Effectively Wild Episode 2379: October Came Early

Summary

Effectively Wild Episode 2379: October Came Early

Date: September 25, 2025
Hosts: Ben Lindbergh (The Ringer), Meg Rowley (FanGraphs)

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Overview

In this episode, Ben and Meg revel in an electric September night of Major League Baseball that felt like the postseason had arrived early. They dissect wild comebacks, bullpen meltdowns, the anatomy of a “Cleveland Guardians inning,” the emotional fallout of a scary hit-by-pitch injury, and the shifting balance of power across the leagues. The hosts also dive into granular rules details, debate the impact and future of the automated strike zone challenge system, and respond to a wide-ranging collection of listener questions about baseball stats and strategy.

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Night of Chaos: Tuesday’s Games Felt Like October

Key Points & Insights

• Both hosts agree the prior night was a “wonderful night of baseball,” with tight games and raucous comebacks reminiscent of playoff atmosphere.
• Social Media Fandom: Baseball conversations on Bluesky and elsewhere gave a sense of everyone watching together, a feeling both hosts miss since the heyday of “Baseball Twitter” ([01:37] Meg).
• Tigers–Guardians Centerstage: The high-intensity of the Tigers-Guardians game particularly captivated baseball fans online.

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Guardians vs. Tigers: Anatomy of a Cleveland Inning ([03:20]-[04:56])

The David Fry Injury

• Incident: Guardians utility man David Fry was hit in the face by a 99 mph fastball from Tarek Skubal during a bunt attempt.
• Aftermath: Although Fry suffered facial fractures, he avoided surgery but will miss the playoffs if the Guardians advance.
• Emotional Fallout: Skubal was clearly rattled, affecting both his performance and the inning’s outcome.
• Pitcher’s Responsibility:

  “With great power comes great responsibility. That would unsettle me if I did something like that…that could be career-threatening, life-threatening.”
  — Ben ([05:16])

• Pitcher Empathy: Skubal’s visit to Fry in the hospital was praised as a humane and meaningful gesture uncommon among pitchers.

The Most Guardians-Inning Possible

• Guardians scored three runs on bunts, infield hits, a wild pitch, and a balk—without hitting a ball into the outfield.
• “It was just a microcosm of the Cleveland Guardians experience.” — Ben ([04:56])

Bullpens & Playoff Prospects

• Guardians Pen: Deep and dominant, especially in contrast to Detroit's.
• Tigers: Their bullpen issues threaten their playoff hopes and their narrative if they collapse out of the division lead.

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Collapse Narratives: Tigers, Mets, and October Perceptions ([09:34]-[13:10])

• If the Tigers blow their division but still make the Wild Card and succeed, it may relieve the sting of collapse.
• “If they lose the Central but still win a wild card…they’re saved the worst of it, probably...” — Ben ([09:34])
• Narrative neatness compels fans and media to link collapses to prior years:

  “We love a good narrative. Right?” — Meg ([11:45])

• Comparison to the Mets’ struggles: Mets' fall feels less embarrassing due to lack of a strong preseason expectation or division lead.

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Pitching Problems: Dodgers’ Bullpen Fire & NL West Drama ([13:10]-[17:41])

• Dodgers Bulllpen: “Absolute tire fire”—the strongest contrast to their 2024 championship team.
• Dodgers now have too many starters, leading to speculation on using Kershaw and Sasaki as bullpen pieces in the postseason.
• “It’s fascinating...just dregs of a rotation, just guys who are barely healthy…and they win the World Series…Then this year…they just like get swept or something.” — Ben ([17:41])
• Shohei Ohtani’s first MLB playoff start will be a major storyline.
• The National League playoff bubble is full of vulnerability due to weak bullpens across contenders.

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Playoff Picture & Fan Emotions ([20:00]-[21:23])

• Wild Card Standings: Constant churn; teams can go from missing out to a bye within days, highlighting extremely tight races.

  “You can go from missing the playoffs to being the top seed…in a matter of days.” — Ben ([21:23])

• Meg admits she’s been a nervous Mariners fan, even needing a gin cocktail break during a tense loss-to-win swing.

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Dodgers’ Bullpen Solutions ([21:50]-[22:19])

• Offbeat suggestion: demote all failed late-inning relievers and reconstruct the bullpen from surplus starters and reliable middle-inning arms.
• "Just overturn the bullpen pecking order because it's just not working." — Ben ([21:51])

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Introducing the Challenge System for Balls & Strikes ([23:28]-[31:07])

Industry Reaction:

• Split Expert Opinion:
  • Joe Sheehan (newsletter): Critical, calls the challenge system a "half measure" that avoids real reform.
  • Craig Goldstein (Baseball Prospectus): Loves the compromise, seeing it as adding strategy while appeasing both tradition and technology advocates.
• Quote Recap:

  “Perhaps this is the mythical compromise where neither camp is happy and it’s also for the best…” — Craig Goldstein (as paraphrased by Ben) ([25:34]) “My immediate reaction is that this is a half measure that won’t have much effect…” — Joe Sheehan ([24:24])

Meg and Ben’s Take:

• Both hosts largely favor the challenge system, arguing it preserves tension, allows for strategy, and keeps the “art of framing” alive.
• Key Quote:

  “I think it introduces strategy in a way that technology often removes…less bothered that there will still be calls that are 'wrong.'” — Meg ([26:33])

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The Philosophy of the Strike Zone ([31:07]-[38:52])

• Ben on Framing: Believes the pitch isn’t complete until the call, and the catcher’s skill is a feature, not a flaw.

  "The act of receiving the pitch is part of the pitch itself. It’s a pitcher and catcher in tandem." — Ben ([36:46])

• Both acknowledge slippery slope worries—if the challenge system works, will full ABS (Automated Ball/Strike system) become inevitable?

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The End of the K-Zone? ([38:52]-[42:11])

• Both favor removing on-screen strike zone tools, seeing them as engagement bait that misleads and inflames fan outrage (“we do not need to manufacture reasons for grumpy upset” — Meg [41:24]).
• “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, fake K Zone.” — Meg ([42:09])

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Listener Questions & Deep Dives ([42:48]-[97:07])

Warning Track: Outfield or All Around? ([44:09]-[51:00])

• Issue: Is “warning track” only for dirt in front of the outfield wall or for all dirt around the field?
• Consensus: Technically can refer to all warning track dirt, but convention/intent is usually only for outfield. Outfield/infield is a more meaningful distinction than fair/foul.

  “I don’t think it’s technically wrong…but it is most often a term…as it pertains to the outfield.” — Meg ([48:37])

The Easiest Day at the Office ([52:41]-[55:25])

• If a batter pinch hits, is intentionally walked without seeing a pitch, and is then replaced—has he had the easiest possible game?
• Hosts note the rare “no plate appearance pinch hitter,” who is announced but immediately replaced, might have it even easier.

Bayesian vs. Frequentist Teams ([57:57]-[63:46])

• Statistical Philosophies in Team Analytics:
  Some teams focus job postings on Bayesian techniques, others do not.
• Expert Ben Clemens’ Input: Teams use both approaches; job listing language may suggest a philosophical slant, but practical needs blend both methods.

Hypothetical: The 1-Single-a-Game Player ([63:46]-[72:39])

• If a player got one single (and nothing else) in every game—would he make the Hall of Fame?
  • Despite a massive hit streak, the lack of overall production (no power, low OBP) would limit both career and Hall potential—unless the player is a literal magic pinch-hit specialist.

2025’s Playoff Landscape and League Strength ([77:08]-[88:17])

• Despite preseason expectations, the American League is nearly even with the National League in interleague play.
• Both leagues’ “top end” teams have underperformed, creating a tightly-clustered, “mid” playoff race.

  “Just a general midness which we have discussed before and…is attributable to the top end in both leagues being kind of down relative to expectation.” — Meg ([77:58])

• Mariners’ playoff and World Series odds prompt a discussion of how fans interpret (or misinterpret) probability stats.

Tag Plays, Replay, and Airspace Debates ([92:13]-[97:06])

• Airspace Outs: Should a runner be called out if they momentarily lose contact with the bag while over it and are tagged?
  • Replay Criticism: Noted for creating delay, chasing “outs hiding in there.”
  • Ben splits “mental error” airspace (e.g., hopping after arriving) from brief slide-momentum mistakes.

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Notable Quotes

• “It was a microcosm of the Cleveland Guardians experience.” —Ben ([04:56])
• “In a situation like this… there’s so little ambiguity about it being an accident…” — Meg ([06:27])
• “It would be funny, I think, if [the Dodgers] got eliminated early…they come into it with Ohtani and Yamamoto and Snell and Glassnow…and then they just, like, get swept or something.” — Ben ([17:41])
• “I love [the Challenge System] and think that it’s great fun…it introduces strategy in a way that technology often removes…” —Meg ([26:33])
• “Even tennis…has now…turned to having no line judges and just letting the machinery call the games. This is the beginning of the end of the home plate umpire…” — Joe Posnanski (quoted by Ben) ([31:07])
• “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, fake K Zone.” — Meg ([42:09])
• “I think it’s more of an outfield/infield distinction to me than…it’s a fair/foul one.” — Ben ([50:54])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Tigers–Guardians Game, David Fry Injury: [00:45]–[06:27]
• Collapse Narratives: [09:34]–[13:10]
• Dodgers Bullpen & NL West: [13:10]–[17:41]
• Automated Strike Zone Debate / Challenge System: [23:28]–[38:52]
• K-Zone Critique: [38:52]–[42:11]
• Listener Mail: Warning Track: [44:09]–[51:00]
• Listener Mail: Bayesian Baseball: [57:57]–[63:46]
• Listener Mail: 1 Single Per Game Player: [63:46]–[72:39]
• Listener Mail: League Strength: [77:08]–[88:17]
• Listener Mail: Tag/Replay Debate: [92:13]–[97:07]

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Memorable & Light-Hearted Moments

• Meg describes leaving a tense Mariners game mid-dinner for “a gin cocktail and some chicken wings” ([20:22]).
• Playful, semi-serious callouts (“We love a good narrative. Right?” — Meg ([11:45]))
• Theorizing about “no PA pinch hitters” having the true “easiest day at the office” ([53:13])
• Frequent riffs on what makes the “most Effectively Wild” scenario (listener challenge issued for nominations—[98:56]).

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Summary

Episode 2379 takes listeners through a wild late-September baseball night brimming with playoff tension, remarkable innings, and oddities. The hosts dig into emotional and strategic wrinkles—both on the field (bullpen failures, the emotional impact of a major HBP) and off (debate over rule and tech changes). The episode is vibrant with natural, knowledgeable banter and a devotion to examining the full spectrum of baseball, from the tactical (bullpen construction) to the philosophical (what “right” means for strike calls), all capped by thoughtful listener interactions and real-time pennant race drama.

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For more on any topic, consult the show notes and Fangraphs for stats, stories and links referenced during the episode.

Transcript

[Ben Lindbergh]

The show is called Effectively Wild. It's about baseball and stunts. We might meet a major league break down some autonomy. Effectively Wild. Effectively Wild. Effectively Wild. Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2379 of Effectively Wild Baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer, joined by Meg Riley of fangraphs. Hello, Meg.

[Meg Riley]

Hello.

