← Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild Episode 2381: Week in (P)review
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about their plans for playoff livestreams and an MLB attendance announcement, then recap the highlights of the last weekend of the regular season and discuss what excites them about the playoffs. Along the way,
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- [00:00]
Ben Lindbergh
I just a fan who wants nothing less than effectively wild. Oh wild, oh wild.
- [00:14]
Meg Riley
Oh wild.
- [00:18]
Ben Lindbergh
Nothing less than effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2381 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by Out Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer, joined by Meg Riley of Fan Graphs. Hello, Meg, Hello. I didn't ask how you were, but people are about to hear.
- [00:42]
Meg Riley
I'm croaky. I sound like I'm going as Kathleen Turner for Halloween and I'm working on the impression I sound like Bette Davis if she had smoked a bag of cigarettes the day before. I feel mostly okay. I perhaps have some fatigue, but it's mostly just everyone else problem. At least everyone else just listened to me talk. So my apologies for being pretty croaky, you know.
- [01:10]
Ben Lindbergh
Well, we'll make it work and if you need me to monologue while you recover your voice, just let me know. And I guess we should say we said this on our Patreon bonus episode, which was published over the weekend. But it's playoff season, which means it is also playoff live stream season for some of our Patreon supporters, those at the appropriate tiers. So just a psa because every now and then we remind people that they can support the podcast on Patreon and some of them do, which is very gratifying. So you can do that. And if you do do that at that level, then one of the perks you get this month is that you get to have to. No, it's optional. But you get to, if you so choose, Join us in the Patreon Discord Group while we banter during a couple of games. Games TBD as we know which games we will be doing, generally we pick one about a week or so in advance based on which matchups intrigue us and our schedules and whether or not we sound like Bette Davis after she just smoked a pack of cigarettes. So we will notify our Patreon people via the Patreon messaging system and we will notify you if you are one of said people. So please do join. And we just chat. We just chat and bring some friends on and talk while the game's going on. And people can chat via text in the Patreon Discord group while we do that. So we'll do a couple at some point before the playoffs end. We always do. And you even teased that if the Mariners made the World Series, you might do a live stream during a Mariners road World Series game. So we'll see. That's Something to root for for people.
- [02:54]
Meg Riley
I. Well, I hopefully will sound better by then. Yeah, I do love our crack strategy of every now and again remembering to ask people to support the bucket. Oh yeah. We have generous listeners like our show and want to hang out. I think the live streams are super fun. They typically feature at least one person who is on their way to being or is already unhinged. Often it's Craig being stressed about the Dodgers, although not always. You know, sometimes he's very level headed. Joe Kelly not being there will probably make him more hinged regardless of what's happening in the game. But I think they're a good fun time. They're a nice way to pass a couple of hours. Sometimes we get absolutely wild marathon games. Sometimes I try to surreptitiously eat crunchy snacks and mute myself appropriately. But yeah, come hang out. Hopefully I'll have a voice by then.
- [03:50]
Ben Lindbergh
Yes. So we're going to talk about how the regular season wrapped up. We're going to talk a little bit about the playoffs. Here's a Fun with Press Releases edition. We just got this press release before we started recording from Major league baseball and MLB attendance reaches 71.4 million and growth continues throughout the sport. And that's the headline. MLB attendance reaches 71.4 million. Three straight years of growth for first time since 2007. It does not in any place specify how large the growth was or how much the increase was. And I knew it wasn't big, so I just went to check. And to be clear, there's nothing inaccurate in this press release. No lies to detected. But I did think it was kind of funny that they're bragging about the 71.4 million because last year's attendance was 71.3 million. And, and that if anything that implies like a hundred thousand difference there that, that overstates the case because yeah, last year's attendance was 71,348,405 and this year's attendance was 71,409. 4:21. So that's. It was basically, you know, a third of the way to 71.4 and maybe a bit more. And now it's just over 71.4. It's a difference of like 61,000 or something like that.
- [05:26]
Meg Riley
Not a lot much at all.
- [05:27]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. And not only is it not very much, but most of the reason why there is that increase is that there was one more game played. I think that. So last year I guess a game was canceled and not made up. So there were 2,429. This year there were 2430. So I don't know which game it was that wasn't made up last year or what the expected attendance would have been. But. But that's, you know, just a little bit more than one good game's worth of attendance, basically. And so if you. Yeah, if you break it down, the difference in average attendance per game.
- [06:05]
Meg Riley
Yeah.
- [06:06]
Ben Lindbergh
Last year it was 29, 3 73. This year it was 29, 3 86. So that is an increase of, on average, 13 fans per game. 13. So it's as if they sent a press release to brag, like, we got 13 more fans to come per game this year.
- [06:27]
Meg Riley
Got a church van worth of new attendance per game.
- [06:30]
Ben Lindbergh
13. Now, look, it counts. I mean, sure, it's. It's an increase. It's not a decrease, you know, challenging economic environment and all sorts of other competing entertainment options. And two teams playing in minor league parks, which the press release does not mention. You know, they don't brag in here about we managed to have an increase, even though somehow we have two teams in minor league parks. They did not specify that. But knowing that context, it maybe makes it a tad more impressive. But it is a little funny that they're kind of bragging about three straight years of growth and 71.4 million. That's just fine that it's really 13 more fans. There's some additional info in the email that it does actually sound encouraging. Things about TV ratings being up and streaming and social media stuff and average age of ticket buyers and viewers being down. So that's all good. But, yeah, the headline is essentially, we drew 13 more fans per game on average this year. Go us.
- [07:37]
Meg Riley
I'm of the opinion. Sounds so bad. Wow. I. I even tried really hard just like, not to talk for most of the morning.
- [07:45]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, that's my strategy.
- [07:46]
Meg Riley
Most days I had a little. Oh, I can't. That's not an achievable strategy for me most of the time. Look, some of us live our lives out loud. I'm a soccer Ben, you know, professional talker. Over.
- [08:03]
Ben Lindbergh
Well, that's the thing. I'm a professional talker, but I'm not really an amateur talker.
- [08:07]
Meg Riley
Right.
- [08:08]
Ben Lindbergh
I'm only talking if somebody's paying me to do it. Otherwise, if someone put a microphone in front of me. Otherwise I'm happy to stay silent most of the time.
- [08:17]
Meg Riley
Yeah. When I was a little kid, if I would drive places with my dad, like if we would drive from. Sometimes we would drive from Seattle to Bremerton, which is on the other side of the Puget Sound, to go visit my grandparents. Because sometimes you got to drive around rather than take the ferry. The ferry schedule doesn't work out or you miss it. You got to drive around. So my dad would be like, I need 10 minutes of uninterrupted silence. And I would, I would wait very patiently and then I would immediately start talking for all the things I thought in those 10 minutes. Dad. That's what I was thinking about while I had to be quiet. Anyway, who are we talking about? Oh, right. Major league 13 fence attendance, 13 fans. I always struggle in the post pandemic era to know what is good as far as attendance numbers go. I mean, I think the, the lack of retrenchment is inherently positive. And I. My understanding is that if you compare where we're at, attendance wise now, we've largely made up the pandemic swoon. Right. Like, numbers are strong both in terms of gate. You know, there's always a bit of squishiness with tickets because it's like announced attendance. And that can mean a couple of different things depending on what the team goes by. And it doesn't necessarily mean like, butts in seats. Right?
- [09:41]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. The official average attendance per game eclipsed 2019 in 2023. So the new rules helped.
- [09:51]
Meg Riley
The new rules helped. But like the fact that we, we recovered both from the pandemic and then from the effects of the lockout, which to, I think sour people on the enterprise. I think the fact that we've seen those gains and that people are watching on TV and all of that is very positive. You want the sport to be healthy. I'm less fussed about, like, cultural prominence, but I'm not, not fussed about it. Right. Like, I want baseball to be in the conversation. And I think that, you know, we, we have such great players right now, and that is certainly helping. The new rules have helped. So I think that it all feels very positive. But there is a small part of me that is like, well, if it was like really positive, would you Crowing about 13 extra people? It's also funny because, you know, in years like this, I. E. Non bargaining years, Lee has a ton of incentives. Talk about the health of the sport, the profitability of the sport, all of the, you know, the eyes that are on the sport, and then there can be kind of like tonal shifts around that stuff. When you get into bargaining years and you have to paint a picture of the sport as one that requires concession in order to maintain so it's, it's just an interesting kind of push and pull and back and forth on that. But I mean, generally, look, I think particularly in a year that we have talked a lot about being like pretty mid, at least on the team level, I think that's very positive. And it does make you feel good about sort of the long term viability of baseball because in addition to the in person attendance, I know they track, you know, viewership and my sense that that's all pretty positive even for teams that aren't necessarily all that good. And you know, I think the, the broadcast picture long term is pretty cloudy. We've seen Seattle shutting down Root Sports, so this is another team that's going to go to full MLB game production. Seattle being the division series bound Seattle Mariners.
- [11:56]
Ben Lindbergh
Yes.
- [11:56]
Meg Riley
And so, you know, like that part, you feel like you might be able to weather that. Although obviously like I should say, like there are a lot of people at Root who do good work who are about to not have jobs. So that part really sucks. But anyway, I just never, it's, it's always a mixed bag. I think that you don't want the numbers going down. That would sound like I'm doing Jimmy Stewart.
- [12:17]
Ben Lindbergh
I know as Cassin Turner, you're almost doing a natural Jimmy Stewart now without even. This might be your best Jimmy Stewart attempt ever. And it's not even on purpose in.
- [12:27]
Meg Riley
The right register though. I mean I feel like the, the affect is right, but I don't know if, I don't know if the rest of it. I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened. I was like, oh my God, am I getting the razor blade throat Covid thing? But I don't have Covid. I just have some dumb little, some dumb little cold, you know, being felt right before the wild card.
- [12:48]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, it's the end of the season. Everyone's playing a little hurt, playing a little tired. It's the grind. But gotta keep going because the game' do. Or at least many of them do. Not all of them do. I have no problem with the press release. I'm entertained by it. I'm happy that MLB's attendance is not down and the 13 extra fans on average went home either very happy or very unhappy this past weekend.
- [13:14]
Meg Riley
Oh my gosh.
- [13:14]
Ben Lindbergh
Deeply engaged one way or another because the last weekend did not disappoint. Well, to be clear, it's very drastically disappointed some, but from an entertainment perspective, we got good stuff. The streak, the run continued of engaging games and memorable moments. And I guess there's there's no boring way to clinch a playoff spot in the last weekend or last game of the season. However you win, you'll take it and you'll be happy to have it. But there were just some, some really great ones. Just some, you know, whether it was guys getting knocked out, you know, Mike Trout more or less ending the Astros with a couple dingers on Saturday. And the Astros were supposed to have an easy schedule. Oh A's and Angels, easy pickings. And then turned out not to be easy enough for them. And then the more affirmative, the positive case, I mean, you had things like Noel V. Marte, converted outfielder, amazing catch. Ryan Reynolds maybe saving the season.
- [14:23]
Meg Riley
Saving the season.
