Effectively Wild Episode 2394: Swing Hard in Case You Hit It

Summary

Effectively Wild Episode 2394

Title: Swing Hard in Case You Hit It
Date: October 30, 2025
Hosts: Ben Lindbergh (The Ringer) & Meg Rowley (FanGraphs)

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Episode Overview

This episode covers World Series Games 4 and 5, including their statistical and narrative significance, the culture of viral, obvious baseball punditry, bullpen and managerial decision-making, and key player performances. Ben and Meg also dig into the Magic Johnson Twitter phenomenon, analyze team and player storylines, and cap off with some entertaining side discussions about playoff rituals, the Jonas Brothers halftime show, and recent MLB news.

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Main Themes & Key Discussions

1. “Must Win,” “Have to Win,” and the Magic of Obvious Baseball Commentary

[00:27–07:34]

• Stephen A. Smith & Magic Johnson’s “Analysis”

  • Ben notes the viral power of celebrity analysts stating the obvious (“Blue Jays have to win Game Four”—Stephen A. Smith; “Game 5 is very important”—Magic Johnson).
  • Quote, Ben [02:33]: “This is the kind of non-committal, not especially insightful statement I can get behind... it does sort of circle back around in some sort of horseshoe theory of virality.”
  • Magic Johnson’s posts are celebrated for their earnest, non-edgy banality, contrasting with most social media “poster” culture.
  • Meg [05:11]: “If every insanely rich person posted the way Magic Johnson posted, the world would be an objectively better place.”

• Media Virality & Obviousness

  • Viral content often comes from stating the utterly obvious, especially if a celebrity does it.
  • Comparison to posts like “here’s what time the Super Bowl starts.”

2. World Series Game 4: “Just Baseball” (Blue Jays Win Vs. ‘Fatigued’ Ohtani)

[07:35–15:29]

• Game Pace & Fatigue

  • Game 4 had far less drama than Game 3—shorter, more “routine,” but effective for the Blue Jays’ purposes.
  • Shohei Ohtani started but looked worn after a long Game 3 where he reached base 9 times and had little rest. Dodgers and Angels are credited with optimizing Ohtani’s routine, but even for him, the schedule was a strain.
  • Meg [10:29]: “He looked pretty worn to me... the degree to which he and the teams he has played for have really dialed in his routine... I think it’s a more delicate microchip than we have had to reckon with.”

• Toronto’s Approach & Win

  • Shane Bieber pitched “avoiding mistakes.” Blue Jays assembled their offensive outburst with typical, not spectacular baseball.
  • No major controversies or nail-biters—just a solid postseason win.

3. Dodgers Bullpen Drama & Dave Roberts' Stubbornness

[15:29–22:50]

• Blake Treinen and the “Security Blanket” Problem
  • Repeated use of a seemingly diminished Blake Treinen in high-leverage spots perplexes Ben & Meg.
  • Meg [16:55]: “It is just a disaster every time he comes in to pitch... He is the can of gasoline. He looks quite cooked.”
  • Roberts is described as improved as a postseason manager overall but has occasional “stubborn” stretches with player usage.
  • Even with no clear errors in Game 4, this bullpen management could hurt LA as the series continues.

4. Blue Jays Flexibility & Notable Player Performances

[22:50–30:59]

• Winning Without George Springer
  • Toronto managed to win Game 4 with Springer out, giving them flexibility and confidence.
  • Ben [22:50]: “You have home field advantage essentially for the rest of this series.”
• Shohei Ohtani Praise
  • Ben notes how even John Smoltz is overtaken with admiration for Ohtani on the broadcast, emphasizing how special Ohtani’s achievements are.
  • Ben [23:08]: “That’s one of the few times when Smoltz just sounds as gobsmacked as anyone else, marveling at how good these players are instead of finding fault with them.”

5. Intentional Walks & Playoff Managerial Trends

[30:59–34:54]

• John Schneider & Blue Jays’ Intentional Walk Rates
  • Toronto’s manager is questioned for aggressive use of intentional walks; listener emails and research provide context (6th-most IBBs in regular season).
  • Side anecdote: Addison Barger’s “hotel couchgate” and the frugality of young MLB players, with relatable but curious examples (e.g., sleeping on couches to save a buck, team unwillingness to pay for hotel rooms out of cycle).

6. “Who Does Addison Barger Look Like?”—Listener Segment

[36:49–39:28]

• Substantial feedback from listeners on Barger’s doppelgänger:
  • Most popular: Jason Ritter
  • Others: Casey Affleck, Stuart (Tyler Johnston, Letterkenny), Grant Gustin (bearded), Chris Witaske (“The Bear”), Roy (David Denman), Dave Franco, Dylan Sprouse.

7. The Lost Art of the Starting Pitcher as Protagonist

[39:29–45:18]

• Complete Game Intrigue & Narrative
  • The story-within-the-story of how deep a starter can go, the rarity of complete games, and the emotional attachment fans build with dominant pitchers.
  • Ben [41:34]: “I find that consistent through line of tracking the guy... just more entertaining to me... especially if it’s a really great pitcher like Yamamoto.”

8. The Jonas Brothers World Series Performance Fiasco

[48:34–59:58]

• Fan and Broadcaster Backlash
  • Meg [51:31]: “The tonal shift was completely bizarre... you pivot to the Jonas Brothers doing a ‘this is my fight song’—so bad. What are we doing with this? Are we trying to have a halftime show at a baseball game?”
  • The attempt at a pop music “halftime show” in MLB postseason is described as jarringly discordant—both for its corporate synergy (Mastercard Stand Up To Cancer tie-in) and timing.
  • Both hosts hope it isn’t a harbinger of more such spectacle, noting MLB’s lack of tradition for midgame live music and the uniquely solemn context of the Stand Up To Cancer moment.

9. Blue Jays’ Hitting Surge & The David Popkins Effect

[60:02–68:37]

• Viral ‘Swing Harder’ Philosophy
  • New hitting coach David Popkins receives recognition; Athletic articles detail the Jays’ simple, but impactful, emphasis: swinging harder—but only where it fits a player’s skillset.
  • Ben [64:16]: “It does kind of boil down to they swing harder now and they swing harder without compromising their contact ability... which is pretty important. Best of both worlds.”
  • Credit is also given to development of players like Vlad Jr.; not all “swing harder” narratives fit every hitter.

10. Awards Roundup: Cal Raleigh vs. Aaron Judge “Player of the Year”

[69:02–72:14]

• Ben reviews the logic (and subjectivity) behind end-of-season awards—distinguishing “Player of the Year,” “Most Outstanding,” and MVP, with a focus on Cal Raleigh’s winning accolades for being a standout, notable season distinct from simply being the “most valuable.”

11. Phillies Mini-Controversy: Bryce Harper, Dombrowski, and Trade Speculation

[72:53–87:23]

• Dombrowski’s “Honest” Comments
  • The Phillies President’s mild, factual remarks about Harper “not having an elite year” spark trade talk, which upsets Harper (after DC experiences) and local media, but the hosts see the reaction as overblown.
  • Ben [81:50]: “It is sort of a shame because I… would like to live in a world where a baseball executive or sports executive or leader in any field... could just speak plainly and not kind of have their words twisted…”
  • Meg [79:59]: “If I were him, I would err on the side of not disrupting that relationship because he’s going to be around. But also, I think that this is mostly the fault of sports talk radio in Philly…”

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Magic Johnson’s Twitter:

  • Ben [06:34]: “You’re not going to see any community notes on a Magic Johnson tweet because he is just… spitting facts. Essentially.”
  • Meg [05:11]: “If every insanely rich person posted the way Magic Johnson posted, the world would be an objectively better place.”

• Dodgers Bullpen Woes:

  • Meg [16:55]: “It is just a disaster every time he comes in to pitch. He is the can of gasoline. He looks quite cooked.”

• Shohei Ohtani:

  • Ben [23:08]: “That’s one of the few times when Smoltz just sounds as gobsmacked as anyone else, marveling at how good these players are…”

• Jonas Brothers MLB Halftime Show:

  • Meg [51:31]: “...you pivot to the Jonas Brothers doing a ‘this is my fight song’—so bad. What are we doing with this?”

• Blue Jays’ Hitting Approach:

  • Ben [64:16]: “...they swing harder now and they swing harder without compromising their contact ability...which is pretty important.”

• Executives Speaking Honestly:

  • Ben [81:50]: “I would also like a baseball executive asked about the performance of a player to answer honestly about that.”

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Timeline of Major Segments

• 00:27–07:34 — Magic Johnson, viral obviousness, sports pundit tone
• 07:35–15:29 — World Series Game 4 recap, Ohtani fatigue
• 15:29–22:50 — Dodgers bullpen management, Treinen usage
• 22:50–30:59 — Blue Jays flexibility, Ohtani admiration, Toronto’s IBB trends
• 30:59–34:54 — Blue Jays walks, Addison Barger’s “couch” saga
• 36:49–39:28 — Addison Barger lookalike guesses
• 39:29–45:18 — Complete game nostalgia, SP drama
• 48:34–59:58 — Jonas Brothers, “halftime show” backlash
• 60:02–68:37 — Blue Jays’ hitting surge, Popkins “swing harder” philosophy
• 69:02–72:14 — Cal Raleigh awards vs. Judge
• 72:53–87:23 — Bryce Harper–Dombrowski–trade talk “controversy”

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Final Notes

• Game 5 Recap [87:32–end]: Blue Jays win 6–1; Trey Savage sets World Series rookie K record; Ohtani goes 0-for-4; LA now faces must-win situation ("must win Game 6") in Toronto.
• Listener Corner: More Barger doppelgängers; Blue Jays fans praise Vladdy.
• Look Ahead: Dodgers must rally on Halloween in hostile territory.

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Effectively Wild remains a podcast that blends in-depth stats, wry humor, and winking self-reference, perfectly suited for devoted baseball fans who enjoy both the numbers and the narratives that surround October baseball.