[Ben Lindbergh]

What a wonderful night of baseball that was on Tuesday. Just such a good night. It just, it feels like the playoffs have started already and I know that that's the case.

[Meg Riley]

I'm nervous.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So yeah, yeah, because we're anxious and because I'm already recogniz that whatever we say will be a bit out of date by the time people hear it, which is our plight every October and now also in late September because of course there will have been more exciting and consequential baseball on Wednesday by the time this is posted. But Tuesday, just what a thrill. Just comebacks, close games. Such good stuff. It felt like everyone was watching Tiger's guardians. I know that wasn't the case, but everyone on baseball social media was watching Tigers guardians and reacting to it in real time. And that was just a lot of fun.

[Meg Riley]

It was a lot of fun. And I, I have to say this is obviously a very specific thread of, of one's experience of sports. And you know, I think you should take in games however you want to. I think having a mix of like being in the moment, being really focused, putting your phone aside and also like if, if you are a person who, who does social media to do that. But it did feel not only like everyone was watching Tiger's guardians, but like a noticeably larger percentage of my Blue sky timeline was watching baseball at all. And that was nice. And I hope that we can keep that going because that's a thing that hasn't quite taken hold the way that it used to on Twitter and, and I miss it. I think the only thing about the evening that wasn't fun. Now I say that as someone who's whose preferred team one was the scare that David Fry had. It seemed like it unsettled Skubal to the point of perhaps contributing to that inning and game unraveling on him and his team. Thankfully it sounds like Frey is going to be able to avoid surgery but is going to miss the the playoffs entirely if the Guardians managed to pull this out. So that is a bummer and one of those scary things. It's never good when the pitcher immediately throws his shit on the ground after hitting someone like obviously a mistake, clearly not something Skubal intended to do, but you have a, you have a real clear view what's going on. So that was, that was scary. But the rest of that game was fantastic. So.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, yeah, and Fry was leaning into bunt, so it wasn't even like it was such a wild pitch. There was a wild pitch that followed that. But yeah, it was still a 99 mile per hour Terence Goople fastball in the face. That is going to hurt. And it did, fortunately. Sounds like Fry is more or less okay. I mean, okay, he still has facial fractures, but he doesn't have to have surgery and there will seemingly be no long term damage. So that's good. But yeah, that somehow ended up doing damage, I guess, to Detroit because it did play into that inning, which as many people have pointed out, was just such a quintessentially Cleveland Guardians inning. Just kind of dinks and dunks. Not even dinks and dunks, cuz. Dinks and dunks, I think implies that you actually propelled a ball into the outfield.

[Meg Riley]

Correct.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Guardians Guardians did not do that in that inning. And nevertheless they scored three runs, which was all they needed to win that game because of course their relievers do not ever allow runs anymore. So yeah, that was just, you know, there was a, a bunt single and then there was a sacrifice attempt that Tarek Skubal got a little too cute, a little too fancy with perhaps, and, and tried to chuck it through his legs. And then you end up with a two base throwing error there. And then there's just another infield tapper. That is a single. And then, yeah, Skubal seemed to be rattled by having hit Fry like that and, and then did deliver the wild pitch and then balked and then there was a ground out to score a run. And that was it.

[Meg Riley]

That was it.

[Ben Lindbergh]

That's three runs for you. And the Guardian scored five on the night without hitting very well, as we would traditionally define it. But they got the job done. So that was just one of those weird innings that sort of sums up a whole season. I guess it was just a microcosm of the Cleveland Guardians experience. I didn't find it to be kind of endearing that Skubal was so upset by having hit Fry, because I'm, I'm often taken aback by how blase pictures seem to be about it. And maybe, maybe on the inside their guts are roiling, who knows? But there seems to be sort of a culture of don't show any regret or concern or sentiment for an Opponent or something. Sometimes you'll see a nod or, you know, a gesture like, oh, I didn't mean to. Something like that. But. But it's fairly rare. Oftentimes the pitcher will just kind of turn around and ask for a ball or whatever, and that'll be. And in this case, yeah, Scubal was thrown by that and he actually went to visit Fry in the hospital, which is a nice gesture. So. Yeah. Cause I always imagine if I were in that situation, if I somehow possessed the power to throw a 99 mile per hour fastball and could hit someone with it in the face that, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. Like that would. That would unsettle me if I did something like that. That could be career threatening, life threatening. So, yeah, I don't see how that wouldn't affect you. But sometimes it not to.

[Meg Riley]

It's a little bit different when you're just. You plunk a guy like on the hand. Which isn't to say that, like, that isn't a problem. I don't mean to make light of it, but I think that when it involves the face, it tends to elicit a stronger reaction because the degree to which that can be dangerous is just like meaningfully higher than messing with all your little bird bones or what have you. But yeah, it is. It is nice when you are reminded of. Of it being, you know, like there's. There's brotherhood and fellowship and what have you between these guys. And, you know, I do think in a situation like this, there's. There's so little ambiguity about it being an accident that it also kind of helps the moment sort of move along in a weird way. Right? No one, no one thinks Skubal, like, meant to hit David Fry in the face. Stakes of the game are so dramatic. The stakes of the series are so dramat. Skubal has not demonstrated himself to be a serial killer in any capacity that I'm aware of. So I think that helps too when it's just obviously like a bad. A bad bit of luck and misfortune for everyone. So.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So they beat the big guy, they beat Goliath, they beat Skubal. And you know, people will often say, oh, if you're the Tigers, you gotta win the Skubal games. And technically you don't need to. I mean, it's good if you do, and probably you will. But also. Yeah, right. You should try to make. Make the most of that opportunity. But maybe they lose the game that you expect them to win, and maybe they win the game that you expect them to lose. That happens often too. But they lined him up so that they could start him twice this week. And I think I, I referred to that as regular rest, but really he's starting on four days rest, which used to be regular rest. That used to be the standard, but now he's usually working on five days rest, sometimes even more. And that's kind of swept the league and that's what pitchers do these days. And so four days, which used to be the norm, is now quasi short rest. He has pitched quite well when he's gone on four days rest this season and he pitched well again on Tuesday, but things just didn't go his way. So yeah, that Tigers bullpen is just really rough. As we discussed last time, just once they're losing in the late innings, it feels like just going to get worse from there. And it's the opposite with the Guardians, where they've gotten this great starting pitching work this month, but the bullpen work is a little less surprising and just so dominant. They have so many guys out there even without Class A, and they're just all good. Like if, I don't know, like how many Tigers relievers could even make the Guardians bullpen depth chart? Like maybe Finnegan, I don't know that anyone else would actually crack that bullpen. It's just so much deeper.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I think that's right. I think Finnegan might be the. At least based on how they've pitched the, you know, this year there's been, there's been better production out of members of that group in years past, but yeah, it's been pretty rocky. It's been pretty rocky.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So the saving grace for the Tigers was that the Astros also lost. So the Tigers maintained their slim lead in the wild card race. And of course they have the tiebreaker over Houston too. And even though that division lead has now fully evaporated, I do think it would somewhat save Detroit from just historic notorious status if they blow the lead. If they lose the Central but they still win a wild card, then I think they're, they're saved the worst of it probably, if they still sneak in. And of course, who knows, they could have a deeper October run than the Guardians do in that event too. And then would we even really remember it as a collapse? Because if they get in, you know, that's all that matters really. I mean, yes, it's nice to get a buy in to win the division, but if they made it out of the wild card round, then I'm not sure that it would really cling to them in the way that some of the other historic collapses did. Because in past historic collapses, if you collapsed, you did not make the playoffs. That was it. Right? So. And I think that's what sort of separates their situation from the Mets situation and that the Mets have kind of collapsed two, but they never really had a secure path to the top of the nle, so it seemed like, well, they were going to win a wild card, and maybe that's just a little less embarrassing to blow a wild card. I don't know. Maybe I'm drawing fine distinctions here that don't really matter. But I think if. If the Tigers lose the division but make the playoffs, especially if they're able to play well in the playoffs, then I think they could save themselves from the worst of the stain associated with having blown this big lead.

[Meg Riley]

I think it certainly helps if they are able to still make it through, and particularly if they end up advancing through to the Division Series. I think it's pretty gnarly though, you know, and I think in part the reason it might stick to them more than you'd expect is there's. There's like a narrative neatness with the way that their season this year lines up compared to their season last year.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right.

[Meg Riley]

And I think we're gonna have a hard time resisting the, the siren song of like a PAT narrative. Right? It's like last year they sold the deadline and then you never believe what happened next. And this year they're in this dominant position, you know, they seem like they're just gonna run the table and then you'll never believe what happened next. And so I think that puts them on shaky ground just because we love a good nar. And I think part of it will depend on whether their collapse stands alone or they are joined by some other collapse in. In the nl. I agree with you that in on a single season basis, what they have experienced is worse, quote, unquote, than what the Mets have gone through just because of how precipitous the fall has been. But we sure do love making fun of the Mets. Not you and me. We're sweet as can be. But. But people, you know, mean people that might counterbalance things a little bit. I mean, that could be true to the Mets benefit as well, right? That they are not the only team. And who knows? Like, it seems unlikely that the Dodgers will lose the NL west, but those Padres are nipping at their heels and they couldn't even defeat the Diamondbacks last night. So what's going on? Speaking of bad bullpen speaking. Good Lord.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Dodger Spillpen is an absolute tire fire. I brought this up recently. It's just fascinating to me. This is, I think one of the most intriguing postseason storylines is that the Dodgers just have the opposite pitching problem as the one they had last year where they had hardly any healthy starters left, but they had a pretty lights out bullpen, as it turned out, and they rode that all the way to a title. And this year they just cannot figure out who to give the ball to in this high leverage late inning situations. And meanwhile, they have an excess of starters, if anything. And so then I guess the question becomes, well, do they rob Peter to pay Paul or do they pull from their strength to bolster the weakness? And there was some talk about, oh, Clayton Kershaw is available out of the bullpen. Here we go again. Which I guess he may have volunteered for. That's nothing new, but, but that's maybe his role for the postseason that they just have too many starters. So maybe Emmett Sheehan, I mean, he's maybe more of a long guy, but yeah, Shohei was great. Like he, he went six for the first time this season, didn't give up a run. He hasn't given up a run this month, I believe. And yet the Dodgers have lost all of his starts because as soon as he's removed from the game, it's just night and day. It's just whomever they bring in instantly blows the leads. So this time it was not Blake Trinen for once. It was Tanner Scott who took the loss. And just, it was, it was ugly. It was like he hit a guy and then he walked a guy and oh, here we go again. So here we go again. Yeah. And the Diamondbacks keep themselves very much in the running with another late inning comeback. And Perdomo gets the, the walk off hit. Very exciting. It's like the Dodgers relievers who can be trusted now are more of the middle inning guys or the guys who were supposed to like Alex Vessia. Jack Dreyer has been huge for them, but the late inning guys, you just cannot use them anymore.

