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Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild Episode 2401: Just Awards
01:49:20
Ben and Meg banter about Based Boras vs. Borscht Belt Boras and a few corny quips they overlooked, then discuss end-of-season awards (Aaron Judge vs. Cal Raleigh, Paul Skenes vs. Cristopher Sánchez, Skenes as a paid pitchman, José Ramírez MVP shares,
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- [00:00]
Meg Rowley
More than 2,000 episodes retrospectively filed. And at each new one, we still collectively smile.
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Michael Mountain
That's effectively wild.
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Meg Rowley
That's effectively wild.
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Ben Lindbergh
Hello and welcome to episode 2401 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of fangraphs. Hello, Meg.
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Meg Rowley
Oh, hello.
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Ben Lindbergh
We talk a lot about Corny Scott Boris, or as Baseball Prospectus dubbed him on Friday, borsch Belt Boris. But we don't talk enough about based Boris because often I think I agree with him when it comes to his actual substantive thoughts on the game, as opposed to his quippy, punny wordplay about his clients. So you, you get the Borscht Belt Boris? That's hard to say and that's always entertaining. But you could say that maybe he's just trying to attract our attention to his actual substantial thoughts about the game, about which I usually agree with him. Not in all cases. Every now and then he'll come out and say there should be a neutral site, World Series or something. And I say, scott, what are you talking about? But I'm with him on this one. He, I think compared to pretty much everyone else in baseball, has come out and been pretty clear and firm about the prop betting. And he talked about this this week, too. He said that prop bets should be entirely banned. He said if a guy throws a damn pitch in the dirt, there's going to be an integrity question about that. You can't have that. And he said that MLB's step to limit the amount that one can wager on these per pitch prop bets and, and to prevent them from being part of parlays did not go far enough. Yeah, and I'm with him on that. He said it doesn't matter the amount. You have to elim all of that. So guess it makes sense because often our sympathies and sentiments align with the player side of things. Not always, but his do as well because he, he tends to represent them and was one himself. So it tracks. But you know, we had the commissioner and the sportsbooks doing partial measures, which is better than no measures, but not going all the way. And then mostly team executives have kind of no commented or deflected, which is it's not really their job to police this. But you know, they don't want to get in hot water, I guess. And they're not directly the ones who are kind of with their hands on the levers of power here probably. But you know, it is nice to see someone who is a powerful figure in the sport come out and state that plainly.
- [02:57]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, I think, you know, when we talked about it last, we applauded the move that they made, but acknowledged that, you know, it's a half measure. I do think that it meaningfully reduces some of the incentives, but I think that there's a really great way to eliminate the incentive entirely. You know, it's just to get rid of those bets and there's not going to be a shortage of other means of gambling derangement to satisfy the non criminal element. But I, I'm not at all surprised that he would be in favor of getting rid of these because the, the threats that players face from them that their families receive are. Yeah, real and escalating and increasingly n. And why not get ahead of it such that you not only protect the competitive integrity of the game, but prevent the worst possible version of those threats.
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Michael Mountain
Right.
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Meg Rowley
Like these have not, to our knowledge, come to any violence yet. And that's good. And it only takes one like real sicko or very desperate person or what have you for these to go very fast in a more dangerous and scary direction. So get rid of them. You know, it's so easy for me to just say ban the thing I don't like at all. But I think that there's, there's real even for those who enjoy sports betting and think that they can do so in a responsible fashion and just have it as like the dumb little thing that they waste a little bit of their disposable income on. I think even those folks, and maybe especially those folks can acknowledge the value of getting rid of these because if you're better, you don't want there to be points of potential manipulation within the system. Right. So if you can eliminate those, why not do it?
- [04:52]
Ben Lindbergh
There were some team execs who spoke up primarily about the player protection aspect of it. Chris Young, for instance, Rangers Popo said, I just want rules and regulations that protect our players, our umpires, our coaches and front office. We've got such a great game and you'd hate to have anything that can come in and soil it the way sort of this gambling thing has. Craig Breslow of the Red Sox. The threat that players are facing and clearly of the inducements that players are facing are real and need to be dealt with. Perhaps not coincidentally, those are two former and fairly recent former players themselves, so perhaps they can identify with that. But yeah, on the one hand it is more complicated than just snap your fingers and ban all of this stuff. Multiple parties involved, there's a lot of money at stake. And then, you know, there's just. Where do you draw the line on legality? And then from their perspective, maybe they're thinking, is this a slippery slope and we ban this and then people will call for us to ban other things. A shame that would be. But it does show that if they decide to do something, they can just do it. Because that's what happened this week when they drastically limited those bets. At least that was just purely. Boy, we're taking some heat for this. And, you know, they called it proactive. It clearly wasn't proactive. It was very like the definition of reactive.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah, I was going to say definitionally reactive.
- [06:13]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, I mean, I guess it can be both in that they're taking proactive steps to prevent a recurrence of this from happening, but I don't know if that's the word I would have used there, but.
- [06:22]
Michael Mountain
Right.
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Ben Lindbergh
They did just do it because they knew that this would be bad for pr, but also just bad for the sport. And so they wanted to not get ahead of it, but not get too far behind it and at least give a little damage control and, and a little filigree to it. Oh, we did something, you know.
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Meg Rowley
Right.
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Ben Lindbergh
And so they could just voluntarily do that if they wanted to. So they could go farther if they wanted to. But based Boris leading the way and Borscht Belt Boris, we. We actually neglected a couple of quips because he flooded the zone with so many quips that we actually didn't see them all. And they were collected in a BP piece helpfully. And there were a couple, I think, that are maybe worth noting here. There's one that I don't understand, and I'm not sure, I'm not sure if there's more to it, but it was about Nick Martinez. Nick Martinez can close, he can relieve, and obviously he's a starting pitcher, so, you know, he's got more gears than an astronomical watch, which I. I wasn't sure if there was like a. I don't think it's a play on anything as far as I can tell.
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Meg Rowley
No, it's just like a weird ass comparison.
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Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. Because it's Boris, so I assumed that. Oh, okay. Nick Martinez, astronomical watch, phases of the moon. Like, what are we going for here? And I can't come up with anything. So it's just. I guess that was the comparison that made sense to him. I don't know. He's got a lot of gears, I guess. Sure. And then Ranger Suarez here's one Suarez. Suarez has got true four pitch command. He's really what you'd call the Zone Ranger. And there's no doubt that anyone who looks at the playoffs and you look at the last three or four years that Suarez's playoff quality is frankly, he's the Lone Ranger in that category. So if you're interested in acquiring a postseason pitcher that has proven himself, I would suggest you wouldn't want to miss the Suarez soiree.
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Meg Rowley
Ben, I'm so angry. You know, I'm just like really angry. What?
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Ben Lindbergh
He shows his age sometimes with his.
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Meg Rowley
I was gonna say the Lone Ranger is what he's going with here.
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Ben Lindbergh
He is a 73 year old man and I guess sometimes that shows. I mean, 73, he wasn't even born when the Roland Ranger was at least beginning on the radio. I guess he was, he was alive when it was for the show.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure the show is the reference. Well. And who can Forget the.
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Michael Mountain
The.
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Ben Lindbergh
2013. Yeah.
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Meg Rowley
Lost to the Disney Volt.
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Ben Lindbergh
Yes. What an incredible cast. Army Hammer, Johnny Depp. And Johnny Depp unproblematic leads. Yeah. Winners.
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Meg Rowley
Winners across the board.
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Ben Lindbergh
That injected a little life into the franchise. But yeah, I, I appreciate that he just went for it with the Zone Ranger, but then he used Lone Ranger later in.
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Meg Rowley
Right? You can't. Right. If you're gonna do the wordplay, you gotta do the wordplay. If you're gonna just make the reference, just make the reference. I guess he can't call him a Power Ranger because Suarez throws like 92. But I don't know, I, I think that I'm just, I worry that I'm not able to judge these on their individual merits because I have just soured on the entire exercise, you know, Like I, again, I think he would benefit from taking a year or two off and then allow himself and us the joy of rediscovering, discovering the pun. Let them percolate, you know. And part of, part of the problem here, although the strongest one he had was the Brexit one, is that he has some repeats.
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Ben Lindbergh
Right?
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Meg Rowley
Like this is, this is the issue with guys having to take deals that are shorter term than they were expecting. And then opting out is like he's not able to just get a fresh batch. You know, he's got Bregman again, he's got Alonzo again. But then, you know, put your efforts into your new dudes, you know, into your new dudes. New dudes. Sounds like nudes, like too close together. And I have regret about that. But not as much regret as Scott Bore should have about some of these little jokes. Some of these little jokey jokes are not good, Ben. They are.
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Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, you're right. He probably should. Yeah, he should. Instead of trying to run it back a year after if someone opts out or something. Right.
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Meg Rowley
Just play those ones straight and then. And then the potential comedy of the ones that you actually do can, can, can sing. Right. It. You know, then you have Alonzo as like a straight man to Ranger Suarez basically and Zone Ranger. That's fine.
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Ben Lindbergh
Right?
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Meg Rowley
He. He resisted Power Ranger. Which is good. Which is good. Or did he. Maybe he used Power Ranger somewhere else too.
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Ben Lindbergh
Don't even know Power Rangers. That's. That's a millennial reference. I'm not sure that. That Scott would be on top of that one.
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Meg Rowley
Not something that you can apply to a guy who averaged like 92 on his fastball slasher. So I just not sure that he's.
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Ben Lindbergh
Horse is always bound by accuracy when it comes to these things. Like oh, that doesn't quite fit the profile of the player. But if the wordplay is there, I think he's gonna go for it.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah. I don't mean to suggest an integrity where none exists, but I am confounded by some of these. But I am.
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Ben Lindbergh
There was just one more that we neglected on the last episode and actually we gave him too much credit I think because you know how I said that he didn't have one for Tatsuya Imai and we were thinking, oh maybe, maybe he steered clear of that out of cultural sensitivity and not wanting to turn an Asian name into a joke. He didn't. He didn't do that. I mean Imai is going to post on the 19th of November and certainly has done everything Yamamoto has done in NPB and he does it more actually. He said the NPB. I believe it. It's the same as MLB, just should just be.
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Meg Rowley
It is MLB. You would say KBO, but. Right, yes, NPB.
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Ben Lindbergh
Yes. And he does it more with a change up than a splitter. So his durability is really of notice. And he's 27 years old. So when most teams talk to me about imai, they say, oh my, he's that kind of guy. I think when you watch him pitch, he leaves an indelible mark on you. Kind of a Tatsuya. So you kind of always remember what you saw and how that type of talent has converted over here and done so well as in a tattoo. I think is what he was reaching for, which is sort Of a slant rhyme of a pun.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah, the, the rhyming one with a. My. That one. That was okay. I feel like that was okay.
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Ben Lindbergh
You know, it's low hanging fruit.
