Members-Only Game Thread: ALCS – Oct 16, 2026
Welcome to our Open Game Thread for the ALCS game today. Only Members can participate, and unlike our usual staff Q&A chats, your messages will be posted immediately.
Our Member community is made up of thousands of incredibly knowledgable baseball fans, and we think this is a great way to follow a game with like-minded baseball enthusiasts. We might even have some FanGraphs Staff drop in and join the fun. Please be courteous to your fellow Members, or you may find your chat privileges revoked.
the brewers fan in my vicinity has stated "i don't care who wins this series, only that it goes 7" which. i think is fair at this point
but wouldn't MIL lose some of its momentum?
how massive is milwaukee. i figure their collective inertia should carry them a while
7 games with two extra inning games in TBR.
Though there's two off days between a game 7 and game 1 of the WS. Which is plenty of time of a bullpen to recover. SP might not be lined up.
I wouldn't mind more baseball games.
without giving away too much, i got an interview in baseball thanks to seeing a posting on fangraphs! thanks fangraphs!
eyo, grats!
that's awesome! good luck!
congrats!
did you have to fight through AI resumes and AI HR screening?
… don't remind me of the hell that awaits me after my thermo midterm…
honestly no, it was a pretty lightweight application and process thus far
I'm scared if I had to apply for jobs again.
i'm hearing all my classmates complain about r. i have never used r. i keep reading that i should learn r, upskilling and whatnot, and i just don't want to.
i wrestle with computers enough… i don't want to do more wrestling… i don't want to wrestle a computer to make the computer wrestle more computer…
When I was in college more than 15 years ago I also had classmates learning R. If it's still in use now, that's an eternity in computer time so maybe learning it is a better investment than learning some other things?
i will be honest, i just don't enjoy stats! i think it'd probably be good for me, but i took quantum with that intention last year and it was not very pleasant.
I bet the Rays at 25/1 to win the AL East (thanks to FG projections), so I've been a fan all year. I kinda like them at +155 to win the Series, but the Sim says I need 2/1, so I'm reluctantly gonna pass.
You would have lost money if you bet against the Brewers because of our projections.
I've lost money betting against the Brewers the last THREE years!!
Sorry about that!
But had the 2 long shot AL East winners (TOR/TB) because of FG. That makes up for a lot of OV/UND misses.
It looks quite wet in Cleveland. Tarp just got put back on…so that's not good.
Tarps on is just not compatible with baseball in 2026.
I didn't realize the game was going to be delayed when I posted up on the couch, and now I've got a sleeping cat on my lap and my book is in the other room.
I've never looked up Cleveland's weather so much as I have in the last week.
mike trout would be so disappointed in you
I look up weather a lot. Just not Cleveland.
And sunrise and sunset.
I learned R in grad school and it (in addition to my non-coding skills) has kept me in steady work since 2021 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
im in a similar spot, but i did Python instead of R
I live on the other side of Lake Erie and all of our storms come from the general direction of Cleveland
I've been slowly building up the Python skill, mostly for ArcGIS
Oooo…are we turning this into a coding chat? I'm in!
Until we get baseball?
what do you use to code the chats? i assume its mostly javascript?
if it turns into a coding chat, do I need to leave or will I learn something?
neither, we'll probably be incompressible and boring with a dumb joke every now and then
Sean actually has his own bespoke programming language just for fangraphs? /snark
Most disappointing thing is sitting down on the couch with delivered pizza in hand and seeing a tarp on the field.
Hey, at least you have pizza. I have cat.
But think of the people who are seeing a tarp and *don't* have pizza!
Cat? Side note, our 15 year old cat just caught a fly. That was exciting.
the cat i live with is trying to convince us that he has never been fed
what toppings?
The kids are cheese and so am I.
My favorite pizza in town is a Beef Tostada though.
I'm couchlocked by a sleeping tabby (see above)
Our orange tabby just got off the couch to wait for his food in 90 minutes.