[Meg Riley]

And it does make me wonder, you know, I know they activated Sasaki off the il. I wonder how they will deploy him. I wonder if they will contemplate sort of like a piggyback thing with him and she. And maybe I feel nervous for, for him because they're in such dire straits all of a sudden. And then it's like you're going to throw the guy whose velocity was down and who couldn't adjust on his first Try into like the heat of the postseason fire. I don't know if that's like the right way to do it, but, you know, if he's a healthy arm and they feel good about what he can contribute, then maybe, I don't know. It's, it's so odd. But you're right that they have, they seemingly have options. It's just how they want to fit those bullpen pieces together out of their existing starters. And you know, it's not like it has to be the same series to series. In theory, they could, you know, kind of move some guys around, but you gotta advance in order for that to be remotely a strategy. And I don't know how advisable it is to continue to monkey with the usage of guys who are used to starting. So I don't know, Ben seems a mess, but they'll probably win the World Series again or some. I, I, I do appreciate, I am not wishing the Dodgers ill as a team. I do not have a particular disdain for them. I do appreciate them not running roughshod over the entire National League all year. You know, we talked last time about there being archetypes of teams approaches to team building that we think are good for the game just in, in the abstract. And we want to see those rewarded with postseason births. And I think that the Dodgers being mid is good for baseball not because of their midness, but because it might get people to shut the hell up about how they're a super team and you can buy one of those and it's really about what's good for the game and not about me being right. But me being right is a nice ancillary benefit. I won't lie. I have pride. I like to have my analysis be sharp, you know, I do.

[Ben Lindbergh]

No, it would be funny, I think, if they got eliminated early going into the postseason with.

[Meg Riley]

You have to take a different word on the off chance that Craig actually listens to this episode because I worry about his well being and the state of his brain because this feels really rough.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I'm gonna mention Craig again in a minute in a different context, but no, it would be, I think kind of cosmically appropriate in the playoffs are random and unpredictable sense if they go into it with just the dregs of a rotation, just guys who are barely healthy and weren't even supposed to be here and they win the World Series and then this year they come into it with Ohtani and Yamamoto and Snell and Glass now and all these guys and then they just like get swept or something. That would be funny in a way Dodgers fans would not find it funny, but it would be fitting in a sense. And I am looking forward to Ohtani's first MLB postseason start. That should be exciting. Yeah. And Sasaki, I mean, if he could be a October bullpen weapon, that would be fun. I don't know that I believe that he just came off of a AAA rehab assignment where he had a 6 ERA and he walked 6 per 9. Still, granted, he was starting for most of that assignment and then they moved him to the pen and I think he had a couple scoreless outings in relief to close it out. So maybe. Maybe he'll be a better fit for that usage. But yeah, it's tough. And the Cubs, the back of the Cubs bullpen, similarly full of holes too about it. And good thing for the Mets because the Mets went down five to one. And then Kate Horton had to come out of the game with a back issue. And then the Mets made it back and had a huge homer from Francisco Alvarez. That was a game that they really needed. So that helped them maintain their lead over the Diamondbacks and regain a lead over the Reds, who lost. So it's not a lot of breathing room, but for at least one more day, they're back in possession of a playoff spot. Or as we speak, they are. So there was that comeback. There was the Yankees late comeback. There was the Mariners late comeback. Just so much excellent action that was going on there. And then the Padres win the game to narrow the NL west lead, and the Red Sox beat the Blue Jays to solidify their position a little bit. And they beat Gossman as well. A tough assignment for them. So, yeah, it was just a lot of fun to follow all of these things in this very granular way. It was a good trial run. This is getting me very much in the mood.

[Meg Riley]

In the mood? Yeah. I felt terrified. I felt nervous. I was heartened. If we're doing Mega motion watch by, like the. The Astros seemingly losing, I'll admit something, though, Ben. Are you prepared for a dereliction of duty?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, yeah.

[Meg Riley]

Well, first of all, technically, it wasn't a working day for me. We podcasted. But podcasting with you, that's no work at all. That's a pleasant treat. And then, you know, it was the last night before I had to not only go back to work, but, like, we got all this stuff to do. It's very busy. I spent the morning putting credential requests in and the Mariners were losing. And I was like, it's time for us to go to dinner. And so we did. And I, I, I had my phone out at the bar to pay attention, but I didn't watch the very end of that game live. I did watch it when I got home, though. I got watched it when I got home, but I, I was nervous. I felt, I felt agita. And so I had to go have a gin cocktail and some chicken wings.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, for a few days you can maybe relax a little bit before you then ramp up the anxiety again because the Mariners are sitting pretty at the end.

[Meg Riley]

Well, I mean, a few days or maybe a whole week, you know, if things break the way that we want them to.

[Ben Lindbergh]

That's the other fun thing about this, is that because a lot of these teams are clustered so closely together, it's like you can go from missing the playoffs to being the top seed potentially, and we're getting a buy just in the matter of days. All these things are still in play potentially here, so the range of outcomes has been very wide. So, yeah, I forgot to mention Justin Rubleski as, as another guy who's pitching decently for the Dodgers out of the pen.

[Meg Riley]

I don't know what to make of him.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, I think, I think they should just like, Demote, Blake Trine, Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates, all the guys who were supposed to be the late inning, high leverage closer, save getters, Just make them the garbage time, mop up men, put some starters in the pen and then just go with Dreier and Rubleski and Vessia when you need to nail it down. Just, just overturn the bullpen pecking order because it's just not working.

[Meg Riley]

It's not working. And I don't know, I mean, they're so smart, you know, and they got so many smart people working for them and they haven't been able to crack it, you know, at least not yet. Like, what's going on? What's going on with Blake Trine?

[Ben Lindbergh]

You know, I mean, yeah, well, so many things, I'm sure. But on the field, nothing good. So you never know, though. Like, maybe you just, I mean, it's bullpen performance. We're talking about a very small number of outings and innings, and maybe you stick with your guys and then you are rewarded for your faith when suddenly the calendar flips and they're good again. So who knows, who can predict anything? But I'm enjoying not being able to predict that's happening this week. That's been great. And we'll see if the Pirates can continue to play spoiler and they can get a taste of that postseason atmosphere. It's the closest Paul SK is going to come to the playoff environment, playing a playoff contender and perhaps stopping them from making it somewhere.

[Meg Riley]

Paul Skeens is like, I. I'm just sitting here, but I feel like somewhere in the world I'm being weirdly insulted.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, well, it's not his fault. It is far from his fault. Well, we will continue to monitor and discuss and watch along with everyone as this story develops this week. So I was going to invoke Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus because both he and Joe Sheehan in the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter reacted to the news that the automated strike zone is arriving next season in the form of the challenge system. And in some respects they had identical takes, and in other respects they had diametrically opposed takes, which amused me because I know these guys read each other and respect each other. I've seen their various interactions and I read both of them and enjoy their work. But here they could not have disagreed more except in the ways in which they completely agreed. So they both called this the challenge system, a half measure. They both used that exact term, but they disagreed on whether it's a good half measure or a bad half measure. And I guess when you call something a half measure, usually you are saying something negative. You're saying that it doesn't go far enough and it won't satisfy anyone. And that's what Joe is saying, he wrote. My immediate reaction is that this is a half measure that won't have much effect. It is in fact designed to not have much effect, but rather to win the press conference. There will still be thousands of instances in which the home plate umpire reverses the results of the pitcher's action, calling a ball a strike, calling a strike a ball, and influences the course of the game. There simply aren't enough challenges in this rule set to repair every instance of an umpire flipping 500 points of OPS. By being wrong on a 1:1 pitch. MLB can get the calls right and is choosing not to do so. This program is a compromise and it should serve as a reminder that not all compromise is good. The midpoint between a good idea and a bad idea is often just a different bad idea set against the backdrop of smiles and handshakes. Withering, withering take from Joe. Yeah, and called it a half measure. Called it a compromise. And so did Craig. But Craig loves it. Yeah, so do we, I think. And I don't disagree that it's a half measure, but I'm happy about it. So Craig says, this is great news. While half measures are usually anathema, this one just might work. And he goes on to say that it will not satisfy the many fans who value the human element of the umpires, nor will it satisfy those who prioritize the correct call uber alles. But perhaps this is the mythical compromise where neither camp is happy and it's also for the best. The challenge remains an option for those crucial or egregious situations which can get rectified while preserving, in part, the discretion of the umpire to move things along in blowouts and catchers who excel at framing to ply their wares. So I think we're more aligned with Craig here. But it amused me that those two guys used the same phrases and evaluated it very similarly and yet reached completely opposed conclusions.

[Meg Riley]

Yes, I. I mean, people know where I stand on the challenge system.

[Ben Lindbergh]

That.

[Meg Riley]