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Meg Rowley
It's basically right. I'm not saying it's a good joke, but I'm saying it's not like. Yeah, right. It's not like a joke where you're like oh Scott, like on buddy. But the, the tattoo one, I don't think I care for that.
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Ben Lindbergh
Stretching it. Yeah, it's. Anyway, real comedians do trot out old bits from time to time. You know, they have their new material, they've got their new tit 10 or whatever but then they, they have their, their old classics. You know, if you went to see Carlin or something, he was going to do the, the thing about the words and you can't say in football versus baseball and, and you know, if you obviously a musical performance, you're expecting someone to play the hit. So if Scott comes up with something good for Alex Bregman and then he has back to back years in which he can use it, should he really be expected to refrain? Yes, probably, but. But he won't. Anyway, just closing the loop on Scott. The based Boris and the borscht belt Boris. So we had some awards votes, results this week and mostly they weren't all that interesting, I guess or, or unpredictable or surprising. There wasn't a ton of suspense about most of them really. Any of them except one, I guess. So the theme of this year's awards was really repeat winners.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah.
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Ben Lindbergh
Because we had, well, judge and, and Cal was the one that people weren't entirely sure about that ended up actually being kind of close, which we can talk about. But judge repeats, Ohtani repeats and then Skubal repeats as al Cy Young award winner. Skeens was not a repeat with that award but he did win the rookie of the year awards last year and then now he upgraded to sai and then even the managers of the year were repeats which is fairly rare. So Pat Murphy and Stephen Vogt won again. They are the first two managers to win in each of their first two seasons as manager. And it's unusual. I, I think there hasn't been a year maybe where both manager of the year winners were reigning managers of the year.
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Meg Rowley
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Ben Lindbergh
There have been back to back cases before like Kevin Cash several years ago. Yeah. Bobby Cox 20 years ago. But it's, it's rare and I guess it tells you something about that award that it is as rare as it is to have a Repeat, because you really can only win that award by surpassing expectations. That's the whole. That's what you know, there should be plenty of repeats in theory. Like, you know, it doesn't make sense that there's as much turnover in that category as, as there is, because you'd think that the manager of one year has a pretty good shot at still being the best manager the next year. But there's just so much we don't see about what goes into that award. And that's probably increasingly true. And so it ends up being who surpassed preseason expectations by the most, and not even the manager specifically, but the manager's team. And so it is rare to surpass expectations by enough in back to back years to win that award in consecutive seasons, because usually you win one year, you raise expectations for the second year. And I know that there are people who think, oh, Tito should have won for taking the Reds back to the wild card round, or Schneider should have won for the excellent season that the Blue Jays had. And I wouldn't argue with you. I rarely have an actual opinion about who should win, but it is, it is telling, I think that it is as rare as it is for a repeat. And I guess it tells you something about the fact that the Guardians and the brewers could both be so surprising, even though they were good enough to get these guys the hardware in 2024. Like, I, I assume a lot of that has to do with the fact that these votes came in the day of or the day after the Guardians completed their historic comeback in the AL Central. So that's gotta help, I'd imagine. And then the brewers had the best record in baseball. So, I mean, those were both legitimate surprises. Whether they were the biggest surprises or not, I don't know. But maybe that speaks to the fact that like, the good, successful teams this year mostly weren't that great. Because it's, you know, it's sort of silly that like Dave Roberts has managed a back to back World Series winner and didn't win Manager of the Year in either of those years. But it, it makes sense also because this isn't a postseason award, it's a regular season award and the Dodgers didn't have a great regular season. So, you know, it's just the whole exercise is sort of silly, which I think most people probably acknowledge.
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Meg Rowley
I was fine with pretty much everything. I was relieved that Dan Wilson didn't win because I just didn't want to do another day of that discourse or have my head explode and then I actually have a take that might surprise you, which is the biggest shock to me in this whole thing. And I don't know if this is a take or not, actually. I've not monitored the discourse on this question isn't about Cal and Aaron Judge. I think that result was fine. I'm glad that it wasn't unanimous because I think that like the, the argument about Cal being a catcher doing what he did, playing as often as he did at that position, you know, like that merited consideration such that he should have gotten first place votes. I think if I had had an MVP vote at the end of the year, I probably would have come down on Judge's side. Even though, you know, it's not a bad ass, but it's just not as impressive of one. And so I thought that that shook out the right way. You know, I thought that it, it gave appropriate consideration to Cal and the season he had. I saw a lot of people say, and I, I think this part is true. Like, like I am going to remember Cal's 2025 season for a very long time and I don't think that that's just the Mariners fan in me talking. I will not remember this Judge season distinctly, which isn't a knock on Judge. It's just an acknowledgment of like how consistently he is doing this incredible thing. And so I think when you think about Judge's prime, it's going to be taken as like a chunk of years rather than this one season standing out individually. If there's one of his that is going to sort of elevate above the rest, it's probably going to be the year that he broke the AL home run record, which was impressive not just for that, but because of his overall offensive performance. Cal's season I think was just very memorable in and of itself. Great. What a joy to me as a Mariners fan. What a great thing for baseball generally. We've talked before about how many individual performances elevated a year that was largely marked by mid teams, but I think gave us so many standouts that it was like a really fun and engaging season. It had this great postseason ending. So I think that when we look back on this year, if we're trying to judge how it washed over us, the end of year standings are likely to be underwhelming relative to some of the other seasons we've had recently. But really a great season. Here's my take. Here's my potentially hot take. Or maybe it is incredibly tepid. I think it's weird that Skeens won Unanimously. I think it's sort of insulting to Christopher Sanchez. I think Christopher Sanchez had a hell of a. Hell of a season. A hell of a season. And I am fine with Skeens winning. I don't have like a hot take there. I think what he did was tremendous and he is obviously going to be an important player, a really important player in the game for a long time to have the momentum build of like rookie of the year to Cy Young. Like, what a special career. He looks like he's on his way to. It's special already. But like, I think that this guy is going to be like a really important dude for the game for a long time, provided he stays healthy, which like pitcher. But he's. This is. I. I so rarely get to neg men, but I'm going to neg men a little bit here. A testament to how incredible a player he is to watch and how good an interview he is when you get a chance to talk to him, that the fact that he has a negative charisma in the advertising space isn't going to matter. But, boy, I'm sorry, Paul. Those raising Cane's ads, they're not doing you any favors, friends. Like, what's going on, Buddy?
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Ben Lindbergh
I find it very. Yeah.
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Meg Rowley
Best take they had. Ben, you know how we know that's the one that made it?
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Ben Lindbergh
Ask him to redo that. I wonder. Or maybe they're just like, well, that's the best we're going to get. Because what do you expect at this point if you're asking Paul Skins to be your hype man, your pitch man, so to speak, it had to be.
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Meg Rowley
The best take they had because that's the one they went to air with. You know, like, that had to have been their best take.
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Ben Lindbergh
Well, that. That endears him to me. I'm not saying it's. It's good to sell the product unless it is because it's so noticeable, that is not generating any fake enthusiasm, that it almost stands out more from the pet. Because, you know, usually if someone's trying to sell something, they're hyping it up. And the fact that he's not. It. It actually is maybe more sticky in my mind.
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Meg Rowley
I think we are. We are in like a. A golden age of like negative charisma athlete advertising. And it's not limited to major league baseball. You know, there are former football players who are on. Who are in ads where I'm just like, buddy, there is no. Is this what the kids mean when they say Riz is that I don't know what? I don't know. I don't understand. Riz, it's fine. I don't need to. I think we were both struck when we chatted with Skeens. Was that just earlier this year that we did that? I guess it was, yeah. I thought he was a great interview. He's the thoughtful guy and I appreciate so much when, regardless of the context, when an interview subject pauses and thinks about their answer, it is often indicative of them really engaging with the question that you have put to them. Right. They're thinking about what you said rather than only leaning on sort of media training and having sort of a pre canned response to stuff. I thought he was a very good interview. You know, if you read other interviews with him, I think there is like kind of a dry sense of humor there. But in terms of like, let's go raising canes. No charisma. And I know that like, veterans issues are important to him and that's part of why he's in that ad, because it's a collaboration between Raisin Keynes and the Gary Sinise Foundation. And so like, I'm sure that that was the more important variable for them in selecting him. But just like there is negative charisma in that ad, but that's not the point.
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Ben Lindbergh
Well, Riz is, I think, usually used in a more romantic context.
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Meg Rowley
Oh, okay.
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Ben Lindbergh
He may very well possess that sort of Riz based on, well, our public knowledge of him.
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Meg Rowley
Sure, he might. And like, he, he and Livy seem very happy together. But the other thing I would note about that ad is like, it's okay to wear a little foundation pole. It's okay.
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Ben Lindbergh
See, I, Yeah, I agree with you on all this. And yet it makes me much more fond of him that he just, he seems to make no effort, any artificial area.
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Michael Mountain
Yeah, right.
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Meg Rowley
It's like there's no right guile and.
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Ben Lindbergh
And he's willing to do it, clearly. Like he will. You know, we talked to him because he was promoting, appearing in mlb, the show. Like, he'll. He'll do it. So I guess you could say, well, if he were like principled or something about this, he just wouldn't even agree to advertise stuff. But, you know, I assume he's not. I mean, people are coming to him, I guess, because he's such a prominent, young successful figure in the sport. But he's not putting on any kind of facade here. Like, you got to know what you're going to get from Paul schemes if you're signing him to represent your product. And And I, I respect that he's not putting on some sort of fake charm. It's like, this is Paul Skeens. This is what you're gonna get. You know, this is the real me. And it does come across as just more authentic in a way. It's, it's because he is not trying to, you know, and it's sort of like, I mean, remember when Mike Trout. There was the whole conversation about Mike Trout. Is he the face of the sport? Can he be if he's not out there as much? And Rob Manfred went as far as to say, well, you can't promote a player who doesn't want to be promoted. And kind of, you know, publicly called him out and suggested that, well, Trout just wasn't interested in being that kind of figure. Trout did plenty of advertisements too, of course, but it seems like Skeens is even more out there. And I don't know whether that is the Livy connection or not. Kind of getting him some publicity that he might not seek out on his own. I don't know if you saw the video of his reaction to winning the Psy. Yes, but at first he just completely. No. Sold it. It was just blase, like, you know, a little grin, like a little faint smile, a Mona Lisa smile. And then after a few seconds, it seemed like he did try to. And this is maybe going against my point of like, he's just being himself. It did seem to me that he tried to generate some enthusiasm in that moment, like because it was a delayed reaction where suddenly he did a double arm pump, kind of as if he had just gotten a big strikeout or something. But it seemed a little forced to me, like maybe he was thinking about how he keeps, keeps getting memed and going viral every time he wins something and basically doesn't react at all. I wonder if whether that was coaching from Livy or just him having been through rounds of winning things before.
- [27:05]
Meg Rowley
Right.