Transcript

[Ben Lindbergh]

They'll still be speaking statistically rambling, romantically pontificating, pedantically bantering, bodily drafting, discerningly giggling, giddily, equaling Effectively Wild.

[Meg Riley]

Hello and welcome to episode 2394 of Effectively Wild a Fan Graphs Baseball Podcast, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Riley of Fan Graphs and I am joined by Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer. Ben, how are you?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, I'm okay, Although I'm upset that I missed out on seeing something from noted baseball analyst Stephen A. Smith of ESPN who commented prior to World Series Game 4 on Tuesday. And all I saw was a headline on the clip at espn which was Stephen A. Colon, the Blue Jays have to win Game four. Now that's not necessarily a must win.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It's a have to win. It's a very fine distinction. But the clip unfortunately will not play for me today. So I'm being deprived of day old baseball analysis courtesy of Stephen A. But he was essentially saying, I believe that it was imperative that the Blue Jays win game four. And indeed they did.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And they have now, I guess, won both of the must win, slash, have to win games that they had to win in this series, according to people that we cited on this podcast. Podcast. And it's a good thing too, because if they had lost both of those games and also lost the two that they did lose in reality, then the series would be over. Yeah, that would be done. That would be. That, that'd be a bummer. So I missed out on Stephen A's analysis, but I did want to highlight Some pre game 5 analysis as we record here on Wednesday afternoon. And this is more my speed. This comes from Magic Johnson.

[Meg Riley]

Oh, yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

NBA legend, Dodgers part owner. And for people who are not aware, Magic Johnson a very distinctive Twitter presence. Yes, it's. It's purd. Happily esque. For those who have seen Parks and Recreation, he just sort of.

[Meg Riley]

That's a great.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, he just enthusiastically states things that are pretty obvious to everyone. And his comment at 1:14pm Eastern time, 10:14am his time with the series being 2. 2. Game 5 is very important. Whichever team wins takes control of the series. Exclamation point.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You know, yeah, he's onto something.

[Meg Riley]

No lies detected.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, I can't dispute that. I guess we could, we could quibble with whether you're truly in control. Yeah. But I think what he is saying there, that game five of a best of seven series that is tied through four games is very important. I would confirm that. I would absolutely endorse that statement. And this is the sort of prognostication and. And punditry that I approve of and probably why I'm. I'm not a more successful pundit, perhaps. But this is the kind of non committal, not especially insightful statement that I can get behind. You know, it's not bold, it's not inflammatory, but it does sort of circle back around in some sort of horseshoe theory of virality.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Where if you say something super obvious, then that can actually get attention. That could go viral. Just as viral, maybe even more viral than saying something super bold or provocative like a. A Game one is a must win. If you are a celebrity and you just say game five is very important, people are quite taken with that. People like to engage with that kind of content.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. I. It's like how those posts that tell you what time the super bowl starts and how to watch it just do.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

Bonkers numbers. You know, the.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Or our running bit from last year or the year before, whatever it was that everyone loved, where we kept reminding everyone how many games were needed to win a postseason series.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. And, you know, I thought that we got creative with it because we adjusted the number based on how long the series was. We weren't like immediate. It was pretty important to the conditions on the ground, as it were. Yeah. I. I love. I love the way he posts because you can't. He doesn't have a poster's heart because there's no edge to what he says. Right. Like, it's not. There's nothing particularly gritty or snarky. But he does love to post. You know.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yes. He has nothing to say, seemingly, but he really loves to say it. It's just the most banal observations. It's sort of like old Twitter content when people would just say whatever was on their mind because that was how people used Twitter originally, as if it was just sort of a Facebook status.

[Meg Riley]

Live journal.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Here's what's running through my mind. You know, not trying to be pithy, clever, or go viral, but just. Just saying stuff. Just making very mundane observations.

[Meg Riley]

And that's.

[Ben Lindbergh]

That's still the way that he is using it. And it's. It's sort of wholesome.

[Meg Riley]

Oh, it's so wholesome. If every insanely rich person posted the way that Magic Johnson posted, the world would be an objectively better place. Like, we would be in better shape than we're in right now.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And.

[Meg Riley]

And look, like, I, I get what you're saying. He's not wrong. I mean, there's the, like, the, the factual piece of it that he has managed to pin down, unsurprisingly, but he's getting at something, which is that, okay, so the series is tied, famously. You know, if whichever team wins tonight, they're putting. They're putting the other team on the brink of elimination.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right.

[Meg Riley]

And so when you can, when you can push the other team into what is for them an actual must win game, well, then you kind of one.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Step removed from actual must win.

[Meg Riley]

And I think you could argue that you have taken control of the series at that point, that you are sort of in the driver's seat.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, you're in the catbird seat, whatever that means. Yeah. I was actually scanning some of his observations from earlier in the series. So his most recent tweet, as we speak, from a little later on Wednesday than the one we just read. Another sports day for me with my Dodgers playing the Blue Jays and my MLS team, LAFC taking on Austin to begin their playoff run. Exclamation point. Yep.

[Meg Riley]

Wow.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Again, indisputable. You're not going to see any community notes on a Magic Johnson tweet because he is just, he's just spitting facts. Essentially. One other one that I wanted to highlight here. Freddie Freeman's walk off homer seals the victory in the 18th inning as my Dodgers win 6 to 5 against Toronto and now lead the series 2 to 1.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, man.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, you're right. That's true. Yeah, yeah, you got a point there, Magic.

[Meg Riley]

That's true, man. I. Look, again, I'm just gonna offer that if, if more very wealthy people like just did this, that'd be great. I'd be into that. You know, he's like, I got my teams. I mean, literally, his, at least in part, that's gotta be cool. He's excited about him. He's telling you, he's telling you. Here's the. Here's the extra X tree. Here's the state of things on the ground for me. Literally. Magic Johnson. How fun.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

From a reliable source, part owner of the team, he was correct that that home run happened and the Dodgers did win by that score against that team and that that did lead them to be up in the series. Just no editorializing, no commentary. He's not trash talking, nothing snarky. He is just summarizing reality, really. And if you were following this series exclusively through Magic Johnson's tweets and you had notifications set up, let's say, and you were waiting with bated breath to find out what the Dodgers did and you Were probably wondering, the game started seven hours ago. Why haven't we had an update here? And finally it came through and he reported what happened. He's not going to mislead you. No fake news here. So yeah, I celebrate magic and this is the kind of commentary that I can get behind when it comes to the relative importance of various games. But the Blue Jays did indeed win game four. And I'm guessing that we have a whole lot less to say about it than we did about game three. I think we'd be hard pressed to conduct a. A World Series Game four draft. Or we could, but it would probably be a pretty short episode cause just not a whole lot of highlights, which is not because the Blue Jays won. All credit to the Blue Jays. I'm sure Blue Jays fans are happier with the outcome of Game 4 than Game 3, even if the game was not quite as scintillating. But yeah, just, you know, not the same ups and downs. It was half as long for some reason. It was just over like that snap of a finger essentially, which I can't do, by the way. I'm not a gifted snapper. I just. Yeah, I can't really. It hurts a little bit. I find the friction. Oh, I just. I don't know my own strength.

[Meg Riley]

Apparently not.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It's just. Yeah, but it just does not produce a sound. My, my daughter also has issues with snapping. She's four, so it's probably a little more understandable. But Jesse is a great snapper, so she has tried to teach me and it just hasn't. Hasn't taken.

[Meg Riley]

You know, it's probably okay. Ben, I don't know that that's skill that's ever going to like be make or break for you unless you want to be in a production of west side Story as you're in, you know, you can't do. Boy.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, I've survived and thrived thus far. I guess we'll never know what my life could have been if I could have snapped effectively all this, all this.

[Meg Riley]

While, but effectively snapper.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. I'm satisfied with my life thus far, I think as a non snapper. And the Blue Jays, I'm sure are satisfied with the outcome of that game, which was, look, they didn't beat up on Ohtani, but he was not at his most unhittable. Obviously, like, you know, there were some signs of fatigue there probably for everyone involved in that game, just about. But it's, it's maybe more obvious for the guy who has to start the game and also had played the previous game and gotten on base nine times.

[Meg Riley]

He looked worn, you know, he looked pretty worn to me, and I think that he and the Dodgers and, you know, the Angels didn't do a bad job of this either. So I don't want to make it sound like this is purely a. A Dodgers phenomena, but, you know, I think we have. As much as we talk about how hard what he is doing is and how remarkable of a player he is, the degree to which he and the teams he has played for have really dialed in. Sort of like his routine, the starter day versus the rest of the time when he's DHing. I think it's a more delicate microchip than we have had to reckon with. Right. And it makes total sense that he would just be kind of off. You know, think about when a starter has to get to the ballpark, particularly if you're also the dh. You know, what's, you know, how. How soon could he have gotten out of there? What time could he have possibly hit rem? You know what I mean? Like, just like, I know he's reportedly like a quick sleeper, which feels like having a little kid thing to me. Right. Like you just got to be able.

[Ben Lindbergh]

To snap, get on it out of desperation. Yeah. You got to maximize every minute. I think they said he left at 10 after midnight LA time, so he got out of there quickly. And it depends if you sleep in as a baseball player, like, you know, there are 17 hours between the last out of game three and first pitch of game four, I think, which. That's enough time to get a good night's sleep if. If you can, if you set things up. You know, you say Kikuchi could sleep that entire time if he was allowed to, probably. But, but Ohtani, you know, he has to get to the park early. Of course, he has to go through his whole routine as a DH and as a starter and do whatever prep he has to do. But, you know, you're probably. You should relax. Whatever rules there are about, you have to be here. But, you know, I'm sure he's there when he needs to be anyway. But I, I would just say, like, you know, get here when you need to get here. You can roll right in whenever you feel comfortable.

