Effectively Wild Episode 2542: C U in the CS

0:00More than 2000 episodes retro-spec-t-e-filed, and at each new one we still collectively smile That's effectively wild. That's effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2542 of Effectively Wild. The Faker-U-Space Ballpark has brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh, a fan of graphs, and I'm joined by Ben Lemberger, the Ringer Ben, how are you? Doing alright, and here to remind people for the final time that they can join us on Sunday for our first Patreon Playoff livestream if they are so inclined. NLCS Game 1, we know who will be playing. We do not know who will be playing in ALCS Game 1, but that is not a problem for our Patreon livestream. We'll do one on Sunday, and we'll do one probably during the World Series. Sign up now. You can join us for those, and you can hear this whole episode and won't that be fun?

1:03It's going to be holidays on Monday in the US and Canada. Just Sunday night spend your Sunday evening with Effectively Wild, with all Ben and Meg, and many of your fellow Effectively Wild listeners. We thought today we might be able to preview both Championship Series, but not the case, because the Guardians 1, Game 4, enforced a Game 5. We will do some NLCS discussion, and we can do some other stuff too. We can catch up on a few other things. We can talk about MLB's latest CBA proposals, etc. We can also catch up with the Soul Division Series, still standing here, and Game 4, which was sometimes exciting, and sometimes a slog, and an exciting slog, and occasionally exciting slog. It was a long one. Yeah. It was a lot of pictures. It was a lot of pictures.

2:03I think the most important part of that game for me is that I finally figured out who my visual comp for Eric Fettys, or you're ready for this? Are you ready for my very relatable example? Okay. We're in the first X-Men movie, with OG X-Men with Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman and Anna Pakwin. You remember how there's the anti-mutant senator? Right. Is it there always? Yeah. Bad sort. We are to understand him to be. And for those who don't remember the 2000 film X-Men, one of the plot points is that Magneto, played by Surrey and McCallan, has a device that's going to turn everyone into a mutant. Right. The whole planet. And then they won't be persecuted because everyone will be a mutant.

3:06And his test subject for the mutant machine is this racist senator. And he gets over his skis, though, as the problem Magneto, because it just sort of makes you dissolve and die. It doesn't take it too much for your body to have this genetic mutation affected in real time. And so this senator becomes like a, he becomes like a water man. And then he becomes like an actual water man. Like he dissolves into water after he is rescued. And there's a moment mid blob transformation when he goes from like kind of vaguely leaking to dissolving. And in the midst of that transformation, he looks like Eric Fettie. Specifically at that moment, specifically at that moment. Not just in general, because this is Senator Robert Kelly played by Bruce Davison. And I ran this, I ran this comp by Michael Bauman and he was like, you're crazy. And then I specified, no, this is like mid, mid blob.

4:10And then he was like, okay, you're right. Like I just sent you, I just sent you a photo from the internet. That's Eric Fettie, you know, like a more translucent version of him to be clear, but like that's Eric Fettie. It's not a very flattering comp to the picture you sent me at this moment, which I will share on the show page. But this is like a blobby, modeled skin monstrosity is you're saying the closest copy you can come up with for Eric. It's been bothering me. It's been bugging me like, what? Who does this man look like? And to be clear, he doesn't look like Bruce Davison. Davison? Davison. Davison. Yeah. And a Pac-Win. Bruce Davison. Yeah. Grumkin. Well, Grumkin. Yeah. Well, I never would have come up with this comp, but. I think it's pretty relatable, you know, like. But that film started like the superhero movie. Sure.

5:10And Spider-Man, you know, like we were kind of out of that business for a long time after. Yeah. And you don't forget blade the blade movies. Shut up to the blade movie. You never forget the blade movies. Yeah. But they're having some trouble making more blade movies, but they are, of course, making many more X-Men movies soon. And everything old is new again. And so many of those original X-Men are coming back. Cool. And Ventures Doomsday for better overs. So we will see. There can be an Avengers? No, they're not going to. Anyway. Anyway, we should probably. Yeah, but well, okay. Well, I'm sure Eric Fettie would be thrilled to hear that. She doesn't listen to the podcast. No, I'm sure he doesn't, but I guess I see sort of what you see what I mean. It's in the chin, maybe, or something. It's a lot. It's a lot about the chin, if we're being honest. Yeah. I see something with Bruce Davidson non-mute and transformation also just maybe with that.