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Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. I don't want headlines about how I, I didn't react to winning the Cy Young Award, so I'll do a little, little pump here just to satisfy everyone. But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's kind of nice. You know, he's just kind of a low key guy just in the body of someone who is immensely talented and successful.
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Meg Rowley
And, and I, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I agree. It makes them seem genuine. I'm also not like knocking people who decide to do advertising. This is part of the athlete economy right now. I get, I get all of those things. But to return to the point, we should have had some more respect for Christopher Sanchez. I mean, like, I think that we should have had some respect for him. He should have gotten at least a couple of first places votes because he had a tremendous season. It was not that dissimilar from, from Skenes and I just think it, it suggests a narrative momentum that, you know, it's not that that's necessarily a bad thing and I understand wanting to, to vote for him, but like they were within, you know, a tenth of a win of each other by fangraphs war. Sanchez actually did better by baseball references. War. Again by I think like 3, 10 of a win. I think the warp gap was even bigger. That's fun to say. Warp gap. That makes it sound like they're on a starship. And so I just, you know, again, like, I was just surprised by being unanimous and I wonder if I had had an NL SCI vote where I would have landed. God, I would have had to really.
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Ben Lindbergh
Explain myself though, thought that deeply about what I would have done because I didn't have a vote, never have a vote, and also because I just don't care that much about awards votes anymore. But I think you're right that there was a lot of unanimity and you could say groupthink or herding or something if you wanted to be uncharitable. Because okay, it's one thing if Ohtani wins unanimously, as he always does, as he does an unprecedented number of times, but it should be closer sometimes in theory. Now, there's always the argument that, that okay, if it's close, but one person is clearly ahead, even if it's only by a little bit, it might end up being unanimous. Just because everyone reaches the rational conclusion that this guy was better and that it ends up being looking lopsided even though the actual results weren't. It's just that there was a clear edge for someone, but there's not that clear an edge as you're saying when it comes to at least WAR with, with Skeens and Sanchez. So it is, it is a little curious that it was 30 to nothing that Skins pitched a shutout here. And I'm glad that Cal and Judge were close. I was actually surprised by how close I was.
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Meg Rowley
I thought that it would be, I thought that he would get some first place votes and not just in the Seattle chapter, but I didn't expect it to be quite so. So even a split. Yeah, I was surprised by that.
- [30:11]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. So it was 17 to 13. So Judge had 17 first place votes and Cal had 13. And then Cal had 17 second place votes and Judge had the other 13. So it was just a split of those top two spots and it's a 20 point difference in total points. And again, one of the many reasons why I don't care that much about the awards is that this is just 30 people and it was pretty close. So if you had had the entire electorate, I'm guessing it would have gone the same way. But it is entirely possible, statistically speaking, that this just happened to be a small subset of, you know, it's, it's less than a tenth of the total possible members. Right. So and if it's that close, if, you know, I mean, just a couple people switching things around, they would have tied or something. So it's a very small difference. And given that this is a small portion of the electorate, it doesn't even really mean that we know that much anymore. It means that we know that 30 people, sort of semi randomly selected from within this larger group, barely came out on the judge side. Doesn't even tell us what the writers as a whole think necessarily. So, yeah, that whole thing is, I still think, sort of silly. And I get that they want, you know, two writers in each city that the league is in so that there's no bias when it comes to bigger markets having a bigger sway and the awards votes. Okay. But I don't know, there's got to be more than. Are there more than two members in each league city? Hopefully. I don't know, some of these.
- [31:50]
Meg Rowley
Oh, yeah, there are.
- [31:51]
Ben Lindbergh
There, you think, right?
- [31:53]
Meg Rowley
More than two.
- [31:54]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. So couldn't it be a little bit bigger without skewing things or, you know, I, I feel like there are ways to make it a bit more representative and I don't really see the downside, but I am glad that I thought it was a close ish race and I think this is probably the correct result. But it could have been the situation I was just talking about where everyone agrees that Judge was slightly better and then judge wins unanimously or something, which doesn't really reflect the feeling of how close it was. But yeah, all along I've said Cal was the player of the year. He was the most outstanding player. He was the most memorable player. He's the most the. He's the guy that we'll look back on. He kind of defined the season. We talked about him more, all of those things. And yet he probably wasn't as valuable as Aaron Judge because that's how good his judge was. So so that's fine. You know, Cal's won some. Some player of the year, most outstanding player awards, which are not as prestigious, obviously, as mvp, but, yeah, I don't think justice wasn't served or anything here, and. And I'm glad he got a good number of votes to reflect the fact that, yeah, this season was. Was really kind of his calling card. Although, who knows, you know, maybe he'll hit 62 next year, and then we'll all just forget about 20, 25. So, you know, you're talking about how Judge not as memorable because he had better seasons before. Who's to say that this was Cal's peak? I mean, it probably was, but you never know.
- [33:22]
Meg Rowley
You were, like, so prepared for me to have, like, a big Cal take, and I. I didn't. Here I am riding for Christopher Sanchez. I'm just saying, he. He went, you know, and you might say, like, well, yeah, make. He threw, like, more innings. Yeah. It's because he went deeper into games. You went deeper. And now some of that is the Phillies letting him do that and the Pirates not maybe letting schemes do that. But you know what? He did do it. He didn't do it.
- [33:48]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. I wonder if there is. Part of it is just feeling like Skeens is better, which I think he probably is better. And so maybe the fact that. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
- [34:01]
Meg Rowley
I guess we shouldn't have won, to be clear. Like, I. I don't know, like, you. I don't know where I would have come down in that race, because I didn't have a vote there. So I wasn't sitting there, like, scrutinizing it to quite the same degree that I did for, say, my Anarchy of the Year vote, which I was like, how's this gonna go? And then everyone was like, drake Baldwin. And I was like, cool. All love it when we all agree. Some of the down ballad in that was fascinating to me, though. But anyway, I wish I could have just given the brew. It's like, Drake Baldwin and then the Brewers. Yeah, give the brewers the second place award.
- [34:37]
Ben Lindbergh
They can share it. Yeah.
- [34:39]
Meg Rowley
Which is kind of what happened.
- [34:40]
Ben Lindbergh
But I do wonder if part of it was just feeling that if Sanchez's big advantage over Skins was pitching more innings, that maybe people kind of gave Skeens a pass on that because he was kind of limited by the Pirates to an extent which I don't think you should necessarily. Like, his value was his value. Right. But it was kind of lowered through no fault of his own. It was just, you Know, his, his age and everything. And so maybe people didn't really hold that against him as much.
- [35:10]
Meg Rowley
Sure. And I, I, again, I'm not saying that he shouldn't have won. I don't know how I would have voted. But like, he had an incredible season. I think voting for him is perfectly reasonable. I am, I am simply surprised by the unanimity of it, I would have thought. And then, you know, but maybe, maybe I shouldn't be because not only was he the unanimous first place vote getter, I think Sanchez was the unanimous second place vote getter. Right. Like, he took all 30 second place votes. So maybe 30 people just independently came to the conclusion this is the order. One, two. And, and, and I should shut up, you know, But I have a podcast to record today, so am I going to shut up? Not for at least another, I don't know, 45 minutes.
- [35:51]
Ben Lindbergh
Perverse incentives. We gotta say something here. But yeah, I, I do think that there is just a little too much lockstep because everyone's looking at the same thing or it's, it's not too much. I think it is the thing that I would look at. But also it does make it more boring. And we've talked about this and people have written about this Bauman, I believe, just about like, did war kind of ruin MVP voting in making it more accurate, quote unquote, as we understand player value, it also just led to more agreements, which, you know, is good, I guess. I, I like when people agree about something that I also think is correct, but it does make it less entertaining because it used to be that you'd have all sorts of people with all sorts of perspectives about what value was. And I thought those debates were often pointless and silly and we're all just arguing over what value means, but people could bring their own perspectives to it. I would disagree with many of those perspectives. And so I don't lament really that they've fallen by the wayside, but it does mean that once this time of year rolls around, there's just not that much to talk about. It's like, yeah, okay, the right players wonder, that's, that's good, that's an improvement. But it's not really an improvement if you're looking to generate debate or controversy or something. And I don't want to artificially inject that into the process either. I think, you know, when we started covering the game even like it was still, you'd have kind of wacky votes or you'd have people who'd still look at old school stats or you'd have people who would heavily factor in whether their team was good and made the playoffs and all of that stuff. And now I think people have really congregated around the idea that it's on field value. It's mostly independent of context and team performance and your teammates performance. And that war is the best measure. We have one of the wars, some blend of the wars and that's kind of boring, but you know, on the whole, probably an improvement, I guess.
- [37:57]
Meg Rowley
I think that as long as the electorate is the size that it is. And I would be the first person in the association to say let's figure out a way to open it up a little bit because I appreciate that like in the one time that we're not worried about New York exceptionalism, they don't want the New York chapter to dominate the votes because this is the biggest chapter by like a lot. But it does feel like you leave yourself vulnerable to goofy ass ballots. You know, the, the possibility of goof ass is real high. And I think that war has been an important sort of countervailing force to that goof ass potential where the number of ballots that are truly bananas, that doesn't really happen anymore. We don't really get. You get like down ballot weirdness sometimes. And I don't want to say that that doesn't matter because you know, it's not like contract incentives and stuff are limited to getting an actual MVP win. Right. Like you might have an incentive clause that is top X finishes or whatever. So I want my fellow writers, and I think most people take this responsibility very seriously, to come to it with rigor and care and take seriously the notion that they are, you know, helping to shape the trajectory of these players in terms of how their careers are regarded in retrospect. So I think that that's important. Most people do a good job, but you know, like it's good to have a counterweight to, to goof ass. We don't really have a lot of goof ass. I just, I am realizing I'm enjoying saying goof ass, goof ass.
- [39:39]
Ben Lindbergh
I do wonder how much of this is people actually agreeing and reaching a consensus and how much is fear of blowback from social media and just that kind of hurting. I think that's, that's part of it or sort of a subtle peer pressure.
- [39:55]
Meg Rowley
I think it really depends on the race.
- [39:58]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, I, I don't know if voters, having never been one, if they compare notes at all with each other or whether it's purely just informal kind of reading the tea leaves. I guess you're probably not supposed to. You're certainly not supposed to talk about it publicly.
- [40:13]
Meg Rowley
I have talked to people about what they think of a race that I have a vote in, but not in a. I haven't. First of all, I haven't disclosed my own thinking because I think it's a fine data point to say, hey, what do you think about such and such. What do you think about these? The way that I put it to people is, what do you think about this guy? How do you think about his season? I think that that's fine, but I don't disclose what my vote is because you're not supposed to disclose in advance for a number of reasons.
- [40:47]
Ben Lindbergh
Gambling being one of them.
- [40:48]
Meg Rowley
Gambling being in the primary one.
- [40:51]
Michael Mountain
Right.
