Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1020: The First Baseman’s Fumarole

Episode Date: February 15, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Carter Capps’s comeback, Brian Flynn’s barn accident, the Reds’ weights and nicknames, and C.J. Wilson’s retirement town, then answer listener emails about preventing Tommy John surgeries, a Randy Johnson alternate history, Statcast in non-MLB ballparks, a baserunner’s secret skill, whether defense slumps, a Kyle Hendricks hipster, and an […]

I get away from the hustling crowd and all that rat race noise down in the street. On the roof, the only place I know where you just have to wish to make it so. Let's go up on the roof Hello and welcome to episode 1020 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs. What other kind of podcast would Fangraphs have? Actually, I guess that's not true. Watch yourself. If you've ever heard Carson's.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello, Jeff. Hi, how are you? Doing well. We are doing an email show and we have lots of good questions in the hopper. I'm excited about this one and to see how many we can get through, but we have a bit of banter before we get to that. First thing, I just saw our guest from last week, Dennis Lin, just tweeted a video of Carter Capps throwing a bullpen session, which is great because we haven't seen Carter Capps in action for a while. But something about his crazy borderline illegal delivery is even more amusing when he's just

doing it in a bullpen. I'm watching the video right now. There's no hitter to deceive or anything. So he's not getting any benefit from the perceived velocity boost or anything. He's just doing this weird thing while you can see like six other pitchers behind him throwing like a normal human being. He's just doing his thing. So nice to know, I guess, that Tommy John surgery didn't rob him of his hop. Yeah, it's just such an innocent little hop And he looks almost so bored by it In this I mean it's like a video of someone

Throwing a bullpen of course with So many other players pitchers so it doesn't mean Anything there's zero intensity but I can't be alone in that I throw I mean Matthew Corey like to throw when it's sunny out And you know you see a delivery like this And you want to mimic it like a child would mimic any favorite athletes mechanics and it's really hard it's

really hard to do this or to do what Jordan Walden does and clearly I mean in order for him to do this in the major leagues clearly he has it down to a science but the fact that he can do it every time identically every time and throw like two-thirds of his pitches for strikes as he's throwing 99 miles per hour, I get that people think it should be illegal. I get that there are people who think that pitch framing shouldn't count for anything, but this exists, and it's unbelievable, and I'm so delighted that hopefully, hopefully we get to see it in the major leagues this year, because something was missing last year,

and it was this. It was this hop. Same. Yeah, not that I want anyone else to start doing this. I kind of want only one or two pitchers at a time to be able to do this or else everyone would have a 50% strikeout rate and then it wouldn't be fun. But when one guy's doing it, then I like it a lot and I like it even more when he's doing it in a bullpen not that there's any reason why he wouldn't do the same thing in practice that he does in a game but it just looks even more ridiculous when he's doing it in this context and uh walden walden's been hurt for a while right he's had shoulder problems so he can't really get a job i think i read it would be easy for me to

confirm but i'm not going to do that i think he's thrown like 10 innings in the last three years or something so what do you have that can have since he's probably done as a major league pitcher of any significance. So caps is caps is our guy. And, and he looks like he could close for the Padres. Maybe this makes it easier for a pitcher to get hurt. I don't know,

but the whole activity is stupid. You should never do it. So he, he burns bright while he burns. Do we have anything to say about brian flynn victim of architecture so gravity uh in a sense this is like the funny spring training injury of the year because for anyone who is uh not aware brian flynn this brian flynn of the kansas city royals not of the montreal canadiens this brian flynn who is a 26 year old lefty he fell through the roof of his barn i did not click

through for details because i didn't want details to spoil the story because a pitcher getting hurt by falling is funny through a roof is funny the roof of a barn it's about as funny as you can get it's kind of like when why jeremy affelt cut his hand open separating hamburgers, I think it was. Which incidentally happened to an NHL goaltender not too long ago as well. Frozen hamburger patties need to be better separated by wax paper. But the problem with making fun of Brian Flynn is he didn't go on the disabled list because he strained an oblique sneezing. He went on the disabled list because he has a fracture in his spine. So it's less funny now i guess it's a funny arrangement of words that

unfortunately has cost a player a a shot at making a major league roster on opening day brian flynn is not someone who's going to be like a shoe-in for the roster i think every year so on a personal level for brian flynn the sucks from the perspective of someone who's never going to meet brian flynn i will laugh, I think, in private. And, you know, he's been treated, so he'll be okay. And he'll always be the guy who fell through the roof of a barn. Right. And we don't know that a trampoline wasn't involved.