[Meg Riley]

As far as you. Yeah, but he did look fatigued to me, not quite as sharp. And, you know, it wasn't like Bieber was dominating, but he was avoiding mistakes in ways that he needed to. Yeah, I thought that they played a good game. It was sort of a very. I'm sure that Smoltz was thrilled, I will admit to having him muted at times. That like, you know, they, they did string contact together and their big inning was a sort of a mix of the best parts of what makes their offense work. I don't know, it was a very, it was a very normal baseball game. When it comes right down to it, Ben, like, it was so typical.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Like, you could see that kind of what we needed. I mean, you know, I would have liked an off day there. I'm sure everyone involved would have liked an off day there just to digest what had happened and actually rest if you were directly involved or if you were up all night writing about what happened. But if we couldn't have an off day, then, yeah, just sort of a standard routine run of the mill game, as much as you can have one of those in the World Series. There just, you know, wasn't a lot of intrigue, nothing super controversial or at least decisive and not a lot of lead changes. It wasn't a blowout, but it wasn't the closest. You know, it wasn't a game that like swung on a single play. Exactly. So there wasn't that much to say. And maybe that's okay because there was such an excess of stuff to say about game three.

[Meg Riley]

Right. Yeah. Like, you get, you get Vladdy homering, you get the guys stringing stuff together. I. Here's a question that I. That occurred to me while I was watching this and I realized that perhaps his use yesterday is not an entirely fair springboard for this question because those bullpens were exhausted. We don't know who was really available. You know, we did get an email, by the way, that Snell had thrown a bullpen earlier the, the day of the very long game, which is why he was not available to come in and in relief. Why are you having him throw his bulb? If, you know, you might. Anyway.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, I was wondering about that too. Yeah. Credit to. To Jeremy Patreon supporter for pointing that out. But yes, that is interesting. I guess the timing of the throw day.

[Meg Riley]

Don't you want to preserve the option to have him throw?

[Ben Lindbergh]

But. Right. And maybe the fact that, that they didn't preserve the option, maybe that means something in itself. Maybe Snell just doesn't want to actually throw in a game on his throw day. Or they don't want to have him do that.

[Meg Riley]

They don't want to have him do it.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, that could be meaningful. Maybe. And I guess it's also like the timing of it maybe because like, what if he had saved his Throw day for.

[Meg Riley]

And then he hadn't thrown.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And. And, yeah, and then he, like, didn't pitch in the game. And, well, the game went seven hours or whatever, and then it's midnight, and he hasn't done his bullpen session yet. I guess. I guess in that game, he probably would have pitched. He probably would have had Snell come out.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Instead of Will Klein for his fourth inning. But, yeah, you could end up in a situation where you didn't do your throw day and then the day ends.

[Meg Riley]

Oh, and then the dance. But all of that is prefaced to me acknowledging that, like, the. The. The situation for both of these teams from a pitching perspective was, like, totally goofed, although they did not incur additional very bad damage. And again, Chris Bassett was like, yeah, that's why I only threw one inning, you guys. Here I am for two. But at what point does the Dodgers front office say to Dave Roberts, hey, pretend Blake Trinen is dead. Just pretend he, you know, pretend he decided to become a youth pastor. Pretend that his arm fell off. Inexplicably, there was no violence done. It just. He woke up one morning and, like, you know, like. Like an eyelash coming out. He was like, oh, gosh, there's my arm on the floor. What are you going to do with that? It's clear that training occupies, like, a security blanket type of space in Robert's psyche, and that is not what he is. He is the can of gasoline. Right. He is cooked. Like, he looks quite cooked. Now, as is always the case with pitchers, we don't really know what's going on. Maybe Blake Trine is hurt. Maybe Blake Trinen, I don't know, has a mental block going on. Maybe. Who knows? Who knows what's going on?

[Ben Lindbergh]

It's Dave Roberts job to know that. But it is Dave Roberts, so he should know that. Exactly.

[Meg Riley]

Exactly. And so, like, I. I'm not saying that there. I. I bring up the not knowing, because here I am saying Blake Trinen is cooked. And I think Blake Trinen might be cooked, but there could be information I'm missing here that might change my future forecast of him. And by future, I mean, like, what Blake Trinen might look like in 2026. But as things are currently const, it is just a disaster. Every time he comes in to pitch, he does not look sharp. Like, he's not commanding the ball. Well, I don't get it.

[Ben Lindbergh]

What are we doing?

[Meg Riley]

He has 8, 31 ERA in the postseason. Now his FIP is a 22 1. But, you know, the Dodgers aren't so simplistic in their analysis to say well I guess he's good out there. You can just watch the guy and he looks cooked.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, that's the thing. I don't know if he's permanently cooked but. But right now I just would not use him right. And I know that the FIP is respectable, but FIP sort of a precondition of FIP is, is that you are like a major league quality pitcher. Because FIP just assumes that everyone, you know, once the pitcher gives up a batted ball, once the ball's in play, they can't control anything. But. But if you or I were on the mound, you would not assume a league average battle against us. I'm not saying that Blake Trine and diminished as he equivalent to us, but I am saying that he's given him.

[Meg Riley]

10 hits in four innings.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Like yeah, that just does not seem reflective. I don't watch him and think oh, bad bounces, you know, hard luck. No, it just does not look like that at all. And I just wonder what Roberts is seeing except some vision of 2024 October trine in because he doesn't look good. It would be one thing if he looked like his usual self and things were just going the wrong way. And you might say I'm just going to stick with my guy. I'm just small sample, you know, he's been good before and I'm just going to trust him. No, he just doesn't look like the same guy. He's clearly diminished. And Smoltz was saying that on the broadcast which you may not have heard because you might have got him muted. But, but like the movement's not there, the speed's not there. I haven't really done a deep dive into the metrics. Like this is one case where I'm sort of satisfied with the eye test. Y test is telling me that Blake Trident is just not a good pitcher right now. And the, the hitters are telling everyone that too. So I know that in this game maybe he didn't even have another right handed reliever available. But I'm not even like playing matchups and platoons with Blake Tran. Give me, give me the platoon disadvantage by all means over the disadvantage of Blake Tran being on the mound.

[Meg Riley]

Right. It. The whole thing is just so bizarre to me. I think two things simultaneously. I think that Dave Roberts is a better postseason manager than I think the popular consensus of him is because I think he has improved over time. I think the decisions that he has generally made have improved over time. And part of why there is so much managerial grist for the mill, this is what I noted to other Ben when we previewed the series, is he's just been there so many times, Right. And so you're just getting a lot of looks at this guy, and sometimes, you know, he does make confounding decisions, but he is also capable of stubbornness. There are times when he is stubborn, and sometimes that doesn't matter, but sometimes it's, I'm going to find a way to get Clayton Kershaw into this game. Just you watch me. And right now, it's manifesting as I am going to Trine in. And again, I want to, like, caveat what I'm saying ever so slightly for game four, just because of the complete cluster that was game three, and it probably threw all sorts of plans into chaos. And so I want to be mindful of that and not, like, assume too much. But also it feels like somebody's got to say to him, hey, Dave, you got to be done with this guy. Like, he's. No. If they really thought that, if they felt that way, they would tell Blake Trinen to pretend he's hurt and replace him on the roster. And they haven't done that, you know, so, you know, if he's gonna be there, I guess maybe you're like, we gotta go to this guy. But Banda was in a jam, and then Blake Trine admitted a lot worse.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yep. That's what he does these days. So it may not have mattered in that game because of the final score. That's why I said, you know, there wasn't anything that was controversial and decisive, because you can't really look at the final score and say, oh, if he had just not gone to play Trine and they would have won. That would have required them to score more than two runs at any point in the game. But it does make you worried about Game 5 and potentially 6 and 7 if he has not broken this Blake bad habit.

[Meg Riley]

Right. And our listeners will know the answer to this question, you know, by the time they listen to this. But as we sit here, you know, we're. We're preparing to see Savage match up against Blake Snow. And Blake Snow has been great this postseason, and he was pretty bad in his last start. And so what version of Blake Snow are we going to get tonight? How deep can Blake Snell go? Right. So we don't. We don't know the answers to that. Well, Toronto still hasn't released the lineup, so they're still not sure what Springer's deal is, I guess the other way I wouldn't have called game four a must win for Toronto. But being able to win Game 4 without Springer, that has to feel pretty good. You have to feel like you've, you know, and with one of your less sure thing starters on the mound, I feel like that's. And now, now, you know, you get to go home. How nice is that?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yep. You have home field advantage essentially for the rest of this series. So, yeah, I will say that one thing that you can do to endear yourself to me, not you, someone who has not already endeared themselves to me, is to say nice things about Shohei Ohtani.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Sincerely not pandering to me, but believing them, which, you know, it's easy to do. John Smoltz, he really does like Shohei Ohtani. And that's, I think, when I most like John Schultz, when he is really raving about Shohei Ohtani because for once he's not doing back in my day or players today or get off my lawn or anything. He can't actually. Yeah, you can't, right? What are you gonna, who are you gonna say back in your day was. Was better than Shohei Ohtani? That's just, you know, Micah Owings or something like, because he's probably post Smoltz too. I guess they overlapped for a couple years. But yeah, like you can't really make a case that anyone in your day was better and he doesn't. And what I appreciate is that he really appreciates Ohtani as a pitcher because Ohtani gets so much attention for his hitting, as he should. But Smoltz always feels obligated to defend him as like a true pitcher's pitcher, that he has all this incredible stuff. But also he's great at manipulating the ball and he has a great feel on the mound. And he maintains that Ohtani is more comfortable on the mound. I don't know how he assesses comfort, but obviously Ohtani does really prize being a two way player and really values pitching and Smoltz values that in him. And so that's one of the few times when Smoltz just sounds as gobsmacked as anyone else. It sounds like he's having a great time watching someone who is playing today and marveling at how good these players are instead of finding fault with them. So gotta give him some credit for, I know, being really bold and going out on a limb by acknowledging how good Shohei Ohtani is.

