Episode 773
Atlanta general manager John Coppolella resigned on Monday due to a “breach of Major League Baseball rules regarding the international player market.” While the specifics of his case remain unknown, the flaws of the league’s approach to international players are manifest. In an effort to reduce costs — by way of bonus pools, for example — owners have incentivized clubs to pursue illegal means by which to acquire international talent. What are the other consequences of these cost-cutting efforts? How can they be resolved? Managing editor Dave Cameron attempts to answer these questions.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 46 min play time.)

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The MLB playoffs select for the best teams, and the rosters of those teams additionally select for the best players. As a consequence, nearly every playoff team is likely to feature an above-average offense, and an above-average pitching staff. In reality, the pitchers tend to be better than the hitters, and this leads to people believing statements like “good pitching beats good hitting.” It’s certainly true that, in October, run-scoring output is reduced, relative to the regular season. Every run is important, and not only because every game is important.

With the first game of the 2017 playoffs just a short while away, I thought I’d quickly review what playoff offense has looked like. I say “review” because I’m sure we’ve covered this ground before, but there’s no harm in going back to the same points every 12 months. This time of year, at the plate, should you be hoping for contact, or should you be hoping for power? Both approaches have managed to win championships, yet one has seemed more helpful than the other.

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Pretty soon, there are going to be nine playoff teams remaining. Pretty soon after that, the field will narrow to eight. In time, there will be four, then two, then one, the one remaining team being the champion. Say what you will about the MLB playoffs, but they never fail to select someone. There will be nine losers and one winner, and the winner will write the story. In some way or ways, the winner will have been the best team of the month.

Who *looks like* the best team of the month? That, we can try to answer today. The playoffs begin only a few hours from now. A few hours after that, either the Twins or the Yankees will be eliminated. Before that happens, I thought we’d do some rating. Some rating that goes beyond just basic regular-season records — some rating that considers how playoff rosters are constructed. I did this a year ago, and I’m doing it again.

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For fans of 10 (and soon to be eight) teams, finding a club for which to root in the playoffs presents little difficulty: just keep doing what you’ve been doing for the last six months. For the rest of us, though, manufacturing some interest in a team or two can be a useful device for cultivating drama in the postseason.

There are a few ways to go about this, of course. For some, the solution is just as simple as rooting against a rival. For others, supporting a team with lengthy curse or championship drought — like the Red Sox or Cubs in recent years or Cleveland, still, this season — might make sense. Backing an underdog is always popular, obviously, as is pulling for all the small-market teams to beat the larger-market ones. There’s no wrong way to do this. What I’d like to discuss here is another alternative, though — namely, rooting for a specific player.

Perhaps you’ve been already been doing this in some capacity. There’s a player who maybe used to play for your favorite team or one whom you always wished would wear your team’s uniform. For me, the easy answer in year’s past has been Adrian Beltre. He’s a future Hall of Famer and a joy to watch. Add in that he was oh-so-close to a title in 2011, and it’s easy to actively support a scenario in which Beltre finally gets a ring. The Rangers failed to qualify for the playoffs this year, though, so rooting for Beltre isn’t an option.

While the Rangers third baseman will be absent from the postseason, there are a handful of other future Hall of Famers who have yet to win a World Series title and will be playing games that count this October.

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Tonight, the postseason kicks off with the Yankees hosting the Twins in the AL Wild Card game. And there may not be another game this year where one team is as strongly favored to win as New York is today. Our Game Odds have the Yankees as 67/33 favorites, FiveThirtyEight has it 63/37 for the Yankees, and depending on the sports book you’re looking at, the Yankees might be as high as 70% favorites to win tonight.

It’s not too hard to see why the odds are so slanted in New York’s favor. For one, they’re pretty clearly the better team. Their 91-71 record might only be six games better than Minnesota’s, but their BaseRuns expected record of 102-60 was actually the second-best in baseball, and 21 wins better than the Twins 81-81 expected record.

And the advantage is only amplified by eliminating the depth pieces in a winner-take-all affair. Luis Severino (2.98 ERA/3.07 FIP/3.04 xFIP) is a significantly better pitcher than Ervin Santana (3.28 ERA/4.46 FIP/4.77 xFIP), and the gap will only grow once the bullpens get involved; the Yankees had the game’s best bullpen this year, while the Twins checked in at #22. With Chad Green, David Robertson, Tommy Kahnle, and Dellin Betances all around to bridge the gap to Aroldis Chapman, the Yankees can afford to get Severino out of the game at almost any point, rather than let him bury them with early struggles. The Twins, though, don’t have enough good arms to get through six or seven shutdown innings if Santana gets in trouble in the first few innings.

Toss in that the Twins won’t have their best hitter, Miguel Sano, even as a pinch-hitter, and well, the Yankees should be heavily favored tonight, especially given that they also have home field advantage. The fact that the Yankees have dominated the Twins over the last decade is irrelevant, but it’s still correct to think New York is in a significantly better position to win tonight than Minnesota is.

But this is baseball, and at the risk of relying on cliché, any team can beat any other team in a single-game matchup. The Twins might be underdogs, but they’re about as likely to win tonight as Jose Altuve is to get a base hit in any given at-bat, and no one is surprised when that happens. So, let’s look at how the Twins might have to do in order to pull off the upset.

