I think Otani should go up without a bat and then get one when there's a strike. Is

that allowed? There's only one way to find out. I don't know if that's allowed, to be honest. That's how I used to, when I played college softball, I was not a very good hitter. All I could do was hit a hard ground ball to the shortstop. And so I would just go up without a bat and until we got to two strikes. Is that real? Oh yeah. Yeah. And it drove people crazy because they didn't always throw strikes. Like, you know, it's kind of hard to throw strikes if you're like, everyone hung over, you know, like and not good at softball.

And so I took a lot of walks and a lot of grief, I would say. That's so good. You're right that Soto's demeanor, I mean, besides me, he's the most entertaining at bat in the history of the game. But he also gives you a sense of confidence in him. It's like if you're watching a Steven Soderbergh movie with the director's commentary on, and you're like, oh, I get what he's doing here because he's explaining it to you so well and so eloquently. And that's like Juan Soto's at bat. Judge doesn't, I mean, most hitters don't have that. If they swing at a pitch and they look kind of bad, you feel like they got beat. I mean, Stanton is that taken to the extreme. Stanton looks bad on every single non-home run. Every single non-home run. He looks like if Chris Carter were a Hall of Famer, it would have looked like Giancarlo Stanton. Like just how is this guy in the, oh, that's why he's in the majors. Like he hits the home runs and it's incredible. But like with Stanton, you feel fear when he's up and you don't feel, you never feel that confident. Like it would kill me to root for Stanton on my team, I think. Judge is not really, Judge is, I want to say he's in the middle, but he, in some ways he's closer to Soto because he's got such great control of the strike zone. He doesn't have to overswing. Like that's a really comforting thing when a guy's not overswinging and it's just off right now. And so instead of him taking that spitting on the slider the two strike slider just off the plate which he usually does and which he's done a few times in this series he had some some good at bats sorry my cat is

uh eating my cord yeah hey buddy yeah yeah i'm gonna throw you out the window all right stop dude you gotta stop more come

on do it keep

going he is a monster um judge did have better at bats uh last night it seemed like where he was getting a lot of close you know sliders away that were like just missing and he had clearly was just like i'm taking that pitch and if it gets called a strike like that's fine and the dodgers kept trying to hit that spot and just missing and you know so he was able to get on base a few times. And he even got a hit near the end of the game when Brent Honeywell was in there. It almost feels like he's playing

a game of rock, paper, scissors with the Dodgers where he's thinking, OK, they're going to try. The scouting report is going to be they're going to try and get me away. But you know what I'm going to do? I got great power to all fields. I just gonna try and go with the pitch right and it's almost like he's expecting this but the Dodgers are executing it so well that his opposite field approach is getting him into even more trouble so last time it looks a little bit more like no you know I'm just gonna try and yank a ball if it gets into the strike zone or you know if it's in the middle Maybe I should just

look for pitches

in the middle again, and maybe that's a good sign. I

felt this last year, especially watching

Corey Seager during the postseason,

where I feel like great hitters, it's almost like they, in some ways, they just hypnotize the pitcher. And it's like, how did he get a fastball there? How did they throw him a fastball there? And they just control the zone so much that there's a mistake. And all of a sudden he's just, well, that's the pitch I wanted. Boom, you know. And Judge is a player like that, where you're like, why in God's name did they throw him that pitch? And it's because he controls the zone and doesn't chase. And like, sometimes you have to go after him. He's gotten those pitches this series.

He just hasn't done damage sometimes too if you have a hitter who's that good and who is you know you have such a hard time pitching him sometimes pitchers or pitching coaches or scouts will actually talk about throwing him pitches that would be considered mistakes because you you have to use the whole you have to use every possibility you're trying to throw him off it might be the one batter that you throw a you know a right on right change up to because you just don't like you can't trust your normal weapons to get it past them and then they hit a home run on it and it looks like a really bad pitch

but

it's just it's like what what do they call it with the the poker these days where it's like you're supposed to make bad bets sometimes because it's the only way to be

yeah i mean there's a

there's a phrase called donking um which is definitely not the phrase i was thinking of rational theory play or something like that it's got one of those like nerdy names like uh

oh yeah a game theory optimal yeah yeah so there's there's the idea that on the on the decision tree you know there's there's three distinct and you do one of them, 75% of the time, one of them, 20% of the time, I really hope my math's right. One of them 5% of the time. And yeah, choosing the 5% option, they might be caught off guard because they're so geared up for the 75% option.