I love it and think that it's great fun. I think it introduces strategy in a way that technology often removes and will give us insight into individual catchers or pitchers and hitters for that matter, and their discernment of the zone. I am less bothered by the notion that there will still be calls that are, quote, unquote, wrong, because I think that you have the ability to rectify the ones that are an issue. I don't think that the. The number of challenges is, you know, irrevocably fixed, and if they find that actually having four would be better than two, and here we should remind listeners that you retain your challenges if you get the challenge right. So in theory, you could have an infinite number of challenges as long as you keep getting the. The challenges that you call for correct, and have those correspond with the action on the field. You know, I'm sure that, like their other attempts at sort of fiddling with the rules, that they will be open to further fiddling if further fiddling presents itself as necessary. You know, the majority of calls that I think Joe is probably worried about here, and I might be putting words in his mouth, so if you. If he said something different, I haven't had a chance to read his piece yet, you tell me, but I think of the strike zone as a probabilistic endeavor. That's the way it's been called for most of my life. It's been called worse than it's called now for most of my life, because umpires keep getting better and better, and as long as they can keep their, you know, draftkings accounts out of the hands of professional gamblers, there's no reason to think they can't keep getting better and being very good at baseball. So I think of the zone as probabilistic. I think of its edges as probabilistic. And I think that they're being those pitches being called in accordance with the execution of the pitcher or his catcher is, is a cool part of the game. And if you want to be persnickety about it, you're going to have the ability to do that. So I think it's great. I think Joe is wrong. I understand his perspective. I don't agree with it. Craig's point is funny. And I think that the unacknowledged thing that folks who want the full abs need to grapple with is that what fans want isn't the call to be right. Fans want the call to benefit their team. Right. I don't think that there is a large constituency that is advocating for a rule book zone and it's strict enforcement because they like the idea of it being consistent. They think it's going to benefit their dudes. That's why they want it. And that's a perfectly fine position to have. It's not one that I think should be the governing principle of the rule set that like, you know, guides the game. But as a fan, that's a perfectly reasonable position to hold. The problem is that you're not going to get it. You're not going to get it whether you have the challenge system or full abs. And if you go to full abs, sure, maybe fans can adjust, but you think fans can play now, just you freaking wait until they have a full ABS zone, which is going to, by the way, make games longer again. This is what they found in AAA that when they called a full automatic zone, it made game times longer. So you're going to be giving back some of your pitch, be more walks, more walks. You're going to give back some of your pitch clock gains. You're going to have more walks, which are boring. They're valuable, but boring. So what I think you end up with is people still pissed because their intuition about the zone and whether things are, you know, a strike or not is going to have to go through a period of adjustment that most people will not bother to do. So they're going to have a bad intuitive sense of the zone and always think the call is wrong. The game's going to be longer and crammed with. They don't want to watch. So I'm right again. No, but I, I think that having clarity about the thing that fans are really asking for and really Invested in is useful in evaluating this, having seen it in practice a bunch, and not just in spring training this year, although in spring training this year, people like the Challenge system. People have fun with the Challenge system. Like people in the crowd who are not accustomed to the Challenge system. Get. First of all, they get it very quickly. The reviews are super fast. They show the little graphic and everybody goes, ah, it's great. It's great.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It enhances the spectator experience. It doesn't take too long. It's not like replay, where there's a delay before you figure out whether they're going to challenge and then there's a further delay. No, it's over pretty quickly. There's a visual component. You can all experience that together. Right. And I do agree with another Joe, Joe Pisnanski, who wrote about this and echoed what I've been saying, that I fear that this is a slippery slope. And Posnanski wrote, here's the thing about replay, and really the use of any sort of technology in any walk of life, it never stops creeping into the game. Within a few years, the Challenge system will become automated balls and strikes. It just will. You know what they say about Genies and bottles. Even tennis, where the Challenge system was immensely popular, has now, in most tournaments, turned to having no line judges and just letting the machinery call the games. He says the big story here is that this is the beginning of the end of the home plate umpire. And I guess by that he probably means the home plate umpire calling pitches, because I don't think they're going to do away with the home plate umpire entirely, even when there is full abs, if and when there is. I do fear that that will happen eventually because as I've said, I just. I think it could become unsustainable to say this is an improvement because we're getting more of the calls right? And then what do you say when someone says, hey, we could get all the calls right? You know, why are we just appealing to the computers and the robots, these individual pitches, when we could do it on every pitch by default? And there will inevitably be a few games where a team runs out of challenges, and then there's an egregious call and you're unable to appeal it, and that'll be frustrating. And of course, we'll still have replay and we'll still be able to see when an ump seem to have gotten something wrong. And so I do worry that once we've normalized the use of ABS in any degree, then we will inevitably creep towards Using it all the time. But I do hope that we can maintain this balance, this compromise, this half measure, because, yeah, I like it. It just preserves a lot of the things I like about the game. It gets rid of most of the biggest blown calls, which. Which aren't even necessarily catcher and pitcher skill. In many cases, they're just. Just a whiff by the umpire. Pretty much, yeah. Sometimes it's not attributable to the player's skill, it's just the ump screwed up sometimes. So. So we get rid of those. And of course, we appreciate the fine art of framing and Joe does not. And. And he, I think, regards it as more of a perversion of justice because, you know, he's reading the rule book and he's saying, well, what the catcher does, how the pitch is received, should not have any bearing on what the call is. You saw it in that brief excerpt that I wrote there that the umpire is. Is kind of overturning the outcome that the pitcher deserved or the batter deserved. And I tend to look at it more as the pitch is not complete until it's called. I mean, you know, we can quibble over this and many people do and will continue to, but I don't know that I see something as just it's a ball or a strike until the call is made. I guess this is kind of of tautological, but like the umpire decides whether it was a ball or strike, obviously it was physically within the strike zone or not. But even then with the challenge system with abs, you're deciding, well, what does that mean exactly? And how do you define a strike zone? And are you measuring it? Does it cross the strike zone? Does it touch the strike zone at any point? Or does it just. Is it the middle where this challenge system will be set up? And then is it. It has to be a certain amount of the ball that touches the zone, or is it just any part of it that nicks it, which is, I guess, what it is. So all of this is kind of malleable and amorphous. And yeah, you can attempt to constrain it and say, here's what the rubric says it is. But to me, the act of receiving the pitch is. Is part of the pitch itself. It's not something that follows the completed pitch. It's a battery. It's a pitcher and catcher in tandem working together to try to get that call. And the catcher is an important part of it. And granted, maybe it's not entirely fair to the batter because the batter can't see what is happening behind them, though they could perhaps take it into account if they know who's catching and what the tendencies are. All of this is just nuance that I appreciate, but I also understand why other people find it frustrating, and I don't think they're wrong. It just, just, it kind of comes down to personal taste and it's sort of subjective. This is what I like about baseball, but I also like just having more things to analyze and more depth to everything. And the challenge system gives us that because it's not just automated call, automated call, but you have to decide when you want a challenge and whether it's worth it and what's the leverage in this situation and what's the count and how close was it and how many challenges do we have remaining and who's going to challenge and. And it seems like pitchers consistently are worse when it comes to challenging, which is something that was discovered in the minors but also held true in spring training last year. So I think pitchers have been discouraged and might be effectively banned by their teams from challenging because catchers just seem to be the best at it. They just have the best view. Pitchers, they're just, they're too close to the situation maybe because it affects their stats so personally. And also they're in motion and they're sweating out there and their heads jerking around and they're falling all over the place. And so they might just not have the best view of it. So you're going to see that change. And do players get better at challenging over time? It's kind of interesting that the success rates are basically a coin flip. It's basically 50, 50. Even though some of these calls, they're challenging the most egregious ones where you'd think you're very likely to get the challenge right. But, but there are other times, let's say it's a make or break moment. You know, a call goes one way and the game is over. A call goes the other way and the game continues. Or maybe you, you benefit. Well, you might challenge there, even though the success rate is probably going to be low because what the heck, what do you have to lose? You might lose if you don't challenge. So you're going to have different thresholds for when it makes sense to challenge. And there will be probably some players who have, have some special capacity to challenge accurately. And does it turn out that Juan Soto actually is some sort of savant when it comes to determining where the strike zone is or cow rally? And. And we see that players develop reputations for being good at this. And what sort of a sample do we need to determine whether they're actually good or whether it's just a bunch of coin flips coming up, heads in a row? All these things I'm looking forward to digging into, which we just wouldn't have if it was abs. And maybe this is sicko stuff and most people don't care about this and they just want to see calls right, or calls correct or calls going in their favor. But for those of us who like the layers below that, then I think this is fertile territory.

[Meg Riley]

Ah, there's so many things that I could respond to in that and, and one that I will will say is that, yeah, you gotta receive the pitch, right? You gotta, we got a guy back there, you got to receive the pitch. That's part of the process. It's like completing the catch, right? It's part of the process of the catch.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be. You could say that if the catcher elated and missed it entirely, if it went through the strike zone, it should be a strike. I mean, technically it should. But I just, I don't mind looking at this other way where it's sort of, you know, we, we default to saying it's pitcher versus batter and it's this one on one battle. But it's never been that because there are so many other factors that influence things and the catcher is the biggest one, other than potentially the umpire. And I'm just kind of okay with that.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I agree.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Plus, we get to figure out, well, how do we determine the value of this? If someone is very adept at challenging, does that go on their ledger? Whom do we credit that to? Whom do we subtract it from? And we also get the side benefit probably of getting rid of the on screen K zone, which is another thing that I think if you polled mainstream fans, casual fans, I'm not sure that they would be anti having the box displayed on the screen. I think probably they like that. Certainly the broadcasters think they like that, but we're probably not going to get that anymore for multiple reasons, but especially because MLB doesn't want someone who's watching somewhere nearby to, to see where it is and whether it's in the K zone and then signal that somehow. And so they will want to do away with that. And I think that will be for the best because even if that's entertaining, it, it is engagement bait. And I guess that's good on one level because you want people to care about things and you want people to discuss sports. And so you want some controversy, I guess. But it does seem like the K zone because it's not quite accurate and it doesn't really reflect the actual rulebook zone and, and the batter dimensions and how things are actually judged after the fact or how they would be judged by the challenge system. You can't have that contrast there where the on screen K zone differs from the challenge system if you have the challenge system set up. So I think the effect of having that box is just to make people mad repeatedly. And, and maybe that's good when it comes to driving engagement. I mean, that's, that's what all the social media big tech titans figure out. It's like if they can inflame our passions, then they can keep us in their apps. And unfortunately, the passions that get inflamed the most are anger and outrage. And so if they can sort of stoke those fires, then they keep us glued to our screens. And so maybe that would be good for baseball. At least we're watching even though we're shaking our fists and ranting and, and cursing the umpires. I don't know. You know, maybe in a world where everything's just automated and everyone is used to that and you don't have players and managers arguing with umpires and fans have no one to get upset about anymore, it would all be so smooth and frictionless that in a way we would miss when we used to get upset.

[Meg Riley]

I don't think I'm gonna miss getting upset about that. I get upset when it's there. I get upset when it's there. Because it isn't always, it's not always adjusted right. And then the, the broadcaster will be like, that wasn't a strike. And then you look and you're like it. But it was, though. But the thing is, it was. And you're, you're misinforming your viewership. I don't think you're doing it with the intent to misinform, but you're just being given a bad little bit of information and then you're running with it. Now everybody's all grumpy and upset. And guess what? We got enough reason to be grumpy and upset. We do not need to manufacture reasons for grumpy upset. We have so many reasons for grumpy upset. So I, I say, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Fake K zone.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I agree.

[Meg Riley]

That's what I say.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I'm glad that we have both agreed that we're right.

[Meg Riley]

I, I just I'm not always so concerned with being right. But you know, sometimes you get given the business by people and then you you need to say but hey, who was right though? It was me, the person you gave the business to. Stop giving me the business.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Shohei has a 1.91 FIP, by the way. I know that he doesn't go that deep into games and thus he has hardly faced opponents the third time through the order, so that helps. But also he's very good and I think he's a tenth of a win in fangraph's war behind Aaron Judge for now, the major league lead.

[Meg Riley]

But that's bonkers. I Did you see the Mets DFA'd Jose series? Yeah, they're low.

[Ben Lindbergh]

They're loading load bearing no longer. Yeah, no, I mean hopefully hold the loads. It has collapsed. The structure could not stand. So all right, well maybe we can answer a few emails here and we'll get to more tomorrow too, but we have a little bit of a backlog built up here. Now here's one that comes to us from Dane, who describes himself as a likely future Patreon supporter. I'll take it. I'll take it.

[Meg Riley]

No, I feel like I. I really gotta pay attention.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, I like this question. I'm not trying to induce Dane to sign up by giving preference to his email here. I would have answered it regardless. But hopefully he will be a future Patreon supporter. Hopefully so many of you will. But but the subject line here was official delineation for warning track so Dane writes. During the broadcast of the September 19 Brewers Cardinals game, a ball was popped up out of play over the third base side of the infield as Nolan Arenado made his way under the ball in foul territory. The Cardinals announcer described his positioning as middle of the warning track.

[Meg Riley]

Popped him up.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Will it stay in play? Aronado gallops over middle of the warning track and that takes care of the brewers catcher. This was the first time I had ever heard this area described as such and it seemed really odd as I'd always felt that warning track described only the dirt placed in front of the outfield wall. I'd never considered that the term might be used to describe the full ring of dirt that surrounds a baseball field. The outfield wall portion of the track serves a unique purpose as fielders tracking fly ball often never have sight of the wall throughout the play. Their ability to make these catches as well as not get completely destroyed by awkward high speed impacts fully relies on the dirt alert to warn them of their proximity to the various padding, ivy, chain link brick, ancient metal scoreboards that serve as outfield walls. Whereas plays made in foul territory typically involve positioning that at one point offered a frontal or lateral view of the various walls, nets, dugouts, tarp rolls, and ball people at the perimeter of the field. The out of play dirt and in play dirt zones seem to serve different purposes, feature their own unique risk factors, and are separated by an infallible line of powder. I find this all to be reason enough to reserve the warning track distinction for only the dirt in play. Where it gets hazy, of course, are the corner portions of the dirt that are both in front of the outfield wall and in foul territory.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I suppose I could accept this area as being referred to as the warning track if the fielder is making a play there with his back to the wall. But really, I think the chalk helps us draw the line and we should collectively respect its powdery powers. Wondering if we have pedantificated on this topic by now, and if not, would love to hear your thoughts on how these areas should be referred to. So, yeah, warning track, is it just in the outfield and is it just in fair territory specifically?