[Meg Riley]

I think the reason I'm laughing is because you're Like, I don't know how he's arriving at that conclusion. And you've just been nice about John Smoltz, so I feel like I can be a little snarky. The way he's arriving at that conclusion is that John Smoltz was a pitcher.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

And so he's like the thing that I could do. That's what he can do better. Who could say, you know, so, like, that's, that's how he's arriving at, at that conclusion. If I had to hazard a guess, yes.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And Smoltz was not a bad hitter either for a pitcher. So I guess perhaps he can, he can appreciate. Gosh, it's so sad that I say that. And then his career OPS was 4. 33, right? Yeah, it's like a 16 OPS plus. It's not good. Definitely not. Not good at all. But, you know, some of those Braves aces at least were known for pretty good bats. I guess I should have gone. Should have reached for Brooks Kishnik instead of Micah Owings. Maybe even more of a contemporary of John Smoltz, who was sort of a semi two way player for a while, though. Same sort of two way player. Yeah. Brooks Kishnik. That is a good baseball name.

[Meg Riley]

It is a good baseball name. Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Anyway, diminished Ohtani, like, oh, he's so tired. He's a shadow of his usual self. You know, he was throwing like 97 instead of 99 or something. And probably part of that was pacing himself and acknowledging that maybe he didn't have the reserves he normally would. And he still pitched into the seventh. Maybe he shouldn't have pitched into the seventh, but he pitched through six. And they needed innings desperately, of course, and. And he gave them as many as they needed.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So that was pretty important. And on the other side of things, the Blue Jays pitched to him. So I don't know if, if Schneider was sandbagging a little bit and, you know, I don't know if we're gonna walk him to lead off the game. They definitely didn't do that. Well, they did walk him to lead off the game, actually, but not, not on purpose. Yeah, not entirely on purpose, at least. And that was the last time that he reached base in that game. They pitched to him and they got him out three times. So what a difference a game makes. I guess that now, I don't know if it's like, entirely intellectually consistent to be like, this guy has entered a, a realm of performance where we absolutely will not throw him a pitch. And then the next game we're back to pitching to him again. I, you know, it's a bit of whiplash, I guess, different game situations when you're in a tie game in extras as opposed to it's early or you have a lead. So. Okay. But yeah, I don't know whether he was overselling the degree of their respect for slash fear of Ohtani pre game or whether they reevaluated or maybe even he got a talking to from the Blue Jays brass. Maybe. Maybe Carson Sistoli sat him down and said, hey, we ran the numbers or perhaps sent him a link to Ben Clemens's breakdown at Fancrafts and said, you know, I used to work here, I used to edit this place. These people know what they're talking about. And this other Ben here, he ran the numbers on all these walks and suggests that perhaps it's not the best.

[Meg Riley]

It would be funny if Carson referred to Ben Clemons as other Ben because it suggests a universe in which John Schneider listens to effectively Wild and doesn't already know that his decision making from just a straight analytics perspective there was a little bit questionable. So I like that world where John is a regular listener and if that's the case, I won't say I'm sorry for the way that we talked about the intentional walk decisions. I think we were right, but I hope it didn't grate too bad. You got a win last night, so I think you're probably doing okay. But yes, Other Ben who, which Other Ben? What other Ben is there? That's like a unintentional, like, you know, who's on first kind of situation. And with Carson, that would be a good time. That'd be a funny couple of minutes.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. You know, I always appreciate when we talk about these teams that we fixate on in October and it's sort of the, hopefully to a lesser extent, but the, the national broadcaster problem where you are subjected to people who don't know your squad as intimately as you do. And hopefully we know what we're talking about most of the time on Effectively Wild, but we're never going to have the same insight and familiarity concerning a single team as someone who lives and dies with that team and watches every single game and is just aware of the, the storylines. You know, we're, we're paying attention throughout the year, but also we're kind of parach in when we really embed with a particular team for a whole month at this point. And so just, you know, little, little insights that have been shared. Like, yeah, we were talking about Schneider's proclivity toward intentional walks this October. And you know, he wasn't the, the intentional walk happiest manager out there during the regular season. He wasn't the least either. But the Blue Jays walked 25 batters during the regular season intentionally, which was the sixth most. But, you know, the Dodgers were second most. Right. The Mariners were. Were fifth most.

[Meg Riley]

Definitely a manager you want to emulate.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, yeah, we were, we were really speaking specifically about his behavior in October, I think, where we've, we've seen more intentional walks and bunts and small ball stuff just in general. But, you know, obviously he doubled and tripled and quadrupled down in that game alone on that tactic. So that's really what we were talking about. As for Barger and his hotel room saga with Davis Schneider, we were sort of puzzling. Evidently he did just cheap out, which I guess we, we kind of knew. But we were wondering why didn't he just get a room, you know, Barger get a room instead of bargering into Davis Schneider and his girlfriend's room. And someone suggested to us that maybe part of the problem was that the players leases in Toronto had maybe expired at the end of September.

[Meg Riley]

Sure.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I guess maybe you can't take for granted that you're going to be playing games in October. So perhaps you have to figure something out there. And obviously they're, you know, taking care of your accommodations on the road, but maybe not at home, typically. I still think that it would be in the Blue Jays best interest to pony up for a hotel room for a night if, if it came to it. But he did acknowledge that it, it was an odd decision, perhaps because he had options. And this was, I think, in a passing piece, maybe. I saw it get aggregated. Barger said they set up a place, they being the Blue Jays, I think, But I was like, for a few days, I'm not paying for a hotel room. I know that sounds crazy, but I'm just trying to save a buck, which, I mean, yeah, it does sound, it's relatable, I think, for most of us, but most of us are not major league players on even major league minimum salary during a World Series.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And so like Barger, because he had flown to meet his wife at the hospital because they just had their third kid, I think the day after game seven of the alcs. And then he flew back to Toronto for a Blue Jays workout and he did not immediately have a place to play. And I guess he wanted to. Wanted to save some money, which, you know, Maybe he's putting it in the third kid's college fund, I guess, you know, and I know he's, he's fairly new to the league and maybe doesn't feel secure and safe. It's his second year. He didn't hit well in his first year. So in a, on a relative basis, this is a breakout for him. Not sure. Spectacular breakout, but, you know, to, to be a, a regular for a division winner and pennant winner.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And to hold your own and be starting in the World Series relative to where he has been in the past, you know, that's, that's kind of a breakout. So perhaps he's not feeling so financially secure that he wants to be spending money willy nilly. But I don't think that spending on. And I don't know his background and his upbringing and whatever else created the man who is Aston Barger. But on the surface it sounds, sounds curious to feel so strongly about saving on a hotel room when you're making whatever three quarters of a mil and.

[Meg Riley]

Plus whatever your postseason share is going to end up being.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right. Plus that. And you want to kind of freeload on. I mean, I assume, I don't know if he's like splitting rent, you know, is he offering to, to pay his portion of Davis Schneider's hotel room rate? Hopefully. Hopefully so. But yeah, it, it does sound like taking that a tad far because, you know, invest in yourself, Addison Barger. Right. Like, I mean, get a good night's sleep. You know, it will benefit you long term in arbitration or wherever down the road if you, if you're playing at peak performance.

[Meg Riley]

I agree. But as we have seen, first of all, you're right to point out that like, we don't know, you know, what Addison Barger's circumstances were as a person before being a pro athlete. And you know that your experience of the world, I imagine, would impact your, your willingness on that stuff. And also, sometimes these guys admit to being cheap about things they shouldn't be cheap about even when they're in.

[Ben Lindbergh]

That's true. We talked about that whole.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It was the athletic article about players not paying for subscriptions and the ways.

[Meg Riley]

In which getting a new pillow if you're Steven Kwan and it's like, hey, buddy, sleeping is very important to being able to be at peak physical performance. I would think. Yes, go get like, I mean, surely you listen to one podcast that will give you a coupon code for Casper or whatever the hell.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So I know we, we talk about the, like, it's the player development era. You Know, we're optimizing performance and, you know, just trying to eke out any extra advantage and use all the technology and the cutting edge. What about just paying for a hotel room instead of sleeping on a pull out couch like that? That might be better than studying the scatting report or, you know, tracking your, your biomechanics or whatever. Just get a good night's sleep. That, that seems like it's, it's worth the investment.

[Meg Riley]

Do we think that there was an actual conversation between Barger and the Blue Jays about the hotel situation? Because if I'm the Blue Jays and I'm hearing this story, I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's cute, but Addison will pay for you to stay somewhere. First of all, if you're willing to sleep on a pullout couch in someone else's hotel room, you're not going to be choosy about where we put you up. You're not going to be like, oh no, not the Marriott. You know what I mean? Like, Al, they can't, they don't have like a block of hotel rooms in that, in the thing.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, I, I think they might have, but he didn't want to pay for it. Is they arranged accommodations. But I guess if you're home, I, I don't know if this is a CBA thing, like if your home is the t. Obligated to provide housing for you and it's the postseason, you know, I guess it, for whatever reason it wasn't comped. And I don't know if that's the, the Jays cheaping out or, or if that sort of standard practice. Yeah, it's certainly seems to be Barger cheap. Maybe it's both, but yeah, it's. My questions are kind of answered, but not entirely. He did acknowledge, I mean, he said, I know that sounds crazy. So he, he does understand how this comes off, but. And you know, I guess he's, he's doing fine, obviously. Like I'm talking about how it could impact his performance, but he hit that huge home run, so I guess, I guess it was okay. We did get a lot of responses, by the way, to your prompt, your query about who he looks like.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So I'll summarize. So we got several submissions. I don't know whether any of these is the one that you were thinking of, but the most common suggestion was Jason Ritter, which I think is a good comp.

[Meg Riley]

That's a good comp.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Levi Weaver had posted this on Blue Sky a few days ago and this was relayed to us by A listener. And then also some other listeners pointed it out, perhaps independently. So Jason Ritter. I don't. I don't know if that's a name and a face that immediately comes to mind for everyone, but, yeah, that's a decent comp. And then Chris suggested Casey Affleck, which I can kind of see.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, that one's less. That one's less close for me. I think they're different. They're too different in the face for that to be a clean. A flush comp for me.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Eric suggested Stuart from Letterkenny, which was not who you were thinking of because you said you hadn't seen Letterkenny, but Tyler Johnston is the actor. And then Scott said Grant Gustin, specifically in season four of the Flash, where Barry is in jail for a bit and grows a beard. I'm guessing that wasn't also on the tip of your tongue.