Our front end is NextJS. We still have a handful of pages that still use .NET webforms which is old.
So the front end of chat is in Next/React/JS.
I see the chat polls are a lot more realistic now for who's going to win. Game 1 was 91% for the Rays.
Chat backend is .NET, so C#.
R gang member, reporting for duty
Which this is a lot like some corporate stacks and in turn a lot of teams have tech stacks similar to this. Or at least had a few years ago.
Python >>>>> R
brought to you by the Python Gang
i am decent enough at python that i think i can read docs and be vaguely competent
my partner knows ???frontend??? as well as everything else from cs undergrad. but i know not
Been a while since I logged on to a Fangraphs chat and understood nothing of what was being said. But I know what wrc+ stands for! Is that worth nothing???
what's a run? are they like points?
Yes, but also literally a guy running, which is a necessity; see Merkle, Fred.
Part of me wishes we used more python, but in the end it doesn't matter too much. I also don't do as much with our ETL process.
and sean joins the python gang…
We really ought to bring boner back as a term for messing up
but why doesn't the ball go in the goal?
See, now I'm thinking of Andres Cantor calling a home run
Also, don't know what's happening in Cleveland, but I'm a couple hours west and it's barely drizzling if anything.
if i had my hands on the fan graphs code, id definitely convert more to python and add more plotly style interactive visuals
What would the visuals be?
id focus on the interactive parts more – like adding visuals for all the leaders tables and hovertext, filtering, employing splits filtering into visuals too
We need to add custom photoemojis. I surprisingly use an Austin Hedges one a lot in my baseball group chat. And since Hedges was a league average hitter this year (wRC+ 😉), it was used a lot.
It's wired up to use a .png. We have to hard code it in there, but it's ready for it.
I would add a notification system to the comments so that I would know if somebody replied to me. Would be much easier to waste my days yapping about baseball!
We might be able to do that now. Part of me wants to rip out WP's comment system for a modified version of chat.
Email is the easy notification for this. Probably could do app notifications too.
i also wanna know if my jokes in the comments get likes or not
HOOOOOOOONNNNNRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON
also i have several baseball themed emojis that i abuse in my baseball discords, would love them here
The storm is reaching across the lake now, don't know if that means it's moving away from Cleveland or just quite large
It's moving south and east. So I think it's clearing up now.
Does the tabby get food before baseball starts?
Mine was fed before scheduled first pitch.
Ours is 7 AM, noon, 6 PM, and 9 PM
I'm understanding about half the coding words being discussed here? maybe less?
I'm a field biologist by training so if we get beyond the analysis stuff I actually do I'm pretty much with you. The main thing is to get good enough at the basics so you can work through solutions to the thornier problems by leaning on StackOverflow, etc.
another fun thing we can do while we wait is a friend of mine sent this questionnaire supposedly a baseball team used for job screenings
if my link is allowed?
gotcha
Coding, 1908 references, cats trapping people on couches, Cleveland weather. This chat is LIT!!!
Bad weather along the Great Lakes… kinda wish I had an Edmund Fitzgerald Porter now
I remember drinking a lot of Railbender when I was up in Erie.
Hard to come by in Denver
Usually when I am at a chat on Fangraphs about baseball I feel like I have a strong understanding of the subject but my slash line about what is being talked about here is .000/.000/.000.
This is why they don't let me on these often.
two more chat coding feature requests – uploading images and ability to delete your own comment
Don't make the same mistake I did and start giving a cat three meals a day. I could believe that in theory you could break the cat of the habit, but it would inflict so much pain and suffering that it's not worth it. I can barely hold him to just the three
Welp.
We're going to have to do this tomorrow/Sunday.
This was the best non-game game thread we've ever had!
Same time tomorrow for game 4. Then game 5 will be Sunday at 5PM ET.
whens the last time a playoff game got rained out
I build things here.