Can I have my balls back please?

Can I have my balls back please?

Oh, I can't really feel my look at me. I'm down on my knees.

Yeah, oh, and I don't know how much longer.

I've been living my life like this.

Hello and welcome to episode 1865 of Effectively Wild and Baseball Podcasts

from Bandgrass presented by our patrons,

Forters. I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer, joined by Megarelli of Bandgrass.

Hello, Meg. Hello.

Well, we've got news, we've got debuts, we've got great teams, we've got terrible teams, we've got past blasts, we've got stat blasts.

But I have to start here. Riddle me this.

The Philadelphia Phillies are 14 and three since they fired Joe Gerardi and elevated Rob Thompson, their bench coach to manager, right?

14 and three. Now, when we talked about that firing, our prior, I would say, was that this would not make a major difference, right?

Yeah.

But whatever ailed the Phillies would not be fixed by firing Joe Gerardi, well, now we have a couple of weeks, a few weeks of performance, we have a team that was 22 and 29 when Gerardi was fired that has gone 14 and three since they're not quite in playoff position, but they are close.

Tell me this, if they had not fired Joe Gerardi, what do you think their record would have been over those 17 games?

He gives. Basically, I've asking you, do you give the change from Joe Gerardi to Rob Thompson any credit for any of those wins?

Are you going to take a hard line managers don't matter that much stance and say, eh, they would have had exactly the same record, everything would have transpired the way it already has.

Can I split the difference? That's such a cheapy answer, but maybe that's the answer I want. I mean, I think that if you were to replay those same 17 games, 10,000 times, if you could create that set of alternate timelines, do I think that there is some appreciable number of them that involve Joe Gerardi and still have this record?

Yeah, probably. I don't think that managers don't matter. I just think that they don't matter as much as other things related to the roster, namely the roster itself.

Even the places where they interact most directly with that baseline roster in terms of how it's deployed particularly when it comes to pitching, even then we're talking about fractions of a win.

The question is how much do you split the difference that do you split it down the middle do you split it just a tiny bit toward one end of the skill or the other? It's kind of a tricky question when I put you on the spot on a podcast.

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