- [14:24]
Ben Lindbergh
Phenomenal. Just fantastic moment. You had Alejandro Kirk's grand slam on Sunday. Yeah. And then he had clinched the division for Toronto. And another homer. Yeah. How awesome was that? There was Sedan Rafaela's rare walk off triple. That was a fun moment. There was the playoff clinching walk off hit by pitch for the Guardians by CJ K, a player I'm very familiar with. I assure you I'm well, well apprised of CJ Kiss's career and was before this moment and how dare anyone suggest otherwise. But that was fun. And then you get Brian Rocchio's homer on Sunday. I guess that wasn't technically a division clinching homer because the Tigers lost that day anyway, but it was added emphasis, a three run shot. So just a lot of great moments that, that people got to enjoy and that those guys can become heroes regardless of what happens from here on out. We actually got an email from listener Nick who pointed out that Guardians for Space coach Sandy Al Mar Jr. Appeared to have prevented a Merkel's Boner esque error by the Guardians Gabriel Arias because he was on first base when Kaphis had the, the walk off hit by pitch. But he was like drawn toward the pile up because everyone was dog piling and clustering around home plate and you could see him wandering, you know, he was drifting. He was drawn toward the center of gravity of all those celebrating bodies. And Sandy Al Mar Jr. Just called out and said no, don't you have to, you gotta go to second base. And he told him to keep going and he intervened and he may be prevented. I don't know Gabriel's boner or whatever we would have called it, but it was sort of the same situation. And this was caught on a camera angle that had the full view of Arias on first and Alomar calling out to him and intervening clutch moment by Sandy Al Mar Jr. There. So I'm the guy who thinks there shouldn't be base coaches.
- [16:43]
Meg Riley
I was about to say.
- [16:45]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. And this doesn't necessarily change my mind. I mean, bad mistakes, they should cost you. But if you want an example of the contribution of base coaches currently, what base coaches do, here it is a division title saving decision and intervention by Sandy.
- [17:03]
Meg Riley
I have a hard time witnessing other people's embarrassment. It's really, really hard for me. It's a tricky emotional experience. And so the relief at being spared, watching him realize that he could have sealed it and then failing to do so.
- [17:25]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [17:27]
Meg Riley
I am so grateful for that. But yeah, it's. You gotta watch out, you know, play's not done till it's done.
- [17:35]
Ben Lindbergh
Gotta keep your wits about you.
- [17:37]
Meg Riley
No, gotta keep your wits about you.
- [17:39]
Ben Lindbergh
To join the dog pile. I get it. But yeah, wiser heads prevailed. More senior heads. So that was a nice little moment. It's just. Just great endings. I mean, drama. And I feel so bad for mostly Mets fans, really. Let's be honest.
- [17:57]
Meg Riley
Yeah.
- [17:58]
Ben Lindbergh
Because Astros fans, look, that was. That was a rough fall for them, but they've had a good run. They haven't missed the playoffs since 2016. They barely missed the ALCS most of those years. And it felt like they were a little lucky to get to 87 wins or whatever. It was like, I'm impressed that they got that close, frankly, because they just ran out of guys. And granted, they ran out of guys, man. Yeah, they allowed some of those guys to leave. They traded away some of those guys, sure. But also other guys got hurt and they just could not fill fast enough. And then some signings didn't work out and somehow they just still kept it going and were in it until the, in their case, bitter end. But, you know, that's. That's gotta be disappointing. But as collapses go, as declines go, I think as Nesteros fan, you gotta have a bit of a grace period for your team after the sustained stretch of success. And it's understandable. It's understandable why they faded. They were just so shorthanded. They ran out of steam. It wasn't as if they. They choked it away so much as they just ultimately didn't have the talent. So I don't know that you look at that team and say, yeah, that team should have made it. I don't know how that happened. It kind of feels appropriate that ultimately it didn't work out, even though it easily could have.
- [19:33]
Meg Riley
Oh, yeah. I mean, like, they ended their season with the following members of the 40 man roster on the injured list, Jeremy Bena, Jordan Alvarez, Jake Myers, Spencer Arrogetti, Josh Hater, Bennett Sousa. Those are just the 40 man guys on the big league. I out, you know, so I. Look, would I be telling the honest truth, my honest truth if I said that I was sad that the Astros won't be playing October baseball? That would be a lie I'd be telling a little fish. Is part of my feeling about that mostly related to Mariners fandom? Yeah. But I do think that like the playoff field benefits from there being different teams in it. There needs to be. I think it's good to have stalwarts, you know, because it suggests like a health to the league. It, it suggests franchises that have planned well, that have executed well, you know, signed good guys, you know, develop draft.
- [20:33]
Ben Lindbergh
Continuity, some through lines. Sure.
- [20:36]
Meg Riley
And you want teams to be rewarded for having done a good job of roster construction, but you don't want it to be the exact same set of teams all the time. That's boring. It is boring. Even for neutrals. It's a real bummer for fans of clubs that never get to sort of go play in October. So I think that there is like a rejuvenation that happens. There are parts of the Astros roster that I think are going to be. That are good and, and players who can be good in the very near future. There are guys who I think are maybe, you know, they're on the back nine, as it were. It will. They will be a fascinating team to watch in the off season, sort of see how they understand themselves and their competitive window. Because this isn't a great off season for a team that really wants to push in and like go get some guys and then improve. It's sort of a weak free agent class. Although we, as we learned over the weekend, one that will include Pete Alonso. You know, there are guys who haven't made opt out decisions, so we don't know its exact shape just yet, but one that isn't full of big, big stars. And one of the biggest ones is Kyle Tucker. So, you know, make of that what you will in the case of the Astros. But you know, I think the, the team can. Doesn't need to hang its head in terms of how the season ended up. I don't think that it's any more complicated than what you said. They were just like really very hurt for a lot of the year, key guys, and it's amazing that they were able to persist as long as they did that. They had a good stretch where they were leading the AL West. You know, I don't think that that's anything to be ashamed of. Did the. Did the club get set up from the beginning to sort of maximize the season from a talent acquisition perspective, roster acquisition, roster construction perspective, that I think we could be a little more critical. But. But, yeah, in terms of the players, like, sure, you know, I don't know. You. You have guys who could have played better, certainly. But in terms of the. The end result, I don't know that. Like, I don't know that the Astros getting the season that they were hoping for at a. Christian Walker is like, enough. You know what I mean? Like, they just had so many guys hurt, and they were probably in a spot where even if they had squeaked in, you know, anything can happen in October, but, like, I don't know that they were a club that I would have assumed was capable of a long run. So, you know, sometimes these things happen.
- [23:04]
Ben Lindbergh
The Tigers collapse, that stings more obviously, but that can still be salvaged because they made the playoffs. So you still have hope. And they can essentially erase the stain of the collapse. If they win this week, they get to just go play the Guardians again. If they beat the Guardians in the series, then effectively it will be as if they had won the division and that will just all have been a big nightmare that is now behind them. Obviously they would prefer not to have blown the biggest leads ever blown, but really shocking. Yeah, it is. And if they had. Well, when it came down to it in the end, like, you know, when it was neck and neck between them and the Guardians, then I guess ultimately it didn't matter, except for the sort of fun fact, unfan fact nature of it, because either way, Cleveland, they were gonna play it.
- [24:00]
Meg Riley
True. True.
- [24:01]
Ben Lindbergh
Yes.
- [24:01]
Meg Riley
Gets to play at home. And there was a time, and it was not that long ago, when we didn't think we'd have to see Detroit play this week at all. Not because they were gonna miss the playoffs, but because they were going to be home resting and. And getting ready for the Division series. So, you know, I. I take your point. I don't want to overstate the. You feel a little bit bad about it if you're the Tigers, like, come.
- [24:28]
Ben Lindbergh
On, come on now.
- [24:29]
Meg Riley
But.
- [24:29]
Ben Lindbergh
But not nearly as bad because you're still in it. Unlike the Astros and the Mets, you're still alive. And you can make everyone forget this. If you win this week, if you continue to win, then it'll just be a blip. It'll just be an asterisk. It'll be a funny story that you laugh about later. You know, if the Tigers win the World Series after blowing the biggest lead ever, that would weirdly be kind of funny. Slash, you'd still probably want to have avoided it if you could have. But I'm saying is there's a path to making people mostly forget about this, depending on how they do this week and beyond. And it was actually funny to see how teams handled their starting rotations this weekend and on Sunday, specifically, because you can just see that when it comes to a buy, you care. But if it is not a buy that's at stake, if it's just a home field advantage in the wild card round, then you're gonna keep your powder dry. You're gonna save your ace. Like the Blue Jays on Sunday trying to win the AL east neck and neck with the Yankees trying to get that by.
- [25:43]
Meg Riley
Right. They threw Gaussman.
- [25:44]
Ben Lindbergh
They. Yeah, they, they threw Gossman. He was scheduled to start and they, they kept him on turn. Whereas the Tigers, at that point, it just didn't matter that much. I mean, sure, they would have liked to win and have home field advantage in that round, I guess, but they probably correctly calculated it's better to save Tarek Skubal, hold him back so that we can, you know, it's, it's going to be a bigger edge to have Scubal in that series than it is to have home field advantage. And so not that they punted that last game, but they did that well.
- [26:16]
Meg Riley
They tried to win that game. They tried to win that game. Yeah.
- [26:18]
Ben Lindbergh
They did not maximize their odds of winning Sunday because they were playing the slightly longer game. They were trying to maximize their odds of advancing past the division series. So I'm always interested in quirks like that at the end of the series. And, and the, the Red Sox had a similar kind of case because they went into things as like, with the potential to be the number five seed if they won with, with a win by them or a Guardians loss and then a. The sixth seed if they lost and the Guardians won.
- [26:54]
Meg Riley
Yeah.
- [26:54]
Ben Lindbergh
Which would have been the difference between playing the Yankees or the Guardians in the best of three and the Guardians recent run notwithstanding.
- [27:05]
Meg Riley
You'd rather play the Guardians?
- [27:07]
Ben Lindbergh
I think you'd rather play the Guardians, right? Yes. So there's a little bit of. Is this a tanking situation? Do we want to win this game? Do we want to make it look good somehow? How do we even not try? Exactly. The Red Sox lost on Saturday, they won on Friday, and they won on Sunday. So I. I don't know whether teams really dial it back in that situation, like, once they clinched. Obviously, you're not going to mess around while there's any potential for you not to make the playoffs. But once that's secure, it comes down to number five seed sounds better, but number six seeds might actually be better in this case. It's not unique to this season. We see this sort of thing these days, but it's always an interesting thought experiment. Do you actually want to win today?
- [27:58]
Meg Riley
Yeah, I think most. I think most of the time the answer to that is just obviously an unequivocal yes. And it's like, yeah, but not always. You know, that's the funny thing about it. I was so. I, you know, I've said that I. You feel like secondhand embarrassment in these moments of embarrassment. The pleasure I got in watching Rafael walk them off. He looked so happy and so relieved, you know, because we've talked about how it's been. It's been a rough go. It's been a rough time for him lately, and it comes right down to the wire for him to be the one to do it. It seems pretty good, you know, Seems like a pretty good thing.