Because how did he get on the roof? That's right. How powerful of a trampoline. Thankfully, so far, Felix Hernandez has been okay. But you never know. I think it's worth suspecting whenever you have a pitcher go on the disabled list or any player go on the disabled list under somewhat mysterious conditions. It's the details that aren't in the only detail he offered, which was what I assumed, that he wasn't just up there for fun, but a six, seven, 250-pound van on the roof of a barn, I guess barns are not built for having large people on them. So yeah, I'm sure this was not a publicity stunt because it would have been a very painful one, but if it had been, it worked well because honestly, I couldn't have told you a thing

about Brian Flynn a few days ago. Even though he threw 55 innings last year with a 2.6 ERA, what reliever didn't do that basically at this point? So this makes him stand out from the pack for sure. I feel like this could call for one of those, the more you know, like NBC PSAs. Like you working on the roof of your barn gotta take care gotta harness up watch where you step you could suffer a stable lumbar vertical fracture vertebral fracture not vertical it might be horizontal

do we have anything else yeah one last bit of banter from me anyway you made an important observation the other day which is that the Reds 40-man roster page on their website has, I think it was 16 players listed with weights that were not divisible by five. And this is extremely rare in this day and age. There was a time in baseball history when listed weights were actually accurate or accurate at the time that they were recorded. And you'd see players who were 147 pounds and 163 pounds. And that has really gone away. That is all but extinct. And we actually have a listener who looked into this last year, I think it was, because Sam and I were talking about Ken Phelps

and his baseball reference page lists him as 209 pounds, which is just extremely rare. And we wondered about it and this listener looked into it and he looked into the Laman database and he found that almost no one, I think the listener's name was Jan L or Jan L. He found that there hadn't been a player at all recently with this sort of non-divisible by five weight. So you notice that the Reds had a bunch of them suddenly. And I apologize to our audience for talking about the Reds in two consecutive episodes. This is not a Reds preview episode even. But I had to find out what was going on here. preview episode even but i had to find out what was going on here so i emailed the reds pr people specifically rob butcher who is the vice president of media relations for the cincinnati reds and

probably has more important things to do with his time well how would he dignify this question well he didn't dignify it with a long response. So he sent me about six words in response, sentence fragment. I asked him essentially why the Reds seem to differ from every other team in this respect. And his response, because we use players' actual weights. Oh, wow. That's a... Did not shed a whole lot of light on the situation a little bit of a subtweet i guess there a little bit everyone else i was wondering if the i was wondering if we could see sort of a

rebound with everything this is a general i guess thing to say but with everything getting more scientific and accurate i wonder if we're gonna i mean what's why not just list the actual weights they're getting all the actual measurements when pitchers and catchers everyone report to spring training anyway why not just list that what was the reason for not yeah doing it and i wonder if the reds are just going to be i didn't check to see if it was a bunch of the people who had just reported early for the reds because i don't think any everyone is in spring training yet maybe they are uh i haven't paid attention to spring training because i don't care but i wonder if they are just accurate measurements of everyone who's shown up so far and if players are just going to get folded into this on the roster pages and i guess this is

something that we could observe uh if this holds our attention which i guess it does based on this conversation alone yeah yeah it's gonna be because let's see who else based on chance alone you would only expect 20 of the weights to be divisible by five right and for the reds it's it's less than half so i'm going into this blind uh i'm going to look at the padres roster i do you brought up card of cap so i'm going to look at the padres roster uh let's assume there are 40 players on there and i'm scrolling uh zach lee 22 227. That's one. Still scrolling. Got Zach Lee. Zach Lee. Zach Lee. Just the one. Zach Lee who

the Padres picked up not long ago from a different team. I think it was the Mariners. Let's try our luck with one more roster. What's the first one that comes up for me? The A's. Okay. I don't know if they even have a scale, but we'll look at the A's roster page. They don't know if they even have a scale, but we'll look at the A's roster page. They have one of those carnival

scales where you have to pay to get yourself weighed. And the A's have none. Everyone divisible by five. So okay, so far. I did a little random sampling of some other teams and I didn't look at all of them, but I did not come across any others that had this.

So if it is a league-wide policy, it doesn't seem to be in place yet. I did send another follow-up to Rob Butcher, whose time I was very devoted to wasting, and I tried to coax a little more information out of him to ask him if the Reds have always done it that way and why other teams don't do it that way. And he said, I can't speak for other teams. We list the players accurate weight because, well, that's how much they weigh. Yeah. I mean, when you put it like that, it's very reasonable not to.

And this only came up because, what was it, Brandon Phillips, who the Reds just traded, he's on the Braves roster. I noticed he was listed at, I think, 211, which is weird. So then I wanted to see if maybe jose peraza who i was thinking about the same time had an exact weight as well and lo and behold half of the reds also a little fun fact on the reds roster that someone tweeted at me so as you probably know as many people probably know the reds have a reliever who goes by jumbo diaz diaz depends how you want to pronounce it so i don't know i don't i going to assume Jumbo is not his actual name,

but let me just confirm using the only source I know how. His name is Jose Rafael Rodriguez Diaz, but he goes by Jumbo. Okay, Twitter handle L Jumbo or maybe Jumbo Diaz. He's listed at 278 pounds. That's clearly a large human being. But the Ritz also have uh have one sal romano sal romano stands six foot five so he's got an inch on jumbo diaz but he's at 270 he's at 270 pounds and uh and he's also nine years younger which means that uh maybe romano's metabolism is

going to start to go soon i don't't know. He's still quite young. But Sal Romano is a 23-year-old who tips the scales at 270 pounds on a roster that has a player who goes by Jumbo who's only got eight pounds on him. So if Sal Romano gains weight or if Jumbo Diaz loses a fairly negligible amount of weight. Do they have to change names? Can you be a Jumbo on a roster if you're not the heaviest player on the team? I don't think you can. Also, Rookie Davis, 255, don't sleep on Rookie Davis. Yeah, and does he have to give up rookie once he isn't one? Is his name actually...