[Meg Riley]

Why does Barry go. I watched the Flash. I didn't watch all. I didn't watch all of the Flash. I maybe watched like the first two.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Seasons of the Flash, the Barry grows a beard era.

[Meg Riley]

I don't think I knew that. He went to prison. What did he do? He was falsely accused for the Flash, I imagine.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Okay, so that's probably not what you were going for. And then we also got one from listener Davin, who said Chris Wataska from the Bear, which. Some of these I can see it, and some of them I can't exactly. But I can sort of see that one. He's Pete Sugar's husband.

[Meg Riley]

It's a little too angle dependent for me. I think that Ritter is. Ritter's like the cleanest comp. I don't know that. That was who I was thinking. Yeah, I do know what Jason Ritter looks like. He's married to C. Snap.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, look at.

[Meg Riley]

He's married to show off.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Snapping ostentatiously. Melanie Linsky.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, Melanie Linsky. Yeah. Anyway, I bet they're fun people.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Weighed in. That's what people thought. If that's not the perfect. If you didn't have that epiphany, that moment of. Ah, yes, the light bulb. That's exactly what I was going for. Then. I suppose people can keep nominating other Addison Barger, Local X. If. If they want to suggest one Addison.

[Meg Riley]

Barger who bats lefty.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yes, exactly. That we know. We know the pronunciation of his name. We know his handedness. We have some candidates for who he looks like at least. So that's. That's all good. All right. So I don't know if I have any Other pressing thoughts from game four since we sort of skipped over the first couple games of the series, I will just note that, you know, we. We mentioned Yamamoto and his complete game feats, but I will say it is fun to watch. And I know that we and others have harped on this and the whole starting pitcher protagonist idea, but I do really get something out of that. It. It really is a great story within the story. A subplot, pretty prominent subplot of the game. Just, is this guy gassed? Like, what's his pitch count? Let's do the math, okay? He needs to average X pitches per inning to maybe have a chance of finishing this thing off. And. And these days I don't even do that math. Mostly I don't even think of it because it's so inconceivable. It's like such a remote possibility, especially in the post season, but you still kind of do the calculation and say, how deep could he get into this game? It often ends up being about the third time through more than it ends up being about the pitch count. But when someone is in the running for a complete game, it really does add some intrigue. Because I'm sitting there thinking, you know, and I'm, like, living and dying with every pitch and every plate appearance because I'm thinking, oh, this guy's making him work. Like, the odds of complete game are decreasing rapidly because he had to throw eight pitches to get this guy. Or, ooh, swung at the first pitch, got an out. That's going to help him, right? And I'm thinking of this constantly in addition to the whole, oh, what did he show this guy last time? Not that I have like a perfect memory of. Of pitch sequences from earlier in the game, but just kind of thinking about that or breaking down, oh, is he holding something in reserve here? And is he throwing more of this pitch type this time through the order to give guys a different look. And just that cat and mouse pitcher batter battle. That's really entertaining, I think. So I really. I got something out of that. In addition to being impressed by Yamamoto's consecutive postseason complete games, it does enhance my experience as a spectator.

[Meg Riley]

I also think it is good on its own. And I think that you're right that the starting pitcher so often throughout the game's history has provided a narrative anchor to whatever game he's in. I think part of it too is that especially with this World Series, we know that if the starters come out, we gotta contend with that stupid bullpen. True of either team. And so some of it is just that the options are really not as compelling behind him. But yeah, I think that the, the possibility of a complete game being able to enjoy when a guy is cruising, getting really invested, when to your point, it's like, oh no, come on, you got to wiggle out of this. We want another inning out of you. It really does add a consistent through line to it that. But you know, like, there's a reason that those gamers are a little easier to write. You know, when the, the starter's been in and you can kind of trace a journey for that guy through the course of a game. Like, yeah, that's good.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Yeah. Not that it's not entertaining, I suppose, to think about matchups and bullpen availability and who's out there and the, the Russian roulette of will Dave Roberts bring in Blake Trinen now or not? Or will we be spared that for explicable another inning or game? So there's, there's always something to generalize and anticipate. I'm not saying there's nothing, you know, you could even, I guess, say it's boring to see the same guy the whole game. You know, maybe it's a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get when you go to a Dodgers reliever. And so variety is the spice of life and, and you know, maybe there's something to that too, but I don't know. I find that consistent through line of tracking the guy and he's up and he's down and like in that game he was throwing a lot of pitches early and then he settled down and became much more more efficient and suddenly the pace improves and you can start to imagine he might make it through. That is just more entertaining to me also because I typically have more of an attachment to that starter, especially if it's a really great pitcher like Yamamoto. You know, no offense to the members of the Dodgers bullpen who are not Blake Trine and you know, some of them are pretty good, but they're not as prominent characters in the firmament of Major League Baseball and there's just a little less backstory surrounding them and a little less star power. So just, you know, are they going to bring in Banda or Dryer or what? It's just, I don't, it doesn't evoke the same feeling in me when I see one of those guys as a non Dodgers fan, as someone like Yamamoto, who has all of these storylines surrounding him and track record and accomplishments and, and nasty stuff and all the rest. So I do get more out of that. But your mileage may vary as starting pitchers. Mileage varies in games.

[Meg Riley]

And you're right. I think that really what we want to see is guys executing well. And if it's a starter or a lever, like, if you have a lot of great pitching, the narrative through line isn't the only thing that matters. But it is really something to get to see and. And, you know, it's maybe sweetened because we see it so rarely now when you get those moments of like, wow, he's really gonna go nine. It feels like a special thing, you know, so there you go.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, yeah, the scarcity absolutely makes it more entertaining because if this were the dead ball era, or even if it were the 70s or something, and we were talking about a guy finishing what he started, someone would say, well, yes, is he not a man? Are you suggesting that he. He could not have the strength and the stamina to pitch a complete game? What else would happen? What were you expecting? So now it has a little bit of a different resonance to it than it would have in earlier eras. It's a throwback. It's a rare treat. So that's fun. I did want to say that, you know, we're talking and joshing about the must win and have to win discourse. You can kind of do that analytically. And Neil Payne at his substack has, and I will link to it, but he did break down essentially the average leverage of any game in a series, you know, given the length of that series and who's home and who's away, and is it best of seven or, you know, whatever. And you can kind of look at just the average leverage and change in win expectancy at each point, depending on what the score in the series is going into that game. And it does get higher leverage, of course, as the series goes on. Like, game five is quite important, as Magic Johnson suggested, because it's the best of seven. They're only a maximum of two more games after that. And yeah, you are one team will be one win away from a world championship after game five. And so it's not quite linear, but. But kind of roughly linear that it. It gets more important as. As it gets deeper into the series. And I guess it's sort of like win probability added where it's. It's not as if any one win or loss in a World Series matters more, really. I mean, you know, they're all. All wins and losses are created equal, whether. Whether you win them in that sequence or. Or another sequence. But in terms of just how much it swings, your chances of winning at that point in the series, there's an enormous difference. So it's sort of like with win probability where you know, if you hit a home run in the first inning, a solo shot, it's worth one run. And if you hit a walk off solo shot in the 18th inning, it's also still a solo shot, still only one run scored. But it has a much bigger impact on whether you win the game at that point, what your odds are of winning the game. Right. Or it's like over the course of a season, you know, you could look at that too, and oh, it's the stretch run, it's the pennant race. Every game counts. Well, not really. Every win that you banked in April matters just as much as the win that you get in September. It's just that we have a clear picture of how many wins you need and what's exactly at stake with each given game. But there is sort of an analytical version of this is not must win, but more important to win. So I'll link to that if anyone's interested. But I don't think that's what Magic and Stephen A. And the Globe and Mail columnist were consulting.

[Meg Riley]

Yep.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And here I suppose we should pause for a brief performance by the Jonas Brothers. We'll be right back. We're not actually going to do that, but we didn't talk about the Jonas Brothers performance, which was like one of the main storylines from early in this series. And it did strike me as just so emblematic of baseball that that did get everyone really riled up because there's no precedent for that or no really recent or common tradition of a mid game musical performance.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Live. Other than Take Me out to the Ball game or I guess depending on where you are, God bless America. You know, there's your standard patriotic stuff that happens, but a pop group performing a song that was written for this occasion from a corporate sponsor, like in the middle of a high stakes World Series game. Baseball fans had zero tolerance for that.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. Didn't. No one enjoyed it. I. Okay, so there, there were so many things that were wrong to my mind. First, there's like. And I want to be careful because I think that there are a lot of people to whom like the, the message obviously of Stand up to cancer is very resonant with people, of course. And it sits uneasily. The resonance of that message sits uneasily with the cynical mastercard of it. All. Right. Because it doesn't end up being very much Money when it's all said and done, certainly not as a percentage of what MasterCard could give away based on their profits in any given year. So those things are sort of in tension with each other. It's weird to me. And I know why they do it because they don't want someone to be put like, I stand up for captain, you know, fart butt on the cards. And I think you can go and request a blank one. But the ones that they just put at your seat in a lot of ballparks are just pre printed. So there isn't even necessarily like an authenticity to that piece of it for people which again, like, you know, despite recent policy changes at the federal level, I think most people are anti cancer. But it's, it's a, it's a weird kind of mix of things. Right. And so there's that. But when it is shown on tv, it is a moment that even people who I think can maybe fixate a little bit, and I would perhaps count myself among them on the corporate cynicism, like people don't talk through that stretch of game. Right. People are quiet in the ballpark, you know, because everybody knows someone who's had cancer or died from cancer. And so there is a, like a solemn sort of atmosphere. And then you pivot to the Jonas Brothers.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

Doing a, you know, this is my fight song. And so the tonal shift was completely bizarre. It gave me like total whiplash. The song was terrible. It was. That's a bad song. Right. I thought we were moving past framing all cancer diagnoses as like a fight, you know, and some people, that is a useful metaphor for them when they are undergoing treatment for cancer. And I don't want to take that away from anybody, to be clear. But also we can see the potential downsides of framing cancer and the experience of cancer as a fight because unfortunately a great many people still, despite advances in treatment, do not end up surviving. And so it's like, what did they lose their fight? That puts some sort of onus on the person who's been dealing with cancer. And that song was definitely, I mean, I think some of the lyrics were literally that. And it was certainly in that register.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And then.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. What the, what are we doing? What are we doing with this? Are we trying to have a halftime show at a baseball game?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, I know, it's funny just how much outrage there was about that because it was so foreign to baseball. Yeah. And they did poke fun at that a little bit in kind of a self deprecating way where I think Joe Jonas, I think, left an Instagram comment on the post from MLB saying, why these guys? Or something. You know, it's. It is a tough spot to be put in, but I guess they. They put themselves in that spot. They agreed to. They agreed to do it. They were not forced to perform here.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So, yeah. And, you know, I guess mercifully it was not the entire song, although that, in a way made it even weirder that it was.