- [28:43]
Ben Lindbergh
Now, as for the Mets, I know that people have been invoking the specter of lol, Mets. We have to wait a while. You know, you have to let the pain fade just a little bit. It's never going to go away. But I think out of respect for the Mets fans, I don't know how many Mets fans are listening to this episode, because if I were a Mets fan, I might take a little bit of a sabbatical from baseball. I wouldn't blame anyone after that, but. But that's about as bad as it gets.
- [29:11]
Meg Riley
Yeah.
- [29:12]
Ben Lindbergh
Because that's a talented team. That's a team that seemed to have a secure lead in the division at one point and certainly in the wild card race. This is a team with a lot of payroll, with Juan Soto, a team that went for it. Now, on. On the one hand, you can feel better about the fact that they went for it. They tried to upgrade over the off season. They tried to upgrade at the deadline. There were teams that could have done a little bit more, and they also ended up barely outside the postseason picture. And you can kind of kick yourself for that, too.
- [29:47]
Meg Riley
Right.
- [29:47]
Ben Lindbergh
But there's something about, you know, if. If your team just doesn't do anything that's frustrating in a different way. More of a sort of throbbing way, but less. Less acute pain. You know, it's just kind of a constant ache, more so than it's something that's going to make you scream. But what happened to the Mets here? And it's, it's confounding because of course they had injuries too. They were missing, you know, what team isn't really. But it was still the case that they just seemed to be a better team than the team that surpassed them. I mean, you know, congrats to the Reds. Like, like they earned it ultimately. But you look at the underlying numbers and the players on the roster and you think, how did the Mets not make it? The Reds made it with 83 wins and the Mets could not manage just being better than that. And plus there's just the deja vu aspect of it, of the nightmare repeating, which as people have pointed out, this is the fourth time that the Mets were eliminated from playoff contention on the final day of the regular season in the past 30 years or so, 28 years, I think. And on three of those years they lost the last series to the Marlins. And so when you see the Marlins staring you down this weekend on, on paper, that seems like it might be a good thing. Even though the Marlins were more respectable this season, to their credit, I guess now they were, they were actually motivated to be spoilers. Like they really talked about it. Connor Norby talked about how they wanted to win, they wanted to knock him out. It's a division rival, we want to play spoiler, et cetera. And they lined up their aces. They lined up their top arms against the Mets. I mean they went at them with everything they had.
- [31:38]
Meg Riley
Yeah.
- [31:39]
Ben Lindbergh
And it was enough. But man, the Mets just, they squandered it. Like they, they just frittered it away and there's really no sugar coating it.
- [31:49]
Meg Riley
I am so fascinated, I don't know that I've worked, worked out my like grand unified theory of the Mets just yet. I'm, I'm still, I'm still noodling on these Mets because I mean I, I do want to lead by saying very disappointing thing for their fans and the, the kind of joke that people historically make about the Mariners, like it's a different joke and obviously and it's not as old of a joke because of the relative sort of lengths of the franchises, but it doesn't, it never feels good to be the joke. Right. And we can acknowledge the humor in it, but we could wait a day to find it so funny. I don't know, I just, there was a little bit of mean spiritedness to. And like, you know, I'll admit some of that was Phillies fans. And you. You got your division business to take care of. I was. I was. I was a little sassy. I made a little joke about the Astros. So, like, I understand that instinct, but I don't know what I think of the Mets because on the one hand, there's the obvious disappointment. You know, you. You sign a guy to this enormous free agent contract, you have established stars on your roster, but it's not like they were without their issues coming into the season. Right. Like, they. The. The lineup certainly seemed strong. There's a lot of question in the rotation, either because of injury or because you had guys who were trying to convert from reliever to starter or because you, you know, had really tremendous performances the year before. But in a way that. That didn't necessarily feel sustainable. Right. I think that we are. We can be quick to forget when a team does the sort of miracle run thing and then is fortunate to have a good playoff run. Obviously not a World Series winning one, but one that. I think it was exciting. You know, it knocked off the Brewers. They do all this stuff, but, like, the Mets last year needed the last day to get in, you know?
- [33:50]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [33:50]
Meg Riley
And so it wasn't like there weren't exciting parts of the roster. It wasn't like there was no argument to be made about them sustaining last year's gains, but it also wasn't like they were, you know, some impenetrable fortress last year. They had worse performance and they had way worse injury luck. Now, what does that mean for them next year? Well. Well, Alonzo's opting out, so they're going to have to deal with that. Although maybe they look around and appreciate some of the roster flexibility that Alonzo opting out gives them.
- [34:21]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [34:21]
Meg Riley
Right. Because you got a team that's going to be pretty full of dhs pretty fast. You know, this is at least on the lineup side of things. I sound insane. An old club, you know, or an aging club. Not everybody, but, like, it's got its guys. It's got its guys who are getting up there in years, and their utility in the field is starting to be a little bit limited. So, you know, are you sad that Alonzo is potentially going to leave? Sure you are. Does it give you a place to put Brandon Nimmo, who's becoming, like, just unplayable in the outfield? I mean, maybe. Right. And. And then. And then you contrast that with this incredible youth movement in the rotation.
- [35:05]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [35:06]
Meg Riley
And. And a good farm system. So. Yeah, I. And you're Backstopped by Steve Cohen's money right Now. I have tried to make the point on this podcast in the past that, like, yeah, Steve Cohen is like a zip up and hat guy. Right. Or a quarter zip and hat guy. He's in it. You know, he's. This is his main job now. That doesn't mean he's not a businessman. This doesn't mean that, you know, if we are to look at his life as a financier, a ruthless businessman. So I, I think that, like, the case can be made to Steve Cohen to spend money, and I think that he has a, in some ways, like, a looser definition of like, what is necessary spending than some other clubs. And that is, you know, to his credit. But I think the notion that they just have an open checkbook all the time every year is probably a little bit misguided. So I don't know what my expectations are for the 2026 Mets on opening day. I don't know that they're that different than they were this year, and I don't know that they are all that. They were all that different on opening day, except for Soto, which is like a big. Except, yes, granted, but like, but still just one guy, right?
- [36:24]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [36:25]
Meg Riley
Then they were a month before their, Their incredible run last year to get in. So they're. They're in. They're in a. They're in an interesting spot. They do have some guys like, they're, you know, they're done with Starling Marte now, presumably Jesse Winkler. They got some money, but not all.
- [36:44]
Ben Lindbergh
And they have. Not a lot, presumably a full season of the three young guys, if they want that. And then, yeah, prospects like Jett Williams coming up and Carson Benge. And so I'm. I'm more bullish on the Mets than I am, say, the Astros. And that's not just about next year, but also beyond that with the resources that they have at everything. So they got to get to a point where it's not coming down to whether they win or lose on the last day of the season. Like, that's not where you want to be. And, and they had a lot of deadline acquisitions just completely just go sideways.
- [37:24]
Meg Riley
Cedric Mullins didn't work out.
- [37:26]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. Most of the bullpen guys they acquired, Helsley, didn't work.
- [37:30]
Meg Riley
Felt like disaster.
- [37:33]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. And that's tough to foresee. And then they had a good offense, but their offense also underperformed. Like, sequencing it was just the worst in terms of clustering hits and, and making runs out of your production. So, yeah, look, it's, it's a painful one. It's the most painful collapse for sure. And that's partly the history and the bad memories, but it's, it's not solely that.
- [37:56]
Meg Riley
And I also think it's worth keeping in mind that like it's, you know, when you have a new administration come in, you know, there are parts of, of team building that do take time. You know, they take time to, to put in place and then it takes time for their effects to be felt, you know, like you're not going to see. And that doesn't. I want to preface what I'm about to say by acknowledging that doesn't mean that like starting next year it's going to be roses, everything roses. And it doesn't mean that even when that starts stuff is sort of fully baked and in place that you'll see immediate returns from it. Right. So like Stern's in terms of like being able to like really have his hand in say how the international side of things is going to be run, that's like a years long project, right? And not just because I imagine, I don't say this is like super special insight knowledge but I imagine like every other club in baseball, the Mets are already committed out like three years on the international side even though they shouldn't be. You know, like, like we've, but we've seen, we've seen gains from them. We've seen that they are not just better at, but I think good at pitching development at this point. You know, like the. So I don't mean to say that like the 2026 Mets. Book your October tickets now, friends, but if I could offer some comfort to Mets fans, I think there's good stuff in this org. I think you have an owner who's committed to the team winning and I think that you have smart people running it and then you know what they can do with some of the potential roster crunch they have. You know how they can utilize their farm system. And that means like identifying the guys to keep and the guys that you can use in trade to get other players who can help you more immediately. Like that's an important piece of this. How do you continue to do well in the draft? Some of these are, are endeavors that progress over a timeline of. But it's not all bad and you're right to be annoyed that people are taking the piss out of you so much. It's a lot, you know, it can be a lot. So that's the comfort I offer to Mets fans and I hope that that means that if at some point in the off season I do like one little, one little joke about them, that you will all forgive me because my heart is in the right place. Even though I can't say it in my normal voice, I'm not an imposter.
- [40:28]
Ben Lindbergh
I'm simply saying, you know, even though I just said I, I thought the Mets were a better team than they ultimately showed, if I were the Dodgers watching that race there, I'm not sure that I would have wanted the Reds to win that wild card. Just because even though the Reds on paper, I guess, are the weakest team with the fewest wins, you go into a best of three and you're facing Hunter Green, right? The pitch, Andrew Abbott. I mean, even, even if the Reds don't have much of an offense right now.
- [41:04]
Meg Riley
They do not.
- [41:05]
Ben Lindbergh
Given the respective states of the rotations of the Mets and the Reds at this point, like, I think I would probably rather face the Mets in disarray. Just like, you know, if they had managed to salvage things and just scrape in, I think I'd feel more confident against them in their rotation than I would going against the Reds right now.
- [41:26]
Meg Riley
Now I think especially just because it feels like a more combustible situation with the Mets rotation. And that's not a knock on the talent of the guys. It's just an acknowledgment that they're young, you know, and that they, they don't have a ton of big league experience. And so. Well, I mean, on the one hand it feels like you have the opportunity for much more, for more positive variants. Green accepted. But you also have extreme downside risk. You know, you're not going to put. But you're gonna, you're gonna put this version of Jonah Tong out in front of the, the Dodgers lineup. No, you're not gonna do that. I mean, they wouldn't do it. It's a three game series there. The odds that they would do that would be low anyway. But like, no, that's a bad idea. He's not ready yet. You know, I think he's gonna be a good pitcher. I think that that's a, I think he's a promising young arm.
- [42:15]
Ben Lindbergh
But yeah, it would have been no. 1 McLean and pray for Rain. That's pretty much it at the end there.
