The Josh Innes Show - Do People Care About The MLB Playoffs?

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

We start with a question I have about the fan interference in the Yankees/Rays game. Apparently, the MLB playoff ratings are not great outside of the Dodgers... Why? Well, I'm not going to get into some deep ratings talk. But, I will tell you what's missing from the game. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's a random question about baseball. And I happened to watch a little bit of the baseball game last night. The Yankees game, it was kind of on in the background. There was nothing else on. And I forgot what I was doing. I wasn't even watching the game. It was just on in the background. And there was a point in the game when it looked like the Yankees had tied the game with a two-run homer.

But it turns out it was a fan interference because a fan reached over the wall and hit the ball. So it was determined it was fan interference, which makes that a ground rule double. my question is there was a runner at first, so it was two outs, runner at first. Guy hits a ground rule double, all right? So if a guy hits a ground rule double, how do you score from first on a ground rule double? Is it like the judgment of the ump to determine whether or not the guy would have scored from first or not? Like the ground rule is if you hit a ground rule double, you cannot score from first. But yet the runs scored, it made it four to three.

It ultimately didn't matter. The Yankees lost the game anyway. but it kind of reminded me of a play in the 1982 World Series. It was the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cardinals, and the Cardinals hit a ball into the right field corner at Milwaukee County Stadium. Fan reaches over, touches the ball. It's declared fan interference, so it's a ground rule double. Same situation other than the fact one was a home or one was a double.

It bounces, it hits up on the wall. It was not going to go over the fence, by the way. This person reached over and touched the ball. It was not going to be a double until this person touched it. Cardinals have a runner at first. It's silent George Hendrick. He's streaming around 30s going to score. They make him go back to third.

Whitey Herzog runs out of the dugout. He's like, what the fuck is this? Like it's like he was going to score on the play. And they're like, nope, sorry, he's got to go back to third on that play. Then explain to me why in that situation, like I would assume it has to be then at the mercy of the umpire, like at the discretion, if you will, not the mercy, but at the discretion of the umpire at that point then, right? Like, that's the only thing I can surmise from that

is that the umpire can determine whether or not he thinks the player would have scored, which I think is a bullshit situation in that point, because the rule is a ground rule double sends the runner to third. You cannot score from first on a rule double. But does fan interference change that? Like, does fan interference make it then a discretion of the umpire? I guess so. But either way, it didn't matter.

But that annoyed me when I was watching that. It made me think of that Cardinals anecdote. It just shows you people that I know about sports and I know about sports history, God damn it. Right, anyway, let's play a couple commercials. And we will continue. It's reading some story, and I don't like to get into ratings talk as it relates to games on TV.

You either like a sport or you don't. Like, people use a, you know, ratings as some sort of gauge as to whether or not, you know, fans, you know, care about the outcome of a game or care about a sport. Like, like if you have a team, if you're a fan of the Dodgers, if you're a fan of the Guard Indians, if you're fan of the Chicago White Sox, who are a wonderful story, by the way. They're fun. They're wackos. They're weird. I hope they win that series a day and go to the ALCS and we get more Maracami celebrations and I'm Japanese and all that shit. Like, it is wonderful entertainment. I don't watch the games.

I just watch Marikami. But like if you're a fan of any of those teams, you do not give a fuck what the ratings are. The only people that care about ratings of sporting events are media people who do podcasts and write stories about the ratings of sporting events. That's all they give a shit about. But if you're a fan of the White Sox and there's 50,000 people at the game yesterday, do you think they give a shit if the ratings are bad on TV? No, they want their team to win. But I was reading this story. MLB division series remains strong for Dodgers, less so elsewhere. Overall, the Division Series is averaging 3.27 million viewers through Monday, down 3% from the same point last year. Let's see, 3.27. Game 1 of the Dodgers Brave series averaged 5.37 million viewers on Fox last Saturday.

That was the most watched Division Series game since Game 1 of the Yankees Red Sox in 2018. Viewership was up 20% Yankees, Blue Jays, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. What about this Philly one? Viewership was also up 15% compared to the first game. of the Dodgers, Philadelphia Division Series last year. Okay. What does any of this matter? What does it mean?

Look, baseball's about to go on strike. They're going to have a work stoppage. Baseball's not as strong viewership-wise as it used to be. We know that. Whenever they have this work stoppage, which is inevitably going to happen, the sport is going to die. It will exist. But it will be just a vegetable, essentially.

