybe this is the year the Cubs will win. We're all watching for different reasons. We want

our team to win. We want to watch players play baseball, whatever it is. So I think the drought is a nice little bonus, but I don't think it really is going to harm baseball when it ends. So when the drought started, there were only 16 teams. And so you had a 6%, 7% chance of winning every year. So it really does kind of start to defy mathematics when you go 50, 60 years like that. Of course, starting in 61, they started adding teams. And now we have almost double that. And so lots and lots of teams have droughts that, you know, by 1950s or 60s standards would have seemed long, but we hardly even noticed. You never hear about the Astros, you know, drought or about the Mariners drought or about the Padres drought or about really like even the Dodgers drought, which is going on 30 years. And so do you think that we have lost the power to develop emotionally impactful droughts anymore? Are the Cubs and the Red Sox sort of the last droughts or is it the opposite?

Is it going to be that there's going to be so many, like now there's going to be lots of teams with 100 year droughts and we'll treat all of them as big, awesome, emotional things. I think whenever there's a really long one, it'll still be special. And I think we might be living through the beginning of one right now that, you know, by the end of our lives, we'll be maybe not quite as well-known as the Cubs drought, but, you know, as well-known as, say, the Indians drought. as well known as the Cubs drought, but, you know, as well known as, say, the Indians drought. I mean, when Roger Angel was born, for instance, there was no Indians drought and the Cubs were a really good team that had won not so long ago and no one was talking about how the Cubs couldn't win a World Series. And Roger Angel is still around and writing about this World Series. So these things that seem permanent and just longer than we can

even conceive of aren't really all that long in the grand scheme of things. So something else will arise. All right. So John asks, how many consecutive or not World Series can the Cubs make and lose in before America begins to hate them? I know that many people hated the Yankees and Red Sox due to the fact that they had huge budgets. And were always going deep in the playoffs. A large portion of people loving the Cubs. Is due to the fact that they haven't won the World Series since 1908. And people sort of feel bad for their fans.

But at what point does America's dislike for powerhouse teams. Outweigh their pity for the World Series drought? This question is how many times can they get there and lose? Yeah. Because if they win. and maybe they will have by the time some of you are listening to this, then I think all the sympathy goes out the window, right? So then next year they are just another team and they make the playoffs and they're set up very well for the future so they could keep making the playoffs and keep making World Series and everyone would get sick of that the way that they have the Yankees or the Cardinals or maybe even the Giants. So I think that if the Cubs lose that one thing that sets them apart, then they are automatically going to be hated by some people if they continue to be good. But if they continue to be good and are in the World Series every year, but they don't win it, so they still have the streak going, then how long before everyone turns on them? Or will it happen at all?

I don't think it would happen at all. I don't think in any reasonable situation, like I'm assuming that they're not going to do this nine years in a row. But I don't I think if they if they went three or four in a row, I think it would only up the angst. Like, I think it would only up the angst. Like I think that there would be a real feeling like, well, it's another 20 years now because they use this incredible window as, as you know, the best team in baseball and just, and couldn't get there. And it's really hard to keep that kind of window going.

Even, even for a team as good as the Cubs, it is likely that at some point this team, this nucleus that they have will start to break up and the Cubs will get worse. And once they start losing momentum, I think it's going to be like a lot of gnashing of teeth. I don't think anybody will hate them. Yeah, I don't think so either. I mean, I don't know. People might get sick of them if they're in the World Series five years in a row or something

and they can't finish it off. I mean, are we going to keep wanting to talk about 1908 every year and watching the same highlights and reliving the same failures? I don't know. But, yeah, I think as long as they have the streak going and as long as they keep losing in the World Series, that would be – that would add even more intrigue, I think, and suffering to it and close calls and all of that. So, yeah, I think they're okay as long as they're losers. All right. I guess we can answer this one because it obviously is not going to happen. Didn't happen. Colin asks, Sam is obviously comfortable with a manager starting his relief ace in a win or go home game. Should the Indians start or should the Indians have started Andrew Miller in game seven?

Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, as he says, I am obviously okay with it in theory. But I also kind of believe partly from experience with the Stompers and partly from experience watching Major League Baseball and watching how things catch on and what gets, you know, backlashed is that you should be as weird as you need to be, but you should not be any weirder than you need to be. That, like, there is definitely a real cost to being weird. And if there's a real benefit to it, then you do it, but only if you kind of have to. Otherwise, everybody seems to just be more comfortable when you're a normal baseball team doing things the normal way, just better. And I think that comfort has some benefit. Again, that's not to say that you shouldn't do the right thing. It's just to say that you shouldn't necessarily be looking to do unnecessarily crazy things and expecting everything to go perfectly.

So I don't think that it's necessary to use Miller at the beginning to guarantee you get Max Miller. The benefit to it is if you know that, let's say a hypothetical where you know that Miller is going to give you a two and a third scoreless. Like you just know for a fact that he's going to get you two and a third scoreless. And you think Kluber's good and you're very confident that Allen is good. and you think Kluber's good and you're very confident that Allen is good. If you start Kluber, you don't really know whether you're going to get three innings out of him or seven or one. And the more uncertainty there is about that, the harder it is to plan for it. Like if you're, how do I put this?

If you're going to get two innings out of Miller and you might ask him to do three and you might only need him to do one, and you're going to get two innings out of Miller and you might ask him to do three and you might only need him to do one, and you're going to get two innings out of Allen and you might ask him to go three and you might only need one, the number that you end up asking of them is likely going to be dependent on how good Kluber is. And if Kluber throws six scoreless innings, that's even better for you because then you don't have to push Miller and Allen unnecessarily hard. Whereas if you sort of start Miller, now you're assuming how many outs you can get out of Kluber. And that's the least certain, right? Does that make sense? Like you don't, you want, in a way, you want your relievers. The closer you get to the end game, the more you're mapping out your 27

outs, the more you want a predictable plan because you don't want to find yourself three outs short at the end of it. And you either have to push Miller to 65 pitches, or you have to bring in Jeff Manship or Brian Shaw or, you know, both good pitchers. Shaw's a very good pitcher, but you don't want to have to do that if you can help it. The further into the game, the more you want it to be predictable so that you can really plan your end game out. At the beginning, the first inning, everything is so open-ended that you just, like that's one nice thing about starting your starter

is you're feeling it out. You put them out there and you're just kind of dipping a toe in the game at that point. And if Kluber has it, then that's great. And he gets you four, he gets you five, he gets you six. And then it's really easy from there to do the math and go, okay, how many can I get out of Miller? How many can I get out of Allen? I think that that last attempt explained it. Did it?

Yeah, I think so. All right. Yeah. So I probably, I honestly, I probably wouldn't in this case. If, now, if I had, if it were Tomlin and I'm thinking, well, I might, you know, I'd rather have Brian Shaw than bad Tomlin anyway. I'd rather have Manship than mediocre Tomlin anyway. I'd rather have, you know, pretty much any reliever than Tomlin on a bad day. Then it might be different because then I might really start going, okay, well, I'm just going to start from my best option and go all the way down like we did with Santos. And that would be Miller. Uh-huh. All right. This one is, I thought there was an easy answer to this one, but now I'm kind of rethinking it. So Scott says, according to ESPN stats and info,

Kyle Hendricks headed into game seven with a 15-inning scoreless streak, but one could argue that it should be 16. Here's how. In Game 3 of the World Series, he went 4-1-3 scoreless. In Game 6 of the NLCS, he went 7-1-3 scoreless. In Game 2 of the NLCS, he gave up a leadoff home run in the second and then retired 13 more batters, or 4-1-3 innings, without giving up a run. So add those up and you get 16 innings,

but Stats & Info appears to be throwing out the second inning of game two of the NLCS when he gave up that leadoff home run in the second. So what say you? How long is his scoreless inning streak? I believe that you have to start the inning for it to count for your scoreless innings. I believe it has to be a clean inning. Yeah, well, they're obviously treating it that way well yeah there's there's a rule uh about this just like an elias rule or something i mean yeah i think i think that it was after oral hersheiser that they actually codified the rule about what partial innings count toward and there are there certain partial innings or certain ways of entering an inning or exiting an inning do not count to a scoreless