- [42:20]
Meg Riley
So I would feel good about McClain out there. I think that my, my comfort level with him would be pretty high. And I, I think you're right. Like Green, it's not that Green hasn't gotten attention this season, but you know, part of this is just the. He plays for the Reds. I think that the sort of baseline talent level that your average baseball fan has for Hunter Green needs to be adjusted upward and rather dramatically. I'm excited. I'm very excited for Hunter Green, this version of Hunter Green, to get to pitch in the wild card because his season has been very special. I think that he, like, has really evolved as a guy. And it's funny because he's like, you know, he only threw 107innings, so it wasn't like he wasn't able to check the durability box that he wasn't able to do. But in terms of all the other stuff, like, very good year, really encouraging average fastball. Velo is up. You know, he's. He's limiting his walks better than he has in the past. He's been homer prone, but he's been able to survive it. Like, it's just. He looks a different guy, you know, his. His body looks great, you know?
- [43:31]
Ben Lindbergh
Yep.
- [43:32]
Meg Riley
So I'm just excited for people to, like, get to re. Mentally recalibrate. I think that for guys on teams like the Reds, October is such an important. And I'm not saying anything anyone doesn't already know, but guess what? Working with this voice. So here's where we are. It's just such an important opportunity for guys who play in smaller markets to really establish a reputation. I think that happens in October more often than not. And so I'm just. I'm excited for Hunter Green to get to do that. I hope his dark goes well. Not because I am rooting against the Dodgers or anything, just because it's, like, it's good for us to have a broader definition of or not definition, but a broader understanding of who is meeting the ace definition. And not in a, like, on his team kind of way, like in a. A global ace. He's a global ace now, and I think that's pretty cool.
- [44:22]
Ben Lindbergh
Right? Yeah. I've been trying to think of, well, who's the scariest October team relative to their full season stats or record, and maybe it's the Reds. Just because they're. Their full season record is pretty unimpressive. And what we were just talking about it is. Yeah.
- [44:40]
Meg Riley
So bad. It's really not very good.
- [44:42]
Ben Lindbergh
Then maybe you could consider. Well, of course the Dodgers, given how they pitched in September, that they have their entire rotation. It's open problems, but, yeah.
- [44:54]
Meg Riley
Yeah, I think the answer is the Dodgers, which is a boring answer because it's literally the Dodgers. But I do think it's the doctrine.
- [45:02]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. There is the Guardians, of course, and their bullpen, which I still have a hard time trusting the rotation because it was just so lights out in September, but it's. I don't know if that's mostly a mirage or what. But the bullpen you can believe in and. Or you hope, obviously, which is amazing.
- [45:22]
Meg Riley
Given that they're still without class A.
- [45:24]
Ben Lindbergh
Right? I know.
- [45:25]
Meg Riley
Is he just knocking? He's not gonna pitch in October, right? You can't. Because I'm sure they can't conclude the investigation now that the postse and has started and you can't have the potential gambling Kyle.
- [45:35]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. Not that October went so well for him last year, but still. It's just, you know, and obviously as long as the Tigers have Scubal, then that alone is sort of scary. But. No, I, I guess it is. It's probably the Dodgers, the Reds, maybe the Guardians in there as just. It'd be a little more worried about this team than I would on paper given their full regular season stats. But they, the, the Guardians, obviously neither of these teams from Ohio can hit. And no, I guess the good thing is like people are, are kind of making fun of or celebrating when the Guardians win without getting hits. You know, like when they, they had that inning against scubal where they didn't get a ball out of the infield or then the walk off hit by pitch and it's like, oh, this is emblematic of the Guardians, but, but it, it doesn't feel so much to me like it did last year, let's say, or in 2022. It was right when the Guardians had extremely average offenses in both of those. I think dead on average. I think they were 100 WRC plus in both seasons, like 16th in that category. But people were trying to make them into more than they were because they were slappy and scrappy because they had low strikeout rates or high batting averages or whatever it was. I don't think anyone can realistically talk themselves into this offense being like secretly good because back then it was like, oh, they're zagging, everyone's zigging and it's, you know, put the ball in play and all this stuff. And I, you know, it worked enough for them for a while, but I, I find it kind of annoying with any team when we have to really like pretend that however they're winning is like the way to win or that they've unlocked some sort of secret or everyone's workshopping their like post World Series championship Moneyball esque book. And it's just like, it's not always some special sauce, right? Sometimes it's like just good enough, you know, and, and the Guardians offense was just good enough. And I guess technically it was, was just good enough this year, but it was very bad. It was good enough in that it got them there. But I don't think you can even, because like now they have a super low batting average too, right? And so even if you're like the old school type who's like, oh, contact and put the ball in play and postseason and that's what you want and which I don't think is the case, but people talk themselves into that. I think this Guardians offense is maybe like it's immune to people looking at it and saying, ah, they have found the secrets. No, it's like if they win, it will probably be in spite of the offense. It will be because of the pitching and because they managed to scratch across a few runs. But I don't know that anyone is suggesting that they have some inherent capacity. Well, maybe people are suggesting that they can perfectly time their very few runs for these major moments, but I don't know how you can look at that team and even pretend that, that yeah, this, this is the lineup that you want to emulate. They have somehow found the underrated way to win in baseball or something. It's. I don't think so. But it is funny when they manage to just like dink and doink you to death.
- [48:54]
Meg Riley
I think what the Guardians show you is that what you really want for a good time is like one fully operational and productive Stephen Kwan on your team, but only one, you know, like, I am a big fan of Stephen Kwan's game when it's going good and he was a league average hitter this year. I think he had like about it exactly a 100 WRC plus. But we like to have some bio diversity in the game in terms of the like profile a guy we see. But the thing about it is that the extreme contact hitter, first of all, if it's not going good, it is unwatchably boring and you don't want too much of it in much the same way that you don't want too much of just bopping, you know, you want to mix the guys. And I think that the entertainment value, the ceiling on the entertainment value for a guy with a good but not stellar hit tool and more bop is just higher. So I think that's like, you know what you want a full team of is Jose Ramirez's.
- [50:04]
Ben Lindbergh
Exactly right. And they have like One.
- [50:06]
Meg Riley
They have one. And that's good because if they didn't, I doubt that team's in the playoffs.
- [50:10]
Ben Lindbergh
Oh, absolutely not. Yeah, but he's their only legitimately good hitter, really. And I don't know that even Guardians fans would argue that point. And so unless they win because Jose Ramirez hit a home run or something, then any way that they win will just be like, ah, the Guardians, they did it again. You know, just snatching victory from the jaws of defeat because, like, most of their hitters are so bad or mediocre that there's just. There's no one there who can like put a charge into one and, and that's expected, you know, I mean, I know Quan has been a good hitter in the past and has been okay this year, and Kyle Mansardo's above average, but no, it's. It's a thin group, obviously. So unless Ramirez like comes up in, unless he happens to be up in that moment and he delivers, which he often does, if he's in that spot, then it seems like, ah, they did it. Random Guardians win it. And it's, it's not wrong really, because that's, that's the only way that they can win offensively.
- [51:16]
Meg Riley
Sam posted about this, and I've been thinking about it since, well, since Davey referenced it in his, his preview of that series earlier today. Sam, as in Sam Miller? Miller posted on Blue Sky. Any strike in any situation to Jose Ramirez is a huge mistake. And he, he posted that on the 27th, so that's Saturday, you know. And he posted it with a screenshot of the Guardians batting order. And it got me thinking. How many on purpose strikes does Jose Ramirez see in this series? Greece. You know, it's like classic.
- [51:58]
Ben Lindbergh
Can't let superstar beat you. Yeah, he's the guy.
- [52:02]
Meg Riley
But when we say that normally it's not this bad, you know, like when we say you can't let that guy beat you normally Austin Hedges isn't in the lineup. You know, normally you're not like, oh, what can Gabriel Arias do?
- [52:18]
Ben Lindbergh
No, no, this time we really mean it.
- [52:22]
Meg Riley
We really meet. We. We might really mean it.
- [52:26]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. Yeah.
- [52:26]
Meg Riley
Is my voice totally different than I normally perceive it to be? I'm like learning about where the pain points of this are and I'm like, am I more of an up talker than I thought? I don't want any emails about this. Zero. I will unleash fire upon you. You answer that question.
- [52:45]
Ben Lindbergh
Okay. Delete your drafts. If anyone delete your drafts. Yes, I do wonder these teams that ended up just on the outside. If you're in the front office with your ownership, how much are you kicking yourself when you know that one win here or there would have made the difference? Like if you're. Well, look, if you're the Arizona Diamondbacks, who ended up coming close. Now, the thing with the NL wildcard race in the end was that it was not like the AL side where you had the, the Guardians really running the table for a while there. There on the NL side, no one was playing particularly well, but the Reds played a little less badly than the Mets and the Diamondbacks at the very end, and that was enough. But if you're the Diamondbacks, a team that came quite close to making it despite having been, I think, the biggest trade deadline seller, non Minnesota Twins division, how much are you kicking yourself and saying, ah, if only we hadn't made those moves or hadn't made some of those moves? And you never know know, of course, you never know if some of the guys that I haven't done the math to see, like, okay, add up the wars of the guys the Diamondbacks traded away and the guys that were playing in place of them, and of course you never know whether things would have played out exactly the same way if those players had stayed put. But when the margins are that small and you took a proactive step to spike your season, more or less understandably so, given everything that went wrong, I'm not even faulting them. This is purely hindsight. And of course, if you had the foreknowledge to say, well, we're going to miss the playoffs by one game or two games and therefore we better not make this move or we better sign that guy. Well, yeah, I think probably if you knew with any certainty that that was the case and it was going to be the difference, then you might make that move. The problem is that we never know that, that in advance. So I still wonder whether you look back and say, oh, could we have anticipated, you know, would the Astros have kept Kyle Tucker? Would they have, would they have done anything, something different? Would the Mets have not made their deadline trace if they had, if they had just not traded for some of those guys, then they might have been in better shape. Of course, you could torture yourself forever with these scenarios, but I, I especially wonder about it when you, you made a move to make your team worse in the short term and you knowingly did that and you knew that's what you were doing. If you made a move to upgrade and it ended up backfiring, well, that happens. But it's hard to kick yourself over it. But if you sort of declared yourselves out of it and then you got way back in it or you ended up being so close to it, it's got a smart a little bit. Even if you understand that you know more now than you did the then.
- [55:33]
Meg Riley
I think that it always hurts when you miss the playoffs. I think is the sort of annoying answer maybe. I think that if you're a club like Arizona, where you had a ton of injuries to your point, you made very defensible moves. You didn't make any moves that are going to limit you long term. Right. Maybe you wish you still had Merrill Kelly, but guess what? He's going to be a free agent at the end of the year. If you want bring back Merrill Kelly. Kelly, just go. Just go. Bring back Meryl Kelly. You know, say like, hey, Meryl, you want to come back?
- [56:06]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [56:06]
Meg Riley
Then offer him some money and then he might go, yeah, that sounds good. I bet he didn't actually move, you know?
- [56:13]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, probably not.