[Meg Riley]

Gosh, it's definitely the most. I think it is most commonly referred to as it pertains to the outfield for the reasons that the email describes, right, that you want to give a visual cue to a fielder so that he knows that he is approaching the wall and still is able to track the ball in the air as it is, is as it is hit to him. And so people will refer to the warning track most often in reference to the outfield because you have those wall plays. And I think you're right that when you are making a play on the dirt in foul territory, it isn't that there aren't obstacles you need to be concerned about, because sometimes guys can get really hurt if they're not paying attention to like where they, the end of the tarp roll is if they take. Take a, you know, a corner. Funny if they, you know, tumble into the dugout or they take a weird tumble into the stands even with the netting there, and they can like whack themselves on the chair or what have you. But I don't think it's technically wrong to call the entirety of the dirt track the warning track. But I, I do think the most common usage is going to be referring to that dirt in the outfield. And I think the fair foul distinction isn't really meaningful in that instance. Like, you do need to, to have a sense of where the corners are, because they are often different park to park. Not always. But like, sometimes you. You'll get like those weird little cutouts, and it seems like it's always in right field that you have those weird little cutouts. Why? Left fielders are often excused from having to worry about any weird little cutouts, but all kinds of right fields have weird little. You know what I'm talking about, don't you agree? I don't know why my voice has reached the register that it has, but that's where we're at today, I guess. We're. We're at that register. So all of that to say that if we are interested in it purely as a question of pedantry, that referring to the entirety of that as the warning track is not wrong. But I do agree that. But it is most often a term that announcers, fielders, fans will use as it pertains to the outfield. What about you? What do you think?

[Ben Lindbergh]

I agree on that also, and I. I don't think I'm comfortable using it based on the orientation of the fielder.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Because that was something Dane mentioned, that maybe if the fielder's going back on the ball in foul territory, then it could count as warning track, but if not, then it's not warning track. I don't know that it could be that context dependent.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I think I would probably also raise an eyebrow if I heard a broadcaster call it the warning track. Yeah. In the infield. It just. It does sound odd. It makes some sense, though, because, you know, even if. Yes, you might have a better view of the wall when you're going laterally, but you're not always going laterally. Sometimes you're going back more than you're going to the side when you're trying to catch foul territory there. And. And also you might not really even have time to look up and see where you're going. So it. The dirt is still serving a similar purpose. It's still a warning system there. So it's kind of defensible, I guess, to be the guy who quotes the dictionary definition. I'll go to Dixon's baseball dictionary and see what it says. An ungrassed area. I like that. Ungrassed. An ungrassed area about 10 to 15ft wide, made of dirt, cinders, or rubber encircling the field just inside the wall. That alerts a fielder that he is approaching the wall. Its purpose is to protect the fielder from crashing into the wall as he backs up to catch a ball with his eyes fixed on the ball. The fielder knows he is nearing the wall as he senses the granular texture of the warning track with his feet. So that's interesting because it does say it's supposed to protect the fielder as he backs up, but it also. It doesn't specify outfield wall. It specifies that it started in the outfield, but it does say it's inside the wall. But where? Which wall? Maybe it's any wall. So technically, I guess I wouldn't say it's incorrect, but just by convention, yes, I'd probably keep it to the outfield. I think I'm okay using it in foul territory in the outfield. I think I still. I think it's more of an outfield, infield distinction to me than it is a fair foul one.

[Meg Riley]

I agree. I agree. I hope I. I hope we were impressive. I hope we did okay.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Dane, did we get you to sign up? Was that good enough? We're just podcasting for cash here. I feel like we're. We're busking out. We're in the subway or something with a. A violin case open in front of us, and we're just trying to see if someone tosses a fat wad of cash in there. Second consecutive pod in which I've used that term.

[Meg Riley]

Odd. Busking is. That's. That's delightful. We don't use busking enough.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, we do in New York. I think there's a lot of buskers here. Probably more buskers than you get in Arizona because, you know, not a lot of foot traffic.

[Meg Riley]

I mean, there's foot traffic depending on the time of year or not a pedestrian friendly area. That's true. Does one have to be on the street to busk? Can you busk on the subway?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, yeah, yeah. You can bus, I think. As long as it's. Yeah. In a public place. I think subterranean. Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. Because, like, there were many buskers on the. Is that what. That's a polite way of describing the mariachi pants. I mean, they're very talented, but it's like John Mulaney said, just so loud. It's like a very small space, and it's a very loud sound. Did you see Mulaney on the Cubs broadcast yesterday?

[Ben Lindbergh]

I did not. No.

[Meg Riley]

He did the. I didn't. He was in booth for a little bit, apparently, and I missed that part. But he did the. He held a note for a long time. At the end, I was like, this is great. You know, put Mulaney in a musical. I want to see it.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Okay. Here is a question from Casey, who Says I just saw an Instagram post about John Carlos Stanton's very short appearance in Sunday's game. He came in as a pinch hitter in the seventh, was intentionally walked, and then left the game for a pinch runner.

[Meg Riley]

Oh.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Feels like a thing that probably doesn't happen super often and I'm curious about it now. Is that the shortest amount of time presuming a no pitch walk that a batter could spend in a game? So, so she wants to know like if, if this was the easiest day at the office for a batter. Basically, he pinch hits, he gets an intentional walk with no actual pitches thrown, then he's pulled for a pinch runner and that's that back to the bench. It's, it's pretty efficient. It's pretty quick.

[Meg Riley]

Is that the easiest day at the office?

[Ben Lindbergh]

I think there's one easier way. I think there's. Well, I guess it depends on whether this counts as being a batter. But it is possible to pinch hit, right? And then be pinch hit for immediately. Yeah, yeah. And Sam Miller wrote about this years ago at Baseball Prospectus and he called it the no PA Ph. The no plate appearance pinch hitter. So I think if we count that it. It, you're in the box score, you're. You're in, right? It counts as a game played.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And technically were you a batter though? If you're announced as a pinch hitter, which is a batting role, but you don't actually come to the plate, you don't get a plate appearance, I think maybe you weren't technically a batter, but you know, you were in the game, you played in the game and you were deployed in a batting capacity and then immediately removed. It doesn't get much faster than that.

[Meg Riley]

Okay, well, here's a clarifying question that maybe would help us to sort out whether it counts or not. So let's imagine that you. Now, all right, before I pose this hypothetical, I want to acknowledge that my understanding is that most of these things are done on a PA or innings pitch to basis generally, like when you have a, like when you get playing time incentives in your contract, let's say they tend to be denoted in, in like plate appearance increments or innings pitched increments. But I think that there are some that are games played maybe.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

Imagine you had a games played incentive in your contract and this happened. You're announced as a pinch hitter and then you're immediately pinch hit. 4. It would count as a game played toward an incentive, right?

[Ben Lindbergh]

I would say so, yeah.

[Meg Riley]

And I think that's, I think that's the easiest day at the office possible, you know, because you don't even have to, you know, if you, if, if you're Stanton in this game, you, you go up there, you pinch hit, you're intentionally walked. He, you know, he made his way down to first base and then he was lifted for, for a pinch runner.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Jump host and he could get hurt. Hurt loping down to first base. That's not an entirely risk free situation for him.

[Meg Riley]

Well, it's not even about risk because I wasn't going to be so gauche as to mention his injury history, but I was gonna say like he had to walk the 90ft. Right. And if you're pinch hit, pinch it for, if you're a pinch hitter, pinch hit. 4. Yeah, that's hard to say. You just turn around and go back to the dugout. You know, you don't have to.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right. So I, I think that is definitely easier. It just comes down to whether it counts as being a batter if you don't actually stand at the plate and, and record a plate appearance. So yeah, this no PA pinch hitting phenomenon, it doesn't happen that often anymore. I think mostly because of the three batter minimum. They're just fewer mid inning pitching changes. And you're not necessarily gonna burn a pitcher when a pinch hitter is announced because maybe you can't. So this declined pretty steeply. I think 2020 was the first season with the three batter minimum. So if we look at like 2018, this happened 65 times. 2019, it happened 50 times. 2021, first full season with the three batter minimum in place 33 times. Then 21 times. 19 times. 20 times. This season it has happened only 12 times. So this might be an all time low. It's not extinct, but it's endangered. Well, not all time, obviously. There were seasons with a lot fewer games and teams, but it's a, it's a low for a lot of years. Looks like a post World War II, post integration low at least. It did just happen on Tuesday in that very Diamondbacks Dodgers game we were talking about. I believe Jordan Lawler was a no PA pinch hitter in that game. Game. But yeah, like there are a lot of ways, you know, there's the pitcher equivalent to where you could get announced as a pitcher and you might not even throw a pitch. You suffer an injury or something like the Larry Yount situation or you know, you could come in as a pinched runner and that's all you do. You don't bat. Maybe you just stand there for one pitch or something, you know, that's not a whole lot of work. And there's, you know, defensive replacement who doesn't get a chance in the outfield or just stands there for a while. So there are a lot of ways you can get a game played without breaking a sweat. But if we're talking about batting specifically, then it's either I think the Stanton situation or what we're talking about.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Good question, Kasey. Okay. All right. Here's a question that I actually outsourced to other Ben because I thought he would have a good answer. We could weigh in as well. But this seemed like sort of a specialty question for him because this is some hardcore numbers nerd stuff. Because this is from Patreon supporter Robert. Not future Patreon supporter, actual present Patreon supporter Robert, who wrote in to say, I noticed today a post on a statistics blog that the Marlins are seeking an analyst and the requirements listed in the ad are quite Bayesian. That is one of the listed skill requirements is experience with probabilistic programming languages preferred. You may know that statistics broadly lives in two main philosophical frequentist and Bayesian, which impact both how you think about probability and what you actually do when analyzing data. Skimming through the analytics focused job postings on the Fangrass blog, it seems like some teams specifically seek Bayesian skills and others don't. Frequentist skills are extremely common, so I wouldn't expect to see that specified. Whereas not every relevant university degree would have Bayesian content. And so Robert classifies several listings as Bayesian a guardians listing Marlins, Red Sox, Rockies, and then perhaps not Bayesian Angels, Mets, and he writes, it's a bit tricky to do a good comparison because the jobs themselves are quite diverse and I expect I'm likely overanalyzing these job posts. So my question is whether you think that, say, some teams analytics departments are frequentist shops and others are Bayesian shops, or is it just a mishmash? It makes sense to me that if the models a team uses apply a specific set of technologies, then they may want to recruit people with that skill set. Or alternatively they might want to diversify within the same team. Does Fan Graphs or Effectively Wild have an editorial position on on statistical philosophy? I don't. I don't know that we do, but I don't. Yeah, I thought that Ben would have a good take on this because he was writing about Bayes in one of his recent blog posts. And you know, this is it's sort of like Bayes versus Frequentists it's like, you know, the Bayesian approach is you can calculate the probability that a hypothesis is true, and you can take into account all the things that you know going in that affect those probabilities, which may or may not be visible in that data. But it's like, hey, how likely is this to happen based on everything that we know about this situation and how can we model that? So other Ben Ben Clemens thought this was a really interesting question, as did I, and he wrote, my guess is that every team is doing both to some extent, and that the reason the job postings look different is that they're for different roles within a team team Some of the analysis that baseball teams do needs to be frequentist. The data sets are enormous, the signal takes forever to tease out, and existing statistical techniques do a fairly good job capturing what's happening. Defensive positioning is one that comes to mind here. Sure, the best way to do this is almost certainly to start with an enormous history of batted balls and pitcher matchups and go from there. The flip side of this would be something like trying to figure out when your prospects are ready for promotion. Motion here. A big data set might not be that interesting to you, and the difference between what you expected and what transpired becomes relatively more important. Just like plenty of parts of baseball lend themselves to frequentist techniques, I see lots of parts of the game and think, ooh, sounds like a Bayesian problem. I think that a team that didn't have anyone at all thinking about the world in a generally Bayesian way would probably really struggle in many facets of the game. I also don't think there are any of these teams, even if they're not calling it Bayesian inference, and even if they're not doing it in a rigorous way. Say someone is updating priors as more information becomes available and using that to refine your predictions. I do think that some teams aren't doing it with the amount of mathematical rigor that I'd hope for, but baseball teams are hardly the only institutions in the world that I wish would put more science into their lives. There's one other option worth considering, and that's that even the Bayesian teams don't always advertise how Bayesian they are. At various technically minded places where I've hired people in the past, I preferred for some of my entry level hires to not have the specific technical skills they'd need for the job. That's because I didn't trust that the person who taught it to them would teach it to them the same way I would if you've ever taken up a sport as an adult and had the teacher tell you, great, now you won't have to unlearn any bad habits. This is a corollary. Yeah, I don't really feel qualified to opine on how likely that is here, because I'm not sure a what team split specific uses the probabilistic programming languages have, and b how varied instruction in them is, but it's at least a consideration. Yeah, smart guy, that Ben Clements. Yeah, so it seemed like a question from Rob that other Ben was well positioned to answer, but it is interesting to see what can we infer from a job posting? Or are we extrapolating too much? Is the language in there? Are the qualifications that they're looking for representative of of the way that team operates, or is it just obscured because they don't want to give away exactly how they operate? Or is it just one position among many? But yeah, you would think that a team that's doing it the best way probably would be looking at things in more than one way and wouldn't have just a set statistical philosophy, but would use whatever tool is most applicable to the specific situation, I would guess.