I know this is an email show, but I think we're just not going to get to any emails because I also wanted to mention CJ Wilson wilson is a a former now major league pitcher he's in his mid-30s he made 88 million dollars in his major league career plus what i can say would be a negligible 89 503 dollars which is extremely exact uh negligible to him would not be negligible to me or my landlord but cj wilson 88 million dollars made in his career so he's probably held on to i don't know 50 of that 60 of that whatever athletes get it's not weird to me that cj wilson retired it's not weird to me that he retired to go full-time into car racing and. What's weird to me is that he's chosen to do that in Fresno, California. I don't want this to be like an anti-Fresno propaganda podcast, but I mean, of all the places to settle in California, I could think of maybe three that I would want to

inhabit less. And I've been over, I've been throughout California. I used to live in California. Fresno is not the worst city in California. Maybe it's getting better. Lots of places are getting better. I'm sure C.J. Wilson bringing that much money into Fresno, that's not bad for the community.

It's just, I think it says something about him. I'm not going to speculate. It says something about him that that is where he decided to settle. He wants a challenge. I guess. I mean, it's better now that I think the drought conditions are being released. We should do emails. We should get the emails before we do this for too long because we've already talked for almost 20 minutes. It's better than Bakersfield. All right. Modesto.

Question from Matt, which is probably inspired by the Alex Reyes Tommy John surgery. I just wrote about that, and I wrote about how Tommy John surgeries spike every year right around this time, which is very depressing because this is when we're all at our most optimistic and idealistic about baseball, and then suddenly exciting pitchers get stolen from us. But Matt says, baseball forever. My question is, where does the surgeon rank in importance to Major League Baseball of all non-players? I assume they would immediately supplant James Andrews as the top medical professional, but do they become as important as, say, a Marvin Miller or Kennesaw Mountain Landis? Do they achieve a status in the history of the game that forces people to mention them when they talk about people who changed the game to what it became. Well, in terms of the number of players impacted or percentage of players impacted, I guess it would be a lesser number than players who become free agents. And of course, Tommy John surgery as it is at present would only knock the majority of players out for about a season and a quarter, season and a half. So they're not losing their entire career.

So I think you've still got, say, a Marvin Miller making a bigger impact. But this surgeon would become of such importance that he couldn't conceivably do all of the operations. Maybe this is where Dr. James Andrews comes in, learns a new technique. You can teach an old dog a new surgery. And then, you know, the team surgeons would probably go to conferences, do whatever surgeons do to get better at surgery and pick up on this. And I would think that you could justify putting this surgeon eventually in the Hall of Fame, which would maybe be controversial. I don't remember off the top of my head what they've done with Frank Joby, who is maybe maybe you remember better than i do

but that would be a very important surgeon and that would uh i i this has been the off season of i think developing a little bit of hope from the cases of garrett richards and seth manis that maybe it will be possible to you've written about this and i've written about uh richards and uh that maybe there are going to be these less invasive or minimally invasive techniques to help ward off horrible ligament damage. As Alex Reyes shows, there's nothing you can do about a full ligament tear. You can't just take a shot and make that go away. But already we're seeing some progress, but the idea of a surgery that would give you this insanely strong ligament, I'm sure there would be some complications in

terms of, I don't know, I guess the teams would probably fund it. But then you get into the issues of like preventative surgery, which comes with some drawbacks. But I guess in this hypothetical, everything is perfect and the surgeon is God. And he would be a very important surgeon and also would be God. Right. Yeah, I think you're right. I don't even know how much of a household name, and I'm not even sure that you pronounce the name right, Frank. Is it Joby? I'm almost certain it's Joby, but like any one of us, we read everything, right? We so seldom hear. Certainly, we so seldom hear from an authoritative person. Yeah, I guess we should settle this.

Got at least one video from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that says Job. Anyway, I've always said Job in my head. We're not even sure for 100%, which speaks to the fact that he is probably not a household name, even among, I don't know, like, does the casual fan know his name? Oh, no, There's no way. Right. I mean, maybe that's because the surgery that he invented kind of got co-opted name wise by a better known pitcher. So that may be working against his name recognition there. But I think it affects too few pitchers probably to, as you were saying, rise to the level of Marvin Miller, for instance, this would be a famous person for sure. And if you had some kind of medical wing, then you would definitely put the person in.

But I don't think it would rise any higher than that notoriety-wise unless you could apply the same technique to other injuries and it would be more of an across-the-board preventative thing more so than just this specific injury which seems like an epidemic but still affects a minority of pitchers and when it does affect them the majority of them come back and are still effective so i think this would probably be like removing the need for tommy john surgery would be a smaller step probably than creating Tommy John surgery. Right.