And there will be some people who come back. And who knows, maybe people don't care about work stoppages as much as they did, say, in 95, 94, whenever that work stoppage happened. Because baseball was still, you know, America's pastime. And then they stopped the season. In the middle of the season, there was no World Series. You know, maybe that's not, you know, maybe people aren't as passionate now as they were or care as much about a work stoppage. but a work stoppage is no good. It's not a good situation for them.

So I'm just curious about the future of the game. And look, I don't watch baseball as much as I used to, and I don't care about it. And again, I acknowledge that a large part of my lack of care for baseball is because my team sucks. If the Cardinals were still really good at baseball, perhaps I'd watch a lot more baseball and I'd still be passionate about baseball. I acknowledge that. But the game itself bores me. We have this conversation pretty frequently on this show. show that the game of baseball is just kind of blah to me.

The sport, it's all about analytics. There was a quote from Joe Madden the other day, and I'll paraphrase it because I don't have the quote in front of me. And Joe Madden, I've never really liked Joe Madden, I think he's kind of a heart on, but Joe Madden said something that I thought was interesting, which was people would rather use or lose using analytics than win on feel. And I thought, well, that's kind of dumb, but then I thought about it, and I'm like, he might be right.

Because like let's say you make the right choice analytically and still lose the game, you'll probably be forgiven by a lot of fucking people because look at media people. Media people are so knee-deep in all the bullshit about analytics. Media people love analytics because they love to feel like they're the smartest person in the room.

They love to tell you about the, they love to tell you about hard-hit rates and they like to tell you about rotations on the pitches and they like to tell you about, you know, well, that ball was hit 110 miles per hour off the bat and exit veloes and velos, like these people that are in the media love to do this, that they'll forgive you. You know, I was watching, actually, can I find this audio? It was Jack Morris talking about how he refused to come out of a game. And again, these guys kind of floss themselves a little bit, you know, after the fact. But where is this Jack Morris audio?

This Jack Morris interview was spectacular, him talking about not wanting to come out of a game and basically manager comes out and he says sit the fuck down this is mine let's see it was in the when they was with the twins okay so it's when the twins were in the world series and that extra ratings game in like 91 let's see um is this the audio let me see if this is it wrong thing to say he tore into me one of your first experiences with tom kelly where he he kind of set the tone kha had a different way of doing things and spark he did dick such kind of held the meeting. He was our pitching coach. Everything such he said, we're going to pitch him down and way, soft away. That wasn't in my... Hold on that's not the right one. Where's the one where,

uh, let's see. Here we go. This is great. This is fucking fantastic. Oh, what the heck, go get him. It's just a game. When you have a talk with Tom Kelly. So I finished the ninth inning. Eighth inning was strict. Good inning. Ninth was even better. TK. sits by the tunnel and I was sitting down the other end of the dugout. And he comes up to me, puts his hand on my shoulder. and he says, it's all I can ask you, man. You do your job, you did a great job. I got Aggie Ray, he's coming in. I go, no, he's not.

I go, this is my game. And he didn't say a word. I go, TK., this is my game. I got it. And he walks away. I can't let him come in. Rick Aguilera is a great pitcher, but I don't want him to come in the pressure

because I got handled. Yeah. I'm getting better. I'm getting stronger. And I am dialed in. I mean, it don't get any better than that. And I said to myself, well, if you got to wrestle with your manager, do it now.

So I walk behind him. I'm going to go tell him again. And TK. turns around because he knows I'm behind him. And he throws his hands up in the air and says, oh, what the heck, go get him. It's just a game. That's fantastic. And if I had a line for even saying that to my manager,

today they'd probably say yes. Think about the risk that Tom Kelly took to say, okay. He had already made up his mind. And now he's going to change his mind. think about if I would screw up the shit that he would have taken. To this, yeah, I can't give him enough credit for giving me that chance.

That was on the Midwestern Legends podcast, by the way. And that was, I mean, to me, that's spectacular. And you just don't get that. Like, that doesn't happen anymore. Like, like, and I think that's why I admire and like the old school part of baseball more than I enjoy now, because everything feels so fucking calculated.

And their risk averse, and everything's been determined. before the game starts and you're rarely in a situation where a guy's going to come out, hello, Ross, is going to rarely come out and say like, you know, go get him. Can you imagine? Imagine, who's that dupist that was the manager of the Phillies at one point? Gabe Kapler, can you imagine a pitcher going to Gabe Kapler and going, nope, I got this, I got this, and he goes, oh, what the heck, it's just a game?