- [56:13]
Meg Riley
I bet he didn't actually move. I bet he's like, great, now I don't have to go buy more boxes. This is always the thing with moving. It's like you buy the boxes and then you got to get the boxes home, you know, and then where do you put them all? You don't want to throw all of them away. You're like, what if I need this box again? But then you're like, but when am I gonna move? And then you're like, where do I store them? And you have a garage, but you eventually want to make room for a 10 foot tall skeleton. And then you decide the 10 foot tall skeleton is too big. Can't put it anywhere, you know, Couldn't store it. Too big.
- [56:41]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [56:42]
Meg Riley
Apparently you like break it down. And then I'm like, are people gonna. If aliens come, are they gonna be like, what is this weird race of giant people? We thought that they were all the same size. Mostly because you break it down into its constituent bones. The nine foot, the template skeletons. If I ever win the lottery, that's how people are gonna know. They're going to be like, she's got 10 foot skeleton. That girl hit Powerball. Yeah.
- [57:04]
Ben Lindbergh
Your whole lawn just lawn decorations.
- [57:07]
Meg Riley
I'm not tacky. Anyway, in moderation, right? Which is one in the case of a ten foot skeleton. I would argue. Anyway, I think that if you're Arizona, you can feel it's a cold comfort because, like, you'd rather be in the playoffs and you are Mindful of the fact that, like, you maybe just wasted, not because of any bad decisions, but because of being, you know, pretty snake bit. You just miss, like, kind of wasted a good Corbin Carroll and Catal Marte season and an amazing season from Geraldo Perdomo.
- [57:40]
Ben Lindbergh
Yep.
- [57:40]
Meg Riley
And how many of those are you gonna get? So you feel bad because it's like time is finite and guys careers certainly are, and you only get so many bites at the apple and you don't know who's gonna come back stronger. And the Dodgers still won the division, but relative to how. How they were expected to be by most people in this year and how they typically are, like they were kind of vulnerable, like maybe you could have done something. But I do think you take comfort from the fact that your process wasn't bad. Right. And that's a. That's a. Maybe a coward's argument or maybe an argument that isn't persuasive to people. Because it sounds like I'm doing like, weird, like, trust that process stuff. But I think that when you're. When you're going back and you're doing sort of your postmortem on the season, knowing that you correctly identified the guys to move because of, you know, their proximity to free agency, that you got some guys back who might be useful to you, that you didn't harm your chances in 2026, you can just, you know, run it back with, you know, the pitching injury stuff to sort out. Obviously, I think you'd feel pretty okay within the confines of the disappointment that you would have at a. At a season. Season having ended.
- [58:50]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [58:50]
Meg Riley
And then you have clubs that are really going through it. Like, Rocco Belli doesn't have a job anymore. You know, like the. The Giants fired Bob Melvin. The Mets brought back Mendoza, which I find fascinating. That feels like being rude to your fans because.
- [59:06]
Ben Lindbergh
Yes, yes, there was a lot of fan frustration and, you know, usually that might be over, but when you're talking about the last day and one game being the difference, then you can point to some managerial miscues.
- [59:21]
Meg Riley
And I thought this was, like, very aggressive in that game.
- [59:26]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, well, you better be at that point with your season on the line. But yeah, it's the. The managerial news dump the day after the regular seasons. Carlos Mendoza staying with the Mets. Don Kelly staying with the Pirates. Bob Melvin not staying with the Giants. Rocco Belli not staying with the Twins. Yeah, a few more interim situations or possible retirement sort of dismissals. Yeah, still twisting in the wind there. But that's not foremost on my mind right now with everything else that's going on. I have been thinking, speaking of those close finishes, everyone's I think lamenting the lack of tiebreaker games and how what they took from us and Monday we, we could have had tiebreakers and we could have settled those games on the field the way they were meant to be settled. And generally I do agree with that and I lament the loss of the tiebreaker games and the potential for the tiebreaker games. But I think I keep trying to figure out whether this system is any more or less fair than playing a tiebreaker game.
- [60:29]
Meg Riley
Yeah.
- [60:29]
Ben Lindbergh
Which I guess is not what people are lamenting. They're lamenting that it would be fun to have a game 163. But in terms of like, what's more telling, what is more like, is it more satisfying to win this way or decide it this way? Because, because you know, if you're playing one additional game and that's going to settle everything, it's like you could say that this is more representative of how you played against that team this season. It's taking into account how you did against them all season long and more games than that. And if you wanted to win then you should have done better in those games. But then again, I guess I always thought of the purpose of having an extra game to settle things was at least in part, if not largely just to like have one team win more games on the season than the other team did. Not necessarily to win more head to head or have a better head to head record. Because. Because if you had a, a tiebreaker game in the past, then it wasn't about whether you won the season series or not. It was about whether you won that game. And so that that might seem like, oh, this is small sample. This is silly. What if that team swept you in your previous matchups and then you just happened to win this last and that's the one that counts. But, but to me it was more about just like having a better record on the season than it was against having a better record against that specific opponent. Because it's not as if we really think of head to head team records as being predictive or revealing of true talent. Right. I mean maybe people do think that, but I don't think that's true to any great extent. And obviously like you're catching teams at different times in the seasons with their rosters in different states and everything. But. But for me it was. Was more just about like we had the better record over the full 163 game season than it was about. We had a better head to head record in that one day. But I don't know, I guess it's sort of subjective the way you think about it. You can defend this current system and the lack of a tiebreaker not just on the grounds of there's not enough time because we got to squeeze in all these playoff teams and playoff rounds, but also. Well, it's sort of representative of how you play played all season. So you dug your grave.
- [62:47]
Meg Riley
Yeah, I, I think that the tiebreaker scenarios and I'm open to maybe they, they need adjustment or something but I, I do think the procedure is more representative to your point because it takes in so much more than just one game. Yeah, you know, it, the one game thing is sort of anathema to the whole, whole project of regular season baseball. I mean it's not, it's anathema to the postseason too. Which is why despite not loving the playoff field expanding, I was a fan of the wild card series becoming a thing. Even though sometimes it's only two games and it's like is that really more. And it's like, yeah, it's all like 100% more game. It's only two because of sweeps. And a lot of them are sweeps, you know, and that becomes sweep, sweep. But the game is fun and the tiebreaker games rather are fun. And you can tell. Feel that there is something there that resonates for everybody because of the way that last year on Monday went where they had to do the double header because of. It had to have been weather. Right. I don't even remember now due to rain.
- [63:56]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, it was, it was a mess.
- [63:57]
Meg Riley
And so I, I think people enjoy it more but I don't think that it, it really necessarily tells you anything. It's. It's very arbitrary. It's like if you're. What you want want is to know which is a better team. Well, you just played 162 games.
- [64:12]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [64:12]
Meg Riley
And if you need more games to figure it out, well then you need like 50 more. You know, you can't just play one that doesn't tell you much. So yeah, here maybe I'll just selfishly side with my own interest which is that even having it come down to the final day is kind of a pain in the ass from a site perspective. So personally I'm okay with tiebreakers on those grounds but. But I acknowledge it can be kind of a let down.
- [64:38]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, it does switch to like what would be more entertaining here more so than what would tell us More about the true talent of the teams involved. Because if you win the division by one game, that means that you won more games over the course of that season, and that's how we decide things. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you were the true talent, better team. Maybe you had a way worse run differential. Maybe you had a bunch of fluky things go your way. Maybe if we could somehow simply the season a million times, you would not win most of the time. But that was the one we had.
- [65:09]
Meg Riley
Yeah. So I don't know. And it's. As we started, it's not like we didn't have a great final weekend. Yeah.
- [65:17]
Ben Lindbergh
That's the other thing. Yeah.
- [65:18]
Meg Riley
We still managed to have quite a time.
- [65:20]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. I feel sated. I feel full. It's hard for me to complain, having been given the gift of this fantastic last week of the regular season that I was not expecting. So could there be more? Could it be better? Sure, I suppose it always could be. But it almost feels like getting greedy to demand tiebreaker games because, you know, for all intents and purposes, we kind of got them. They just were game 61 or 162 or whatever instead of 163. So I have to quibble with a couple comments made by Alex Core, Red Sox manager. One big quibble, one minor quibble. So one, one. He pulled the standard. Nobody believed in us quote at the end of it. And. And this was particularly, I would say, emphatic version of it. So I'm quoting here from a tweet by Christopher Smith, Red Sox reporter for Mass Live. Here's the quote. Let's be honest. Love that it starts with, let's be honest. Everything that follows. Let's be honest. You know, it's going to be 100. The truth. Let's be honest. Nobody thought we were going to make it to October parentheses when the season started. Whoever says that. Yeah, we were a playoff team. That's bull. To be honest with you. Nobody thought we were going to make it to October. It was New York, it was Baltimore, it was Toronto, you know, and we believed we were going to play in October. We set our standards every single day. And we hit our standards. Alex, come on. This is. This is some selective memory here. And I know that every team does this. And sometimes it's more of a managerial tactic, it's more of a motivational trick than it is sincere grievance. But come on, we have the receipts here. Nobody. Nobody thought. And I'm not even saying. Well, technically, one person. No, sure. One person predicted Any. Every team would probably make it. A lot of people thought the Red Sox were going to the preseason playoff odds. They were basically a coin flip to me. They were 55% in the preseason playoff odds.
- [67:24]
Meg Riley
They had the fourth highest odds in the American League, and they were only half a percentage point behind the Twins.
- [67:31]
Ben Lindbergh
O. Yeah. And he must have missed or forgotten the fan graphs, preseason staff predictions, because the. The fan graph staff was higher on the Red Sox than any other AL team.
- [67:44]
Meg Riley
Yeah, they were the first pretty. We were pretty horny for the Red Sox. True.
- [67:49]
Ben Lindbergh
It was like, by a lot.
- [67:51]
Meg Riley
Yeah. When I start, when I played, put that post together, I was like, oh, God, this could look real. We could look real dumb at the end of this.
- [67:59]
Ben Lindbergh
Well, I guess not, because I guess squeaked in and also I guess that was completely forgotten. You'd think he would have said, except the fangraph staff, they. They really believed in us. They had faith when nobody else, like.
- [68:12]
Meg Riley
Every other day at home, like, what are you talking about, man?
- [68:16]
Ben Lindbergh
Have some respect. 12 Fangraphs contributors picked the Red Sox as the. The top seed in the al and no other AL team had more than five picks.
- [68:27]
Meg Riley
I mean, I think that they were maybe the most popular. Well, no, I guess the Dodgers were probably the most popular World Series team. Right?
- [68:33]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, I'll have to check on that.
- [68:35]
Meg Riley
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. We believed in you. We believed in you, Alex.