[Meg Riley]

There's more of that song. I think that song keeps going.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. I have not sought it out, actually. I have nothing against the Jonas Brothers, to be clear. And just in general, I have nothing for them either. I have no particular feelings about the Jonas Brothers until I was forced to feel some in game two.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And because this is so common in football, of course, but for a reason. You know, why the halftime show is a tradition in football? Because. Well, for one thing, I mean, it's not always a tradition, I guess, but it's, you know, because you play one game a week each team, and so it's just a bigger deal and bigger production, and you're just. It's a lot less time. Plus, it's such a physical sport. The players actually need a break in the middle of the game more than baseball players do. And there's, you know, lots of scheming and strategy and adjustments that one makes from the first half to the second half. And that's not as necessary in baseball. Baseball either. And I don't know if there's anything to. Well, nowadays you'd be concerned about just the starting pitcher, like, cramping or getting cold or, you know, injury risk or whatever. And I mean, you know, there's the whole icing the kicker. I don't know if there's a Icing the quarterback or whatever, but in baseball, that's always a big concern. Even if there's just like a long offensive inning. Oh, like, he's been on the bench for a long time, that kind of thing. So for a multitude of reasons, it's just not really a thing in baseball, and I'm hoping that it will continue not to be a thing because of the just vehement backlash to this. I hope that this is not one of those cases where they test the waters and then it goes okay. And so they just. They make it a staple now and, you know, postseason baseball previews what regular season baseball will look like in the future. And. And there have been various bright lines where I thought, oh, surely they cannot inflict this on us. Like, you know, between pitch ads. The first time I saw that, I thought, oh, this is heresy. Surely they cannot subject us to mid pitch. Like, you know, this is not even a break. This is not even really a stoppage. This is not between innings. It's just between pitches. Which, granted, used to be longer delays than it is now, but they're still shoehorning those things in, still squeezing in the between pitch ads at times. And now I'm kind of used to it. I'm not outraged by it anymore. So you can get used to anything, potentially even the Jonas Brothers performing after the fifth inning of a World Series game. But I hope we won't have to. And I don't know whether the social media, like, loudest people upset about this is reflective of everyone watching that game, but I'd like to think that there's not a huge contingent of the audience out there that's saying, yes, absolutely, bring on the baseball halftime show.

[Meg Riley]

I just think also it's so funny that they picked the Jonas Brothers to do like the first one of these. Like, if it was a trial balloon, you don't want to, you know, like, they wouldn't. They wouldn't have been able to get him. But I'm just gonna, like, imagine if you have the stand up to cancer moment and they're like, and here's Paul McCartney. People will be like, well, this is weird. But, like, that is Paul McCartney.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I think it's option for Paul. If Paul wants to perform a halftime show, okay, fine.

[Meg Riley]

But it wasn't. It was the Jonas Brothers. And my only objection, or really thought about them at all was the horror at learning that they are all younger than I am. That was. That. That was the only. I didn't feel any. I didn't feel any which way. That's none of my business. Those boys are not my business. You know, like, yeah. And what goes on in their romantic lives, also not my business. I don't.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I don't. I can't be our business briefly. Not the romantic part, but.

[Meg Riley]

And the song was. The song was so bad. That was such a bad song. And they were like, here are the Jonas Feathers. And they're like, yeah. I'm like, okay, everyone in the. If this moment isn't cynical, right?

[Ben Lindbergh]

If.

[Meg Riley]

If we are to buy into the vision of stand up to cancer and this. This moment of recognition that. That MasterCard and the League want us to. There are going to be people in this ballpark, one who are dealing with cancer in the moment, right. Who have cancer, who have family members who are seeking treatment for cancer, you know, for whom this is like a very real non, you know, schlocky kind of a thing. There are going to be people who have recently lost loved ones to cancer. And then what the are we doing? Oh, so bad. It was so bad. So why didn't they pick anyone else? Like, why didn't. Or why didn't they say to the Jonas Brothers, what's your best song? It cannot be this. I'm sure they got paid.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, sure. I mean, this whole. This song was made for this moment. I think it was part of this.

[Meg Riley]

Campaign, so certainly written for that campaign. So made for no moment, in my opinion.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, yes, maybe no moment would have been better.

[Meg Riley]

Believe it was. Was longer.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I guess they thought, well, we're not playing the hits here. Clearly. Maybe that would be even more discordant to just have them randomly show up and play a more popular song. But I don't know.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I mean, like, this is the thing. You can't. And you know, they can't bring in the this is my fight song gal because that they. She. She did this is my fight song. At the when the LA fires were going on, there was a Rams Vikings playoff game that was relocated to Arizona because they obviously weren't going to play it in la. Like, that wouldn't make any sense. And I went and they had the this is my fight song gal.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Rachael Platten, first of all, shocked to.

[Meg Riley]

Learn that that's not Katy Perry. I thought that that was a Katy Perry song. How is that not? I. I was like, roar. Fight song. That's the same song, right? That's the same lady. It's the same lady singing this bad song. The are both bad songs. And so she sings the song and I was like, this isn't just so toxically 2016 coded that we're. We're done with it. Like that didn't. Sometimes you just assume that when everyone has a traumatic association with a given piece of. Of media or pop culture that we're going to be spared having to ever listen to it again. But no, we had to listen to it before the Rams played the Vikings. And I was like, there are people in here who have lost their homes homes, and you're making them listen to this. Bonkers.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Adding insults to injury. Yeah.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Okay. A couple other things. David Popkins has been getting a lot of press this postseason. Popkins press Popkins promo Blue Jays hitting coach David Popkins FORMER Dodgers COACH he was a Dodgers discovery and he was sort of out of the Driveline school, you know, new age coach. He's 35 years old, but he's getting a lot of shine lately because the Blue Jays bats have been justifiably. They've been raking all postseason long and you know, that's been the difference obviously in the games that they've won here when they have outscored the Dodgers. That's how games work. That's baseball. The objective, you score more runs than your opponent. But. But they have done that reliably this postseason and also half the time in this series so far because the Dodgers, I mean, that's partly a Dodgers issue because they have been kind of all Ohtani lately, at least I know Ohtani himself had a cold stretch in this postseason and he has been hot and cold. Now when he's been hot, he's been hotter than anyone else ever has been, basically. So it all evens out. The numbers are pretty impressive on the whole, but he has concentrated the vast majority of his. Yeah, his post season production has been compressed into three games essentially. And you know, he hit at least two homers in each of those games, plus more so again, it, it all, it comes out looking just fine. But they could use some help offensively and that's something that the Blue Jays did in the Mariners series. They the bottom of their lineup especially. That was a big difference getting production out of those guys. And that's been a difference here too. And not even exclusively the bottom of the lineup. You know, they could use some help from Mookie and others in that Dodgers lineup, but it's been kind of a top to bottom, strong team all around performance. And they've just been so good all month that Popkins has gotten a lot of praise and I don't doubt that he deserves it. It seems like a lot of what they did, it's like, what's the, you know, Blue Jays offensive money ball? What's their one weird trick? What's their competitive advantage is that they just, they started swinging harder, which is one of those things that sounds super obvious and you know, it's a little more complex than that, of course. And. And there have been some good articles at the Athletic. Mitch Bannon wrote one and Enoch wrote one and reported pieces. And. And it sounds like he is a good coach and players respond to him and he cares and he really puts in the work and everything. But then I guess ultimately it does kind of boil down to they swing harder now and they swing harder without compromising their contact ability, which is pretty important. Best of both worlds but they were not a bad contact team before. It's just that now they have added power without sacrificing contact. If anything, they have gotten better at both. And that's easier said than done, of course. But it also does sound super simple where it's just like, yeah, if you can keep doing all the good things, but also swing harder so that you can impart more force to the ball and hit it harder and it will go farther. And all these things are pretty elementary. I heard a lot less about David Popkins when he was the Twins hitting coach, which he was for three seasons, I believe. He was the Twins hitting coach from 2022 through 2024, I believe. And, you know, I. I guess the Blue Jays hired him a year ago and, and this has been his first season with the team. And hey, you go to the World Series and on in large part because of your bet, then of course you're going to get some credit for that and probably deserve some. The Twins during his tenure, they did get a little better in 2022 than they had been prior to his arrival in 2021. And then they maintained that performance more or less in 2023 and 2024, and then 2025, they got worse without him. And also having, you know, traded a bunch of guys and granted they were mostly not hitters, but not saying it was solely because he departed, but. But the Twins were better during his tenure than they had been the year before he arrived and the year after he departed. But he wasn't getting as much national attention, at least because they were still the Twins and they were not winning penance. And I enjoy it. I enjoy this sort of deep dive. I'm always here for advanced scouting insights in the post season when we get those tidbits, as we did back in the Royals winning the World Series or at least being in the World Series days. And, and we got all of these little details about the edges that they had supposedly and probably actually picked up. One thing that Popkins said in Enoch's piece, which was interesting, is that, you know, he's talking about, like, hitting with intent. Everyone loves to talk about intent in baseball. And being selectively aggressive. Everyone loves to talk about that, too. But he also acknowledged, which I respect, that this message wouldn't work as well for anyone. And he thinks that these players have the right kind of swings to implement these changes successfully. So his quote was, there's a type of hitter who actually does better, like swing decision wise and accuracy wise, when they're actually looking to do Intent. This is talking about the relationship between contact and trying to do damage. You know, swing with a purpose and put some muscle behind it. There's another type of hitter that when they're doing that, their swing gets long and their decisions get worse. George Springer is the opposite. He actually does better in more of an aggressive mindset because he's so good at making swing decisions that you can err on the side of swing as hard as you can. So I, I like what he's saying there, that maybe this advice sounds sort of simplistic. I'm sure it's. It's less simplistic than it sounds, but that maybe this message just happened to resonate with this group of guys. And it's not like, you know, he recruited these guys. He just was recruited himself. But a lot of the Blue Jays improvement has come from internal development and guys at the big league level getting better, more so than signings and new players arriving, and that maybe it was just kind of a happy, fortunate, serendipitous confluence of hitters and coach with a message that they were receptive to and also able to implement with their skill set. So it suggests that maybe he's a good coach, but also it. It does take having the right kind of hitters to not only listen to that, but then have the skill set to actually apply those lessons. Which is, you know, something you heard during the whole flyball revolution narrative era, where, yeah, it's good to maybe lift the ball and everything, but it's even better if you're someone like Justin Turner who had great bat control, or J.D. martinez, who had some, some raw skill and they could get the bat to the ball. And then it became about, well, how do we get the bat to the ball at a more optimized trajectory? But if you can't get the bat to the ball at all, then you can't even really make use of that insight.