No, and maybe that's, maybe that story's bullshit. I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know why you'd lie about it. But, like, to me, that's. That's what made baseball great because you had old school baseball guys who did a lot of shit based on feel. They watched a game as it developed. They saw the way the game was trending and they managed based on that. And again, this is just a thought about why fewer people are interested in baseball and outside of the Dodgers, why the ratings stink in baseball.

And I'm not going to get to a ratings discussion with you. But what I will tell you is that you start looking around baseball and the way fans react to baseball now. I don't feel that same oom. Now, you can turn on the White Sox game yesterday, and there's 40-something thousand people at the game, and I'm not telling you they're not into it. But baseball doesn't captivate people the way it did. And it doesn't captivate people the way it did

because the game's fucking boring. And you can get great post-season baseball, but you have to figure out a way to get people into it for 162 games, and you can't. And you don't get these kind of old-school stories. Like, I wonder, and this is a legit question. Like, I wonder if, when was that? That was in 1991.

So it was 36 years ago, 35 years ago. I wonder if 35 years from now, Terrick Scoople's going to be talking to somebody or whomever. It's going to be being interviewed by somebody on some podcast up on the moon. And someone's being interviewed, and if you're going to get stories like that. If you're going to get more stories that are like, yeah, the manager came out and said, I got to take it. He goes, no, you're not, Skip, it's my fucking game.

No, you know what you're going to get? Oh, Territ got his six innings and his 92 pitches. Time to give it up to the bullpen. Like, those guys aren't going to have those kind of fucking stories. And I think that's kind of what the lure of what baseball used to be and what sports really used to be. But baseball was one that really kind of fit into that category because it's a storytelling sport.

Like, there are good stories in football, not saying there aren't. But the baseball stories, the gut feeling. The one of my favorite videos of all time is Sparky Anderson, 1984 World Series, Kurt Gibson's at the place, uh, plate Goose Gossage is on the mound. And he's at the plate and that they're in a situation.

It's the Padres versus the Tigers, 84 World Series, where they should probably walk, uh, uh, what's it? How am I? Jesus Christ,

Kurt Gibson. So they should walk Kurt Gibson. Goose Gossett says, I don't want to walk him. Manager's out on the mound. He says, all right, fucking go get him. And in the dugout, Sparky Anderson looks out at Kurt Gibson. And he says, Kirk, he don't want to walk you. And he's like shrugging his shoulders.

I don't know why. He don't want to walk you. And then he does the hand signal with the bat. He goes, go, be a hitter, be aggressive. Of course, he ends up hitting the home run. And then you hear the audio of Sparky after the fact. And he's like, don't walk him. He don't want to walk him.

And it's so good. and those just don't exist. And they never will. Like I understand that's a different time, a different place. I mean, how many teams have, you know, a gray-haired manager like Sparky Anderson anymore? How many teams have, you know, horn rim glasses, Tom Kelly managing a team? You don't get that anymore. Those guys don't exist.

And to me, that's to the detriment of the game. You know, the Dodgers are in the playoffs right now. And in 30 years, how many great playoff Dodgers stories are we going to have? I know we have this. 1985 in LCS. You have the Tom Neenfeer home run that Ozzie Smith hit in game five. They go back to L.A. for game six, and they had a base open, and they could have walked Jack Clark. Instead, they pitched to Jack Clark, and he hits a home run in the ninth inning Cardinals go to the World Series.

Off of Tom Neenfure again. Back-to-back games, Tom Neenfue gives up the go-ahead home run to the Cardinals. And the question would be, should Tommy Lassort have actually pitched to him or should they have walked? Like, you don't get those anymore because, you know, you don't get the, you don't get the managing with balls calls anymore. They don't exist. You know, how many guys make the decisions based on balls? You think AJ Hinge is making gut fucking decisions? These guys are nerds.

They're just everything, like, like, I miss that. And you know what else I hate fucking ABS. Like, I get it when there's a call that's just egregious. But at the end of the day, the strike zone is an invisible line. It is not a real balance. boundary. Like, there's not a line. Like, when you are out of bounds or in bounds in a football game, there is a line.

There is no set line for that baseball. Well, you could say, oh, it's the black of the plate. Bullshit. There is no boundary. There's a made-up boundary in this ABS universe. And if there's, like, an egregious missed call and ABS overturns, like, it's a full ball or two out of the zone, this made-up zone, I'm like, all right, cool. But, man, when we're overturning calls because one, nine-thousand-th of a baseball. is in the fucking zone instead of out of it?