- [40:52]
Meg Rowley
You don't want to be. And it's a rule now. It's a rule. Yeah. For that reason, like, you know, we. We are trying to. We are trying to take it seriously, which is good. But I think that the peer pressure piece of it or the like, fear of discourse piece of it. First of all, I think you're underestimating how much some of the folks in the BVWA like, being contrarian means true. Sorry, guys. Guys. Would that imply that I think it's mostly men?
- [41:22]
Ben Lindbergh
I don't know.
- [41:23]
Meg Rowley
You could draw your own conclusions from the use of guys. Guys can be gender neutral for. For some. Do I use it that way? I don't know. Check the transcript. So I think that some folks are. Are happy to be contrarian. I do think that they temper that exp. That impulse when it comes to awards voting because I do think most people take it seriously and want to do justice to the exercise. Right. Do right by these players. Because I know that you kind of tire of awards votes, but, like, clearly this matters a tremendous amount to the players. I'm sure if you had a vote, you would take it seriously, but you're able to not because you don't have one. So worked out fine for you. And I also think it depends on the race and how wide the gaps are, how notable the players involved are. Like, I'm sure that there were people who voted for Judge and people who voted for Cal who got on social media about. I don't think anybody was looking at the NL rookie of the year field and was like, oh, my God, I can't believe that you would vote for Isaac Collins instead of. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I think that especially when the margins get really tight and the differences are very small. That people are, are willing to look at, like the, you know, the softer factors or maybe you know, just the difference of, like, how you're interpreting a player and going, yeah, it's fine. You know, like, I was surprised that Collins didn't get more support. I was surprised. I was like, anyway, Marcy. I struggled, though. I struggled with how to particularly. So again, like, I had a. An NL Rookie of the year vote and I voted for Drake Baldwin. But. And I felt good about that, that I didn't have any conflict over, like, I settled in on that really quickly and confidently. But then, you know how to, how to deal with. How to deal with all of these. Like, first of all, all of the many brewers, but then these guys where they had very minor differences in war, or you had the guys who, like, didn't have had a good case from like a war production perspective, but maybe didn't play a lot. Like, how do you deal with that? And I, I deal. Dealt with it by not voting for Dylan Lyle. Although I think what an exciting little time that was. Right? I didn't vote for Marcy, but what a fun time that was. I felt conflict about it because it's like, when is Jacob Marcy going to hit like this again? Probably never. But then I felt less bad about it for that reason. And also, Chad Patrick deserves some votes. Dang it.
- [43:59]
Ben Lindbergh
I thought so too.
- [44:00]
Meg Rowley
Important stabilizing force to that rotation. You remember? People should remember. Sorry, I'm just talking about my NL rookie that you. Your vote now, because this is the place where I'm going to do it. Remember when the brewers were so desperate for arms in the beginning that one, it spurred a long conversation about whether the Yankees were cheating, and two, they were like, ah, we're trading a draft pick for Quinn Priester, which ended up working out really well because they kind of made Quinn Priester good, but they were desperate. And you know who was there as a steady hand? Chad Patrick.
- [44:31]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, Patrick was very important for them. And it's kind of weird because then he got demoted after a while after they had more than enough arms, and then he was pitching out of the bullpen when the postseason rolled around. But, yeah, on the whole, he was. He was quite valuable. So, yeah, I don't know. There's something that I miss here, I guess, even though I'm generally thinking of awards votes as just. Well, it didn't change anything that happened that season. We already know that's set in stone. So what some people decide was more valuable than not doesn't actually change Anything that, you know, happened in reality already. But I do kind of miss, I guess, caring about this. I just, yeah, it was kind of fun to care when I did. And maybe that was just because I was younger and because there was more of a culture war aspect of all of that at the time and kind of this crusading element to it that I'm glad is gone now on the whole. So. Yeah, but you know, it's just like even if you're kind of going by war, well, for one thing there are multiple wars. For another, even if there's a consensus leader, it's not always by a lot. You know, you could be the number one war guy and, and be barely ahead of someone else. And so that you shouldn't really place that much value on that. It does seem to me, subjectively speaking, saying this on a fangraphs podcast, but it does seem to me that, that maybe people are paying a little more attention to fangraph's WAR than in the past relative to baseball reference WAR that could be just purely anecdotal. And you know, it's not like I don't actually work for fan graphs. I don't have any horse in this race necessarily. And I use baseball reference and love baseball reference. But it seems to me that just like the reservations that people have about baseball reference for which I share about, well, the lack of catcher framing in Cal's case I think became a big thing. And then with pitchers also, there's always some wonkiness just when it comes to the defense adjustment. And also, you know, the, the runs allowed versus the fit based. A lot of people still think that runs allowed based is the way to go for awards votes. And, and I've explained why I disagree with that. And I think that the, the, the fifth base actually isolates more what the pitcher did, which is what we're trying to reward here. But I think also some of those kind of, yeah, the wonky defense adjustments sometimes lead to. Lead to very eyebrow raising figures that maybe has shaken some people's confidence in that metric from time to time. You know, it's still good and, and valuable and useful. But if you're choosing one or the other, I think probably most people still do some sort of blend, whether it's just informally or, or actually statistically take an average or something. And there are reasons to do that. I guess you could just use the fan graphs ra9war if you wanted to. But you know, to blend those approaches, I think is, is defensible. At least I understand why people do It.
- [47:33]
Meg Rowley
So it's about to say I do work for fan graphs. You are fan what? I am Fangra. We're recording at like 11:30 my time, which is earlier than we typically do. And we're doing that because they had to move the volley championship game to the middle of the day because we're about to get whacked by rain all weekend. And so they didn't want to have to bang the championship. And so I'm just all out of sorts because my schedule is weird today. Anyway. I clearly prefer our version of war, particularly as it pertains to pitchers. I also think that especially in the awards context, the real value of having multiple versions of WAR shines through because I think that they are at their most useful when they are put in conversation with one another. Right? Like I think that the philosophy of baseball that a fit based WAR has is more in line with how I understand the game and the production of value for pitchers. Having said that, I think that the runs based version that B ref uses and warp have their merits and they can tell you different things about the shape of a guy's production. I think that our version of WAR or Baseball Prospectus's version of WAR is more useful than B refs if you're trying to evaluate a catcher. Because I think not including framing is a, is a philosophical decision I disagree with. But I think that putting them all in conversation with each other and trying to really get your arms around how these guys differed from one another in terms of the, the way that they produced value for their team is really useful in the awards context. And so I don't know, like, it's sort of a mixed bag in terms of like which version is being listened to more. I think that most voters who take the time to include advanced stats in their understanding of a guy season are going to look at everything and I think that that's appropriate to do. Which one ends up swaying you, you know, I think comes down to the individual voter and they're not always in disagreement. The gap between Judge and Cal was I think narrower at fan graphs than it was at Baseball Reference, but it was still a win. You know, like it wasn't like we had Cal ahead of Aaron Judge. Like, like Cal had a nine war season and a 161 WRC plus. Aaron Judge had a 204 WRC plus and a 10 war season. Right. Like I, this is where, this is why I say that like if I had had a vote in that, in that award, I, I would have voted For Judge, like, I don't, you know, I spent a lot of time this summer reminding people that like very small differences in war, you know, a tenth of a win, three, ten of a win is, you know, it's well within the sort of error bars of the stat. And treating that narrow gap as sufficiently large to make it not a conversation and not merit further scrutiny is a mistake. If you had a one win, they had like an, you know, he had like 98 points of ops on him. Like it was at the end of the day, like, I think again that it was correct for, for Cal to get some first place votes. And I think that the, the straight WAR case overstates the gap a little bit. But like it was a sizable gap when it was all said and done. See, this is how, you know, I have credibility, I have integrity. Ben, I got. I'm not just some fan. I'm not just some fan. I am fangraph and I am here to tell you Aaron Judge was the deserving winner, winner of the 2025 AL MVP award. And Cal Raleigh had a hell of a season that I'll remember forever.
- [51:23]
Ben Lindbergh
So yeah, you know, yeah, I mentioned all the repeats. This was the first time that there were back to back MVP winners in both leagues in, in the same seasons, consecutive seasons that hadn't happened before. And along these lines of, oh, have we lost something with the debates about these awards or is everyone grouping too much? Joe Posnansky, he proposed new old school awards to sort of preserve that aspect of things but not replace actually more enlightened voting for the Cy Young or mvp. And he suggested that you could have like a Stargill Award and a Jim Palmer Award named after guys who won those respective awards without leading their leagues in war. And, and his version of it was, was more old school than I would advise. It's, you know, more like wins and RBI kind of based. I don't see any need to, to bring that kind of evaluation back. And if it wasn't clear already, just wins for pitchers, just not even a factor at this point. Oh yeah, you can say after, after Paul Skeen's wins with a 10 and 10 record and Crochet who had 18 wins, finishes behind School who had 13. It's just right, you know, for a while there it was like, well, maybe it could sway. So if there was a big gap and it could be at least a factor or a tiebreaker or something. Now I just think it's completely irrelevant. Probably I would be sort of interested in some kind of throwback Award that did consider context for your team. Just, you know, I, I, I like having this be pretty independent of whether your teammates were good and whether your team was good. But, but I would be up for an award that just was context sensitive like that. Just, you know, you were the most valuable in the sense that you propelled your team to the playoffs and took into account your value and your value relative to maybe who would have replaced you on that team and then where your team team finished. Maybe it just ends up being the same anyway because.
- [53:31]
Meg Rowley
Right.
- [53:31]
Ben Lindbergh
You could like Judge and, and Cal were both like equally important to their team.
- [53:36]
Meg Rowley
Right. I was gonna say it's not like, yeah, like the Yankees needed.
- [53:40]
Michael Mountain
Yeah.
- [53:41]
Meg Rowley
Judge to make the postseason and the Mariners needed Cal to make the postseason. These were not, you know, yeah, you.
- [53:46]
Ben Lindbergh
Replace those guys with replacement level players or even average players maybe in both teams missed the playoffs. So it's like, yeah, there's not even really an edge there. And then maybe it would just end up defaulting to some other stat in the way that WAR is now the standard for these other awards. Maybe it would just be like championship win probability added or something would just kind of be the new baseline metric that everyone relies on. And then we'd all gravitate toward and cluster around that. So, you know, maybe we've all just gotten more kind of empirical and data driven and all of that. And I'd be the last to lament that in general. It's just, you know, there's less to argue about when we agree. But you know, we have plenty of other things to argue about in life. One thing that I would argue about, I guess now, you know, decoy, decopen. Shohei's dog got his time in the spotlight again for the third consecutive year. And this year did not jump off the couch as he did last year, which was a big moment for you. You, because that was the moment that kind of convinced you that he was actually Shohei's dog.
- [54:56]
Meg Rowley
I don't think it was the, it wasn't that. It wasn't. But there was like, you know, there's a playing that happened. No, I thought the dog, I thought the dog was totally weird. During the MVP announcement last year, I was like, I don't know what's going on here?
- [55:09]
Ben Lindbergh
Oh, oh, was that, oh, maybe that, that even deepened your suspicions?