[Meg Riley]

Yes. I think that you have to combine players who have the skills to actualize what they're hearing. They have to be communicated to in a way that is going to make sense for them. And that actually conveys the sort of approach that you want them to take. Their skills and physical abilities aren't static. So there is a little bit of perfect storm to it. It's not surprising to me, given some of the guys they have on that team, that they'd be able to do that. And they've also taken an approach of like, you know, they'll let some of these guys just like cook and barbecue on their 40, man, for a while. And then you have Addison Barger famously bats left up. Right. Like you have, you know, you have these guys who it. You have Ernie Clement. It takes a while for it to all kind of come together. And, you know, that doesn't mean that it'll come stay forever either. Right. Like, the. The ability to actualize it for one season, I think is different than it being like a sticky kind of change potentially. But, you know.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, someone with the. The skill set that Vlad has at the place, he's. He's able to apply that. Not everyone can do what Vlad does. Very few can. And I'm glad that he's continuing his reign of terror as a hitter in this postseason. Ohtani threw him a. A fat pitch. A cookie. But he took advantage of it.

[Meg Riley]

A cookie.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And he crushed it.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, a cookie.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Okay. Also wanted to note, I've been tracking the. The Cal Rally Award wins. It's kind of like when people try to forecast the Oscars by looking at, you know, did you. Did you win this award or that award? You know, and some of them are kind of predictive, and some of them are. Are not. And I don't even particularly care whether rally or judge wins mvp. But my take, if you can call it a take, was that he was just the player of the year. He was the most outstanding player. Yeah, maybe he wasn't the most valuable player. I might even lean Judge for most valuable. And so I don't think this should necessarily determine whether he wins mvp. But I didn't have an MVP vote. I didn't have to decide. But for me, he was the player of the year. He was just a little more noteworthy because what he did was new and different and unique. And Judge was kind of a victim of his own success. And that he has been so good that he has even had better seasons, as great as his season was, doesn't mean he's less valuable than Cal. Just means that Cal season stood out more. That's all. That's all I'm saying. Doesn't have to mean more than that, but he has been winning some awards in that vein. He did win the Sporting News Player of the Year award. Think there was one other, and I got a press release today that he won the. The Players Choice Award. Some of these. Every award season, I'm reminded of the existence of awards that I had either forgotten about or just never knew about. But since 1992, the press release informs me. This is a press Release from the MLB Players Association. Since 1992, the Players Choice Awards, which is what it sounds like, Players Choice have honored outstanding on and off field performances with winners chosen by their peers. Voting took place in September. They got KPMG involved, you know, just to ensure the, the integrity of the MLBPA Players Choice Award. And Cal Rally was named overall player of the year and AL Outstanding Player. And I'm okay with that. And you know, hard luck for, for judge because he was quite a player of the year as well and also pretty outstanding. But this is not valuable. We're. We're parsing words and adjectives here, but that's what we do at this time of year. And yeah, for me, he was the player of the year and also the most outstanding player in the league. And that does not have to have any bearing on my personal choice of who would win mvp. But I, I think he should sweep this sort of award regardless of whether he wins MVP or not. Anything that's just like Player of the Year, outstanding player, you know, Cal should win those. And so far he has been best.

[Meg Riley]

Guy around judges and biggest dumper. I don't even know if he is the biggest dumper.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, he's the most notable dumper, certainly.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah. The dumper of the year.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Oh, definitely. Definitely the dumper of the year. Most outstanding dumper.

[Meg Riley]

Most outstanding dumper. Whereas you can't use it as the. You're in a real fixed Ben, because that seems like an obvious episode title. But then what if he does win the mvp? Then you'll have used it already. You're in a real Blake snail bullpen day kind of situation.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, I don't want to burn that. That headline now. Gotta save it. Sometimes it's tough to, to sit on something like that. Probably not tough to sit on a big dumper. Probably pillowy. And cushion. Plenty of buffer and cushion. Yes. Okay. And lastly, have you been following the Bryce Harper has hurt feelings saga?

[Meg Riley]

No.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Okay, well, a brief non World Series related interlude here. This has become a topic of conversation in Philly at least. So Dave Dombrowski held an end of season press conference and he made some comments about Bryce Harper which were accurate and not malicious. Not intended to put down Harper, but a little more plain spoken than your typical top baseball ops exec is these days. You know, Dave Debraski, he's. He's from an earlier generation perhaps. You know, he's couching his comments in GM speak or, or pobo speak. A little less than the typical exec. I saw, by the way, that Matt Arnold of the brewers, whom we answered in email about how he's underrated. He was promoted to pobo, so at least he was. Now he's not underrated in the Brewer's front office. He got his title inflation anyway.

[Meg Riley]

I have a feeling that he got title influence inflation so that he wouldn't go elsewhere.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Maybe that was motivated by something other than just recognizing his excellent work. But here's what Dombrowski said about Bryce Harper at the end of the season. Of course, he's still a quality player. He's still an all star caliber player. He didn't have an elite season like he has had in the past. And I guess we only find out if he becomes elite or if he continues to be good. I look around the league, Freddy Freeman, he's a really good player, right? He still is a good player. Is he elite like he was before? Probably not to the same extent. Freddy's a tremendous player. And that to me is Bryce. Can he rise to the next level again? I don't really know that answer. Again, it wasn't a bad year. But when I think of Bryce Harper, you're thinking elite, right? You're thinking of one of the top 10 players in baseball. And I don't think it fit into that category. But again, a very good player. I have no idea. I've seen guys at his age again, he's not old, that level off or I've seen guys rise again. We'll see what happens. So, you know, it's, it's all, I think, pretty true about Bryce Harper, I guess. What is to be gained by speaking publicly? And you know, again, it's, he's not putting him down, he's not casting aspersions on Bryce Harper, but he's basically saying that he's had better days, he's had better seasons, perhaps he will have better days again. But he's at an age where you can't take that for granted. He's still calling him quality, all star caliber, tremendous. These are all words that he used to describe Bryce Harper season. And again, it's true. Bryce Harper, he's had MVP campaigns, MVP caliber campaigns. And this year he had a 131 WRC plus and, and amassed three and a half fan graphs. War. So, yeah, he's had better seasons, you know, and, and maybe it's age and it's partly that he's playing first base now. And you know, he's been a bit up and down at, at points in his career. But yeah, it's, it's been a few years since he had like one of his, his peak seasons. And perhaps that's because it's been a few years since his peak. But. But, you know, maybe Dabrowski shouldn't have said it just because it did sort of start a news cycle. And unless his goal here was to motivate Bryce Harper by kind of calling into question whether he's still a top 10 elite player, which maybe Bryce Harper still thinks of himself as. Maybe you have to know your guy and how that will be received. But there are times where sending that message again, like should you do it publicly through the press or should you convey that in a private meeting behind closed doors? I don't know. I don't know their relationship. Anyway, that did spawn a cycle of trade speculation about Harper. Yeah. Which is silly because to go outside. Yeah, I mean, that's Phillies eliminated and sports radio yakkers need to say something. So that was not something that Dave Dombrowski started. I wouldn't blame him for that. I guess his comments precipitated it. But I don't think there was anything in the content of what he said that suggested that he'd be on the block or anything. And so Domi denied that and said couldn't be further from the truth, the idea that they were considering trading Harper. We love him, we think he's a great player. He's a very important part of our team. I've seen him have better years. I look for him to have better years. So he did reiterate that, but maybe ill advisedly, but he denied that Harper was, you know, a trade chipper or anything, or that they're open for business on Bryce Harper, but the damage was done anyway. Bryce Harper heard the trade talk. He talked to Matt Gelb of the Athletic and Harper said, I have given my all to Philly from the start. Now there is trade talk. I made every effort to avoid this. It's all I heard in D.C. i hated it. It makes me feel uncomfortable. It's disappointing to hear me being questioned about my contribution to the team. Just really hurt by that notion because I love Philly so much. From changing positions to coming back early, from injury to wearing a jersey, pandering to every possible Philadelphia resident. He didn't say that part. I added that I show total commitment for my team. And yet there is still trade talk. So he wasn't necessarily saying that Dombrowski's comments were hurtful, more just secondary news cycle that was somehow spawned by Dombrowski's comments. So, so what do you, what do you make of. Of that? His Hurt feelings and the fact that this discussion even arose from what Dombrowski said.