[Meg Riley]

I think that that's right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Thanks other Ben. Appreciate just tag him in. Just read an answer. That's easier than having to think for ourselves for once. Okay, Matt Patreon supporter says I feel like you must have answered some variation of this question at some point, but that won't stop me from asking if there was a player who got exactly one single and never more, never less no walks in every single game he played, would he make the hall of Fame? Call it something like 1500-2000 games and the slash line ends up somewhere around 225. 225, 225 with a 2000 game hit streak. And this kind of rang a bell to me too and I thought maybe we had answered something like this. I went and looked at the email database and found some somewhat similar question we answered way back in the Sam and Jeff eras on episode 596 and episode 1295 because those were. They were about extreme compilers basically, but didn't have this hitting streak component to it. They were just kind of like what if you played for 40 years or you know, something extreme like that. Whereas this is not that extreme a career length, but it's extreme consistency and you would blow away the all time record for longest hit streak by many, many multiples. So now it would definitely get you into the hall of fame in the sense that there would be in the museum.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, you'd be in the museum for sure.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yes. So if that's the question, then yes, but that's probably not the question. The question is probably, would you be enshrined? Would you have a plaque? Would you be inducted?

[Meg Riley]

I don't know that you would. I think you would be. You'd be present for some big moments. You might be the. The cause of some big moments for your team. Right. If you're getting a single. Well, sometimes a single is really useful. Sometimes the single is all you need to win the game. But you're not. You're hitting for no power. You're not hitting for any power at all. You're an extreme compiler insofar as you have this wild hitting streak, but you're not even like a super contact guy really. Right. Because you're. You're only hitting the one single. No one single every day. Again, it's not that it's not useful, but I don't know if you would. I don't. What do you think?

[Ben Lindbergh]

I don't think. I don't know how a team would allow you to play for this long, for one thing, because you'd, you'd be a bad player or a bad hitter at least. Because if, if you're hitting 225. 225, 225, not only are you not hitting for any power, you're not getting on base.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Unless, you know, if you steal second and third every time you get that.

[Meg Riley]

Single or we have no, we have no evidence that there's any rooming going on.

[Ben Lindbergh]

No, that is not in evidence here. And so unless you're. Now, if you're just top of the scale, defender and baserunner, could you maybe be playable worth playing? Perhaps. But if, if we assume that you're average in every other respect except that you have the. This incredible capacity to hit one single in every game you played.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Now it's interesting because obviously we're in the realm of the supernatural here.

[Meg Riley]

Sure.

[Ben Lindbergh]

As we so often stray into in these hypotheticals lately especially. Yeah. And so if you get exactly one single per game, does that apply regardless of how many plate appearances you get? So if you are a pinch hitter, can.

[Meg Riley]

Right. Can you be deployed strategically?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're an automatic singling pinch hitter, maybe that might be useful because, you know, if, like getting a single in a plate appearance, that is valuable. That's. Looking at the fan graphs guts page this year. A single. The. The woba equivalent of a single is.883. You know, that's great. The problem is that if you're going one for four or one for five, well, then you have a lot of outs tracking that down. But if, if you're an automatic single hitter and you could be deployed in high leverage like that and still get the automatic single, then I think we might be, we might be talking, you know, and yeah, if you brought some other value in the clubhouse on defense, whatever it is, on the bases, I think you'd have a role there. Now, if you were deployed in that role, if you were just pinch hitter extraordinaire, just the best pinch hitter ever, like a Lenny Harris or John Vanderwaal type, except like automatic singler. And you're able to do that for years and years and years. It's still not going to get you in the hall. Like, you'd have the best rate stats ever, right? You would have the best batting average. I don't, I don't know. You'd be an incredible curiosity. I don't even know if, if you would be a, a big draw beyond a certain point because I think the thrill would wear off for a while. This would be a sensation. Oh, this guy's got the hitting streak going. He's getting a signal every time he comes up. Is he a wizard or something? But after hundreds, thousands of games, are you actually tuning in to see us about is this, I wonder at what point you would start to accept that, yeah, this is just a inherent trait of this guy that he gets a single every time. Would you ever just believe that this streak was going to be broken and would you tune in to see if this was the day finally? I don't know. I feel like I might just stop paying attention because, ho hum, another game, another single.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I don't know that it would make for like, like the best viewing. And also, you know, we, we know the potential for magic or what have you in, in these hypotheticals because, well, we're used to operating in this realm. But like, are you really going to be given to your earlier point? Are you going to be given the opportunity to play this much if it isn't, if you just have to like play the whole game and you can't strategically deploy the guy when you need to pinch hit? I don't know. And if you, let's say you did, let's say that you, you could be strategically deployed to pinch hit. And you, you just, you, you bat a thousand in those circumstances, right? You're always getting A single. It's so great. What are the odds that your manager is like, well, pinch hitting only for you. You wouldn't even be a freak. They would be tempted to try you as a regular and then they'd be like, oh, he's not very good. Good. You know.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. At some point. Well, yeah, you'd probably start as a starter. Well, it depends. I don't know how this guy's making the majors. Did he hit in the minors? Is he getting promoted even though he's just going one for four every day? Yeah. I don't know how his career progresses. Cuz I don't think you're. You're going to get a big league roster spot just because you're magic. Unless you're also just. Just so much fun for fans that you're selling tons of tickets and then there's extra incentive to do that. But I think we've even seen that when someone has a hitting streak going, but it's not actually a hot streak because sometimes you get those weird hitting streaks where someone basically is doing this over a stretch of 15, 20 games or whatever it is, and their numbers aren't even that great during that streak.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So you can't even say they're hitting that well even though they are consistently getting a hit. So this guy's gonna need some help even to get to the big leagues, I think.

[Meg Riley]

And look, let's imagine for a moment that the, the magic is such that he, he does, he gets to the, he gets to the mate there. There's a very good chance that this guy is going to be involved in some moments that are deeply meaningful to fans of his club. Right. But I still don't think that's enough to get into the hall of Fame. I think you might get into your team's hall of Fame depending on. On when those singles fall. But otherwise, I don't know. I don't know about that.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, you could be a fan favorite if you're deployed in this particular role because we like. I don't. You can't even call it clutch really, because clearly there's something happening with this person that is not entirely under their control or it's not purely a result of skill and they can't bottle it and repeat it. And so I don't know if you would even attribute it to their makeup or character.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

But. But if you're coming up in these high leverage spots. Yeah. You're. You're certain there aren't really many dedicated pinch hitters these days, what with the expansion of bullpens. But I think this player would merit a spot and then inevitably you would get a number of big hits. But, but would it, at a certain point, would that even become kind of a letdown? Because yeah, it's just a gimme. It's just, okay, we can just pencil in this guy's single. Like do you even go through the motions of letting him get his hit? Do you just. Well, that's the other thing. Maybe you just put him on. Right? Because if you accept it, at some point a single is inevitable. Because I guess you'd never know for sure that it's his only plate appearance in the game. Like what is if, what if he's coming up with a chance to. Well, I guess if it's a situation where the game would end if he doesn't get a signal, then you could bank on him getting the signal because it's just a inviolable law of the universe. So in that spot you just say why waste pitches here? Just put him on. And then he just ends up being an intentional walk guy. And then he doesn't even get the hitting streak right. Maybe the hitting streak gets broken because he just ends up being walked. You wouldn't walk him if he's a starter because you still have a better than even, I guess. Unless you're down to his last plate appearance in the game and he hasn't gotten his hit yet so that you know he's going to get it in this plate appearance, then you might put him on. But. But usually you can't count on that happening in any plate appearance. And so then, yeah, the streak. But then if you put him on and this rule is unbreakable, that he has to get a hit, do you then this is like the immovable objects meeting the unstoppable. For like, can you.

[Meg Riley]

Once again we are left asking whether we know the bounds of magic. Do we understand its contours? You know, and I don't.

[Ben Lindbergh]

These always become sort of of existential epistemic theological debates basically. Because yeah, if he's bound to get the hit and so anticipating that you walk him, well then you've broken the rule that he has to get one hit a game. I guess maybe the rule is that he's capable of getting one hit again. But it. But if you deprive him of the opportunity, then be realistic somehow. Force.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, sure, yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I can't like this was far fetched.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I can't like force extra innings so that there are more potential moments for him to hit or anything like that.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right, right. If, if they still threw the intentional balls, then of course he could reach out and slap one somewhere and get the hit that way.

[Meg Riley]

But they don't.