- [55:13]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, I think it did. I think it, it took me deeper into the conspiracy and then I got pulled out by, you know, just like the play that we were observing that wasn't being promoted by PR made clear. To me that like this dog is quite beloved. I do think it started, I do think decoy started out as a literal decoy. I think that that was a prop dog.
- [55:37]
Ben Lindbergh
Sham relationship.
- [55:39]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, it was a sham. Yeah.
- [55:40]
Ben Lindbergh
But then arranged relationship for princess.
- [55:45]
Meg Rowley
Yeah. Like some sort of Netflix holiday special, a love brew, you know, that became.
- [55:50]
Ben Lindbergh
Deep and quite genuine.
- [55:51]
Meg Rowley
So.
- [55:51]
Michael Mountain
Yes.
- [55:52]
Ben Lindbergh
And then it's. Yeah. Initially I was just put up to this, but no, we legitimately fell in love. Yeah. I'm obviously, I don't agree with any of that, but I enjoy humoring it because it was. I thought at one point that you were suggesting that this was not a real dog at all.
- [56:09]
Meg Rowley
No, no, I was thinking weird about the dog.
- [56:13]
Ben Lindbergh
Just about the relationship. Yeah, right.
- [56:15]
Meg Rowley
I didn't think it was a fake dog.
- [56:17]
Ben Lindbergh
Dog. Yes. Okay. Right. The fact that decoy leaped off the couch, you were thinking, was indicative of not true affection perhaps. Yeah, but of course, you know, I mean you're a pet owner. Every pet owner knows the pets don't always pose the way that you want them to, so it's hard to corral them sometimes. And speaking of which, this time Shohei leaned over for a smooch. Not of his wife who was there also on the couch, but, but of decoy. And decoy, I guess consented to the smooch, but looked kind of put upon, you know, just like wasn't, wasn't totally into it, but went along with it. My. I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but we, we talk too much about Shohei's dog who seems like a delightful, well behaved, aesthetically pleasing dog. We don't talk enough about Aaron Judge's dogs. They should be the celebrities because he had. Now I'm a dachshund man. I, I'm a lifelong lover of, of dachshund. I have a dachshund companion. I probably always will. It'll be like me with dachshunds will be the, the queen with her corgis. Although little known fact, they were actually dorgies, some of them part dachshund. So even there, anyway, there weren't purebred corgis somewhere, but there were some, some dachshund mixes in the mix there. So yeah, I love dachshunds. I, I'm a whole, you know, my, my lifestyle is, is very dachshund dependent. And so I'm tickled by the fact that Aaron Judge has two dachshunds, Gus and Penny. And they are beautiful, golden, long haired dachshunds. And One was, was sort of sitting on him and one just kind of like lay down on the couch while they were on tv. And the visual in my mind of gigantic Aaron Judge and two tiny dachshunds clambering all over him or running around in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. I mean, I'm partial to them just because I'm a dachshund guy, but I also think just seeing Aaron Judge with a dachshund duo, given the size mismatch and the clear affection here, I think we should be talking more about that. And so I guess it's indicative of the fact that there's so much just sensationalism surrounding Shohei and also just intrigue, curiosity about any aspect of his private life and the way that he did the dog reveal before he did the spouse reveal and the, the marriage reveal. And just every time he pulls back the curtain a little bit, people get a glimpse and they go, oh, something we know about Shohei in his private life here, but we really should talk about Gus and Penny much more than we do if we're going to talk about player, superstar, player dogs.
- [59:00]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, man, yeah, sure. Yeah, that's.
- [59:05]
Michael Mountain
Yeah, we don't have to talk that.
- [59:06]
Ben Lindbergh
Much about anyone's dog because, you know, it's, it's nice for you to have a dog. But when you regale other people with your stories about your dog, sort of.
- [59:15]
Meg Rowley
Or your kids telling them about dreams or fantasy team.
- [59:19]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, yeah. Not always as entertaining for them as it is for you. I mean, I wanna, Yeah, I hear about, I would extend that kids maybe if it's someone I know really well and I know.
- [59:28]
Meg Rowley
Right. Yeah. I don't want to hear about like random kids.
- [59:32]
Ben Lindbergh
I mean, like, I do often hear about them.
- [59:34]
Meg Rowley
Yeah, I, I want to hear about my friends kids. I want to hear about kids who like, I have a personal investment in.
- [59:41]
Michael Mountain
Right.
- [59:41]
Meg Rowley
Like relationship with. I'm concerned with the well being of. I mean, I'm concerned with the well being your children. Sort of an abstract way to be clear, but, you know, specific ones. Sometimes what I find is that like I'll have friends and they have kids and a house remodel at the same time. And it's like a lot of kids and not very much house remodel. And I'm like, that's fine. But like, I want to hear about the kitchen and not as much about your kid. Like the kid is great, but like you got crown crown molding decisions that you're making. Let me know about those. You know, do you think that Aaron Judge being a dachshund guy means that if he had to take sides, he would pick Molly Baz over Allison Roman. Is that what that means? Is that a reference that other people get? That's for all my cooking girlies out there. Yeah, I'm an elder millennial. What's up? The new Alison Roman cookbook. Beautiful. By the way, if you're like, the only person who embraces briny broth is Molly Bass. No, no. Here to say Allison's got you covered. And I. But I support them both. You know, I'm here for, like, a little.
- [60:44]
Ben Lindbergh
Little Brian.
- [60:44]
Meg Rowley
I'm here for both of them.
- [60:46]
Ben Lindbergh
Big oyster guy.
- [60:46]
Meg Rowley
For both of them. Yeah.
- [60:48]
Ben Lindbergh
Okay. All right, I'll. Last observation. Well, last two observations, both Guardians related. I meant to say when we were talking about the manager of the year vote and how I don't have a strong stance on it, I. I stand by my lack of a strong stance. I still. Still don't have one. But I do think, having read it, the athletic Zach Meisel did a piece on how the Guardians have handled the pitch fixing scandal and kind of how they dealt with it, how the team and the players dealt with it throughout the season and how there were some really difficult moments because of this. Like, there was an anecdote in there about how Steven Vogt had one of his hardest days in baseball because when Ortiz was placed on the suspended list, they had to replace him on the roster. They had to call up someone with a fresh arm, and so they had to designate Colby Allard for assignment. And Colby Allard, you know, former first rounder and prospect and. And bounced around a lot and finally had a good year this year for the Guardians and was, you know, it was all kind of coming together and they had to demote him or dfa him to make room for someone because he had just pitched. And because they didn't have Ortiz on the roster anymore, they had to call up a fresh ar arm. And so he had to give this news to Kobe Allard. It kind of. It made me mad at Luis Ortiz in a way. You know, more upset than I was because, like, there was this. This other victim on his team and. And Vote couldn't tell Allard why this was happening. And it made no sense because his numbers were great and he had just pitched three scoreless innings, and then he has to, like, cut him, basically. And. And, you know, he couldn't explain why because, yeah, he wasn't at liberty to say and didn't even know that much himself. And so you know, know, Vote was talking about how he like couldn't sleep and he was crying. He, he felt so bad about this and it worked out okay because Allard just stayed with the Guardians and came back up and, and continued to pitch well. So all's well that ends well for him at least. But there was a lot of disruption on that team and in that clubhouse when not only Luis Ortiz gets suspended because this, but also Class A cuz Ortiz was a recent arrival, but Class A had been in that organization for several years and you know, all these guys knew him and depended on him. And so that really hurt the chemistry and the clubhouse. And yet that team really rallied around that and bounced back from it and played better and pitched better without those guys. I'm not saying it was because of that necessarily, but that happened and it seemed like Vote does deserve some credit for kind of keeping that clubhouse focused and amidst all that turmoil and confusion and sense of betrayal and everything. So kudos to him for doing that. That's the kind of thing that it's tough to see from outside. And then the other Guardians related observation is that Jose Ramirez finished third. And I feel bad for him in a way because he's just, he's so good and you know he's going to end up in the hall of Fame. He's going to win, win other awards and honors, but he now has the distinction of having the most career MVP shares without winning an mvp. And that's just like the, the number of points that a player gets for an award over the total points of, of all first place votes, that kind of things. So it was like, you know, Al Simmons is second, Bill Terry, Eddie Murray, Mike Piazza, and now it's Jose Ramirez at the top with 3.61 MVP shares. And I guess in a way that's a good distinction to hold because you're, you're the best of anyone who never won one. But there's still a caveat that you never want one. And you know, he'll probably be remembered. I mean, I guess he still could win one in theory, but you wouldn't expect him to get better. He's 33 now and other, other superstars are still around. You know, he's had the relative, the slight misfortune of having a Hall of Fame peak at the same time that Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani were having even higher hall of Fame peaks. And so it's, it's kind of rough draw, raw deal for him. He's now gone. Gosh, how many years has he gotten MVP votes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Now he's had nine seasons where he got MVP votes and several of those seasons he was top three or, or top two even. So it's a remarkable sustained run that he has had. But he's. Yeah, he's now earned himself the, the semi dubious distinction of just being the best of everyone who never won one. Just, you know, know, pure chance. It's a bad coincidence for him that he happened to overlap with some Alzheimer's.
- [65:45]
Meg Rowley
My main thought when I saw his finish was, yeah, that's why I picked him for MVP. On the staff predictions post because you know what we should have. If, if you have, if you get a vote in the top five, you should probably be on our post somewhere is what I have to say about that. You know, that's what I have to say about that. But yeah, I, I think that it is unfortunate, but I think that his career will be remembered so fondly and his. The sort of delight that people have taken from him, the quality of a player that he is. I don't worry about Jose Ramirez being forgotten or despite the fact that he has been sort of billed as the most underrated player for his entire career. Like, I think he will be properly rated and appreciated come hall of Fame time time and you know, that'll probably be a while from now. But you know, he's an amazing player and I expect, I guess it'll kind of depend on the composition of the ballad. So maybe I'm gonna be proven wrong here. But like, I imagine he'll be a first ballot hall of Famer Jose Ramirez.
- [66:50]
Ben Lindbergh
Don'T you think should be, I mean. Well, you know, I don't really believe there should be any distinction between first ballot, but there is. I know, first ballot, yeah, we'll see.
- [66:59]
Meg Rowley
But maybe not unanimous, but first ballot. Yeah.
- [67:03]
Ben Lindbergh
I think, yeah, his reputation has already improved to the point that I think people recognize how good he is. At least media members do. And, and he still has. He's shown basically no signs of decline. So he can continue to add on to that legacy.
