I’m lucky enough to attend the first playoff baseball game in Seattle in more than 20 years today, so going to be working through this pretty fast. Do want to say I’ve really appreciated the notes about the Mariners, including those of you saying you’re pulling for them. It’s been a fun ride, though it was a particularly tough couple games in Houston where the Mariners led both games, led for a longer total number of innings over the two games combined, and still lost both games. I could write 1,000 words about their bullpen usage in Game 1, but I shouldn’t.
(But I mean if you’re going to pull my leg I might note the Mariners have a reliever who was the 12th-best RP in MLB this regular season by FanGraphs’ FIP-based WAR and they haven’t even used him one time across four postseason games, while using eight different relievers, including two starters in relief. They’ve also used their best reliever in all four games in the span of a week, to face the toughest parts of very good lineups each time, like he’s Superman and will always be perfect. They have a third good reliever who closed the regular season with some noticeable dips in metrics like K:BB, but decided he’s fine, no worries whatsoever, and threw him out there in the highest-leverage spot of the season in Game 1 vs. Houston when he’d already been blown up in his only appearance in the Toronto series. It’s just been so inconsistent about who to trust and who not to, and maybe there are human factors behind the decisions, but there’s also a strategy element that overlaps with fantasy football where a couple times the decisions have been made without regard for contingency planning, where the move sort of has to be right or you’re in a really tough spot, e.g. using Kirby to close in Toronto — which worked — when in some scenarios you might have wanted him for extra innings in that game or for multiple innings in a potential Game 3, but the better example being using Munoz to start the 8th in a four-run game in Game 1 in Houston — which didn’t work — because he’s your “fireman” and it’s the toughest part of the lineup. I just think that was a pretty poor plan given he’d thrown 44 combined pitches across high-leverage outings on back-to-back days in Toronto, and yes he’d had two days off, but I’m not even sure you needed him to start an inning and pitch it clean, as opposed to leaning on your other relievers, in this case Swanson, to try to pitch the 8th and using Munoz as, you know, the fireman who you could hold back and deploy to put out a fire should one arise. Because the second Munoz got hit a little bit in that 8th inning, you didn’t have great backup options and you wound up using Sewald and Ray as your guys in the 9th when they gave up a combined eight earned runs in literally the last game you’d played. And if you do hold Munoz back in that spot, maybe you don’t need him at all in that game! And he’s a little more fresh for the weekend. And look, I understand that if they use Swanson to start the 8th and he gets hit and then they go to Munoz, there’s no reason to think Munoz wouldn’t have gotten hit like he did, and they also might have been criticized at that point for not just starting the inning with Munoz, but asking Munoz to get maybe one out if necessary just seemed way more logical. It all comes down to apparently having zero faith in Swanson who has been nothing but extremely good and especially when you have a four-run lead and he has an elite walk rate, the last thing you want to do is issue free passes like Sewald ended up doing in the 9th which directly led to the walkoff, three-run homer. All of which is to say the Mariners made a decision that I would argue elevated the “risk of ruin” along some logic that was basically “we gotta trust Munoz” rather than thinking through various potential outcomes and what your actions might be in those next cases, and what you might have preferred to have done in hindsight when you reached those moments, which again relates back so well to fantasy football. When they threw Munoz out there and expected him to be perfect again and then he wasn’t, the Astros knew they’d gotten to our best reliever, and you know you don’t have anything else you feel great about going to, and that pretty directly leads to the debacle in the 9th. And because every Mariners article coming from that game said “hindsight’s 20/20,” here’s what I said in a real-time Slack convo:
To my point about solo HRs not hurting you, the Mariners wound up giving up a two-run homer in the 8th and a three-run in the 9th to lose, again in part because of a walk that went down as a HBP but was in a full count and was a walk if it didn’t hit the batter, who happened to be a rookie pinch-hitting for the 9 hole. And obviously this whole ridiculous Mariners commentary is just me venting, but a big reason I carried on about it this morning is again that I think it relates back to this idea of thinking probabilistically and contemplating multiple scenarios as you make decisions. In those Slack comments, I referenced the broader scope of Munoz’s postseason workload in multiple ways, both my notes about how much he pitched in Toronto and also what we might need from him in the rest of the Houston series, and how that all might manifest, and how once again you probably didn’t need him to start the 8th inning of a four-run game, which is of course a crazy commentary to make when they lost anyway. Alright let’s get into football.)
Here’s the clearest example of Input Volatility I’ve thought of this week while allowing at least some of my brain space for football thoughts:
Devin Singletary
I mentioned in Stealing Signals after Week 4 that Singletary’s 88% snap rate that week was likely due to the specific game context in Baltimore, both in relation to their opponent and how that game developed. I noted to expect it to fall in less competitive games, because they have shown an understanding of not wanting to overwork him, but how it was strong evidence the Bills still see Singletary as their best back.
Well, in this week’s game against the Chiefs, you’d expect the conditions to be right for that theory to lead to a huge workload, should another similar opportunity present itself. Now, to be clear, the Bills can also play full games where the RBs are completely deprioritized, with Josh Allen being their main rushing threat and a heavy pass lean otherwise. There will always be a fairly low floor in Singletary’s range of outcomes, but Zack Moss disappearing in that Ravens game was I think evidence they don’t believe he’s a game-impacting talent worth giving snaps to in key spots, and James Cook has since had an explosive long touchdown run in garbage time of Week 4 that might earn him some rotational snaps here but it also might be too early for the Bills to feel they can trust him for significant work in a key spot.
Singletary’s range is incredibly volatile as a result. It depends on the ways the Bills attack the Chiefs, and how the Chiefs gameplan defensively. But there are scenarios here where this becomes one of his biggest games of the year from a workload perspective if the Chiefs force the Bills to play underneath like some opponents have, and the Bills treat this game like must-win where they use Singletary on over 80% of snaps. In that outcome for Singletary, you’re talking about some rushing yardage, one of his solid receiving games, and elevated touchdown equity.