inning streak. Yeah. So, I mean, if you were going to say a scoreless out streak or something, you would count those three outs, right, that he got in that inning. But a scoreless inning, I mean, he didn't pitch a scoreless inning in that inning. So just, I guess, by definition, it was not scoreless. the other hand if I were writing about this and I had just seen that he had you know technically faced 16 innings worth of batters without allowing a run I'm not sure how I would describe that in print but if there is a rule about it that Major League Baseball follows then I guess there's no reason not to follow that rule. So this actually predates Hershiser, and I'm reading a LA Times piece from 1988 headlined, Fraction Won't Fracture Drysdale Record. It Will Take Hershiser Nine Zeros to Tie,

Ten to Break, Scoreless Mark, Record Keeper Says. And I'm just skimming it, so I might not have the best quote here. This was a rule set in 1968. His initial interpretation was based on a decision by the BBWAA, unofficial guardians of baseball's performance records at the 68 World Series. The writers decided that in terms of a scoreless or hitless streak, a starting pitcher should not be credited with a partial inning if the opposition scores in that inning. All right. Well, that's that.

Oh, so like the American League record is 55. It used to be 56, but they revised it based on this rule. All right. Well, it doesn't really matter either way as long as we all agree on what it is, I suppose. Oh, this is fascinating. So Drysdale, they lay out the scenario where if Drysdale had been pulled after getting the first out of the fifth inning and that inning remained scoreless, it would count as an out for him as a third of an inning. But if he had been pulled and then a reliever came in and allowed a run like a homer, it wouldn't count. Okay. I'm reading the rest of this LA Times piece, and it quotes Leonard Coppett. So Leonard Coppett is one of the great baseball writers by reputation and esteem. At least he won the

Spink Award. He wrote The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball, which is a really, really, I would say, influential book and a good read. And so he was part of this like panel or whatever that decided this rule in the 68 World Series. He was a, he was with the New York Times. And Kavit had like this giant career in sports writing. And at the time this article was written though, in 88, he had just retired as the sports editor of the Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto, California, which is like a tiny little, like that would have been a tiny little paper in a small town. And he was their sports editor. Leonard Coppett was their sports editor.

I wish that I could review his issues just to see if you could tell that Leonard Coppett was editing them. That's crazy. That would be like, I mean, really, that would be like, I guess that would be like the equivalent of like, I don't know, Arthur Lee was now a high school band teacher, maybe something like that. Like, I think the statures of those are all fairly analogous. Yeah, sure. Anyway. All right. So question from Jonathan, watching the final outs of game six reminded me of just how infrequently we baseball fans get to watch World Series Game 7s. And he attaches a chart showing the number of World Series that went seven games over the preceding decade. And it goes back to 1950 and the 2000s, he writes, have been a post-war low point for fans in terms of watching Game 7s. Why do you think this is the case?

The average number of games is down, reaching a low of five games in 2007 and 2012 before rebounding a bit. So basically, World Series have been shorter lately and have not been going to Game 7 as much lately. Do we think that is purely randomness or can you think of any reason why it would be wrapping up earlier? Oh, interesting. He, uh, I was just noticing this last night too. I was, uh, if the, uh, I, I almost wrote something else today instead of what I did. Right. And, uh, this was going to be mentioned in it. Yeah, there, it is crazy. There was like a total, like golden age of world Series Game 7s. In the 50s, I think, there were four years in a row with Game 7s. And we've had three in, what, 15 years?

Yeah. So can you think of any reason why that would be anything other than just randomness? Have teams been less evenly matched? I mean, the only thing I can think of that would be, and this would be a totally untested hypothesis, but this is a way that this could happen, is if home field advantage was much larger in the past, which you could imagine that it would be,

especially if you think that home field advantage is mainly due to kind of umpire choice, umpire bias, whatever. And so the more assessments of umpire choice, umpire bias, whatever. And so the more assessments of umpire performance and the more exactly umpires are judged on their performance, the less they could get away with putting their sort of accidentally or intentionally putting their thumb on the scale. But I mean, I don't think this is true.