- [68:39]
Ben Lindbergh
A lot of people believed in the Red Sox that they were. They had many more people pick them to win the AL East. And this is just one site. Obviously, I. I have not done a survey, but. But it was, you know, maybe the fan graph staff was more optimistic than. Than most, but it wasn't like people were. Were scoffing and said, what are you, the Red Sox October team? There was a lot of optimism about the Red Sox. Like, yeah, they just. They traded for Gret Crochet. They signed Alex Bregman. They still had Raphael Devers. Yeah, they had all the young guys coming up, all these rookies on the cusp farm. And yeah, like, there was a lot of optimism about the Red Sox. You know, they weren't a lock or anything, but. What are you talking about? So what are you talking about? You know, it's hard for me to tell whether he's just trying to bolster an us against the world mentality here. And, you know, they're beat up and they're missing some players, too. And whatever you have to say to get your players fired up, fine. But, man, if he sincerely believes this like, that's some serious selective memory or like, like, you know, I know how it is that it's like it, it hurts to lose more than it, it's, it's good to win usually, like, it makes you feel worse to lose than it makes you feel good to win. In many cases, we, we had something along those lines. And the only rule is it has to work. And many people have said that. And, and, you know, probably applies to the NL Wild card race too. Like, sure, Nets fans probably feel worse than. Then Reds fans feel good. Reds fans, I'm sure they feel very good, to be clear. But probably, like, given the expectations for that team and where they seem to be for much of the season and the fact that they had 83 wins, if they had missed out, it would have been disappointing, but it wouldn't have been probably how Mets fans are feeling right now. And I'm not just saying because there are more Mets fans than there are Reds fans. It just, it hurts a lot to lose and especially to lose in that manner. And that's similar to similar. If you're someone who, say, is a public figure in any way and puts work out there and writes and podcasts and everything, you'll remember the barbs maybe more quickly than you'll remember the compliments. You know, you'll remember some nasty thing someone said to you one time and it's, you know, the outlier, but it sticks in your craw. Maybe that is what's happening here with Alex Kora. I don't know, maybe he read some sites predictions or something, and they were low on the Red Sox and he just generalized to nobody believed in us, but I assure you, plenty of people believed in the Boston Red Sox.
- [71:16]
Meg Riley
Yeah, and, and look, I know that this is the first time in a minute that they've been back. And so maybe what he, if we're being charitable, maybe what he means is to reference sort of a number of years of futility on that score. And not every who knows, knows. Who knows when he engaged, if he did at all with, you know, the various sites, you know, playoff odds for them. Who.
- [71:43]
Ben Lindbergh
Who.
- [71:44]
Meg Riley
We don't know.
- [71:46]
Ben Lindbergh
But he's, we don't know. He's making it sound as if he sampled. You know, he's not like, I don't, I don't know if anybody believed in us. I didn't check nobody. And if he's talking about prior seasons when nobody believed them in them and they, in fact, did not deserve to be believed in because they didn't make playoffs, then. Well, nobody believed in us. And they were right. Kudos. Kudos to them.
- [72:10]
Meg Riley
They're low. They're low. Can I do this fast enough? So they bottomed out from a playoff odds perspective for us. I think around June 6, they were at 12.5% odds of making the postseason. And that's their. That's their total odds. Right. So that's going to include their odds of. Of squeaking in on a wild card and also their odds of winning the division. And at that juncture on that day, so including that day's games, they were 30 and 35. They were 10 and a half out. New York was 39 and 23. So, like, I don't know, Alex, you were playing bad baseball then, man. And. And who knows? Again, we don't know when he engaged with any of this stuff or if he did.
- [73:02]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, this quote does have the. When the season started, but it's in parentheses. So I guess, to be charitable, maybe the reporter who tweeted this was inferring that that's what he meant, and maybe he meant, like, later in the year when they were scuffling or something. But it certainly sounds as if he was saying at the start of the season, I would like to just someone who misses the playoffs just to say.
- [73:27]
Meg Riley
Like, yeah, you know what?
- [73:29]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, you called it. Like, I thought we were going to make it. And everyone said they didn't believe in us. It's like the.
- [73:34]
Meg Riley
They were right.
- [73:35]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, the Twitter meme, like, the. The haters said I couldn't do it, and they were correct, honestly. Great call from the haters. I'd like to have someone say that for once.
- [73:44]
Meg Riley
I also think that, like, I wish that we would sort of change the way that we enter into these moments. And I. The we here needs to be specified because obviously the way that Alex Cora or any member of the Red Sox, either a player or just like an employee of the team, the way that they're going to engage with this stuff is just fundamentally different than the way that I am, the way that you are, the way that their fans are even. Right. The stakes for us are disappointment or annoyance or being wrong. You know, the stakes for them are losing their drops. You know, know, again, we just saw some managers get fired, so I want to acknowledge that this isn't actually a cohesive we that I'm about to make reference to. But, you know, very often what happens when a team goes from having really crummy playoff odds to making the postseason is something really spectacular, you know, And Sometimes it's the guys around you doing a bad job. The Reds aren't in the playoffs. Playoffs if the Mets don't have their collapse. Right. But in the case where a team goes on a. On a big heater, you know, where a prospect comes up and sort of changes the trajectory of a season, reinforces a position of weakness, what have you. Even when that happens, we tend to get this reaction either from fans or from, well, I won't say teams, the social media accounts of team. Teams who are playing their own little game. And it's, it's one of frustration. It's one of like, bulletin board material. No one believed in us. And I, I've said this before. Like, I want, I want our playoff odds to be grounded in, like us, in a sound method, the way that I want all of our stats to be rigorous and, you know, viable. But sometimes the odds are wrong because a guy gets badly injured. Sometimes they're wrong because you got like a bunch of young guys and they, they perform better than the projections thought they would because they're young. And projections are inherently conservative about young guys, and they're young, so they stayed healthier. And, And I just, I wish that we could lean into the wonderment part of that a little bit more. And some of that is self interested because I don't love to see the screenshots that are like, fan grass doesn't know what you're talking about. And I was like, I don't know, man. The team was 30 and 35, and the Yankees looked like they'd never lose again. And Aaron Jones Judge looked like he was gonna hit.400 and also hit 50 home runs. Like, what do you want from me? But I also will acknowledge that, like, it's such a long season, we all keep trying to make it longer by bringing back the tiebreaker. And I think that motivating yourself day in and day out is really challenging. But yeah, with the, the benefit of like. And maybe his answer and his speech would have been different if he had delivered it. Were those remarks post game yesterday or were they this morning?
- [76:42]
Ben Lindbergh
That from September 27th, the afternoon. Yeah.
- [76:48]
Meg Riley
So that was the day they clinched.
- [76:49]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, that was Saturday.
- [76:50]
Meg Riley
Okay. So, like, you know, I also wonder if it's just like I want to grant him the grace of being like, hey, if you'd had 24 hours, would there have been an F bomb in there? You know what I mean? Like, you're in the. The big feeling of the, of the moment. It's like Richard Sherman given Michael Crabtree the business right after the NFC championship game. It's like, I don't know, he just made the biggest play of his entire career. Send his team to the Super Bowl. He's probably going to be emotional, maybe give him a cooling off period. That's a football reference, Ben. That's about football. But you have to know about that. What do you think about the 4040 tie? Did you watch that?
- [77:26]
Ben Lindbergh
I. I talked about it on a podcast earlier today.
- [77:29]
Meg Riley
I love how you did the initial question.
- [77:33]
Ben Lindbergh
I related it to baseball. Why can't we have nice things like.
- [77:37]
Meg Riley
T. Oh my God. Wow. I mean, that's what I get. I was here to give you a little bit of the and you turned it around with a terrible take. A 4040 tie is so funny. I like w. I got up this morning and I made my. I made coffee and then I sat down at my computer to start working and I was like halfway through the cup of coffee and I remembered that that game ended in a 4040 tie. And I was like, oh my God.
- [78:03]
Ben Lindbergh
I don't know if I need more coffee.
- [78:04]
Meg Riley
That was quite the jolt. Back to reality. That's hilarious. 44.
- [78:08]
Ben Lindbergh
Your voice is getting strength just thinking about it. It sounds like you're getting stronger as the episode goes on. The other thing that this was, this was silly, but I think illuminating. So this was a Korra quote from David Laurel's Sunday notes at Fan Grass this past weekend, which was largely about Carlos Narvaez and how he has exceeded expectations. Carlos Narvaez not quoted in here saying nobody believed in me. But so. So he's talking to Cora and he got quotes about how he kind of has a Glaber Torres esque swing because this was, I guess, a comp that had come up in the spring. And so Lorela asked Cora if Narvaez still has a Gleyr Torres like swing. And the quote is not this year's Glaber. Cora replied, now Glaber pulls the ball ball. But with Narvi, he's able to stay inside pitches and shoot it the other way. I thought this was interesting cause I was thinking, oh, Glaber pulls the ball. Now did I miss like a Glaber Torres swing reinvention or something? Because as far as I knew, his numbers were not dramatically different from how they had been before. Surface stats wise. Like he. He started pretty well this season and then ended up being, you know, fine labor ish. Like everyone on the Tigers, he was worse later on, but good enough, you know, worth the signing and everything. But But I'm thinking, well, did I miss? You know, and then I look at his stats and it's not like he suddenly hit for more power or anything. It was very Glabor esque. And then I look at his pull rate, his pull percentage, he has the lowest pull percentage of his career according to Fangrass, bad at ball stats, according to Statcast. However, you slice it balls in the air, all balls, whatever it is. So Cora confidently claiming that this year's Glabor is different from previous Glabor because now Glaber pulls the ball. And I, I checked, I asked Lorela when he got this quote. He said it was a couple weeks ago, like maybe mid September. And so I speculated, and Lorela thought that I was probably right, that what happened here was that the Red Sox played the Tigers for a three game series back in May, in mid May. Oh, and I hypothesized, I bet that Gleber has pulled the ball in games against the Red Sox this season. And I was even thinking like, maybe Lorela got the quote this weekend and Glaber had just because the Red Sox were playing the Tigers. But no, it predated this weekend series. And so there was only one previous Red Sox Tigers series, and it was in main. And sure enough, in those three games, Gleyber Torres pulled 60% of his batted balls, which is like double his rate on the season. And the first game that Glaber played against Boston in that series and on the season, he had three hits and two of them were pulled, including one home run that he pulled. And so what I suspect happened here is that Alex Cora imprinted on that one game of Glaber or maybe that one.
- [81:21]
Meg Riley
Yeah.
- [81:22]
Ben Lindbergh
And then he essentially just hallucinated it like a Google AI overview or something, and just extrapolated and assumed that that was representative of the season as a whole. And I bet that so many managers and players and coaches, 100% all think like this because, I mean, look, they're busy, you know, maybe they're not checking the rest of the league's stats. I think this is probably, probably why for years, when you did have coaches or players or managers, when you've had them vote, yeah. Vote on awards or Gold Gloves or All Star selections or whatever it is. In many cases they don't seem to represent what the stats would say. And I think that's because they are literally just generalizing from the handful of games that they happen to see. And that's, I guess it's not surprising, but it's also Sort of wild to me because like Cora just very confidently proclaimed that Gleyber Torres was a different guy this year based on seeing him in three games. Yeah, like five months ago, you know, and like he knows a lot about baseball. He played, he's managed for a long time. He must be aware that just sitting on a single series and getting abbreviated look at a guy is not necessarily going to be telling. You're not going to be able to. You might just get him in a good series or a weird series or a bad series or whatever. And yet he wasn't like, well, I think labor might be different or, you know, when he played us this year, he seemed to pull the ball more. I haven't checked the stats, but maybe, maybe no, it was just this is who he was in that three games five months ago. Therefore that's just who he is. It's like, it's like that was just fixed, some sort of object permanence thing like that. That was glaber forever because of who he is. And I don't know, maybe later when he was prepping for the series this weekend with actual stakes, maybe he looked at the scouting report and was like, oh, I was wrong about that.