Like, you mean to tell me that 99.999% of a baseball is out of bounds, but one little nibble of it, a stitch of it is in the zone, and you're like, that's a strike. If you called it a strike initially, fine. I don't, and I believe that that's bullshit and I hate it. I'm all in favor of getting it right if it's fucking brutal. If we're talking ball outside by a foot, I'm calling. cool. But if you're talking about something that doesn't impact anything, like to me,

that goes against the spirit of the rule. And that's the kind of shit that pisses me up. I'm all about getting calls right at first base. You want to go back and review and make sure a guy was out by a centimeter. That's fine, you know, because you can determine that. There is a base. And you know if the person is on the base before the ball gets into the mitt of the other person before the foot of the defender hits, that's all well and good. But the ABS bullshit with, oh boy, we're going to review this. Like, I don't want to. want to see games won and lost because we went to ABS and a tiny little sliver of the baseball hit this invisible zone. Like, that pisses me off. And I posted about that one day on the WLLZ Facebook

as the Tigers had lost a game like that where a ball was overturned to be a strike. And it, I mean, it caught just a tiny little piece of this fucking zone. I just, to me, it's against what the spirit of the rule should be. And I'm looking at that. And I posted that. And I'm just getting hammered by people. They're shitting on me. Oh, Tigers, if it was not the Tigers, you wouldn't say that. I don't give two fucks about the Tigers. I'm not a Tigers fan. I don't give a fuck. I bet on it. So that pissed

me off. But like, I'm watching this and I'm going, like, what are we doing here? Like, to me that it goes against the spirit of the rule is all. And the people are like, no, that's exactly why ABS was invented, but it shouldn't be.

If a call is that close on an imaginary border, There shouldn't be a, well, a replay is going to overturn it. It's got to be egregious to overturn it. That's all. So, and those are the things that bother me about baseball. Part of it's that my team's not in it. Part of me is, part of it that I'm not in Houston.

The team isn't good. I don't have season tickets. Like, there was a lot of these things. I didn't have to talk about it on the radio every day. It's a lot of different things. But even in St. Louis, when I was doing fill-in shows and you'd be talking about the Cardinals, I'm like, I don't give a fuck. you know, I just, I don't care anymore.

I don't have a passion for baseball anymore. Like, I'll watch it. And if it's on, and like tonight I'll be at a sports bar and I'll go watch the Cowboys and Bucks at a sports bar tonight. And it'll be nice. And they'll probably have one or two baseball games on. And since Jelly's team is in it, she's into it. She's ordered some new t-shirts and she's into Maracami and she's into these guys. And that's cool.

Like, I get that. And if the Cardinals were having a miracle run, like in 2019, I was super into it when they, they, went to the, did they go to the LCS? Yeah, they got swept in the LCS in 19. And I was into it. Like, that was kind of like the last time I was super passionate. Like, they went to the playoffs again in 01 and they lost to the Dodgers, I think, in a one game playoff.

And I was like, all right, fine, whatever. And in 23, I was kind of into it. And then they lost the fucking Phillies. Or it was 22, I guess. They lost to the Phillies. And I was like, oh, that was kind of the end of the road. Then they just got really bad. So obviously your team being good impacts the way you feel about a sport.

You'll lose interest in something. If your team sucks, that's understandable. But I think, and I see a lot of these old school guys that are saying more about this now. You know, you'll see stories like analytics of ruin stuff. And I think you overanalyze shit. And then I go back to that audio there from Jack Morrison. I'm just like, he's like, nope, it's my game. And I'm like, can you imagine that today?

First of all, how many guys would even want to stay in the game past the ninth inning? How many guys want to stay in the game past the fucking fifth? You know, people suck off Terrick Scoobel most of the year. The dude's barely getting through five. Like, oh, two times Cy Youngwin. Dude pitched like five in a third innings. Who gives a fuck? Like, can you imagine being a, like, imagine being a Jack Morris or somebody that, you know, every game.

I understand this is in the 60s. So we're not talking, you know, Bob Gibson or Denny McLean or something. But like dudes that are out there that would every, that would throw like 15 complete games. They don't even have 15 complete games in three years overall in baseball anymore. So can you imagine a guy going out there? and he's like, give me. Like, imagine Chet Stedman in Rookie of the Year whenever he goes, give me one more.

Like, they're going to give that motherfucker one more. Not anymore. It's not the way the game works. And that bores me with it. All right, anyway, more to come.