- [67:18]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [67:18]
Ben Lindbergh
And you know, I guess you could say that him finishing third this year, maybe that's a raw deal for Bobby Witt Jr. Who, who probably had a better season than Jose Ramirez. So Bobby Whitt Jr. Might be the new Jose Ramirez. He can just take over the crown. I mean, you'd think that Whit might win one. Obviously he's young enough to have more cracks at it, but he's had sort of the same Thing where he's had incredible seasons, higher peak even than Jose Ramirez has had, but he too has been blocked by judge, etc. So. Yeah. And. And this year, Wit was third by a fairly wide margin in Fangraphs War and yet finished fourth in the voting. And then even Skubal was barely fractionally ahead of Ramirez in fangraphs war, and he finished fifth. Was it. I was actually sort of impressed. Like the, the pitchers, the Cy Young winners finished fifth and sixth, respectively, in MVP voting, which is pretty good in this era, but, you know, probably deserved WAR wise. Anyway, salute to Jose Ramirez and also Bobby Witt Jr. And the last thing I'll say, there was news that the Padres are exploring a sale.
- [68:35]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [68:36]
Ben Lindbergh
And as we've learned, exploring a sale doesn't mean a sale is inevitable. We've seen some owners say backsies and pulled their teams off the market, the Twins, the Nationals, the Angels. But it is sort of sad that this has happened to the Padres. Just. Peter Seidler passing away just really threw a wrench into that franchise.
- [69:02]
Meg Rowley
Dramatically altered the trajectory of that franchise. Yeah, it.
- [69:06]
Ben Lindbergh
It did. And you know, he was, he was personally liked and respected, it seems like, and. And also greatly appreciated by fans for just going for it and stressing less about the profit margins than about building a contending team that people would want to come see. And he succeeded in that. And the Padres have been a big draw and they've been a fun, entertaining team. And they've underachieved slightly, perhaps, given that investment and all the talent and stars on that roster. And it's not like they're done necessarily.
- [69:41]
Meg Rowley
Right.
- [69:42]
Ben Lindbergh
But there's uncertainty. You know, they have some. Some prominent free agents and turnover and now this. What will this mean for the direction of the franchise and who will buy it? And of course, there's still legal disputes going on within the family, which hasn't been settled to my knowledge. Right. And Peter Sadler's widow was, you know, there was a dispute about who should have control of the franchise, who should be the control person, and accusations about her being mistreated by other members of the family and accusations that the family wanted to move the franchise and all sorts of bad blood there that doesn't seem to have been fully resolved as of yet. But yeah, it's just Seidler seems to have been just about one of one when it comes to what you want in an owner. And so I hope they figure out some solution that is best for that franchise. But it would be pretty tough to follow in his footsteps and Fill his shoes because there just aren't a lot of people who have that wealth that it takes to end up in that position and yet also be willing to part with that wealth to help that team win.
- [70:55]
Meg Rowley
Like, does, does John Middleton have a, a brother or sister or like a well financed cousin maybe? Yeah, it's a, unfortunately small club. The size of the billionaire club remains shockingly large. But in terms of the ones that are actually willing to put their money into a baseball team. Quite this way. Yeah. You know, we'll have to reserve judgment until we know. And it's not like, given the, you know, the disputes that you've mentioned, that things are completely sunny with the current group, but just based on, you know, who, who has tended to want to buy these teams of late. It's, you know, it's not necessarily this approach that's dominating, although it is, you know, it is present. Like Steve Cohen bought a baseball team was recent. It's gone pretty, pretty okay in terms of the commitment to resourcing. So it can, it can get better in addition to getting worse. But me be optimistic. I, I've, you know, we've been recording for like so long and I haven't talked at all about the Olivia Newsy New York Times profile. So maybe things can get better. Maybe we can be the best versions of ourselves, you know, maybe we can.
- [72:05]
Ben Lindbergh
Sure. I guess even before the sales, I mean, the, the effects were felt not only on a personal level, but in terms of, who knows how things would have changed in this is what I'm saying. Yeah, it's just, you know, Juan Soto could still be playing for the Padres for all we know. I mean, there was obviously, obviously a clear direct result of Seidler's death and then slashing payroll and having to trade people and, you know, still remaining competitive, but obviously within some constraints that he was not as eager to impose. And I have no idea just like the long term financial standing of that franchise and you know, debt they took on and all of that for, for all of that spending. I, I don't know whether the bill would have come due regardless at some point and even Seidler would have had to say, okay, I have to moderate or I have to cut costs here or something. I'm not saying like the, the money spigots never would have turned off or have been tightened a little bit, but it was clear that there was a connection there. You know, as soon as he was out of the picture, the picture looked a lot different.
- [73:11]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [73:14]
Ben Lindbergh
They'Ll take a data set sorted by something like era minus or obs.
- [73:21]
Meg Rowley
And then they'll tease out some interesting data, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's two days to Blast.
- [73:43]
Ben Lindbergh
Okay, well, Meg had to hop off to tend to an edit, but we've got one more mini segment for you here. We'll see how mini it turns out to be. Sometimes I say we're almost done and then we're not even close. But I am joined now by Michael Mountain listener, Patreon supporter, sometimes Stat Blast correspondent, sometimes guest Stat Blaster for yet another guest Stat Blast. Welcome, Michael.
- [74:09]
Michael Mountain
Hi Ben, it's nice to be back with you.
- [74:11]
Ben Lindbergh
Always nice to have you. I believe this is your seventh time on the program, perhaps, and you've joined us sometimes just to answer Stat Blast, but also when you do some special project. So you first came on to talk about your 30 team trip. You tried to develop the most efficient route to go to every ballpark. You've been on to talk about your hall of Fame assessment system, Boog. And you continue to refine that and make it available to everyone in the Discord Group. I forget what other occasions have called for you to come onto this program. You probably remember, but this one is about rivalry scores. You have developed and also published in the Stat Blast channel of the Discord Group for Patreon supporters, a new system for quantifying the rivalries among baseball teams. And this caught my eye. It seemed clever, so I thought other people would be interested in hearing about it too. What was the impetus for this project?
- [75:10]
Michael Mountain
Wow. Project is such a distinguished way to describe my silly little stats games that I like to play. But yes, I. I have a great time sharing stuff in the statplast channel on Discord. It's a great place to be. If you're not already subscribed, subscribed, you should join. But that channel in particular is a very fun place to hang out and post interesting questions or share idle thoughts about stats related baseball stuff, and oftentimes a great place to get thoughtful feedback from other folks who are similarly inclined.
- [75:42]
Ben Lindbergh
You don't even have to wait for the Stat Blast segment on the podcast. You can go straight to the Stat Blast channel and maybe get an answer immediately, depending on the day and the question. But this one. Did a question give rise to this or was it purely your own curiosity?
- [75:58]
Michael Mountain
This was pretty much my own curiosity. I mean, you know, we talk about rivalries in sports all the time and there are obviously lots of different factors that go into that, whether it's geographic density, Familiarity, other cultural events that that can play into it. And obviously a lot of that is hard to quantify, but I was sort of idle musing about trying to figure out some way to represent sort of the most active or the most hotly contested rivalries, not just currently, but also throughout MLB history. And so I was looking for some metrics to sort of help approach that question. I don't think it's a perfect system by any means, of course, but I got some helpful feedback as I was alluding to when I posted something, something similar earlier this year. And after a little more puzzling and refinement and then also incorporating updated data through the end of the 2025 post season, I have what I think is a slightly better metric. And I found the results sort of passed the smell test enough to consider it worth sharing. So the basic idea, I sort of tried to back into this from a perspective of the philosophy. Philosophy that rivalries are active and engaging when both teams are inflicting pain on each other's fan bases regularly and especially in high impact situations.
- [77:21]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, because you have a separate but related system for quantifying the pain that franchises have experienced.
- [77:28]
Michael Mountain
Yeah. I mean, that's the basis for this. Yeah.
- [77:30]
Meg Rowley
So.
- [77:31]
Michael Mountain
Well, actually, let me take a step back. The. The. I think what you're alluding to is the postseason Movie Misery Index, which is, which is a separate toy measure I came up with just to quantify the extensiveness of playoff droughts for various franchises and for various stages of the playoffs. So maybe you could say that I'm a little too obsessed with people being depressed, but that's just kind of the way that I tend to think about how I'm. How I'm quantifying these. So in this particular instance, I've called them pain points. And you inflict pain points on another team essentially when you beat them. And if you beat them in a high pressure situation, you inflict more pain points. So as the basis of this, the metric I used to derive all of these calculations is Baseball Reference has data for Championship Leverage Index on a game level, which is measuring how much does the outcome of this game impact this team's chances of winning a World Series. And that is on a scale where 1 is the average game CLI for all teams on opening day. And Baseball Reference has this data published for all regular season and postseason games going back to 1903, which was the first year of World Series competition. So I use that as the basis for calculating these pain points each time your team loses a regular season game. The team that beat you inflicts one point of pain, and an extra point is added for each point of championship leverage index for that game. So it's not a straight one to one mapping. I did add this sort of base level just to make sure that, for example, if you're the Pittsburgh Pirates and you're out of contention, you're out of serious contention by the All Star break, then the entire second half of the season, your championship leverage index will be very low. But if those losses pile up, that does still inflict some psychic pain on the fan base. So I had that base level of one set to make sure that you weren't disproportionately counting pain for teams that were actually in a playoff hunt or teams that were making the post season and losing in the playoffs a lot, because the earlier iteration of this sort of had it very heavily unbalanced towards, well, all of these really good teams that are in the playoffs all the time are receiving all of this, you know, all of these pain points, and these teams that are really bad are not receiving any, and that didn't quite feel right.
- [79:49]
Ben Lindbergh
Well, that's good. There's enough pain to go around as it is. We don't need to arbitrarily double any pain.
- [79:54]
Michael Mountain
Exactly. And I will say that under this version, there is still a little bit of that unbalance, but it's much less so. And in fact, the way that I like to represent or think about how teams are, you know, on this spectrum of net pain importers versus net pain exporters. So you can look at how the total number of points of pain that your team has inflicted on other teams, and then the total number of points of pain that it's received from other franchises. And if you sort that, it does come out pretty much like you'd expect. Obviously, the World Series champions are pretty much always at the bottom of that list. The Los Angeles Dodgers this year have infl or not this year it's actually a cumulative sum. So what I did was I added up all of the pain from all of the seasons throughout MLB history. But I applied a decay function. So I basically modeled it as exponential decay. You know, if you're familiar with radioactivity or other processes that sort of taper off with some specified half life. So Basically, I set 10 years as the half life for pain points. So after 10 seasons have gone by, the pain that you experience from a given game will have been reduced by 50% and then another 50% after a decade more. And that's sort of Modeling a combination of fresh wounds, hurt worse. But also sort of modeling at the population level, what's the composition of a fan base. Are you having new fans come in who maybe don't remember some of those games as acutely?
- [81:27]
Ben Lindbergh
How many people died?
- [81:29]
Michael Mountain
Exactly. Right. There's certainly pain from the Yankees. He's losing out in the Pennant race in 1948 to the Cleveland team, but there's not a lot of people still around who remember that. And of course, Cleveland has had enough pain of their own in the meantime.