I don't think the home field advantage is significantly more. But if you imagine a world where home field advantage in a sport was 85% to 15, well, then you'd have a lot of game sevens. Well, couldn't it also be because with 10 playoff teams, you're getting a wider range in playoff teams. And so therefore you could be getting a wider range in team quality in World Series matchups, just because it's easy, relatively easy to make the World Series once you make the playoffs. Making the playoffs is the hard part. So in the past, you actually had to be the best team in baseball to make the World Series or at least have the best record. Whereas now you can sneak in there as a

wildcard team. You can be the 2006 Cardinals or whatever. No, yeah, you definitely could. And that is another way that this could happen, except for there's, like, that's absolutely not the explanation here. Because the 2006 Cardinals won 4-1. They, like, they were the worst World Series team, you know, like ever. And it would have made sense that they would have gotten swept. And we would have explained it that way. But they didn't get swept. And if you look at since, you know, since the wildcard has been in play, wildcards have won a disproportionate share of World Series, haven't they? Yeah, I think so. I think they have too. I think that that's one of the kind of noisier aspects of the postseason is how well the wildcard teams have done winning the World Series.

And I don't see a lot of mismatches here, for one thing, when I just, I'm just sort of looking down. Like, I don't, like the, you know, the Giants swept in 2012. I don't think the Giants were better than the Tigers. And the Giants won 4-1 in 2010. I'm sure they weren't better than the Rangers. And I don't know why I'm just spitting out random data points. But the point is that I don't think that explanation, while very sensible and could lead to something like this, makes any sense. All right. So then probably just randomness? I think just randomness. Okay.

Play index? I don't have one. I do have, if you want, I have a spreadsheet here with all 36 game sevens in the seven game series era. And if you want to ask me any questions, I have the pitching lines for the winning team. The reason I looked it up is because if we recorded an hour from now, I probably would have done something with the average leverage index to see what the most what the best game seven was so the eighth best game seven by average leverage index is the giants and the royals uh in 2014 which is like the greatest game like that was a super tense super close game that had what probably the biggest ninth inning out Ever I mean runner on third Tying run at third with two outs And yet there have been

Seven World Series game Sevens better than that most of them before All of them before you and I were born But that is just to say That there have been a lot of really good game sevens Yeah sure that's all Alright Well we're busy.

It's World Series week. Just subscribe to the Play Index yourself and use the coupon code VP when you do to get the discount. You want me to tell you the longest Game 7 so everybody can see if we can set a record? Sure. All right. Game length, sorted, largest to smallest. The longest Game 7 was? Well, the longest game seven was actually Florida and Cleveland in 97 at four hours and 10 minutes.

But that was an 11 inning game. The longest nine inning was Arizona at New York in 2001. And that one was three hours and 20 minutes, which is not that long. Oh, geez. Yeah, that's shorter than the average playoff game this year. I don't trust. I don't know if I trust these numbers.

So not only do we not have a play index segment, we are questioning play index data. By the way, that Indians-Marlins game that went 11 innings, 67,000 people went to that. Wow. Yeah. All right. Question from Scott, Patreon supporter. I'm sure you have discussed.

I'm actually not sure we have discussed. Why does everyone hate Joe Buck so much? What are your opinions on the matter? Yeah, I don't know either. I like Joe Buck. I like Joe Buck too. I guess it's that he's that is it the Cardinals thing is it that he's associated with the Cardinals and they also hate the Cardinals and maybe and he's often calling series with the Cardinals and so he has this reputation for being

part of smug postseason Cardinal Twitter and alsoarver because mccarver is also associated with the cardinals yeah or i don't know maybe it's like a anti-nepotism bias or something if if someone is the son of a great broadcaster you assume that he didn't deserve the job or something i was talking about this with jesse yesterday because she was wondering why people hate chopok too and she was telling me about this time she was at a conference and she was telling someone about how great Roger Angel is and what an amazing writer he is and how it was cool that his parents worked for the New Yorker, too. And the reaction of the person she was talking to was like, oh, there were probably other people they could have hired instead of the son of people who worked at the magazine. As if, you know, Roger Angel has just been coasting by on his parents' reputation for the past 72 years. So maybe it's partially a Jack Buck thing. I think he's probably gotten better over the years.