6:13It's a different color in that era at least. Very different. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm glad that you got that. You're welcome. You're welcome. Yeah. Well, you know how it's like when you can't come up with the comp, it's like, it's like your brain is itching. Yes, right. I'm just surprised that this is what scratched it. It's like, oh, no, no. You're right. Right. Yeah. I feel satisfied now. Thank you. Okay. So that was my main takeaway from the parade of pictures. The perhaps more relevant takeaway from a baseball perspective is just the continuation of what we talked about last time, which is, hey, well, it's actually don't really have pitching. So that's going to be a problem at some point. Also, it's nice when so there's that and we can talk about that in greater detail. And then also just nice to be reminded, like, you know, who's good at baseball? How's it? Remarice. I know. That has been pretty good. That has been a pleasure because after the rough season he had injury plagues, power outage and then hitless in his first couple of games of the series.

7:17And back to back multi hit games, multi RBI games, games with extra base hits. Obviously he hit a big homer in this game. He had the triple in the previous game and a double. So yeah, if he's coming alive, of course, the guardians might have one more game left in their season. But if they have more than one game left in their season, then that boats quite well. If they could get him hot and back to his usual self because they got to this point with a decent by guardian standards offense, despite Jose Ramirez was usually the foundation of that lamp being kind of a drag on it. And so, yeah, if he could click now, that would be huge. Yeah. And then I guess tangentially to all of this is the thought, I don't know if you said that legendary bears had coach. Yes, I think you could. And here's a sentence that remains strange. Wow, I wonder how the Pope's doing today. It's so weird for Chicago sports to potentially have the Pope on tilt, his holiness.

8:22I wonder what he would think of my Eric Fetticop. He'd probably be like, that's not very generous of you. That's not exolding. I don't mean it to be mean to Eric Fettic. Sometimes that's a sweet look like. It kind of is. Even if you didn't mean it that way, I think it's hard to avoid that. But I guess that it wasn't done with ill will that this is the association that came to your mind. But you couldn't help it. Yeah. So 50 pictures, Fettie was the only one who got more than seven outs. He was the Ironman of this game. So it was just pitching change after pitching change, mid-earning pitching change in many cases. It was three hours and 39 minutes, which is long in this era. Jochie and noted 10th longest, ninth inning game, regular season or postseason in the pitch clock era. And I think the third longest postseason, ninth inning game in the pitch clock era. So it did kind of drag, but it also had three lead changes. Right.

9:22And that back and forth in the middle there, that was fun. That was exciting. And yes, the soft underbelly of the White Sock staff was exposed because it turns out that Grant Taylor can't actually go for innings every time. In fact, he might not even be able to go a third of an inning. In this case, he faced six hitters, but he didn't get any of them out. And he came in and was lined up pretty much to finish that game, I mean, given his usage patterns. They arguably, I guess they could have put him in to start that inning instead of waiting for him to be in trouble. But either way, I guess they were trying not to push him quite as long as they had pushed him before. But boy, he didn't give him a single out. And good job by the guardians. Of course, that was that rally would just kept going and going and going. It was a very non-playoff like rally because it was long sequence offense. It was just stringing together hits and hit by pitches and walks and just lots of station to station or first to third.

10:28It was not just bloop and a blast or anything like that that you associated with this time of year. Typically, it's hard to string together that many hits because the pitchers are good and the defense is good. And the White Socks pitchers are not that good though. And they got away with that to this point. And yeah, then they sort of imploded. So maybe they'll claim game five and move on and that'll just be a blip. But that certainly exposed a pre-existing weakness that they had managed to paper over to that point. Yeah. And everyone will get a little rest. They'll be easy travel today before they mount a game five attempt. But it does seem like it isn't the best group. And you know, it's not like the Guardians didn't throw out a bunch of guys either. Oh, yeah. They had to send a sort of parade of relievers. They brought their presumptive game five starter in it. I know. Yeah. So I think that both of these teams are in a spot where they...