I would think. So in that sense, he would probably deserve to be slightly less well-known than Frank Jobe. And I guess the reality is that if you perfected the surgery and you did it all the time, it wouldn't take very long before people just kind of forgot about Tommy John surgery and you did it all the time, it wouldn't take very long before people just kind of forgot about Tommy John surgery and ligament tears and they would forget what it was like to have a pitcher out for 12 to 18 months. So you would lose your appreciation of it real fast. Now granted, maybe some pitchers would decide, oh, I'm not going to have the surgery and then they would get hurt, you know, because you would still maybe have injuries at lower levels where

your high school isn't going to fund you getting surgery. Your parents probably aren going to pay for it your college isn't going to fund you to get the surgery so this would be something that would happen maybe when you're in a professional organization so you'd still have young people getting hurt and getting the other the bigger surgery but most people aren't paying attention to what happens to younger players which granted is one of the problems with younger players right now, but major league baseball fans would kind of forget what it's like to experience the loss of an Alex Reyes. And so at some point you would just start taking the surgeon for granted. Yeah. All right. Next question is from Michael and it's a response to an email we answered, I think in the first email show we did together. He says, enjoyed the discussion about how long

Barry Bonds could have kept it up if he hadn't been blackballed or if he'd been able to get a job in baseball. I think an even better one is Randy Johnson. Specifically, if Randy Johnson wanted nothing more than to pitch in the majors for as long as possible, how long could he have gone? My theory is that with his height increasing his effective velocity and the existence of a loogie roll, he could have gone until his mid-50s at least. Wouldn't a 55-year-old big unit be better than a 46-year-old Jesse Orozco? What say you? Well, let's see. Randy Johnson right now is 53 and 5 months. In his last year, that's 2009. That's less long ago than I thought. He was a starter in 2009 as a starter he was

throwing about 90 miles per hour i think i could be wrong but i think he was starting to have some shoulder issues toward the end of his career okay so let's say he even takes a year off rehabs does whatever uh super tall he uh he was six foot ten as i think people recall and so he's throwing 90 as a starter when he would have been what is that like 46 45 46 yeah he had uh he had a rotator cuff strain that last season was on the 60 day dl and missed 71 days so it was a fairly serious thing that was like one of his first serious injuries but they were i mean he had a lot of back issues so his last his last few years there he was having back stuff and shoulder stuff and right up until that last season he was still very effective as a starter right and then he was kind of breaking down and still not terrible he did make a few he did make a just five bullpen appearances

that year now his stuff was actually worse out of the bullpen, so I can't imagine we can actually take that seriously. But if you think about a guy who's 6'10", fastball slider, you don't forget how to throw it. Let's give him a year to rest up, get healthy, do whatever, and then he adapts to a bullpen roll. That would take him some time, but I would love to see the perceived velocity on a Randy Johnson fastball.

It's one of the things we've missed out on. Now granted, maybe he actually didn't get great extension, but that's hard to believe. I think he would have made it at least until 50. I don't think he'd still be pitching now. I mean, we're talking like eight years after the end of his major league career. I don't think that a Loogie can survive forever.

I also don't know if there would be room for like an old terrible mike myers or jesse roscoe in the majors now i think teams are kind of more focused on pitchers who can pitch to both sides but on the other hand i think the mariners gave marcus obchinski a multi-year contract and he's bad so there's still room like randy could at least he would go out his last year i think he would get a minor league contract spring invite, then he wouldn't end up with a job. But I think he'd have a few years where he would do that and he would get a job. Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, the shoulder could have continued to become decrepit and maybe he just wouldn't have been able to throw any

innings at all in any role. I don't know. So it's possible that he just would have been out regardless. But I would think that just based on how successful he had been a year or two earlier, yeah, if you had him face lefties only and had him not work much and had him take some time off to get as healthy as he possibly could at that age before he started again, yeah, I like to think that he could have made it to 50 or pretty close. I'll note in his last year, Randy Johnson as a starter, his last year against lefties, he faced 89 of them and he struck out 23. He walked five. So that means he struck out a quarter of the lefties he faced, barely walked any. Interesting. Got some grand balls. So still good against lefties, even when he was old and worse and hurt. So that speaks well to the fact that he could have lasted a few more years for sure.

Yeah. All right. Question from Ethan. When do you think other professional leagues will install stat cast in all of their stadiums? Do you think this will eventually make it easier to predict a player's adjustment to the majors? So we can answer the second part of the question in a second. I found out some things about the first part of the question. So major league teams have had Trackman in their minor league parks for a while now. I was talking to one person with a team and he was saying that at this point, Trackman is basically everywhere. 95% of full season minor league stadiums have it. Last year, about half of the short season stadiums have it and probably more this year. Some teams even have it in Last year, about half of the short season stadiums have it, and probably more this year.

Some teams even have it in the Dominican places like that. So that part is easy, and everyone has it, and that gives you all the pitch information, spin and velocity and movement, all the stuff that we have in the big leagues. So that's widespread, but StatCast is not in the minors yet, and it seems like the situation is kind of complicated. If people remember, there was a system called FieldFX that was going to be the future of baseball analysis. And this was a system made by SportVision, the company that created PitchFX and HitFX. And this was going to be basically the same thing as StatCast, at least in purpose, but designed by SportVision. And the difference was that it was entirely camera and computer based like PitchFX is,

as opposed to StatCast and TrackMan, which incorporate radar readings also. And so it took longer than expected to develop FieldFX from what I understand. And it was like a several year process and there were delays and flaws with the accuracy because there was no radar. And maybe if they had embraced the radar earlier, they could have gotten it to market sooner, but they didn't. And so MLB, from what I understand, basically backed out of the deal that they had with SportVision for FieldFX because