[Ben Lindbergh]

They don't. So.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. Although maybe he'd be single handedly responsible for the rule change going back. Here's the problem. This, this creature of a man would be so powerful that in our current environment, I worry he'd be burned at the stake. You know, I'm just, I don't.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, that's always the concern with these questions that come.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. And you know, one that we dismissed out of hand in the past. And now I worry we have to travel.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. All right. Question from Amos, another Patreon supporter. As I try to think about something about baseball other than the Mariners, I noticed that I was caught off guard when the Cubs clinched. My question is, was the narrative about the relative league strengths this year wrong? It might not have been universal, but it certainly seemed like the consensus for much of the year was that the NL was similar in strength to last year while the AL took a decided step back. And yet here we are. And the Cubs, this was several days ago, are already the third NL team to clinch a playoff spot with just 88 wins and nine games left, whereas no AL team has. Has clinched, despite the Blue Jays having 89 wins. Of course, they subsequently have clinched and other teams have clinched a playoff spot too.

[Meg Riley]

Like, who else do you mean like, do you mean like the Seattle Mariners?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Mariners and. And Amos's Mariners.

[Meg Riley]

And Amos's Mariners. Amos, What a time we're having, buddy. I am very nervous, but I am having fun.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I was going to look this up, but Amos saved me the trouble by noting that the AL is up in the interleague standings. 358 to 334.

[Meg Riley]

That was gonna be my next question.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, that may have changed slightly since this email was sent, but probably not enough to change that balance of power. So I guess slight, that's not a huge lead, it's just a slight one. The narrative was understandably driven in large part by the relative off seasons of teams in the leagues, with among others, the Dodgers and Mets continuing to try to meaningfully improve and the Phillies still looking good, while the Yankees and Red Sox, among many others, seemingly not. And the Astros apparently stepping back. And I think as narrative, it was not or even is not necessarily wrong. And certainly the results are driven in part by the shocking seasons of the Braves and Rockies, among other things. But it also seems fair to say that the NL has not been noticeably the better league this year despite expectations. So my question is, has the AL exceeded your expectations or has the NL simply disappointed?

[Meg Riley]

I think they've, I, I'm going to pick a third option which is that I think they have both disappointed. Well, here's what I mean by that. I think the top end of the league in general has disappointed this year relative to expectation. Because I agree that the, the consensus entering the year, and it was a consensus that I did not feel a need to be contrarian about was that the, the, the NL had a much stronger, had a much stronger field than the AL did. And I think that that was borne out by like the world's preseason World Series odds, that sort of thing. Which isn't to say that there weren't any teams that is, that were, that were viewed favorably on the AL side, but they were hyper concentrated in the East. And so I just feel like the, the east has definitely kind of let us us down. It's gotten more contentious. Both of the east have been kind of down relative to expectation. Right. Because I thought that the AL east would yield lower win totals per team, but that would be because everybody was really beaten up on each other and everything. And then you know, we have one team in that division, granted with more games to play yet, but we have one team in that division at 90 wins. So I think that the east has been kind of down relative to expectation. I didn't have super high hopes for the Orioles coming into the year, but I had much higher hopes than what they have been able to put together. Right. So I think they've been down obviously like the Braves have been a huge disappointment, although in a way that feels very like injury dependent and sort of fluky. Man, the Marlins are really ahead of them in the standings. That's wild. I love that the Marlins aren't technically dead in the week.

[Ben Lindbergh]

The Marlins have not been eliminated. Yeah, the Marlins, the Cardinals hanging in there. Yeah, maybe not by the time people are listening to this, but yeah, yeah.

[Meg Riley]

So, and then I think, you know, the just, but just in general, like the top end teams have been down relative to expectation. Your Phillies, your Mets, your Yankees, your Red Sox, your Dodgers, your Padres. I, I, I mean the, the team that has most dramatically outperformed my expectations is absolutely the brewers. Brewers have 95 wins as we're recording here. Ben, you notice how they have 95 wins. For the brewers to be the team closest to a hundred wins would not have been on my bingo card entering the season. So I think that a Lot of this is sort of underperformance, but I think it's just sort of a general midness which we have discussed before. And I think a lot of that is, is attributable to the top end in both leagues being kind of down relative to, to expectation, which is that the worst thing, I mean, down. So one thing that we have, with the exception of the Rockies and I guess the White Sox, we haven't had as pronounced a stratification of, of the league as we have in some recent seasons where you had like a couple of hundred win teams and then you had like a bunch of teams that were really bad. And I think that, you know, do I like this better? I don't know. I'm still like, I still wish the Pirates had like invested in their roster at all. You know, it's a bummer that the Gnats, which I think for some folks the Gnats were like a, like a, a trendy dark horse wild card pick. Right. Like they're going to put it all together. And then for a minute it looked like maybe that was possible. Like McKenzie Gore, they have 65 wins, so it didn't really happen. But it's sort of a down year at the high end and that has resulted in a more clustering of overall records as those wins has sort of trickled down to more mid tier teams. But yeah, we're what we have five left including today, five to play. And we only have three teams as we enter the day's play that have 90 wins or more. That feels.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And Brewer's loss on Tuesday I think clinched nobody winning 100 for the second season in a row.

[Meg Riley]

I think that's right. I think that's right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So it's. Yeah. And as we've discussed that makes the postseason even more up for grabs and random than usual. Just not really big distinctions between the favorites and the underdogs this year in particular. So I hadn't really thought about this. I guess I tend to think less about the leagues as separate entities now. Or at least. Yeah, obviously they're separate for the purpose of, of making the playoffs, but I tend to think less about their respective strengths than I used to. When there was more of a distinction between the leagues. There was a dh, there was a rules based distinction and for a while there there were long stretches where one league was clearly superior to the other. I do think that that just measuring based on head to head play is, is probably the best way to do it. And it seems like they're even ish this year, I. Yeah, I don't. I guess I don't remember really what I thought coming into the season or whether I thought about it all that much, just whether one league was way better. I think that I thought that the top end of the National League was better. And as you said, some of those teams have disappointed to a great degree or a minor degree. And so. Yeah, you. You don't look. You would have expected coming into the season that the. The World Series favorites would be in the National League, and now know it's not really clear who the World Series favorite is. Like, different methods are. Are producing different favorites, and it's not clear and convincing. So.

[Meg Riley]

Ben, can I alarm you? Can I alarm myself?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

It's still the Mariners.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, sure. At fan graphs, it's. It's the Mariners. Yeah. I. I think there are other sources that have different top teams.

[Meg Riley]

Oh, sure, sure. But I. I think I listen to them instead. No, no, I will do no such thing. I mean, I could. I've thought about it, but I will not. I would prefer to not because I am, as we have established, a nervous person. Yeah. 21%. I had a friend from home text me and was like, you have to do something about these odds. And this was a couple days ago. I was like, that is so high. This is not an email, and you don't have to have an answer right now, but you should think about it.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It.

[Meg Riley]

What do you think is the stat? I guess, like, I. I guess I would lumber playoff odds in as a stat. It's not really a stat in the way that we normally use that word. But, like, what is the. What is the stat that you think is the most? And I. I think my. My friend was joking around, to be clear, but he has a handle on this stuff. But do you. What do you think is the stat that people have the worst intuitive feel for in terms of, like, whether a player, a team, what have you, is in, like, a good or a bad range? I think World Series probability is pretty high on that list.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, it is. Yeah. Because the number is always going to be lower than most.

[Meg Riley]

It's always going to be lower than people think. Yeah. Yeah. And people are like, oh, my God, I can't believe that the. I can't believe the Phillies only have 9% World Series odds. I'm like, that's not so bad.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You know, that's like there are 12 teams in the playoffs. It's. Yeah, it's right. That you always take the field and it's not close. So. So I think, yeah, that's a good one. I'll have to think about that. I think about that. Yeah, I think a lot of advanced stats, most people have never even heard of the stat and would not even begin to be able to conceive of what, what the range would be. So, so maybe it's better to restrict it to stats that people would actually be familiar with because.

[Meg Riley]

Or you can assume like what is your, what is the answer for your average, like fangraphs reader.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right?

[Meg Riley]

Like assume a fluency.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Because with these advanced stats, if you've heard of them, then you probably have some sense of what, what good is. And if you don't know what good is, then maybe you just never even heard of the stat, just zero awareness of it whatsoever. But because people probably know something like oh, WOBA is like on the OPP scale and maybe, yeah, they have some sense of what the OBP scale is if they know what WOBA is and everything. But H I, yeah, for like a good stat where it's good to know maybe like, like strikeout minus walk rate.

[Meg Riley]

Maybe that's a good answer.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Cuz even I might have a tough time with that cuz individually I guess I have. I mean I know what a good strikeout rate is. And then cuz, cuz I guess a lot of us, even if we know that maybe looking at it as a percentage of batter's face is better, we probably came up thinking of it as strikeouts per nine walks per nine.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And then converting that into percentage, perhaps that's one step that, that not everyone does. And then when you're subtracting one from the other, you might not know off the cuff what a good range for that is because maybe you're thinking of like walk rate in terms of walks per nine or so that that stands out to me as like a very good and telling stat that people who are aware of it would recognize the utility of and yet might not be able to just go by gut and say oh yeah, that's good without thinking about it a bit.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, that's a good answer. I like that answer. But yeah, I've just been thinking about that because I was like, oh no, that's like high. It's one of those things where, when the playoff odds, I mean the playoff odds for the Mariners, spoiler alert, they're at 100% now because they've got clinch. But I, I will often I'm like, oh, people are gonna think I'm putting my thumb on the scale when there's good playoff Odd stuff as it pertains to Mariners and they don't know how nervous I am. That's the thing about them. They don't understand my.

[Ben Lindbergh]

They do if they've listened too effectively Wild lately or if they do in the next month.

[Meg Riley]

Am I talking about it too much? What's too much? Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. How often do you get to talk about the Mariners at this time of year? You know, make up for a lost time. Wow.

[Meg Riley]

Out of the clear blue, nowhere I got whacked with that. That is amazing. I was not prepared. I was ill prepared for that. Amazing.

[Ben Lindbergh]

What reason that was cited for the ALS superiority In the past, there was a stretch where the AL seemed to be better than the nl and people would argue about, oh, is it just because you have a dedicated dh? And so in the interleague games maybe you have an advantage because the nl, they just have to. To convert some bench bat into starting duty. They don't have a dedicated guy signed for that purpose. But also, I think it was often attributed to, well, the Yankees are in the AL and the Red Sox are in the al. And so there's sort of this arms race and everyone has to keep up with the Yankees or attempt to. And because they were the big spenders at the time, they were kind of dragging everyone else up. And so maybe in the NL there's a similar dynamic these days where you have the Dodgers and the Mets and there's the biggest spenders and people are trying to keep pace with them. And so you have the, the Padres really spending for a while and the Phillies and, you know, so I guess that might be a reason why. But I was trying to figure out whether the fact that teams had clinched sooner, is that reflective of the league as a whole being stronger or is that reflective of just greater stratification, as you were saying? Because, yeah, if you have the Rockies in the nl, that's. There's gonna be a big range there. But. But maybe if you're clinching later, it just, it means there's less of a separation among the teams. Maybe it's just. It's more competitive. Maybe it's a stronger field on the whole. So I don't know if that's really reflective. It did seem like there was a lot of late clinching happening this year. I guess because there's so much midness and because there's competition would be the positive charitable interpretation of that. But yeah, I don't know. I guess I would just default to the interleague, record the head to head and say if that's pretty close, then it's probably pretty close. But I don't. I don't care all that much anymore, I guess, whether whether one league has the upper hand. Maybe I don't care because it's not clear that either does. And it was just more interesting to try to figure out during those sustained stretches of league dominance. Huh? Why is this happening? And now we don't really have to puzzle that out because there isn't that clear an answer. Okay, and last one, this is just a bit of feedback from Simon, who responded to something that we talked about recently. The potential for some sort of airspace play so that you have fewer of the kind of ticky tack tags, right, where someone just comes off the base a bit. Simon says so Subject Line in Response to episode 2375 I Love Airspace Outs on episode 2375, you revisited the topic of the airspace rule for tag attempts, and Ben suggested that no one really likes it when a runner is called out after briefly losing contact with the base while remaining over it while a tag is still applied. I love it. I'm genuinely surprised to hear how you feel about these kinds of plays and that you would support legislating them away, especially when the rest of the conversation celebrated the art of precision sliding. That's true. That is what prompted that. We were talking about how players seem to be better at avoiding tags, maybe with all kinds of creative ways to reach the base. Now because there's replay and thus just beating the ball is not the be all and end all. And if you actually avoid the tag, then you can get credit for that. Simon says if we're going to apply Man, Simons must be sick of hearing that. Oh, if we're going to applaud runners for a great swim move or sneaking a toe in past a defender's glove, shouldn't we keep an even playing field and say if you slip up, you're out, so long as they're not pushed off by the fielder? For me, that doesn't register as ticky tack or even particularly sneaky. It's just a fundamental conceit of baseball. If you're not in contact with a base, you're not safe.