I think the typical complaints about him are that it sounds like he doesn't enjoy whatever's going on, which people have used to interpret as he doesn't like baseball that much, he prefers football or whatever, or he just doesn't like their team and therefore he's not excited when their team does something well. So I think that's the source of it. He doesn't get super enthusiastic. I like his style. I like his sort of sardonic sense of humor. I enjoy that.

And I think he's a perfectly competent play-by-play person also. Just in describing what's going on in the game, he doesn't often say things that are demonstrably untrue, I don't think. So I wouldn't say that I sit down and say, all right, it's a Joe Buck game that I'm so excited, but it's definitely not something I don't look forward to. I like Joe Buck. Yeah, I would sign him for another 10 years.

I enjoy him as part of October. Do you think that it's just sitting next to Tim McCarver made people dislike him? Maybe. Okay, question from another Patreon supporter who just goes by Henchman21. After reading Ben's article about how these playoffs have been Rob Manfred's nightmare in certain ways, I find myself wondering if the time between innings could be shortened dramatically.

My thinking is the pitcher whose team is hitting could warm up in the bullpen as that half of the inning is winding down. I don't know if that would be feasible since I don't know how hard a pitcher throws to warm up for an inning mid-game and he could pace himself properly when an inning goes longer than expected. He doesn't have to be 100% warmed up, but hopefully close. My fear is that implementing this would cause games in the NL to be shorter than games in the AL since pitchers in the NL have to hit, leading to the DH being allowed in the NL. This would make me sadder than the saddest Sam Miller quote.

Then he says, if advertising is what would be stopping this, which of course it is, have announcers do ad reads and use some on-screen graphics during the game. You can make the case that more viewers would see and hear those anyway, and even the best announcers and producers could use help filling airtime during baseball games. even the best announcers and producers could use help filling airtime during baseball games. So, A, do you think, I don't know, I'm sure there's research on whether advertising is more or less effective when it's just reads during the actual action as opposed to games breaking up the action. But as a spectator, would you rather have these super long between inning breaks that we get in the playoffs when everyone tries to squeeze in more ads to take advantage of the ratings or would you rather have the game itself be marred by advertisements i don't like ad reads in general like i i they are i mean like they're part of the business they're part of the

business model everybody does them i do them for baseball references, play index, promo code BP. But I don't like dishonesty. And to me, there's a difference. There's just some line, not on the announcer's part, because the announcer is, you know, clearly just reading a thing and sees himself as like an actor in that situation. But, you know, there's a reason that people like companies like ad reads. It seems more genuine and it is not more genuine. And so I don't like the manipulation of an ad read particularly. So in that sense, I don't want more ad reads. Uh-huh.

But also, do graphics on screen interrupt my enjoyment of the game more than an extra 30-second break in between innings? Probably. Yeah, I think between innings breaks in the playoffs this year have been about 40 seconds or so longer than they are during the regular season. about 40 seconds or so longer than they are during the regular season. So you add those up and, you know, 40 times 8 or whatever. I mean, it adds up to a significant amount of time. It's not enormous. These games are still longer even without that.

But that is the biggest difference between regular season and playoffs. And I don't pay any attention to ads, traditional ads during the playoffs. I really, you know, I'm either writing or I'm looking at things online or whatever. I have no idea. I'm usually muting the ads. I'm not even looking at the TV. So you would think that an advertiser might consider the live reads during the actual game more effective than the between innings ones, even with live sports, which is the one thing that we can't just DVR and fast forward through. So I would think advertisers might like it. And I think I might like it too. I don't know. I mean, it can be heavy handed and overbearing. And you listen to the Yankees radio broadcasts that I hear sometimes because I'm in New York.