- [83:25]
Meg Riley
Actually.
- [83:27]
Ben Lindbergh
Is not pulling the ball more. But there's got to be so much thinking like that that goes on. And it's not just exclusive to baseball. I mean we all do this in life. Like you have to guard against it all the time. But I, I think I, I would like, I try to be aware of what I don't know. And if I've just seen like, you know, a small smattering of plate appearances on a season, you know, I might playfully think like, oh yeah, that guy, you know, he never seems to make an out when I'm watching or I never see him do anything good, but I'm not going to then make the leap from that to actually he sucks. Like see what he did the rest of the time, which is probably the much larger samples. So I guess that's why I'm saying this is why we need like scouting reports and projections and data as opposed to the ultimate anecdota, which is what this was. It's a low stakes observation, but nonetheless, I'm sure that people have thought that way forever and that in many cases they were under a misapprehension.
- [84:29]
Meg Riley
Yeah, you get guys who are like your very special particles, you know, and, and it behaves differently when you're watching it versus. Versus other people. Like for a long time for me, this was Ryan Presley because, you know, and not like this year's version of Ryan Presley, who had like an area before, but like the. The past versions of Ryan Presley, like closer for the Astros, Ryan Presley. And it just felt like every time I watched him, he sucked. Sucked. And I knew that that wasn't true. Yeah, I knew he didn't actually suck because he was like a 2 1/2 win reliever in 2021. Obviously, this is a good. He's a good player. He's a good pitcher.
- [85:13]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [85:14]
Meg Riley
But that year I just felt like. I don't know, He. He was. He was my very special particle. Like, he blew two saves that entire season, and I felt like I watched both of them live. And so then I was like, well, he's not very good, actually. And I was like, I know that's not true, but it did inform.
- [85:31]
Ben Lindbergh
Right.
- [85:32]
Meg Riley
Gave me confidence against him for batters that was completely unearned, you know, because he was really good. Yep. He was my very special particle.
- [85:41]
Ben Lindbergh
But.
- [85:42]
Meg Riley
Yeah, that's funny.
- [85:44]
Ben Lindbergh
Well, by the time people hear this, it will be the day of the first games and, like, always left it all. Yeah. Here we. Some of the team. Teams that. That we're going to be seeing, we're going to be talking about them for the next month, and we're going to run out of things to say and observations to make about these rosters and their strengths and weaknesses. And there are plenty of places you can find that complete rundown of what's this team strength and what's this team's weakness and all that. You know, we get into more series previewy stuff when we actually get to full series, but I'll just. I'll just toss out a few things that I'm generally excited about for this postseason. Yeah, do it now. I'm. I'm very psyched for the series this week. Series. Series.
- [86:25]
Meg Riley
Series. Yeah, series.
- [86:27]
Ben Lindbergh
I know, but. But that could have referred to a single series. It's a problem, but.
- [86:32]
Meg Riley
And one of those ones that isn't better written as opposed to.
- [86:35]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, yeah. So. So I'm really, I think, particularly excited for the AL wild card matchups here now. Yeah, on the one hand, it feels like, like, you know, the Guardians are probably thinking, we did it. We pulled off this incredible comeback. We. Oh, and here. Here we go again. Like, this could all be undone so quickly. And so in a way, we. We just basically saw a playoff series between the Tigers and the Guardians last week, and we were aware of the stakes at the time, and so it. It almost feels too soon. And yet I think I'm ready for more. I, I just like that the AL Wild card matchups are just intra divisional matchups between teams with long standing history slash rivalry or just and, or very recent, you know, just head to head matchups that meant the world. So I'm very excited to see if the Tigers can essentially erase the stain of the collapse that just befell them or if the Guardians can really rub it in and complete the job. It feels like the job is not quite done. They've got to completely exterminate the Tigers now. And on the other side we get Red Sox, Yankees and you know, look, Red Sox, Yankees. It's always fun, it's always heated, but the rivalry, even though just the institutional memory of it persists, it's been in a bit of a slump, I would say lately just because those two teams have for the most part it hasn't been a peak period for those two teams being in direct competition and like costing each other a playoff spot or meeting up in the postseason. There have been times in their history where they met up more commonly or it was like, you know, they were finishing first and second in the division and you know, they really had some, had some stakes, not just historical stakes, but present stakes and so, so kind of happy to have it back. I mean the Yankees and Red Sox haters out there, I guess are happy to see that one of them will lose maybe, but otherwise not super psyched for that matchup. But look, I have enough residual memories and emotional stakes tied to Yankees, Red Sox series that it's good to have that, that juice back at this stage. So we are just, we're going right into the thick of it. Wild card series starts and, and we've got some a matchups on that side. And you know, I, I just talked about, about the Reds and how they are sort of scary and they could, they could very well wipe the Dodgers out just like that, you know, and that ties into the other thing that we've talked about and people have written about and I've written about just the fact that this is a morass of mediocrity. And it just, it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter that these teams were mid for much of the season season. Now if anything, that only enhances the competition, the sense that anything can happen. Realistically. I guess it's not really that much more random than any other year, but it's a tad more random. And the fact that your separation now is what, 14 wins between the lowest win total and highest Win total. And it's not even like there's some team that you think of as a super team that just got jobbed or something. It's. There's just not great teams really. And so I again hope that that will ward off some of the worst of the baseball is broken because you can play a whole season and have a better year and then immediately get knocked out, which I'm sympathetic too. Like, it's certainly true to some extent, but also we're stuck with it. So I'm just, I'm kind of tired of the refrain because, you know, there's only so much we can do at this stage or it doesn't seem like we're going to really roll things back. So I hope, I hope that we'll be spared now, you know, if the Reds beat the Dodgers, then Dodgers fans will be upset about that. You know, no one else will obviously, but I think, you know that that will speak to. Yeah, things are random. But also, hey, I guess Dodgers, maybe you should have been a bit better so then you could have gotten a buy and not had to play in the wild card round. So I think these are good matchups and, and I'm, I'm content with the playoff field as a whole and the fact that we have more evenly matched teams than is typically the case.
- [91:02]
Meg Riley
I think that my guess is that it will make for more compelling viewing and I also have to allow for the possibility that we'll just get a bunch of duds.
- [91:10]
Ben Lindbergh
Yep.
- [91:10]
Meg Riley
And you know, teams don't always behave or play the way we expect them to. Sort of like how your voice can change a lot, which is one cold. But, but I feel like every team in the playoff field does at least one thing very well and has obvious weaknesses and that can make for really compelling baseball. Right. And, and interesting strategy. How do you exploit those weaknesses? How do you bolster your strengths? So that part is good. I know that I said that I feel bad for Mets fans and my, my feeling is sincere. I think it is good for us to have had one of the Mets and Dodgers make the postseason and the other not and that the one that did, didn't do it with like 115 wins. I want teams to be rewarded for spending money. I want very desperately to not have the same discourse about spending that we had last off season around the Dodgers and but for the, the Dodger spending, we could have had the same conversation about the Mets. Right. So y. I think that a reminder to everyone that like, you can't, you can't buy the thing on the first day or any of the days that precede it, you still have to play 162 is valuable. And then having a team that did spend a lot make it is also valuable. So I appreciate that part of it. It's not going to stop those who want a cap from arguing for one, but they're going to sound sillier when they do it. That's always nice. And it's good that we have some. We have a little shakeup in terms of who's there. You know, like we said, we don't have the Astros. The Red Sox are, are not without a. An August October history. But, you know, they've been out of it for a couple of years. Red sneak in on a squeaker. I'm comfortable saying that I am less enthused by this year's AL Central participation than I was last year. Last year it was like, oh, yeah, like the Royals are fun and young and cool and Bobby Wood Jr and Da Da da. They had this pitching plan and it worked. And that's great. You know, pitching chaos. Cool. And you have Cleveland, you know, and now I'm like, I. I wonder if this is a little too much. True.
- [93:13]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. For this week. I think it's a highlight for me just because how they got there, but when one of them advances, then.
- [93:20]
Meg Riley
Yeah. And if it's to, to your earlier point, if it's Detroit that advances, I think then a lot of the consternation there falls away because they are, you know, they haven't played well lately, but I think they are a good team and they are a better team certainly than Cleveland.
- [93:33]
Ben Lindbergh
So I would like the redemption arc, the, the get off to hot start completely collapse historically. And then can they make good. I would be pretty into that. And, and yeah, also I think really one of my number one storylines here is that the teams, the four teams with the longest World Series droughts or the longest streaks of seasons without a championship are in these playoffs. So a third heard of, and I'm counting, of course, the. The three who have never won one, namely the Mariners, the Padres, the Brewers. Mariners haven't won a pennant. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. And then of course, the Guardians, who have not won since 1948, so their drought extends decades longer than those three teams I just mentioned. So for all intents and purposes, sure, they have one World Series in the past, but for anyone who's alive right now, they've potentially been waiting longer, suffering more in some respects. So the fact that we have four teams, a third of the field is composed of these teams that have never won one or haven't won one for the longest time, that's pretty exciting because you do have a potential for these teams to meet. Obviously, you could get Mariners versus Padres or Brewers. How much fun would you that be? Guaranteed franchise, firsttime champion. That would be fantastic.
- [95:03]
Meg Riley
We'd be it. If we had Brewers, Mariners, we'd be guaranteed a Fangrass World Series. One ring.
- [95:09]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, I guess that's true, but true. We haven't had. We haven't had a series like that where both participants had no titles coming into since 1980, when, oh, I wasn't even alive yet.
- [95:24]
Meg Riley
That's how long ago it was.
- [95:25]
Ben Lindbergh
The Phillies played the Royals and someone was. Was guaranteed to win their first, and the Phillies finally did. And, you know, there have been some others since then with, like, teams that hadn't won in the city that they were located in, that kind of thing. But. But franchise all time. It's. It's been 45 years since that happened. So I'm pretty excited about that, though I. I have to ask for your perspective on this. So, so say that happens. Say you get Mariners or Guardians versus brewers or Padres. Would it be more painful to lose that way? When you look across the field and the team that wins is very much feeling what you would have been feeling because they have sort of the same history and baggage? Like, would that hurt you more? Let's say I don't even want to put this on the Mariners. Let's.
- [96:20]
Meg Riley
Let's put it on the Mariners. Okay.
- [96:22]
Ben Lindbergh
All right. Let's say the Mariners make the World stand Series, at least, hey, we won a pennant for the first time. That's. That's something.
- [96:28]
Meg Riley
Yeah. Very exciting, but. Wow.
