Ben Lindbergh (42:49)
Passon tweeted a partial list of pitchers who've landed on the IL with arm injuries this year. Scubal, Garrett Crochet, Spencer Schwellenbach, Hunter Green, Hunter Brown, Brandon Woodruff, Joe Ryan. Another who was recently felled, Nick Pavetta, Josh Hader, Edwin Diaz. So yeah, it's nothing new. It's unfortunate. It's one of the worst things about baseball these days, but it is not a surprise. And Skubal, because of the injury issues earlier in his career, he was a little bit of a late bloomer. He pitched effectively in his mid-20s, but he didn't blossom into Cy Young school until his age 27 season and this is his age 29 season and he's going to turn 30 right before the lockout, probably around when he would be signing his deal. So it's not as if he's super young already. Now he's maybe young enough that if he wanted to maximize the length of the contract, this might be his best bet. But if he did, I mean, if it takes him a little longer to come back and, and he say settled for a one year deal or something. Oh my goodness, the money that he would make in that one year and come back. But that's probably unlikely and odds are it won't be too different from what we were all expecting, assuming he comes back. But the Tigers will have to cobble together a rotation out of all the loose bodies that they have floating around. Just maybe Jackson Jobe returns from TJ at some point. And I meant mention Melton and Verander and Reese Olson and Casey Mize it's just, it's a whole rotation's worth of pitchers on the IL for them. So. But I have confidence that they can just sort of stay in the race. Their offense is good enough like the rest of their roster measures up to the AL Central standard. So I think that they will hang around and they'll still be hanging around when he returns. Hopefully when okay, so the Mets have the same manager as the last time we talked and it sounds like they will have the same manager for a while, somewhat to the surprise of many observers, us included. But Carlos Mendoza receives the voted confidence from Pobo David Stearns. And sometimes that is described as the dreaded vote of confidence because sometimes the vote of confidence does precede a dismissal and it actually belies some lack of confidence. But this one was pretty explicit and I think it's, it's maybe backed up by the fact that if they wanted to let him go, they've had ample opportunity to. So the fact that he has survived this long sort of suggests that they want him to be the manager. I mean, they get off to a 1021 start despite all the spending and the turnover, the expectations and everything. And then they had a weak home stand. It was what, three and six? And they were losing to bad or not great teams. And as we speak, they've won three of their past four because that happened to come against the Angels or no, that's not right. They won one against the Rockies and then they took two out of three from the Angels. It's something. It's a start. But David Stearns said they don't intend to make a change. It wasn't even a like. Right now we're comfortable. We're not making a change. Like Stern said, we know our record is not what we want. We know we are capable of more. We don't view this as a manager problem and we don't intend to make a change. And he called Mendoza on Friday to deliver that news and Mendoza said he appreciated the support and he has always felt it from them. And you know, I actually think a little bit better of the Mets for staying the course here. Not because I think Mendoza is an amazing manager or that dismissing him or keeping him changes their outlook all that significantly, but precisely because I don't think it changes the outlook all that significantly. I actually sort of appreciate that they are just standing by their guy just because I think that speaks to maybe some decisiveness or perhaps some actual accountability. Because. Okay, two things. One, Danzaborski wrote a piece last week which I thought was good. It was kind of the definitive look, I think, at whether you should expect your team to play better after firing a manager mid season. And this was pretty comprehensive. And he went back more than 20 years and he looked at how the teams were playing before they fired their manager, how they played after, and crucially, how their performance after the firing compared to the in season projections from that day, which Dan has handy as the proprietor of Zips, and then also using the Fangrass depth charts for more recent years. So nothing too surprising, I suppose. The teams did better after they fired their managers. Prior to the firings, they had a collective.414 winning percentage. After the firings, they had a collective.467 winning percentage. Okay, well, that's a significant bump. And we've already sort of seen that small sample. But you look at the Red Sox post Cora and the Phillies post Thompson. The Red Sox were recording on Tuesday afternoon. They're four and four under Chad Tracy. The Phillies are six and one under Don Mattingly. And the thing is that you would expect them both to be pretty good because they were expected to be pretty good coming into the season. And the fact that they weren't is why Alex Cora and. And Rob Thompson are no longer their manager. But that's the thing. Dan took the extra step of comparing that improved performance post firing to what Zips projected on the day those managers were fired, knowing nothing about who the manager was, because that's not an input into Zips. And it, it worked out almost too well, almost suspiciously cleanly, because those teams were projected to have a.467 rest of season winning percentage. So Dan says across 3,061 games played or managed, the new managers won 1.5 fewer games than expected. I mean, it almost could not have been closer. And that's like 40 firings from 2004 to 2025. That's a pretty substantial sample. And those teams played exactly to the projection system's expectations, which, as Dan noted, it doesn't prove that managers mean nothing. There's. There's no way to prove that, he wrote. It's certainly quite possible that if these managers had been doing an especially poor job, their teams would have continued to fall short of expectations. Taking a team that's usually playing miserably and at least getting it back on track is a good thing. You never know. Maybe managers had something to do with those slow starts in some cases or the recoveries in some cases. I'm sure in some number of those cases the managers made a difference. But yeah, on the whole, you shouldn't expect to just flip that switch and pull that lever and suddenly be better than the projections are already expecting you to be. And so I sort of respect that. The Mets are just like, you know what, it's probably not a managerial issue. And there was a post last week by Andrew Ball. I've cited his newsletter a couple times. The front office executive. He. He was the AGM of the Astros. And he basically said he doesn't think that firing the manager in the absence of any other change or like a real smoking gun kind of malpractice is actually what accountability looks like. And we kind of talked about this with the Phillies firing of Rob Thompson, how we all just. We take this in stride. We take it for granted. We don't really bat an eye when a team that's off to a slow start just sort of sacrifices the manager because it's the way things are done. But it is kind of inconsistent to say, as the GM or the popo, I take full accountability. Right. I constructed this roster like the buck stops here. Ultimately, the responsibility lies with me. And then defy the manager, which is very often what they do. And we're not surprised when they say those things because they always say those things. But it doesn't actually fundamentally make much sense because, like, if. If you're the one who's accountable and you built the roster and you hired the manager like you, you had more to do with this team's fortunes probably than the manager did. But you're not firing yourself. You are firing the manager to the wolves to maybe get the heat off yourself. Ultimately, that's often what it is about, or it's just about doing something to avoid the accusation that you're too complacent or you're not doing enough. But I really think, you know, given these three situations, I think all these teams will be much better than they have been to this point. But I really do, I sort of respect the Mets for just saying, you know what, like, if there are issues, maybe they. They run deeper than this, or we have confidence or whatever it is. We just don't think this is actually going to make a difference. So we're not really going to go along with the pressure to do this just for the sake of doing something.