And, you know, everything that happens on the field triggers some sort of Geico ad or something that is tied to— Benevolent police officers union. Yeah, right. That's the Mets broadcast. But, yeah, I think I probably would rather just have the game be over sooner and not have all that dead time. I don't know. Either way, it's not great. Ads are annoying. But I think I'd probably have, you know, if it were just like reading something at the beginning and end of the inning, that kind of thing, like whatever

they're showing who's coming up to the plate, they're showing some crowd shot, they're showing the blimp shot. And yeah, meanwhile, Joe Buck buck is reading something i don't you know i don't care about that so i okay so let's let's say that the this doesn't really uh address the the problem but i i feel like it's somewhat it's maybe an easier way to answer this question or to get to some truth in this question let's say that the commercial that the uh between innings break were the exact same length but But if instead of one more Chevy focus group commercial that is sort of taking place in this other universe away from the baseball game, like you're like, now we're going to switch to the Chevy focus groups and then we'll switch back to the baseball. If instead of that same time in between, but the last 30 seconds are Joe Buck reading about what Chevy's doing with their new line of cars

while we see video of fans, the manager, the pitcher warming up. You're in the universe of the baseball game again. Yeah. Better? Yeah, better. I think so too. What if the whole two and a half minutes, again, we're not cutting short, but you never leave the park. And it's all ads. It's all Joe Buck reading while we watch B-roll of post-season baseball. Yeah, I think so too. So in that case, since I apparently prefer live reads to advertisements, to commercials, I can no longer use that as an excuse. I would rather have shorter breaks with live reads than commercials. Again, assuming that you can do it in a way that's not like, and here's the 2-1 Chevy pitch. Like, I mean, you don't want it to be in play, but there's a lot of bumper time in baseball, like a lot of it. And I think you could probably do it.

I agree. All right. See if we've got one more. All right, question from Mike. By now, everyone is aware of Javi Baez's 80-grade tagging skills. As Jon Lester was pitching, that got me thinking, since the Indians are known as an exemplary base-sailing team and Lester is known to have issues preventing base runners from taking dramatic leads, and to a lesser extent, Arrieta is thought to be poor at holding runners as well. I wonder whether there would be any benefit derived from playing Baez at first when a runner is on first base. In theory, given Baez's lightning quick tag, runners would be forced to take shorter leads for fear of being more easily tagged out on a pickoff attempt or backpick by the catcher. Would runners react differently to having Baez at first? And if so, how? And basically, would it be worth it to have Rizzo at second base, presumably being a worse second baseman than Baez for those plays? Rizzo's a really good tagger too, by the way, at first base. And I don't think the problem is the tagging. I don't think there's much Javi Baez can do. It's not even the throwing. It's not even the throwing that's really the problem.

It's that there are no throws. Yeah, right. That's the problem with Lester, yeah. I don't think it would work. I don't think even Baez could fix that. I like the idea of trying to find more ways to use Javi Baez's tagging and other skills. And those guys have Swapped positions on like

Bunt plays right and swapped gloves And everything Rizzo and Zobrist have at least Yeah uh huh yeah I mean The Cubs would be the team to try it if it would Work but yeah I agree Wouldn't work I um Yeah Alright

Is that it? Yeah that's it Alright so we will End there and presumably All right. Is that it? Yeah, that's it. All right. So we will end there and presumably be back at some point to talk about the end of the World Series and the season. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have done so already. Alex Stanford, Andrew Mee, Quinn Stack, Eric McAvoy, and Michael Billmeyer. Thank you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review

and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Go to the website at theonlyruleisithastowork.com for more information. And by the way, we are somehow up for Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 in the Goodreads Choice Awards with a lot of other really impressive and best-selling books. I don't know how we got into this group, but it's cool that we're there. So if you're interested in supporting us, you can go to goodreads.com slash choiceawards slash best hyphen nonfiction hyphen books hyphen 2016. Or you can just Google the Goodreads Choice Awards. I also posted a link at the top of the Facebook page. And the first round of voting ends Sunday.

So if you'd like to support us, vote sometime soon. Hamilton doesn't need another award, right? I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up with Michael Bauman. We talked to Kevin Burkhart about the really good Fox postgame show and A-Rod and Pete Rose and Frank Thomas. You can contact me and Sam via email at

podcastatbaseballprospectus.com or via the Patreon messaging system. And we will be back sometime soon. I'll see you next time.