11:32Well, I mean, apart from anything else, probably, which they had been able to take care of business much earlier because they will go in without that much rest to the CS. And they're sitting there about to take on a race team that's like, we are quite rested, actually. You know, that's the way that they're thinking about it. So, yeah, I don't know, man. It's going to be interesting. And they were going for their first home playoff clincher in 120 years, which would have been nice for Chicago. But they didn't get that then. And so, yeah, the Cleveland pitching plan, both of these teams were managing pretty sweatily and just tap dancing and spinning plates. And I don't know. The whole White Sox approach, it's pitching chaos, although as Joshi and noted, it's nice when you have pitching chaos. If you at least have some sort of bedrock when the Tigers were doing pitching chaos, they had Tarek's Google to build around.

12:32And the White Sox don't really have that guy. They had Davis Martin as that guy earlier in the year. And then he kind of fell apart. And then they have Sean Burke. And Burke has been effective when he's coming in in relief in that long relief bulk role. But they just have not gone with any traditional starting pitcher, really. And they just don't have any that makes you super confident. And Cleveland does, and they have a couple of them. And yeah, they use Gavin Williams to close out this game. And they have to have him start Saturday, which I'm sure he's probably not quite as fragile as Chris sale, let's say. I guess you can be more confident that this is not going to derail his start on Saturday. But then again, he's never done this. He's never done this before. He's never pitched in relief. And so you can't forecast that with complete confidence. So it did seem to me, I guess this comes back to what we've been talking about where teams were trying to push their leverage guys longer and longer.

13:37And it was working in some cases and backfiring in others. And it seems like teams were already backing off that a bit that the Padres said, well, maybe we'll just use Mason Miller for one inning before the paternity leave pre paternity. And then in this game, Kate Smith was set up to go multiple innings again. And he looked fine in the first inning, but then the second inning, he just, he seems sort of gassed all of a sudden. And he lost a couple ticks and just didn't seem as sharp. And I guess they could have stuck with him and pushed him with the off day ahead. But it seemed like vote had lost a little confidence in him. And to have to break glass and bring in Williams, which I know they had talked about it. It wasn't just a spur of the moment decision. And there was enough of a cushion there that I thought it was debatable. Did you really need to do that? Right. There were other guys, I get that you don't want to risk anything, but maybe let it get a runner too closer and see if you can get away with a lower leverage guy who's not your ACEs or starting your next must win game potentially.

14:44Yeah. And I guess it all removing Messick as early as he did, which I like the urgency because it is an elimination game for Cleveland. And he was not at his sharpest, but then again, when you start that creative relievers, how many of those guys do you really have more confidence in than you do in Parker Messick? Right. Yeah, once they gave him the quick hook, then they had to just keep him coming. And that's how you end up with Williams out there. I don't know what I necessarily would have done there. The fact I wonder if the sequencing had been a little bit different. Like if I mean, it probably would have because you would have had an out in hand, but I do wonder about the psychological toll of Vargas like leading off that ining with a home run. And then you going, oh, oh, and then you know, Murkami walks if that's even, you know, it's just if you would have one out in hand, do we see Williams at all or does he just let Smith kind of try to like like what knuckle his way through?

15:44And you know, you're compromising Smith to in that circumstance presumably right if you leave him out there. And he has to throw a bunch of innings, but like he comes at the end of game five and you have to figure out the first couple of things. So it's just like, what are your, what's the plan here? And he threw what like 18 and 18 pitches, well, he's did so, you know, it's not nothing. You know, and you had to go through the whole room or roll, warring up and who knows what that did there. So I don't know, it's, I don't know if it's the sort of thing that one day off sort of washes away from. Yeah. Well, I have no idea how to predict what the pitching plan will be and any game between these two teams and especially one featuring the white socks. But yeah, the guardians have done a good job to claw their way back into the series and they've put them on play. They've also drawn a bunch of walks and so they're not hitting for a ton of power, but they're getting on base.

16:44And that has been enough. And obviously, white socks offence is sort of feast and famine at least with the strikeouts and the homers and everything. And so with Burke going again, he is a pretty decent control guy usually. And so maybe that plays in the white socks favor. Maybe he doesn't issue quite as many free passes. Maybe he can give them a little length and maybe by that point Taylor is back in form. So I don't know whether that was just not his day and good job by the guardians and maybe a little luck with where some of the bad at balls went or whether it was some sort of delayed response to his usage earlier and that taking its toll after the fact who knows. But obviously he is a candidate to be stretched out and start next season. So he's not totally miscast in that role. But yeah, it's been pretty unpredictable from start to start from game to game. I mean, Tanner, Bobby got into this game too.