StatCast was around and it was a better alternative that was ready. And from what I was told, right around the time they made that decision, FieldFX kind of had a bunch of its kinks ironed out. So suddenly it made a big leap in progress and was a pretty good system, but it was too late. Anyway, as part of this backing out of that deal, Major League Baseball Advanced Media agreed that they would not try to push StatCast into the minor leagues. So they sort of ceded the minors to FieldFX. And so there are some teams that have FieldFX in the minor leagues now. And there is an agreement of some kind. It's not in perpetuity. It's some sort of short-term agreement

that says basically that StatCast can't compete with field effects in the minors, except for certain teams or conditions that I wasn't able to find out about. So that's the state of things now. Everyone has TrackMan. Some teams might have field effects, and I'm sure they'd all want StatCast, but they are prevented from getting it for now.

But at some point, they will be able to get it. So that's where things stand. I had learned from your Ringer baseball podcast with Glenn Perkins that he mentioned that the Twins had TrackMan all the way down. Glenn Perkins that he mentioned that the twins had TrackMan all the way down. And I guess I'm a little unclear on what the difference is between TrackMan and StatCast because StatCast is built upon TrackMan radar and cameras, but I guess there's further interpretation necessary. Yeah. This might be wonkier than some people care about, but StatCast is like a fusion of two different systems and companies.

So there's TrackMan and then there's Chiron Hego, which is the other company. And that's like the other part of the system. So both of the FieldFX and StatCast have like different camera placements and different number of cameras and camera height and all of that. But the thing that sets StatCast apart is the radar and that's the TrackManman component and then the chiron hego is i think the camera component so it's a a fusion of two companies and systems and that's what enables stat cast to record the player positioning and the flight of the ball all the way through the air whereas trackman doesn't get all of the same stuff if you only use it in isolation so you'd be losing you'd be missing a all of the same stuff if you only use it in isolation. So you'd be losing, you'd be missing a lot of the defensive stuff in the minors, but you're still getting all the pitch stuff. You're still getting all that.

And base running and yeah, right. But that's the stuff that we know the least about how to use right now. Anyway, at least in the public spheres, obviously the teams have the stuff that they can do, but you're still getting all the pitch information. You're still getting all the hitter information. And of course, what we've seen the most use with is exit velocities and and launch angles and and whatnot and i guess when we talk about the differences between public knowledge and uh private knowledge in at the major league level we have i don't know like 98 of what the big league teams do but the real difference might be down in the minors because we get nothing all we get are the regular

statistics and sometimes at least in the upper levels we get like swing rates and contact rates and stuff but we don't have any sort of meaningful like pitch effects or i guess now it's track man data for for minor leaguers unless they show up in like the futures game or they pitch in in spring training so we have we have nothing on that which is an analytical analytical void, I guess, for us from the outside. In theory, that should make teams better at evaluating players for all the reasons that we have seen with major league players and trying to predict who needs to do what and who can make breakouts. So it will be interesting, I guess, to take a look at when we have more information, whether bust rates start going down or whether

player development gets better now that teams have all of this information, but that will be a project I would be delighted to leave to somebody else to do. Yeah. There's always that question about like your first trip around the league, like before the league gets to adjust to you. I don't know that I've seen really great research on that. I think maybe Russell Carlton might have done something on that at some point, or maybe not. I don't know that that is true for all rookies or even most rookies, but in theory, if that is a thing or has historically been a thing,

it won't continue to be a thing, at least to a certain extent, because you'll have the same detailed scatting reports on a player who just got called up today that you do on someone else because you'll have all of his track man data from the minor leagues. Of course, that's assuming that the pitchers or hitters who face him read the scouting reports and pay attention to the scouting reports. And a lot of players, I think, still go on their own personal scouting reports of what they've seen and how many times they've faced the guy. So they might not be paying attention to those things. Related to, just real quick, players and their first times around, I like to check them.

I haven't seen great research on this either. I would assume if anyone has researched it, it would be Russell Carlton, who does the hard stuff I'd never want to touch. So I've always wondered, players first time around, how do they get treated? And in the major leagues, we can look at Bryce Harper, who debuted at 19, versus Mike Trout, who debuted at 19 as well. So just looking at fastball rate, pretty basic. Harper, as his first year, he saw 46% fastballs. That's quite low. Mike Trout saw 58% fastballs. So he was treated very differently when he was 19. And Bryce Harper, when he was a rookie, he saw 42% of pitches in the strike zone, and Mike Trout saw 52% of pitches in the strike zone. So Mike Trout was pitched a lot more aggressively when he was young.

The next year, when Trout became the Trout that we all know and still somehow underappreciate he actually saw far more fastballs he saw 65 fastballs and he saw uh the same 51 of pitches in the strike zone and then he was like a what 10 win player that was almost an 11 win player so the next year pitchers are like, nope. And so they stopped throwing so many fastballs and they moved out of the zone promptly. The problem with that, of course, being that Mike Trout hits everything and doesn't swing at balls. So pitchers have still tried to find their way around Mike Trout, which, hot tip, there isn't one. But Bryce Harper has continued to see not very many pitches in the zone, although his fastball rate, interestingly, has gotten higher every single year, such that, let's see, let's see, off the top of my head.