It is a disappointment to me that Aaron judge is having a bad series. Not well, because I, uh, I think that we're, I I I'm surprised that Aaron Judge is not a bigger deal I guess he is a New York Yankee who is having who is setting AL home run records who is having some of the greatest seasons of all time and he's a big star but doesn't it feel like he's not that big a star like when they talked about how Otani jerseys are the leading jersey sales in the game, and then I think maybe, I don't know, maybe Smoltz said, who's second? And I think maybe Joe Davis said Bryce Harper. It's like, not Aaron Judge. Not the biggest, the best player in the game, playing in New York, only worn pinstripes his whole career broke roger maris's al home run record had the best season ever by a right hander and yet kind of not that big a star like am i wrong do you do you feel like aaron judge's career is like strangely under appreciated like relative to what he's done people

aren't buying his jerseys because they're too big for them. They're too big, yeah. No, I do agree. I think it's easy to overlook, apart from the home runs, how good he is at everything baseball-related. And the home runs almost serve to obscure that. And even when he popped the hood, it's like, wow, he does a lot of things really, really well. But yeah, he's got the template. But that's like when i would think about hall of famers like what's the perfect template it's longevity it's with the team it's a you know multiple championships very visible that's how you get in the hall of fame but it didn't work for andy pettit didn't work for bernie williams you know what i mean so it there are these, well,

you just, you made a face. You don't think Bernie Williams should have been in the conversation? I'm sorry. I opened up an Aaron Judge conversation expecting better comps than that. Like maybe we could go with like Clayton Kershaw struggled in the postseason, took a book for people to really appreciate how great he was. No,

but you can't bring up Clayton Kershaw as a comp because he's the last of his kind that's true Aaron Judge is like the next of the last of his I don't know uh but okay so just I'm just saying that you have this template of what you think a superstar might be what a hall of famer might be and judge clicks all those boxes but there's like a charisma factor I think that's part of it he's. He's a

non-dynamic. He's a lunch pail guy, you know? So are we going to go through the rest of our lives disappointed that the best player in baseball isn't charismatic enough? Because we did go through a decade of like kind of specious complaints about Mike Trout because he wasn't interesting. And now we're moving to Aaron Judge's doesn't deserve to be a superstar because he isn't interesting. Is this like, are we going to have we pivoted to now?

All that matters is whether you have

charisma.

The we is doing a lot of work. I don't give a rip if Mike Trout bought a weather balloon with points. Like, you know, all I care about is how what it looks like when they're in the box and there's an intensity there. I'm not an off field sort of sort of fella. So I don't care. I

just think the cultural significance of any baseball player in America is just going to be, you know, capped, basically, because I think the game is just less relevant than football, you know? And the NBA, while there's a lot of evidence that baseball is doing, you better than the NBA the NBA has like sort of cultural permanence that baseball doesn't and a lot of that is just because of like you know it's like this league and it's messy and stuff like that and baseball tends to discourage that type of behavior for a long time I mean it's like you know we used to there this felt like more of a topic from like 10 years ago really it was around trout you know people would ask like tony clark like hey like do you guys want to be more famous like you got to do more interesting things otherwise stop complaining about not being famous and to be clear i don't think judge is complaining about not being famous i think he's perfectly fine with the choices he's made his life seems to be going pretty well but yeah i mean if you wanted to be like a bigger figure, you'd probably have to, you

know, be more whatever. I wrote about Giancarlo Stanton when he won the Home Run Derby, and the compare and contrast with, say, Stanton or Judge or whomever is up at the time, and say, Steph Curry. It's the nature of the sport to where, hey, Aaron Judge is in town, right? He's coming through Detroit. He's coming through Oakland. He's, for three days, you're going to see him come up 12 times and do Aaron Judge stuff. And maybe he gets two doubles. Maybe he gets double, two singles, and a walk. And that's the experience for three games. with Steph Curry if you go to a game where Steph Curry's playing he's probably going to be guaranteed to do at least one Steph Curry thing that makes you oh man whereas baseball does not offer that guarantee football offers a little bit of that guarantee especially when it comes to quarterback play so it's the nature of a star in baseball and what that means for any specific game is you have less of a guarantee that you're going to get the full Aaron Judge experience when you sit down to watch a baseball game, whether in person or on TV, than basketball or football. It's just that way.