[Meg Riley]

I understand this line of thinking. The reason it rankles is because it introduces delay into the game, because these like airspace outs, if that's what we want to call them, where the fielders coming off the bag microscopically for an instant, are almost always determined on replay review. And we've told teams there might be an out hiding in there better look, and I do think the teams are more discerning about replay. I don't know if I have actual evidence to suggest that, but my instinct is that we see fewer bad, like, legitimately bad replay review requests than we used to. Not that we never get them, but I feel like we get fewer of them than we used to. But I think that the fact that you know a cool swim move and granted, sometimes cool swim moves are only confirmed because of replay reviews, so. So it's not like that never happens in the thing I find cool. But you, you know, you're almost always like, that guy puts a little hang on and then like, you gotta. And we shouldn't have told teams that there's an out hiding in there. You know, we shouldn't have done it because now they're gonna look for it. You know, you've told them there's an out, so they're gonna go find it. And so I think it kind of bogs down the proceeding and is very rarely when an umpire misses that. It's very rarely something that I think a reasonable person would have expected them to have gotten right on the first attempt. Whereas, like, I don't know that the same can be said of swim move stuff, but maybe. So that's part of my thinking. It's like you're bogging it down because now we gotta go to the friggin.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, right. If this is the price we have to pay for some of those more exciting slides that are revealed on replay.

[Meg Riley]

Then maybe it's a good trade, maybe.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It'S a good trade, maybe it's worth it. But we could have the good without the bad if we think the other is bad, potentially. And Simon conceded he sent a link to. There was a George Springer play this season where it was in an A's J's game and Springer pulled into third base and he was just, you know, he. He got there and he was like bouncing up and down a little bit on his heels on the base. He wasn't still in motion or anything. Like he was fully there. He had stopped right. He wasn't trying to advance. And then he was just like hopping up and up and down a little bit and the fielder just applied the tag to his butt while he was like, you know, a millimeter off the back or whatever as he was hopping and he was tagged out. And Simon called that a little rules lawyer y. And I guess that's what I mean because it, yeah, on the one hand, like, you can't let your guard down, you know, you do have to be in contact with the base. And that's a brain fart. That's a mental mistake on his part, I guess. He shouldn't have been so careless. He should have been conscious of the fact that a tag could have been applied and he didn't have to hop. So I kind of separate this from the play where, like, your momentum carries you just an inch past the base and you lose contact very briefly. That is different, I think, because you're, like, still in the act of sliding. And I'm not sure if that's better or worse because you could say, well, that's not like a careless mental mistake. That was. Your sliding technique was off. But. But that wouldn't even be this airspace play that we're talking about. This is like when you're on the base still, you're over the base, right? Then you'd just kind of be safe there. Even if someone tagged you and you were suspended above the base briefly, I don't think that would extend to if you kept going and you slid past the base. Well, then you should have slowed down. I mean, that's more of a physical mistake. You're sliding technique. Whereas what Springer did there was just a careless mental mistake. And so I don't know whether one is. Is worth punishing more than the other, but those are a little bit different, even though they're still subject to the same. Oh, look at that. He lost contact just by a teeny tiny bit there. So, yeah, I don't know. I guess I kind of feel. And, you know, you could call time and. And just the play ball will be dead, and then you can hop on the base if you want. So I do kind of fault Springer for that one. Maybe it's. It's almost like the one where you. You pop off in the process of. Of sliding. But then again, I'm sympathetic to the opposing view on this too, because, yeah, you know, maybe it's. It's just something you should factor in. You should make sure that you can slide in such a way that you don't pull yourself off the bag. And if you do, then you're at fault for that. But it's somehow unsatisfying when some of those happen.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I agree.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, twas another night of great excitement. The Guardians won again to take the lead in the AL Central. Fortunately for the Tigers, the Astros lost again, too. So Detroit clings to a flimsy lead in the fight for the third wild card. They do still have one more game against Cleveland. Elsewhere in the American League. The Yankees won while the Blue Jays lost to Garrett Crochet and the Red Sox. So we have a tie at top the AL East Aaron Judge hit two home runs and not to be outdone, the big dumper hit two dingers too. Cal Raleigh's 59th and 60th on the season, maintaining his home run lead over Judge and his measly 51, which also helped propel the Mariners to a win in the National League. The Mets got beaten up by the Cubs and fortunately for them, then the Reds got beaten up by Paul Skeens. So the Mets retained their lead over the Reds and also the Diamondbacks, who dropped one to the Dodgers. The Dodgers survived yet another bullpen blowup. The Padres lost two, which helps the Dodgers in the NL west race. Another Topsy Turvy night, folks. Doesn't get much better than this during the regular season in the era of the 12 team playoff field. Speaking of the Dodgers, it came to my attention that at the end of a game that they won 21 against the Giants on September 18th, that was a game closed out by Alex Vesia. Joe Davis invoked the phrase effectively wild. Now, let me be clear. We do not need to be notified every time a broadcaster says effectively wild. Some of you let us know when that happens, and I'm here to tell you, it happens a lot. It's a pretty common phrase. We named the podcast after it, so we don't need to know every instance. But every now and then there's a novel usage or an actual reference to the podcast or to a player who is near and dear to the podcast. So in certain rare instances, it's fun to hear the phrase. And this was one of them. Take it away, Joe. Ripped off center field call is there.

[Meg Riley]

That's the game.

[Ben Lindbergh]

The most effectively wild game in a half century. It's the first time in 48 years that a team issues 10 walks but gives up just one hit. The most effectively wild game. You heard Davis's rationale for that claim. Makes sense. You could come up with any number of definitions, but that's not a bad one. But can it really have been the most effectively wild game if Shohei Ohtani didn't even pitch in it? It's now making me wonder what would be the most effectively wild game as it pertains to the podcast? Is it a game where some strange hypothetical comes true, or a game in which a number of our player favorites from over the years appeared? If you have a nomination for the most effectively wild game based on the podcast connection let us know. And finally you know I can't resist an illuminating illusion to another sport and listener. Grace writes in with a good one. I will let her explain. I was just listening to episode 2378 and was enjoying your slightly outraged discussion of pitch calling from the dugout. I share your opinion, Ben, and wanted to draw a potential comparison to the dynamic between race engineers and drivers in Formula 1 auto racing. In F1, the driver manages the car, basically a hundred million dollar supercomputer, during the race with the help of hundreds of live strategists, analysts and engineers whose advice is all funneled through the mouthpiece of the race engine. The race engineer performs the function of the catcher and dugout combined, relaying high level strategy about pit stops, engine modes, tire wear, etc. While also alerting drivers to smaller level things like proximity of other drivers and hazards on track. Like a catcher, the race engineer is also a personal psychologist, at times calming the driver during dangerous situations or controlling their aggression during tense moments. The best ones know when their drivers need silence to focus and when they need feedback back. However, there are rules about what a race engineer can and can't help with, which have evolved over time. In 2014, the international motorsport governing body the FIA issued a new regulation that race engineers could not convey performance data to drivers during a race, expressing that drivers should drive the car alone and unaided. They wanted to encourage drivers to develop their own racecraft and technical performance management skills in race, rather than letting them rely on a team of engineers to feed them curated data. This strikes me as similar to Ben's desire for no mound visits, no dugout play calling, no team interference between the catcher, pitcher, battery relationship and game. It's the let them play approach. This regulation was overruled about a year later after a few racing incidents and as the cars continued to get more complex through improvements in hybrid engines and drs. Not that DRS drag reduction system engineers play a more active role than ever in shaping the way the driver runs their race now, but there are still social norms that limit how much an engineer can help a driver. McLaren driver Lando Norris was widely criticized this year for how actively his engineer year Will Joseph helped him navigate racecraft and overtaking strategy during a number of critical race situations, things a driver is expected to do on their own, and things that traditionally distinguish superior drivers from capable ones. There's no regulation preventing Joseph from advising him on the best way to overtake or maintain position, but it's bad form. Other drivers, like Williams Racing's Carlos Sainz Jr. Are often praised for how well they manage strategy independent of the advice of their engineers years. How they navigate that relationship and how much assistance they accept plays a big role in how drivers are evaluated against one another. Meg's point about game calling skill being a part of how catchers are evaluated on the free agent market also applies here. Obviously there are huge contextual differences here, but I think the way that F1 navigates data transmission between team and driver in race offers an interesting comparison to the way that MLB teams do. MLB teams are a lot more hands off despite the role of the base coach itself. Etc, though potentially the Marlins new pitch calling dynamic pushes them ever closer to the pit wall model of engagement. For the record, I share your outrage. I understand that it's difficult, but it's their job to learn and it's the job of the coaches to educate them so that they may perform successfully on their own. That pitcher catcher relationship is so pivotal to the game that it feels like a cheap diminishment to remove it or severely mediate it. Thank you Grace. Fascinating. I do have some sympathy for taking some responsibility off the plate of drivers who are operating heavy machinery at high speeds in very dangerous circumstances. And I suppose suppose catching is quite dangerous by baseball standards, but I'm still against feeding them that info in real time. Coaches pulling players strings and it's good to know that navigating that dynamic has given people pause in F1 as well. We hope you won't pause before supporting the podcast on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com effectivelywild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners Sam S, Joshua Lamkin, Brian Dobbins, Juan Padre, and Peter Teller. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams coming up soon. Sign up now. Prioritized email answers, personalized messages, discounts on merch and ad free fangraphs memberships, and so much more. Check out all the [e-mail] effectivelywild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If you if not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastangraphts.com thanks to Sean P for today's new theme, which will enter the theme rotation. Henceforth, you can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook [e-mail] group effectivelywild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit @r effectivelywild, and you can check the show notes and fan graphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKean for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. Time I want to learn about statistics. I want to hear about rbi.

[Meg Riley]

Tell me about some prospect I should know about.