Well, this isn't off the top of my head. So last year, Trout saw 58% fastballs and Harper saw 56%. The gaps between them are narrowing. They appear to have gotten smaller basically every year. So pretty soon, maybe this year, Harper will see more fastballs than Mike Trout. Yeah. So it took pitchers surprisingly long to adjust to the fact that Mike Trout is a baseball god, right? I mean, you'd think that they- Well, I mean, how do you adjust? What do you do? I don't know what you do, but presumably they would have at least tried to throw him fewer fastballs as one tactic, and it took them a while to do that so i don't know how quickly the scouting reports would get around but one day obviously stack cast will be everywhere it'll be

super cheap and routine and perfect and it'll just be a matter of course you have stack cast in your minor league park and colleges will have stack cast and we'll have stack cast for people from when they're in little league or going to showcases or that sort of thing and you just get it for christmas yeah i mean eventually it'll happen all technology starts out as something fancy and expensive and then it's something cheap that fits into our pocket so i'm sure stack cast will get there too i guess you would have had the chance when you were in Sonoma to maybe like throw and test yourself on pitch effects. Yeah. Just to see.

Because it would be fun, right? If you know the systems calibrated, you would like to see what your own pitches do. I don't know if you pitch or throw very much, but I think it would be a great time. I would love to have the opportunity to pitch just to look at my own data. Yeah, I think Sam and I did that just to make sure it was registering pitches neither of us is like a practiced pitcher or particularly good at pitching but we threw baseballs and they were trapped which was cool so all right stat segment sure so i don't well whatever we don't need to take over the fact that we don't have a name for it. So for no reason but desperation, last week I started thinking about not just stolen bases, but high leverage stolen bases.

I think this came out of the fact that I continued to be surprised that the Baltimore Orioles stole just 19 bases all season. And they also hit three triples all season. So for those of you who are familiar with Bill James's speed score, the Orioles rated as, I think, I didn't make a note of this, but I think the second slowest team of all time by that measure. But this isn't about the Orioles. This is about high leverage stolen bases. So for anyone who's unfamiliar, high leverage refers to basically the most important situations in a baseball game. It's when there is the most to gain or to lose by win probability, etc, etc. So last year, Jonathan VR led the majors with 62 stolen bases. Six of those came in high leverage situations. I don't know if that seems good or

bad. It's basically what you'd expect. Billy Hamilton, 58 stolen bases, 6 in high leverage spots. For a low example, Oduble Herrera or Mookie Betts, they stole about 25, 26 bases, only 1 in high leverage situations. Hernan Perez, 34 steals, 1 in a high leverage spot. But what got my attention was the other side of things where two players last year, two players in all of baseball had double digit stolen bases in high leverage spots. Can you guess those two players last year, two players in all of baseball, had double-digit stolen bases in high-leverage spots. Can you guess those two players? I was going to guess it was like Paul Goldschmidt.

No, he did have five. He's sneaky like that. He did have five steals in high-leverage situations, but I think the Diamondbacks maybe only had five high-leverage situations. So two players. I'll give you a hint for one. He doesn't hit ever. Eduardo Nunez?

No. When I say he doesn't hit ever, I mean he doesn't even get the chance. Oh, he doesn't get the chance. Lenny Harris? Last year. Who doesn't hit ever? Oh, Terrence Gore. Right. Okay. So Terrence Gore, last year he stole 11 bases, and 10 of them came in high leverage spots with the Royals. So that was second best in the majors, Terrence Gore. He batted zero times in high leverage spots, but he scored five times because he stole 10 bases,

and he got caught two times. But Rajai Davis, he had 14, 14 high leverage seals, and he was caught not once. So Rajai Davis led the majors with 14 high leverage steals. No one else had more than 10. That made me a little curious about Rajai Davis and other players to do stuff like this. So at Fangraphs, we have these splits going back to 2002. So that covers a decent 15 years of Major League Baseball. And over that span, there are 19 player seasons who have stolen double digit bases in high

leverage spots. So Terrence Gore is there, of course, with his 10 steals and 12 attempts. So 15 years, 19 players, player seasons who have stolen double digits. No one has stolen more than 14. So there are four cases of players stealing 14 high leverage bags. We have Billy Hamilton, who two years ago went 14 out of 17. We have Jose Reyes, who 11 years ago went 14 out of 17. But Roger Davis shows up again. So Roger Davis last year went 14 out of 14 in high leverage spots. In 2013, Roger Davis went 14 out of 14 in high leverage spots. In 2013, Rajai Davis went 14 out of 14 in high leverage spots.