- [81:42]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, there is sort of depending on the market or the team, there's kind of an institutional pain that gets passed down. Perhaps you almost inherit it, but it's probably not quite as acute as experiencing those losses yourself or all those years of losing. But. But it does weigh on one if you are kind of brought up in a culture of having lost for a long time.
- [82:07]
Michael Mountain
Right. And that's sort of what the system is trying to capture. So all of that pain is still present in the calculations, even going back all the way to 1903. It's just weighted significantly less than more recent outcomes. So, as I alluded to, you can rank teams by total amount of pain imported versus exported. Interestingly enough, there are actually more teams that are net importers than exporters. And I think that's probably because it's easier as a really good team to just steamroll over everyone else and distribute a lot of pain widely versus if you're importing. You can only receive it from one team at a time, if that makes sense. So there's 12 teams in baseball that are net equal exporters of pain, led by the Dodgers. The other candidates are pretty much who you'd expect. Red Sox, Yankees, Astros, Atlanta. Teams that have been in the playoffs a lot, and especially that have won, or teams that have knocked other folks out in tight pennant races. The biggest net importers of pain, again, probably easy enough to guess. The Tigers, the Rockies, the Twins, the White Sox, the Brewers and the Orioles. So it's a little bit more of an interesting mix here. There's not as big a factor separating all of those. And they achieve those pain points in very different ways. Right. Some teams, like the Orioles, it's a combination of being bad this year, but also having been in close pennant races or in postseason matchups recently where they also lost. Whereas for other teams like the Rockies or the White Sox, it's more. Just a lot more of that is coming from that base. One. One point for each loss in the regular season. Okay, so that's Sort of an overlay there. And then the other thing I did to turn these pain points into a rivalry score is I took the harmonic mean of pain points for each team versus team matchup. You have certain number of points going from team A to team B. You have a different number of points going from team B to team A. And if you take the harmonic mean of those two values, you get what I'm calling the rival. And the purpose of harmonic mean here, it's the same statistical tool that Bill James used for his power speed number. The idea is that you want the rank of a rivalry to be higher if both sides are inflicting similar levels of pain on each other. So a harmonic mean will depress the ranking of a pairing where it's all one sided, where it's not an even fight, so to speak.
- [84:35]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, that's just. Just bullying. More so than a rivalry.
- [84:38]
Michael Mountain
Exactly. That's the I don't think about you at all index from the Mad Men.
- [84:42]
Ben Lindbergh
Meme, which you did quantify as well.
- [84:45]
Michael Mountain
Which I did. Yeah. And we can get to that in a second. But you, you may have looked at these already. I don't know if you want to play a guessing game or not, but I can just read off.
- [84:52]
Ben Lindbergh
I did. I pre spoiled myself.
- [84:54]
Michael Mountain
Okay, fair enough. Listeners at home may want to take a moment and think about, you know, what rivalries might end up highly ranked in this metric. It is a lot of coastal elite bias. Unfortunately, it's also a lot of AL east supremacy. And I'm not just saying that as a biased Orioles fan, But the top 10 rivalries, six of them are in the eastern divisions, only two of them are in the west, and two are in the central. So it's Yankees Red Sox at number one.
- [85:24]
Ben Lindbergh
Shocking.
- [85:25]
Michael Mountain
Then you have Dodgers Giants. So any system that ends up with Yankees Red Sox and Dodgers Giants at the top, you know, it passes the smell test. Like I said.
- [85:34]
Ben Lindbergh
I'm sure someone is saying you just went to all this trouble and reverse engineered and crafted this system to tell me that Yankees Red Sox is the greatest rivalry. Wow. Sure.
- [85:44]
Michael Mountain
But it's nice to have some numbers behind that gut feeling, right?
- [85:47]
Ben Lindbergh
Yes. I always enjoy having some sort of rubric, some sort of objective basis for confirming the things that we already thought.
- [85:55]
Michael Mountain
Actually, one of the more interesting things I found is that the number three overall rivalry, which is is Dodgers Padres. Now, divisional matchups are highly incentivized within this metric just because it is the familiarity effect. You're playing so many more games against them. Obviously not quite as many now as we played in the slightly more unbalanced schedule before 2023. But the Dodgers Padres one is notable because third highest rivalry score in the league right now. That is the highest placement ever for a rivalry that involves an expansion team. Some of that is just that the Padres were an older expansion team so they have had more time to accumulate these. You know, it does build up even with the decay factor just from playing the same teams over and over again year after year. But I was kind of surprised to see that that you know, it is a divisional opponent. So that helps because there's familiarity within a season. But. But in terms of the breadth of history, it only goes back to the 60s or 70s versus these other matchups that go back, at least for the data I'm pulling, they go back to 1903. The other rivalries in the top 10 are Philadelphia, Atlanta. You have Guardians, Tigers, Mets, Phillies, Cubs, Cardinals, another classic one. And then the bottom of the top 10 is sort of rounded out by a few other alternatives. East matchups that have been back and forth in the last 10 to 20 years. They aren't all intensifying as of this year, but they're either growing or they have enough history behind them to still be in the top 10. And that's blue Jays, Yankees, Yankees, Orioles and Ray's Red Sox. Okay, you mentioned the Pete Campbell meme. The I don't think about you at all. The most one sided rivalries where one team is consistently beating up another and and they're not getting much to show for it going the other direction. The number one mismatch there is Yankees Guardians. The Yankees have inflicted 296 points of pain on the Guardians and the Guardians have only returned 122 points.
- [88:05]
Ben Lindbergh
By the way, it's Ginsburg, it's not Pete Campbell.
- [88:08]
Michael Mountain
Oh, that's right, that's right.
- [88:10]
Ben Lindbergh
You've just doubled down on not thinking about Ginsburg at all by misremembering who is even was in the elevator with Don.
- [88:17]
Michael Mountain
I'm embodying the spirit of the meme, not the facts. But that index is actually mostly dominated by recent World Series matchups. Because if you think about it, interleague matchups where the teams don't face each other regularly in the regular season, that means the team that lost the World Series doesn't really have a chance to get any revenge, right? Unless they happen to make another matchup. So a lot of these are recent World Series or postseason matches across divisions. Dodgers Blue Jays is number two, Astros Yankees is three. Dodgers Yankees is five. So there's a lot of matchups there that are, they're one sided because those teams had one high profile meetup and the team that won inflicted all of this pain and the team that lost didn't get a chance to return the favor. The other thing I did was I looked at the evolution of these rivalry scores over time. So I sort of retroactively calculated going back to 1903, so not just a current score based on the cumulative total of all of these years of history, but also if you go back to say 1972 and you say apply the weighting factor for that year, but only on the games that are older than that. So you're only looking backward, but you're looking at. So for any year in history, you can find out what were the top, top rivalries at that time. So I put that in a spreadsheet that listeners can look at. It's got. For every year going back to 1903, what were the top 10 rivalries across MLB? And also for each team, what were their top three rivalries? And as I mentioned, these are pretty much exclusively dominated by divisional matchups. So none of them should look that surprising. It is kind of interesting to track the history of what was the top rated rivalry in baseball. As I mentioned, Yankees Red Sox is number one right now.
- [90:13]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. Take me through the timeline of what was the prevailing rivalry at any particular time.
- [90:18]
Michael Mountain
Yeah. So the early years of this data set is kind of noisy just because there's almost no history anywhere. And so there's lots of bouncing around. But I would say the first sort of, of sustained rivalry in the early 20th century dead ball era was Cubs Giants. So that was number one from 1908 to 1920. It reestablished itself in 1930 up through World War II and then just after World War II. Cardinals Dodgers took over as number one from 1946 to 1953.
- [90:52]
Ben Lindbergh
It's like the Branch Ricky Derby.
- [90:55]
Michael Mountain
Yeah.
- [90:55]
Ben Lindbergh
That he built up the Cardinals and then went to the Dodgers.
- [90:58]
Michael Mountain
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and again, note that, you know, these are, they're not divisional matchups at the time, obviously they're league matchups. But I'm sure if you look at, you know, what were the, the league standings looking like in those years? A lot of those years it would have been Cardinals 1, Dodgers 2, or vice versa. Or, you know, a team coming in late in the season to ruin another team's chances at staying in the red race. The late 50s, early 60s, it's New York and Cleveland in the American League. Is the number one. So that is a little bit after Cleveland obviously their most recent pennant in 1948 or their most recent World Series title, excuse me, 2016 happened. Yes, they did win another pennant in the early 50s. And that's driving a lot of that really. I think the, the Yankees guardians getting to number one really had more to do with the guardians finally getting up off the mat and fighting back. Because Yankees had been in the lead of that rivalry for years and years and years. And then once Cleveland got good enough to start sort of landing some blows of their own, that really primed it up in terms of being a more closely matched opponent. So they took over for a little bit there. But then of course, Cleveland didn't stay good for very long. And in 1962 there was the National League playoff or yeah, the National League three game playoff, which according to the rules of the league at the time counted as regular season games. But they had a tremendously high championship leverage index. And that was the playoff series between the Giants and Dodgers. And that pushed that matchup up to number one overall. The 62 tiebreak series won by the giants two games to one after both teams finished the season with 101 wins. And the Dodgers got no playoff games out of that that season. But that series stayed number one. Giants Dodgers was, according to this system, the premier rivalry in baseball up until 2004 when Red Sox finally broke through. And again, very similar, I think to the Cleveland New York matchup from prior because New York is still leading this rivalry, so to speak, in terms of pain points received versus pain points inflicted. And so 2004 being the year that the Red Sox broke through, sort of got the monkey off their back, beat the Yankees in the alcs, inflicting a bunch of points. And then that makes the rivalry closely matched enough that it takes over from Giant Dodgers is number one. And it's been stayed there ever since.
- [93:37]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, that's interesting that it's been only 20 years or so that Red Sox Yankees has been number one. Because obviously there's history that goes back further than that and there's, you know, you can't quantify, I guess like the curse of the babe, right. Like that doesn't factor into this or you know, but. And then there's like 78 and so, you know, there's stuff that predates that period. But it was wasn't number one. And is there any way that it could be supplanted? What would it take to knock it out of that perch? Because. Because I've noted that that rivalry isn't what it has been or what it was when it kind of took over that number one spot 20 or so years ago when you had 2003 and 2004 and these teams almost every year were finishing one and two in some order in the AL east and then sometimes playing each other in the playoffs. And, and there's been a bit of a lull in that lately, at least for a full round playoff series. Obviously we just had a wild card matchup and that has happened in the not too distant past as well. But is anyone within striking distance of knocking off Yankees Red Sox?