- [96:30]
Ben Lindbergh
But say you lose to the brewers or the Padres and you see the brewers and the Padres over there celebrating. Granted, I guess they've been around slightly longer than the Mariners have, but. But nonetheless, you could so easily envision, oh, that could be us having our first. Is that more painful because you came so close, or would it be less painful because you're like, you know what if we have to suffer? At least a team that's sort of in the same boat, their fans get the relief that we crave and. And someday it will be our turn. And we can be kind of philosophical about it because, like, a wrong has been righted. It wasn't the greatest wrong that my team has never won, but, like, is there. Is there sympathy among the fans of teams. Do you feel an affinity for brewers fans, for Padres fans, because you've all been waiting collectively for so long and would that ease the pain or would that accentuate it?
- [97:26]
Meg Riley
I think it would ease the pain. Part of it is that I just like those teams, man. I like that brewers team. I like that Padres team. They have fun players. I have enjoyed watching them play all season. It's so funny. Maybe part of the problem is, is just this, the specificity of it. I think that in terms of teams that I personally maybe don't like a lot, I don't really have a great amount of animus for any of the clubs on the NL side. I guess I find some of the approach to like building the team on, on the part of the Cubs to be somewhat confounding. And they have, you know, it's like if, if them winning in 16 open one hell portal, what does them winning again do? You know? So we do have some like, cosmic questions we maybe have to answer there. But I don't know, I like, I pretty well like most of the teams in the playoff field this year. Even ones that I'm like, I don't, I don't know that I have a great need to see a Dodgers back to back back. Not because I have any animus toward the Dodgers, but just because it's like, we'll let somebody else do it.
- [98:42]
Ben Lindbergh
Sure.
- [98:43]
Meg Riley
You know, but there's enough, there's enough distance between, you know, I like all these clubs. I don't know. I think that the way that the NL field is currently constituted, there isn't really a team that would make me go like, oh, I feel even worse now. I do think that like, you know, if the, like, if the Marin. If Cleveland wins and knocks Seattle out in the division series before it can advance, like that sort of brings back some painful memories. But it's not even a flush, totally flush comp, you know, So I don't know, man. I, I think it's a good group. I'm pretty happy with it in general.
- [99:22]
Ben Lindbergh
I think so too. Yeah. Even some of the, the perennial playoff teams like the Phillies, they've been back a few, but they keep winning more games every regular season. And, and this is a fun group of guys and so I don't begrudge them making it back.
- [99:38]
Meg Riley
Like, we haven't seen really good.
- [99:40]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, we haven't seen these Phillies win one. They've, they've gotten close, but I'm not sick of seeing them on this stage. Yeah.
- [99:47]
Meg Riley
Stan Grass World Series ring. Maybe that's really what I'm rooting for more than anything. I just want the site to get a ring by proxy.
- [99:54]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, well, the Mariners when you get both. So that's the best case scenario.
- [99:58]
Meg Riley
But that's right, right. Yeah, that's right. You know, so really we should do. That's just what we should do, I think.
- [100:05]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. I'm, I'm obviously excited to see SH make his first MLB postseason start on the mound and how the Dodgers navigate their bullpen and rotation. And. And another thing, I was planning to write an article on what seemed to be probably a, a record number of first year playoff starters. And, and by that I mean like, like postseason starters who are in their first year in the majors, not, not their first trip to the postseason. Because this was actually a good, a good year for old pitchers just in general. Like it was the most war and innings pitched by 35 plus pitchers in quite a few years. But there were also quite a few young guys who we talked about that came up during the stretch run and were playing important parts. You know, really load bearing, to use your terminology, pitchers on, on staffs being put, promoted and that article got sort of scuttled because the Mets and then also the Miz is in the bullpen it seems like and Kate Horton is hurt and unavailable for at least through the the division series. So that's a blow. But even so, the record in non 2020 years there were. Michael Mountain, Patreon supporter, determined this for me that there were seven distinct, distinct first year starters in the 2020 playoffs with 16 teams. But in other years it's five. The record is only five first year starters and that was in 2013 and that's, that's in play potentially a lot of things would have to go right. But you know you have like Connolly early with the Red Sox, you have Parker Messick with the Guardians, you have Cam Schlitler for the Yankees. You have.
- [101:43]
Meg Riley
You weren't confident?
- [101:44]
Ben Lindbergh
No, I wasn't. I hesitated a bit, but I think they made it. You have.
- [101:47]
Meg Riley
I think you did okay.
- [101:48]
Ben Lindbergh
Treya Savage for the Blue Jays, you have Chad Patrick for the brewers and you perhaps have Horton for the Cubs. And all of these guys have been between the best and third best starters on their staffs by fan graphs. War and RA9 War since the day they debuted. So like these guys have played important parts for their rotation and, and some of them at least are going to, to be thrown into the fire. And that's pretty. It's like Trey Savage just showed up but he was like he was the most effective Blue Jay starter in his three starts he made. So then you have to navigate, okay, are we going to just go for it and and roll him right out there and, and maybe you'd take a chance and you know, short leash or whatever. So I'm excited to see what those guys do, but I'm just generally excited. We kind of got like the our appetites were wet, dreaded by all of the madness of the last week and now it's the main event. Here we go.
- [102:46]
Meg Riley
Here we go.
- [102:47]
Ben Lindbergh
All right. A few follow ups and book closings on various statistical quirks we were tracking. We talked last week about how the Cardinals and Giants effectively eliminated each other in consecutive games. Listener David writes, I'm sure you have already received a ton of emails about the 1982 season in which the Giants were eliminated by the Dodgers in the second to last game of the season season and the next day the Giants eliminated the Dodgers in the last game of the season. Actually, we did not receive a ton of emails about that, but we did receive this one and David says, I was at the game in which the Giants were eliminated and as an 11 year old Giants fan, it introduced me to baseball heartbreak. Rough guess you gotta learn at some point we talked about the Nationals hiring Paul Taboni as their head of baseball operations, former Red Sox assistant gm and when we talked about that, we didn't yet have his job title, so we just knew that he was the head of baseball operations. And we joked about how Toobo was a hobo and would maybe one day be a Pobo. Well, that day has already come. The Nationals named him President of baseball operations. So he just skipped straight past gm. Are you supposed to be able to do that? It's like the Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200 do not pass Pobo. I guess he didn't pass Pobo. He bypassed GM on the way to Pobo and collected presumably much more than $200. How often has this happened though? How often has someone gone from assistant GM straight to Pokemon Pobo? Craig Breslow came to mind. Paul Taboni's former boss. He went from assistant GM of the Cubs straight to chief Baseball officer, the Boston equivalent of Pobo. So maybe this will become more common because of this title inflation that's happening. Just demand immediate Pobo status. If you're running a baseball operations department, maybe people won't want to be GM at all. The GM will just be the Pobo and the person who would have been the agm will be the gm. Or I guess it could be something where you have to offer multiple title bumps to get someone to come if they're happy where they are or they're entering maybe a dysfunctional front office. Not that the Red Sox front office has been free of dysfunction, but if you're wary of entering the national situation where it's unclear how much initiative you can take or who your bosses are or what the investment will be and you're a hot shot front office prospect, you say, yeah, you can have me, but you got to make me POBO on day one. But then I wonder, what will the next step be? If POBO is the new gm, there's got to be a new pobo. Stay tuned. Tuned. Okay, what else? Luisa Rise ended up at a 3.1% strikeout rate, which, while extraordinary, was slightly less extraordinary than it was the last time we talked about it. So he ended up with a 14k percentage plus. That's his strikeout rate relative to the league index stat. That is the lowest since Nelly Fox in 1961 and 62. But Joe Sewell can eternally rest easy because Arise did not reach single digits nor did he reach a.300 batting average. Only Trey Turner did among qualified National Leagues hitters. Speaking of low batting averages, Jake berger did not hit.250. So much for the Quarter Pounder. He batted.236. James Wood finished two strikeouts short of Mark Reynolds single season record 221 to.223. So Reynolds reigns supreme. Willie Adamus hit 30 home runs for the San Francisco Giants. So one improbably long post Bonds drought is over. The giant streak without a 30 home run hitter. William Adamus snapped it. Now the other improbably long post Bonds drought is also in line to be broken. That's the one where there's been a different opening day left fielder in every season since Bonds, but there is some potential for there to be a repeat next year. Elliot Ramos started opening day in left field this season and he may well do it again. We ended up with three 200 plus inning pitchers. Tarek skuple did not join the group because he didn't pitch on Sunday, but Christopher Sanchez did clear that bar at 202 innings. So three Webb Crochet and Sanchez and Webb tops the list at a measly 207innings. And while we're talking innings eaters, Patrick Corbin did not lead the Texas Rangers in innings pitched. He finished second about 17 innings behind Jacob deGrom. Finally, it's time to eat crow. You may remember that back in mid July episode 2350 I began the POD with a prediction, which I rarely do, but the Pirates and Royals had recently swapped Adam Frazier and Cam Devaney and there couldn't have been a lower stakes, lower profile trade. But for some reason I seized on this and I thought, I don't get it. Cam Devaney seems to me to be just as good as Adam Frazier right now and he's the younger, team controlled guy. Why not just promote Cam Devaney if you're the Royals instead of acquiring Adam Frazier? Well, the Royals were right and I was wrong. Fair. Very wrong at least going by the results and what else can we go by? Frazier played perfectly well for the Royals. 56 games, 197 plate appearances, multiple positions 98 WRC plus 0.6 WAR. What more could you expect or ask of Adam Frazier? Meanwhile, Cam Devaney was not promoted by the Pirates for quite some time. He was in AAA for them, but when they did ultimately promote him, he did not make a case that they should have brought him up earlier. 14 games games 38 plate appearances negative 5 WRC plus negative 0.4 war so not only did Cam Devaney not out hit or out war Adam Frazier Frazier was a full win above replacement better. I am chastened. The Royals were right. I was wrong. This has taught me or reminded me that making predictions about baseball is a fool's game. I will not predict that anyone will support us on Patreon after hearing our plea at the start of this episode, but if you should choose to to, we would be grateful. You can do it by going to patreon.com effectively wild 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 Cara Kaufman, Tom Valenzola, Andrew Guthrie, Jason Weiger, and Adil Wali. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord Group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes. We just published the 47th of them this weekend and you can sign up and access them all immediately. The aforementioned playoff live streams coming soon to the Discord Group near you. Sign up at the Ned Garver tier or above to partake, plus personalized messages, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch, and so much more. Check out all the offerings@patreon.com effectivelywild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastangraphs.com you can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Music, and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group@facebook.com group effectivelywild. You can find the effectively wild subreddit at 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 McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We survived another regular season. We're about to embark on another postseason. We we hope you'll join us for the ride and we will be back with another episode soon.
- [109:48]
Meg Riley
Their wacky hypotheticals are perfectively styled and their stat blast queries are detectively compiled. A nonagerian baseball legend selectively dialed, but their spiciest takes are still respectfully marked. More than 2,000 episodes retrospectively filed, and at each new one we still collectively smile. That's effectively wild. That's effectively wild.