And five years ago in 2012, Rajai Davis went 13 out of 13 in high leverage spots. So of the players who have stolen double digit important bases and not been caught, we have just reading up the list. We have Tony Campana, not a surprise. Darren Mastroianni who that's the first time I've said his name out loud and probably will be the last we have Jimmy Rollins from five years ago and then topping the list we have Rajai Davis Rajai Davis and Rajai Davis so I don't know

what this means about Rajai Davis for his career because if I look over his entire career, he hasn't been an exceptional base stealer by rate or in these spots. But at least over the past five years, I guess, Davis is looking at 48 successful high leverage stolen bases, almost 10 a year, and he's been caught just four times. And actually, that overlooks that in 2011, he went six out of six. just four times. And actually, that overlooks that in 2011, he went six out of six. The year before that, he was five out of six. So Rajai Davis, for all of his, I guess, drawbacks, he does seem to be not only an incredible base runner overall, but also an incredible situational base runner, which is something that seems like he would have a decent amount of value, at least for a playoff team. So not the team that he plays for now but he is 36 years old seems like he could be an easy mid-season trade candidate

so raja davis even at the age of he's what he's 36 years old now and still he's up to 365 career stolen bases which is a lot he has shown no sign of slowing down or maybe if he has shown signs of slowing down he's shown no signs of getting stupid on the if he has shown signs of slowing down he's shown no signs of getting stupid on the bases he's been a tremendous base stealer the last well for his career he's added more than three wins of value just by running uh stealing bases alone throw in the fact that he doesn't hit the double plays and he runs the base as well when he's not stealing fantastic base runner and so raja davis would be at least one example of a player who is his entire game is based around speed but he has not had uh one of those early declines i don't

know when people talk about player types and how they decline i'm not really sure where the consensus is i think a player like raja davis is said to either have a graceful decline because he's so athletic or he'll decline really fast because his game is based around his speed and And what it seems to me is that people mean we don't know what's going to happen to a player like Roger Davis because we've you've heard both arguments, right? And they're in direct contrast with one another. Yeah, I remember hearing the same about Sean Figgins, which whoops, that was a mistake. But I remember when the Mariners hired him, he seemed like he's a great runner, contact guy, great defender. He should age gracefully. And what actually happened was that he's not literally dead, but he performed as if he were a dead baseball player who was in the lineup every day.

So I think people, one of the early sabermetric ideas that people got maybe a little too comfortable with was the idea of how players decline and it turns out no we really don't know how they decline certainly not by player type and i think it was russell who not too long ago wrote an essay about what was it n equals one i think was the name of his his article that every player is different uh i'm gonna write something about felix hernandez soon for fangraphs because he uh he had an off-season workout regimen for, let's say, maybe the first time in his career. I don't want to cast aspersions on Felix Hernandez, but he's never had to work that hard before. But his trainer said that the idea

of working so much on his lower body is that he wants to get the fastball back up to 93, 94 miles per hour, which would be be interesting he hasn't averaged 93 or above since 2011 Felix Hernandez now is coming up on 31 years old it would be easy to be dismissive and say well Felix that's too bad but it looks like you were declining this is just how you are going to decline and pitchers don't get better when they are your age but we can't really know that because just because the population gets worse doesn't mean that Felix is guaranteed to do that we've seen Justin Verlander has gone from averaging 92 miles per hour a couple years ago to 93 and a half last year so there are clear

signs of players who can bounce back and Verlander is even older than Felix is so there's reason for hope and I think when we are talking about players declining or not declining, we just don't know. And I would imagine that aging curves are changing by the year at this point anyway. Yeah. Good point. All right. Interesting. Now I know something about Rashad Davis that I didn't know before. I appreciate him more than I did before. All right. Question from two people, Ben and Eric, who asked virtually the same question. In the Cubs preview episode, Sahadev alluded to the conventional wisdom that defense is slump-proof. I'm just wondering to what degree we have evidence for this.

It seems like StatCast might be helpful in trying to figure out if players go through defensive slumps. What do we know about this? And I think that's true. This is another case where StatCast can help, but hasn't helped yet. So I'm just going to speculate. I think probably the things that are more prone to slumps, well, the less something is out of a hitter's control or out of a player's control, the more prone it is to what we view as slumps, I would think, the more factors are in play. Like a hitter slump might just be because he is mechanically screwed up and that's just something that is a problem with him only.

But it could also be that he's been facing really good pitchers lately who've been making really good pitches or he's been facing really good defensive teams or he's had some bad batted ball luck and you know you can strip some of that out with stat cast too but a lot of what might have looked like a slump might have just been things bunching up in ways that were hard to quantify before and if you look at something like Russell Carlton does his research about things stabilizing or becoming reliable, and basically the lesson is just that if it's something that is very directly under a player's control, like if it's swing rate or something, well, a player can always decide whether to swing or not. That is just a decision that he can make when he's standing at the plate. And if he's wired a certain way to swing a lot or not swing a lot, he's probably just going to do

his usual amount of swinging in any small sample. And so defense, I think, would theoretically fall somewhere in the middle there in that you must slump in that sometimes you have a nagging injury or you're tired or you're sick or whatever and you're not going to get as good a jump you're not going to be as fast that day but for the most part players are roughly in the same sort of shape throughout a season I would think and they don't get hugely slower over the course of a single season. So I wouldn't expect the raw skills to vary that much. And the opportunities vary a lot. And that's something that StatCast has already shown, that it's really a pretty small number of plays in a season

that differentiates a good fielder from a bad fielder. And the opportunities to distinguish yourself in that way can vary from season to season. And you just might not get challenged that much in a single season or you might get challenged a lot in a single season. And so you might appear to slump just because you had fewer balls in a zone that would make you look good when you caught them, that kind of thing. would make you look good when you caught them, that kind of thing. And so something like DRS or UZR would penalize you perhaps for that, or you'd have fewer opportunities to stand out from the pack. So I think there's probably something to that. And there's probably something to the fact that not everyone is equally well positioned to get good jumps and run really fast every single day throughout a season,

that stuff will fluctuate just like anything will fluctuate. But I would think it would be more stable than hitting, for example, where there are just all of these variables that are only partially or not at all in the player's control. Yeah, I basically agree. So I'm going to say what you said with different words. I think that it comes down to, first of all, you have to define what a slump is, whether it's a hitter actually underperforming or are you slumping if you hit five straight balls right at the third baseman because you went over? I don't know.