- [94:45]
Michael Mountain
Yeah, I mean, it's not as commanding a lead as it once was. You know, to your point, rivalry scores in general, the magnitude of these scores has been decreasing since, steadily since the, since the 1960s. Again because of the advent of divisional play league expansion. You're not, you don't have as many games against the same opponent each year as you used to. And also because of the expanded playoff format, those regular season games don't have the same championship leverage index that they used to either. And because you're obviously not facing the same team in the playoffs every single year, the fact that those regular season games are getting devalued means that your ability to rack up really high pain points against a single opponent in a given year is declining. So we haven't been talking too many numbers here, but just to sort of frame the discussion a little bit, I mentioned the 1962 National League tiebreaker series. That was the highest rivalry score for any team versus team matchup in MLB history. The Giants Dodgers at the end of that season had a rivalry score of 831 points. And the number one active rivalry by this system as of today, Yankees Red Sox is only at 311 points. So that gives you a sense of the scale here. And when Yankees Red Sox became the number one rivalry in,022, 2004, it had a score of 369 points. So it's gone down by, you know, 15 to 20% since it peaked. But you know, other rivalries across the board are also decreasing. So Yankees Red Sox is number one at 311. The Dodgers Giants, which is second behind it is at 287. So that's about, yeah, about 25 points or so of gap, which is not insignificant. But, but it's not nothing either. I mean, to give you a sense, I don't have the numbers right in front of me of how much pain, like what's the most points inflicted by one team in a single season. But to give you one sense of scale, the Yankees Twins post season series in 2019 that is actively contributing about 35 points to the Twins pain score. So 35 points to or. So that's for a postseason matchup. Obviously, if you're only seeing a team in a regular season, that's going to be a lot less. But again, the sort of base number of it's one point for each loss plus whatever the championship leverage index. So you know, you play a team 12 times in the season and you split the series with them, you're probably picking up between six and 12 pain points, depending on where you are in the postseason hunt. So, you know, 25 points is. You're not going to, you're not going to overcome that gap in one year, but it's not insurmountable either.
- [97:34]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So there's the spreadsheet which we will link to so that you can check this year by year and see the top three rivalries for each franchise and the top rivalries for each league. And if you were sensing, you noted on the discord group that for instance, this year there was a new top rival. The Angels fiercest rivalry is now with the Rangers instead of the A's. So all the Angels fans out there who are suddenly thinking to themselves, you know what, I really, I resent the Rangers more than the A's all of a sudden. That is backed up by Michael's system here. The other thing that you did was design a rivalry weekend because this is something that we talked about on the podcast and people critiqued MLB's selection of which teams would face each other during that rivalry weekend. And some of them were real rivalries and, and some of them were not exactly right. And you're limited, you're kind of constrained in what you can do, of course, but you came up with kind of the platonic ideal rivalry weekend if you want to maximize the scores.
- [98:39]
Michael Mountain
Yeah, I mean, again, it's just, it's tough to pair everybody off in a way that makes it satisfying. You're always going to have leftovers. And also, again, this system is not accounting for all of the factors that MLB was feeding that with. Right. They were heavily prioritizing non divisional matchups. They did a lot of crosstown Yankees. Mets was a series ace, Giants was a series, et cetera. So I did a version of this that was just maximizing the rivalry score across all matchups. And then I did another version that was only non divisional opponents because odd number of Teams in each division. You're always going to have a leftover if you do it that way. But the absolute peak rivalry weekend, if you wanted to say these are all of the most storied matchups that we can fit into a single weekend of play where there's no overlap that would have looked like Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, Padres.
- [99:29]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah.
- [99:30]
Michael Mountain
Atlanta, Philly, Guardians, Tigers, Cubs, Brewers.
- [99:36]
Ben Lindbergh
Yep.
- [99:36]
Michael Mountain
A's, Angels, Mariners, Rangers, White Sox and Twins, Reds and Pirates. D backs and Rockies, Marlins and Mets. You can see we're going down the list here. We're getting less exciting. Rays, Blue Jays, Giants, Cardinals, Orioles, Royals. Say that three times fast. The o' Royal matchup. And finally the two leftover teams, unfortunately, Houston and Washington. Houston is kind of a really weird case in this just because they've changed, changed leagues recently. And so they don't, they don't haven't. They haven't built up the history with sort of teams in any league in any division to the extent that others have. They just don't have the same history. I mean, obviously they've, they've been in the playoffs a lot recently, which has helped, but it's not a substitute for, you know, decades and decades of history playing against the same set of opponents. In fact, if you look at the inter league rivalry scores in general, it's a very wide range in terms of how those balance out. I mean, you know, the brewers and the Astros have some what we would now call an interleague rivalry, which is, you know, comparable to some in intra league rivalries from other teams just because they've had so much more time. You know, Astros, astros, cardinals is 117, rivalry score of 117. But if you discount those sort of edge cases, most of the interleague rivalries are like 25 points or less. Just because there's no history there, you don't play them enough. I mean, there's the MLB designated regular interleague opponents again. Yankees, Mets, Angels, Dodgers, Royals, Cardinals. Those.
- [101:24]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah. And yeah. So you can account for geography in this method. I mean, you kind of can indirectly, because the division rivalries. Divisions tend to be at least loosely correlated with geography. And so the teams that have played each other a lot are probably in the same region of the country. But you're not cooking the books, you're not adding extra points for being in the same city, for instance, over and above the competitive history. Yeah, yeah.
- [101:49]
Michael Mountain
It's just coming out as a consequence of the league scheduling those matchups more frequently, which builds up that familiarity effect.
- [101:57]
Ben Lindbergh
Yes. And is there A team. Maybe the answer is just it's the most recent expansion teams but the least rival risk team, like the team that just has no juice when it comes to really rivalries with anyone.
- [102:11]
Michael Mountain
Yeah, I mean again, divisional or sorry, expansion teams in general just because they haven't had as much time to build those up. The team with the lowest primary rivalry score is actually Houston, but again, we talked about that being an edge kick of changing leagues. The second lowest is Colorado. Again, expansion team, not a ton of history. The White Sox are among, you know, classic 16 franchises, you know.
- [102:38]
Meg Rowley
Yeah.
- [102:39]
Michael Mountain
Teams that go back to 1903, they're, they're, you know, number one rival is currently listed as the Cleveland Guardians, but it only has a rivalry score of 218 which is like, like, I mean the average inter intra division rivalry will have a score of, you know, between 200 and 225. So the fact that their number one rival is, you know, in the middle of that range is a little depressing.
- [103:08]
Ben Lindbergh
That's so White Sox. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [103:11]
Michael Mountain
And the least intense rivalry by the way in baseball right now a across any pair of teams. Speaking of the White Sox, it's the White Sox and the San Diego Padres. Yeah. Nine points of rivalry score between those two.
- [103:28]
Ben Lindbergh
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess. I, I don't think of them as, as great rivals. Okay. Well actually I guess, you know, you're not accounting for the Fernando Tatis trade. Maybe in.
- [103:40]
Michael Mountain
That's right.
- [103:41]
Ben Lindbergh
Maybe that adds some intrigue to the least, least rivalry. Rivalry.
- [103:46]
Michael Mountain
Yeah. They can start playing the Tatis Cup.
- [103:48]
Ben Lindbergh
I don't know. Yep. Yep. Okay. Well, this was fun. Thank you. We will link to the data on the show page as always, if people want to peruse it and you can join the Discord group if you are a Patreon supporter and have access to these insights all the time. But always a pleasure to talk to you or get answers from you. Thank you very much, Mike.
- [104:10]
Michael Mountain
My pleasure. Thanks, Ben.
- [104:11]
Ben Lindbergh
Well, some people sent us additional information and images and video of the Addison Barger exhibit in the lobby of the Marriott in Toronto where the pull out couch that he slept on is on display or has been. They have a red carpet rolled out in front of the pullout couch. The couch is not actually pulled out. I was sort of disappointed to see it just looks like a regular couch. So you can sit on it but you can't really lie on it it the way that Addison Barger did. Anyway, here's an excerpt from a segment on CTV News.
- [104:41]
Meg Rowley
After a grand slam in the sixth inning of Game one of the World Series. The lore of the pullout couch lives on, now on display in the hotel lobby with fans flocking in to have a seat.
- [104:53]
Ben Lindbergh
Is that the couch?
- [104:55]
Michael Mountain
No.
- [104:56]
Meg Rowley
And as far as how comfortable it.
- [104:58]
Michael Mountain
Is, well, I think he got a great sleep. I think that's the secret sauce here. He clearly really enjoyed his stay. And again, he looks so relaxed in that picture, it's unbelievable. He's just doing his thing and hit one of the biggest home runs in Blue Jays history the following day, giving.
- [105:11]
Meg Rowley
A whole new meaning to the phrase big comfy couch. The couch will be here in the lobby on display until November 14th. Then the hotel says they're not sure if they're going to keep it here on display, auction it off for charity, or put it back in its original room.
- [105:25]
Ben Lindbergh
If you weren't aware that there was any special meaning to the phrase big comfy couch. It's the name of a Canadian kid show. Anyway, by the time this podcast is posted, the couch will be gone. Unless they do decide to extend its stay. Or if they auction it off, maybe you can be the proud purchaser and owner of the famous couch. In other vaguely Blue Jays related news, I'm amused to learn that Blue Jays assistant hitting coach Hunter Mintz is now going to the Giants to become their hitting coach. He played for Tony Vitello in college. It makes sense. Mentz makes sense. And it also makes sense given all the acclaim that the Blue Jays got and their hitting coaches got for how they helped their holdover hitters improve by seemingly preserving their content contact ability but getting them to swing harder, hit for more power without sacrificing any contact. One of the things we speculated about was whether other teams would try to do that too. I'm sure they have been trying to do that, but whether they would figure out a way to do it as effectively as the Blue Jays evidently did given the Blue Jays success in the postseason. And one way you do that is by poaching the people who helped make that happen for the original team. But the best part of all of this, of course, is that there will now be a Hunter Ments on the Giants, which sounds like some sort of fake alias for Hunter Pence. I was very relieved to see that it is in fact pronounced men, so that it does rhyme with Pence. All right, so we started this episode talking about rivalries between Judge and Cal, or between Skin and Sanchez. We ended up talking about the rivalry between the White Sox and the Padres, and also some more notable ones. Michael also messaged me to note I said that the top three rivalries for each team are all intra division matchups, which is true, but only barely. The Atlanta LA rivalry 205 points points is only slightly behind the Atlanta Washington rivalry 210 points for Atlanta's tertiary rival placement. That's also by far the strongest non divisional rivalry between any two teams. Atlanta LA Guardians Yankees is second fiercest but only 173 points. You can make like Michael Mountain and support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners, Tom Dever or Deaver, Matthew Stone, Janet Green, John McGinley and Eddie Campbell. 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, discounts on merch and ad free Fangrass memberships, personalized messages, and so much more. Check out all the offerings@patreon.com effectivelywild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastangraphs.com youm can join our Facebook group at facebook.com group effectivelywild. You can find the effectively wild subreddit at r effectivelywild and you can check the show notes at Fan Graphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today, as well as the site where you can sign up for Effectively Wild Secret Santa. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. Thanks to you for listening. That will do it for today and for this week. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you next week.
- [108:47]
Meg Rowley
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