17:44It's all hands on deck, which it should be when you're backs against the wall. And again, I enjoy that about playoff baseball. I don't so much enjoy not getting to see good starting pitching matchups. But I do enjoy that we then get to see those starters come in when you never know when they're going to come in. I might not even be expecting them to come in. And then there they are suddenly, but these are two pretty good managers seemingly. So it seems like they should know what they're doing. But boy, they were busy. I don't know whether it was managing or over managing or just dealing with the hands that you've been dealt or the lack of arms. You've been dealt in Venables case. But yeah, that was that was wild. And I don't know what we have in store on Saturday. Yeah, I don't know man. It's going to be wild. It's going to be wild. Yes. And so I was thinking about the the rest versus rest conversation that we were having a few years ago. That has subsided mercifully.

18:45I think so because the results have flipped at least. And I don't know if the results we've had lately are anymore telling them the results we had early on. But Neil Payne noted coming into this postseason that by teams now, if you look over the history of this latest playoff format going back to 2022, it's now they've both played about two expectations according to his calculations using elo ratings and trying to assess the strengths of the teams coming in. Because over the first two playoffs with that format, the by teams won a couple times fewer than they should have according to the projections and underlying strength and everything. And then over the last couple of post seasons, they won a couple more times than you would have figured that they would. And so it has equalized. And on the whole, the by teams have now or coming into this year, I think,

19:46were expected to win about nine and one nine. They went nine and seven. And that was basically bang on what you would have expected. It's just yeah, you had two years where it went against that in two years where it was even more extreme in that direction. And this year, it's been three and oh in favor of the by teams so far. And Cleveland's now that still hangs in the balance, but the by teams will have gotten the better of the division series round. So I would guess that the by teams on the whole they they should win more often just because they are usually better or often better than that's why they got the buy. It's not always the case as we have discussed with the seating and the awards for division winners who might not be the best teams, but you'd expect them to win a little more often than not. And now they have or even a little more often than that. So I think it's just a lesson in wait for there to be a bigger sample because yeah, anyone long October is not going to tell you whether.

20:49Oh, actually there is a huge penalty to taking those days off and getting rested and healthy, but also rusty. I would rather have the by on the whole, but I don't think that teams, you know, having those results go heavily in their favor in recent years really tells us the true talent level of rest versus rest anymore than those teams losing more often than expected. Yes, I think that I think that's a good way to put it. I don't want to say that there's nothing to the notion right or that we or that we couldn't find out that there was something to the notion. I'm just skeptical that the question of rust versus rust isn't just going to be swamped by other stuff that is particular to the teams in question, right, that. I just, I'm I'm I'm I'm remain skeptical. My default answer is you want to be able to rest your guys. Because everyone is banged up this time of year, even if you're not banged up in a way that requires an IEL Stint or that has curved your use in the final month of the season or whatever.

21:54You just want to, although, you know, as I'm aging, I'm realizing that like sometimes one left to your own devices and the and able to sort of like feel your body over an extended stretch. It's worse, you know, yeah, yeah, I'm very aware of all the like I you know when I was on vacation, I went hiking one of the days. And I think my knee is just permanently different now. I think my left knee is just different than it was before. Is it better? No, Ben, you know, and it never goes in that direction, right? That's the thing about it. That's the humbling condition that is aging that we all experience. Where it's like, oh, other than like, why is it you become in theory, wiser as you age, right? Because you have a you have experience, you have perspective, but in terms of the body, yeah, only moving in the one. It's just different now. And nothing I didn't fall, you know, well, there is that idea. After a certain point of use it or lose it and skills and attributes to grade and and atrophy.

22:59And so you want to sort of, and that's why it's important to get exercise as you age and stave off osteoporosis or muscle loss or whatever and being active helps. But of course, it only helps so much. And yeah, the trend line does tend to trend in one direction over a long enough time frame. But I'm with you. I would rather have the rest and also be the team that got the buy because maybe I was the better team to begin with. But yes, those results have equalized at least a little bit, if not more than equalized. Shall we discuss the NLCS? Yeah!

24:07Thanks for watching!