These Twins aren’t the slap-hitters of years past; this team surged to the playoffs on the backs of a strong offense led by a bunch of guys hitting homers. And while Severino didn’t have a home run problem this year, it was his primary undoing the last two years, so it’s not impossible for the Twins to take him deep a couple of times before the bullpen arms can get warm. Hoping to string a bunch of singles together to put together a rally not only has a lower chance of success, but the time it takes to start that kind of rally also gives Joe Girardi a chance to get one of his army of relievers warm, so the Twins best chance to put up runs tonight is to score quickly. And that means home runs.

So forget everything you hear about bunting, small ball, and playing for one run tonight. The Twins need to put up five or six runs to have a real good chance to win tonight, and they’re probably not going to little-ball their way to that kind of total. The Twins’ best chance to win tonight is to hammer a couple of mistakes and hope that they can get some kinds on base before putting the ball in the seats.

While Santana was the team’s best starter this year, Berrios might be their x-factor tonight. On a staff full of pitch-to-contact types — they ranked 29th in K% — he’s the one guy who has legitimate swing-and-miss stuff. He didn’t blow hitters away as a starter, but given a few innings in a winner-take-all situation, his stuff might play up a few ticks, and if he’s sitting 95 and throwing his wipeout curveball, it’s not that hard to imagine him going all Andrew Miller on the Yankees for a few innings.

Using Berrios in relief tonight will put the Twins at a big disadvantage in the ALDS, given that they’d have burned their top two starters just to try and get there, but they don’t have any better options. If Santana has to hand the ball to Taylor Rogers or Tyler Duffey, things probably won’t go that well for the Twins. If they can go Santana and Berrios for the first seven innings, then hand the ball to Trevor Hildenberger and Matt Belisle, then they might be able to hold the Yankees to just a few runs. The Twins should be aggressive in trying to avoid a middle reliever fight, because that’s the one they are least equipped to win.

Gary Sanchez has one of the best arms in baseball, but he struggles to keep the ball in front of him on pitches that bounce; no catcher in baseball allowed more than the 69 wild pitches and passed balls he allowed this year. He also led the league in catcher throwing errors, so while his arm is very strong, it’s not always particularly accurate.

The Twins probably won’t get a lot of baserunners against New York, so they need to convert a high percentage of them the ones they do get into runs. So if they get guys on first base, and there is a pitch in the dirt, don’t be afraid to go. If they can steal a run or two through aggressive exploitation of Sanchez’s biggest weakness, then maybe they can also steal a game in which they are decided underdogs.

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CLEVELAND — If you’ve found your way to this article, it likely means that you’re an educated baseball fan and aware of how certain elements of the game have trended toward the extremes in recent years — in particular, as marked by the home-run and strikeout records of 2017. Much hand-wringing has occurred over the lack of balls in play this season.

But there’s another extreme that’s developed, as well, one that’s received a bit less attention perhaps: the share of innings absorbed by bullpens.

Bullpens have never accounted for as much work as they did in 2017. Relievers combined to throw 16,496.2 innings this year, bettering the previous mark of 15,893.0 set way back in… 2016. Relievers combined to throw over 1,000 innings more than just two years earlier in 2015 (15,184.1) and nearly 3,000 more than in the first year of the 30-team era in 1998 (13,968.2).

To look at it another way, bullpens accounted for a record 38.1% of innings this season — and that rate has continued to inch up in the modern era. In 1959, just 21.3% of innings were pitched in a relief capacity. In 1969, that figure increased to 26.4%, to 28.9% in 1979, and then 33.7% in 1999. It’s a trend myself and others have documented in recent years.

The workhorse starting pitcher is endangered. Only 15 starters reached the 200-inning threshold this season, matching last year’s mark, which is the lowest on record.

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The first of two Wild Card games is scheduled for tonight. In addition to must-win baseball, this time of year is also typically marked by the appearance of a Dave Cameron piece on the merits of “bullpen-ing” a game — that is, the practice of using nothing but relievers in a single contest, of attempting to exploit matchups in order to maximize the chances of winning.

While the logic of “bullpen-ing” is sound in theory, it also fails to account for the comfort of pitchers who’ve potentially become attached to their roles. To get a better idea of how they might adapt to such an approach and how it might be handled in practice, I asked some actual players about it. Turns out, there’s a particular type of reliever who’s best suited to take the ball in the first few innings of a win-or-go-home game. And a particular type of pitcher who should follow him.

The first thing revealed by my inquiries is that relievers love the idea. “I’m down for whatever,” said Giants reliever Hunter Strickland with a smile. Nationals closer Sean Doolittle just laughed for a while. “Would I get paid like a starting pitcher?” he finally asked after the laughter had subsided.

Relievers would be fine with it because they’re accustomed to answering the call whenever. “We’re used to throwing in whatever inning, [if] not usually the first,” said Strickland. Added Miami’s Brad Ziegler: “I don’t think it would be very different for me, as much as it would be for the starter coming into the game [in the later innings]. His whole routine would have to change.”

And a starter probably would have to throw a couple innings in such a game — in order to reach a full complement of nine and still leave some arms for extras, that is. So the question is probably which kind of starter would adapt effectively to an otherwise unusual arrangement.

The answer? Probably a young one. Older starters are more married to their routines. “It’s very hard for me personally,” said Brandon McCarthy regarding the idea of starting a game in any other inning but the first. “My routine as a starter is fixed to the minute and a lot of guys are like that. It’s certainly not something impossible to deal with but could make a team nervous.”

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