[Meg Riley]

Okay, I will admit that for the first like minute and a half of what you were saying, I thought you were, you were purposefully avoiding a it's been a while joke. I keep waiting like for the beat to drop and it didn't. It never came. So then I had to lock back in on what you were saying because I was like, I was primed, you know, I missed it's been a while opportunity a couple of weeks ago. And I was like, well, I can't do that again. I'll never, I'll never live it down. Everyone loves that joke so much. But then to focus back up. So I have a couple of thoughts on this and they're going to be a little disjointed, but they are interrelated. The first is that like, like if you're Dombrowski, you're in a weird spot because like, we do have an expectation that GMs will speak with some amount of honesty about the state of their team when you get to the end of the year. And it was a disappointing conclusion for Philly. I don't think that the disappointing parts of their season were like exclusively or primarily or even really a little bit Bryce Harper's fault. But he didn't have like one of his transcendent Harper seasons. Right. This was not an MVP caliber campaign for him. So on the one hand you want to have some honesty about that because you want to reassure your fans that you've got like your finger on the pulse. They know what's going on. But you do have to manage the personality too. And, you know, whatever nonsense this inspired. The thing about it is like, they're not going to trade Bryce Harper. Doesn't Bryce Harper have a full no trade clause anyway?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, yeah, I guess he must. Right? I forget whether he did in his deal, but he's, he's got to be a 10 and 5 guy at this season.

[Meg Riley]

Yeah, I was going to say he has, he has rights at this point. So, so, and even if he didn't, like, they're not going to trade Bryce Harper. This team is not like in tear down mode. And that's, that's a tear down kind of move. Right. I get if you are giving some feedback to Dombrowski, you might say so. Hey, Dave, there's sensitivity here because. Because I think that the trade stuff did make Harper really uncomfortable when he was in D.C. right. And he got asked about it a lot. And I can imagine that sucking Especially before you hit free agencies. You're like, I don't know. They'll trade me or they won't. I don't have any say in the matter, so stop bothering me. If I were him, I would err on the side of not disrupting that relationship because he's going to be around. But also, I think that this is mostly the fault of, like, sports talk radio in Philly, because what he's saying seems perfectly reasonable. And based on the quotes that you've read from Harper, the whole thing probably wouldn't have even come up if it hadn't inspired some goofus doing Philly sports talk radio to, like, turn it into trade speculation. Yeah, I understand Harper being frustrated because he's sort of been down this road before and he's, you know, he's spent money on getting the inside of all those jackets lined with the fanatic's face. You know, like, those are. That's a custom job, Ben. You're not getting that off the rack. And so it's like, surely I can be free of this now. Right. But mostly I think it's a lot of kind of much ado about nothing and it not going to end up mattering really, at all.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Probably not. No. It'll die down and. And the Phillies will make other moves and improvements, and people will drop this if they haven't already. It is sort of a shame because I. I would like to live in a world where a baseball executive or sports executive or leader in any field for that matter, could just speak plainly and not kind of have their words twisted and. And start something to the point that they're just hesitant to say anything that is not couched in all kinds of caveats. It's just GM speak. You hardly ever hear them say anything very revealing because they don't want to give away any competitive advantage, and they don't want to give anyone any ammunition, and they don't want to start something like this. But I like that Dave Dabrowski said that. I like that he just kind of told the truth when asked about Bryce Harper and didn't try to gas up the guy or, like, you know, pretend that this was his best season or something and he wasn't dumping on him. Not a big dumper on Bryce Harper, but, you know, this was fairly innocuous. And I think there's a happy medium between, like, back in the day where managers would just routinely throw their players under the bus, and now only really, Ron Washington does that. And he might not be a manager anymore anymore, and Maybe that could be motivating. But also, I think a lot of that stuff is typically handled better, just more diplomatically and less traumatically, less anxiety inducing, to just have a conversation instead of putting that out in the press. But I, I would also like a baseball executive asked about the performance of a player to answer honestly about that.

[Meg Riley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Not that we need to get our information about how Bryce Harper did this year from Dave Dabrowski. We could also just look at his stats and see the same thing, essentially. But, you know, obviously Dabrowski is going to be somewhat biased and motivated to portray his players in a positive light most of the time. And you're, you have to know you're not going to be getting the straight dope from an employee of the team, someone who's the boss of all these guys. But, but I would like a world where you could just say something that was not overly critical, but just fair and accurate and not have to speak in platitudes and cliches and exaggerate, accentuate the positive because you're so afraid that anything that is just reality based will be twisted into a negative news cycle. So that sort of stinks, I think, because it contributes to how boring many of the executives are to listen to, maybe more so than ever when they were kind of just shooting from the hip and you never knew what they were going to say, which probably wasn't good either. But again, maybe there's a middle ground. And also I, I do feel some sympathy for Harper here. Yeah, not an enormous amount. He has it pretty good. But I, I understand why that could be sort of destabilizing to not sure you're gonna play. Maybe not as much as it would for most people in their jobs, which would be more disruptive, perhaps, than when you're mega rich and have a long term guaranteed deal and everything. But still, it depends. It affects where you live.

[Meg Riley]

And you might have to sleep on someone's pullout couch.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I'd have to sleep on someone's squeaky pullout couch. And, and yeah, you know, you've got kids, which we know. Bryce Harper.

[Meg Riley]

What did his girlfriend think of that?

[Ben Lindbergh]

His girlfriend was fine with it. And, and we know all about Bryce Harper's wife and, and what a wonderful deliverer of children she is. And so we know that they have. I prefer to forget that we know that they have.

[Meg Riley]

It also doesn't feel like my business.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Children and, you know, you don't want to uproot them if you don't have to make a home for yourself and you understand that as a, a professional baseball player that's subject to change. But if you're happy where you are, then you hope it won't change. And it also, I think paints in a slightly different light when he wanted an extension on top of the long extension that he had whenever that was a year or two ago and he was talking about wanting something tacked onto his deal and wanting to be a Philly for life and we were like, aren't you kind of already like you're ready your age 38 season? And, and as I recall, I think Dombrowski didn't pursue that, kind of shut that down. Yeah, I don't know that they have conducted any talks there, but, but maybe that was not what I was sort of assuming at the time, which was kind of, you know, other guys have signed bigger deals and so maybe this is an attempt to renegotiate. Maybe it was actually a little bit about just like actually being so scarred from the trade speculation that he really wanted to be absolutely sure, as sure as you can be that you are going to finish your career in the place that you signed. So that, that seems to weigh on him. And I feel bad that he was forced to contemplate that again for no particular reason because I, I don't think it's a very realistic possibility in the short term.

[Meg Riley]

I think that once again, kerfuffle result of sports talk radio nonsense. And I, I bet Bryce wouldn't have even heard about it if it hadn't been for that. You know, I bet he wouldn't have even heard about it. And to your point, I think that the frustration is more with the trade speculation than it really is with anything that Dombrowski said.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So yeah, okay, so swear off sports talk radio. Listen only to sports podcasts because there's no nonsense on those. Never.

[Meg Riley]

Never.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, a few late breaking Barger doppelganger suggestions, Listener Tim says. I see Roy from David Denman as well as Dave Franco and listeners Robert and Cody independently suggest Dylan Sprouse of former Disney Channel fame. So many suggestions. There wasn't just one. I guess Barger must just have one of those faces as they say, he looks like a lot of people or a lot of people look like him. We also got some Blue Jays fans writing in to talk about how good Vlad has looked all year. Listener John he stepped his game up in the postseason, but his hustle, his defense and his compete level have been like this all year. His defensive metrics don't capture a lot of the things he does does incredibly well. Of course one of the things he does incredibly well is hit homers and he did that yet again on Wednesday after Game five. Magic Johnson tweeted Austin Reeves was the Lakers hero tonight, hitting the game winning shot and ending with 28 points and 16 assists. Again, yes, factual statement. He then tweeted Austin, thank you for making me feel a little better after my Dodgers lost. And indeed that is what happened. Game 5 wasn't that different from Game 4, except that Game 5 went even better for the Blue Jays. Instead of 6 to 2 2, it was 6 to 1. Instead of Shane Bieber pitching pretty well, it was Trey Savage pitching extremely well at the splitter and the slider working 12 strikeouts, a World Series rookie record over seven innings. Instead of going 0 for 3, Ohtani went 0 for 4. And if Ohtani goes over four, the Dodgers don't score. That is more or less the rule lately. On the bright side, Blake Trinen pitched a scoreless inning this time. Evidently he does have that in him. Unfortunately for la, by that point the Dodgers were already downfall five and now they're down one in the series, heading back to Toronto for what will be A must win Game 6 for them and the Blue Jays will have two shots at a title beginning on Halloween. Of course you always have a shot. A good shot at supporting the podcast on Patreon. You can do it if you set your mind to it. Just go to patreon.com effectivelywild and sign up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to and perks as have the following five listeners Josh, Hopped Body, Isablade, Victoria, Chris Gale and Rebecca Lloyd. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, personalized messages, potential podcast appearances, discounts on merch and ad free Fangrass memberships and so much more. Check out all the [e-mail] effectively wild 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, your comments, your intro and outro themes to podcastangraphs.com youm can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Music and other podcast platforms. You can join our facebook [e-mail] group effectively wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at R Effectively Wild and you can check the show notes at. Fan graphs are the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKean for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Quite soon in fact. We will talk to you then. Number one Fangrass Baseball Podcast this stack cast is stat blast tops plus when the stats need contrast zips and steamer for the four forecast coming in high big boss on a hovercraft no notes minor league free agent draft burn the ships flames jumping forward N Cal FEMA boning on the bat shaft makers on the buck beat Never say your hot seat games are always better with the pivot table spreadsheet. No ads subscribers will support us. Vroom vroom. Fast on your slog the rig of mortis. Rest in peace Sam Rest in peace. Jeff.