There's kind of a simple answer for why Judge isn't a figure on par with, say, Derek Jeter, who's also not the most outwardly charismatic in terms of doing outlandish stuff to get attention. His team won the World Series five times. And so he was on the news all the time because he was like, hey, the shortstop from that team, who's their best player. And if the Yankees won the World Series, you know, five times, Dave Judge would probably be a similar sort of figure of, you know, national. So Judge

needs more gift baskets. That's what I'm reading. Hi-ya. Most

players, you know, they'll have ups and downs in the postseason, and it won't really affect their legacy for the most part. Clayton Kershaw, around 2014, it became like the annual story is like, what is this postseason doing for his legacy? Have we reached that point with judges? He at playing for his legacy moment? Yes. Yes. No, this is like,

yes, a hundred percent. Yeah. Fair or unfair. Like that's, that's the gig, man. Like Mookie Betts won the world series in 2018. He won the world series in 2020. And he had like seven bad games spread between 2022 and 2023. And all year, the discourse was like, can Mookie play in October? And like, is that fair necessarily? Is it predictive? Is it all this stuff? No, but like, that's what the money's for. have a theory about that where he's smaller and so the levers are shorter and harder to like get inside just yeah and by the way moogie bets has been pretty good this postseason you know and so like it's not predictive and it's not to say that aaron judge won't come out you know tonight and hit two bombs off jack flaherty although if he hits one off flaherty it's hard to imagine dave is going to keep Flaherty in the game for more than, you know, like a turn through the lineup, given all the relievers he has.

Maybe he'll be down two to nothing and he'll decide to punt the game by letting Flaherty

eat outs. Oof, my goodness. There we go. My goodness. I don't think they're going to do that. But I don't know. I just think like, yeah, like if you, if you are in the postseason every year and you don't perform at the expected level, it becomes a thing. And that is, you could say, the

burden of great book plates available predictions. Just just give me give me how how long does this series go over tonight? Yeah, probably.

That's like 90 percent of that prediction is how likely am I to get what I want in this world. And because I would like to have the World Series go a little longer, so I have more baseball to watch, I've now convinced myself that a bad thing will happen. That's why I'm going to—no. Okay, rationally speaking, I think the Yankees look pretty good tonight, and I'll take them 53-47.

That's

a high-scoring game. I

think it ends in six.

Okay. Okay. I think it goes to a game seven. I'm going in. I think game seven, we've earned it as a society. We've earned a game seven. I don't know if that's actually true. It's very much untrue. I really don't think that is true. Do we have time for me to just say one last

thing? The Dodgers felt like they were dominating for three games, right? And if you take out the home runs, which you wouldn't take out the home runs. Home runs are important. But if you take out the home runs in the first three games of this series that the Dodgers seemed like they were dominating, the Yankees hit 162, the Dodgers hit 168. The Yankees had a 265 on base percentage. The Dodgers had a 262 on base percentage. The 3-0 lead in this series was basically that the Dodgers had two more home runs. That's the margin. It has been a very closely played game. One home run on either side has been basically the margin. So I don't think that the Yankees are like, I think that they're going to, I think they've played fine. Or maybe I should say the Dodgers haven't actually played good. Maybe that's what I think.

The Dodgers have a 206 batting average this series. The Yankees have a 206 batting average this series. But the Dodgers have a 287 on base percentage. The Yankees have a 312. So they've actually bested them. They've gotten more players on base.

It's just the power. It's the timing. Hey, it's baseball. It's cruel. Yeah, I mean, look, the Dodgers have won three games. The Yankees have won one. If the Dodgers win the series, they'll be called the champions of the

world, and the Yankees will be called a failure. That's what the money's for. That's the freaking game. It's been episode 116 of the Roundtable. When we come back next week, we'll know who won the World Series. We'll be back next week with Katie Wu, and we'll talk about who won the Dern thing. And, yeah, it'll be good content. All right, we'll see you then. Thanks for listening.