That would classically be a slump, but I think that doesn't reflect the hitter slumping. So if you have a hitter who's slumping because he's, like you said, kind of sick, well, that's going to affect the way that you defend. If he's slumping because he's, like you said, kind of sick, well, that's going to affect the way that you defend. If he's slumping because his attention is elsewhere, maybe he has some family crisis or he just is having a professional crisis and he is thinking about other things he could be doing with his life. Well, then you're also going to be of a wayward mind in the outfield or the infield. So you would be getting worse jumps or whatnot. If you are slumping because you are hurt, well, that's going to affect you in the in the field as well but i think that there's not really such a thing on any complicated level as like defensive mechanics you know you're basically

running and you're catching and you're throwing so of course there are some mechanics but it's nothing like hitting it's nothing so intricate as hitting mechanics so i think you don't lose sometimes hitters will kind of lose their swings and i don't think you're going to see that in the field like you said there's a lot of it's going to come down to opportunities or positioning as well so you might just end up with like a few too many balls that are just out of your reach but they look like they're catchable so to some people it might seem like you're slumping or to ucr it might seem like you're you're slumping i think one area where you could see a meaningful statistical slump even with no change in performance is like arm statistics come down to very few plays during a season and if you are a if you're say juan lagaris and you build up

a tremendous arm rating because you threw a bunch of runners out at home well i don't know how often you've watched plays at home but they are they're flips of the coin almost every single time. And obviously, the accuracy and strength of a throw are in large part up to an outfielder, but they are so fast and they happen so quickly. And I think for a throw to be six inches offline from 200 feet away, it says nothing different about the outfielder, but such a small difference, or even just an umpire call difference can make a difference between a runner being out at third or home and being safe at third or home. And so it comes down to these bang bang plays that I think it would be really easy to see an outfielder having a great assist season one year and then

the next year he could have almost the same exact throws, but because maybe the runners are better or the throws are very very slightly worse then your arm rating would look a lot worse and it wouldn't really reflect anything about your skill so granted that would be a statistical slump and not a performance slump but it's something i think about whenever i look at crazy arm ratings because usually they involve base runners doing things they shouldn't or throws essentially getting lucky for lack of a better word. Right. All right. Quick one from Joe.

As a Cubs fan, I had a few years of heavy prospect watching recently, just hoping what the Cubs were doing would turn out well. It did. Yay. My question is about Kyle Hendricks. He was never a top prospect, but I fell in love with him as a pitcher when he was still in the minors. I totally bought into the Maddox comps and was a believer in him when he had a good season as a rookie. When a lot of people were expecting regression in 2016,

I did not do much analytical research to confirm my love. I just had a feeling. I guess I like the underdog. I do feel like a Kyle Hendricks hipster though. This is my question. Is it okay for me to feel smug about being one of the early ones on the Hendrix train, or did I just get lucky? How much am I allowed to gloat about this? My gut says I probably just got lucky, but I want to feel validated. Well, so the answer is, yeah, you got lucky, but you can still be smug as long as you stop now. Don't, I wouldn't try to like go identify the next Kyle Hendrix because Kyle Hendrix is to a a certain extent kind of a baseball miracle and he didn't even necessarily figure out quite what he was until this last season when he picked

up a new trick and he got better against lefties but if you want to speak generally I think you can learn from Hendricks to grant greater respect to strike throwing minor leaguers who might not have the classic stuff that gets you attention. So you can be smug about your going against the prospect lists and valuing something else. But I certainly would not try to make a habit of trying to find more of these guys because usually they aren't going to run ERAs in the twos in the major leagues when they throw 88 miles per hour on a good day. Yeah, I think you know how much credit you deserve. If you watched him and evaluated him and came to some counterintuitive conclusion that no

one else was coming to and you saw what they didn't see, then sure, you deserve lots of credit. If you just liked him for reasons that you couldn't qualify and you couldn't even describe and you didn't even know why you liked him, well, maybe you were picking up on something subconsciously and you had some insight, some sort of blink level insight that was informing your opinion of the player. But, I mean, have you fallen in love with lots of other players who turned out to be bad? have you fallen in love with lots of other players who turned out to be bad? Is it the same process that you were using to evaluate those players that you were using to evaluate Hendrix? If so, yeah, you probably got lucky, but that's okay. I think you can still take some pride in it as long as you don't gloat too loudly and too publicly. Do you remember John Stevens? Does that name mean anything to you? So John Stevens

was a guy he pitched. I remember he only came to my interest or attention because of those old volumes of baseball prospectus that got me into this stuff in the first place. And John Stevens was a righty. He was a pitcher for the Orioles when the Orioles were terrible. So he was interesting. He pitched parts of just one year in 2002 in the majors. He ran an ERA that was literally over six, but he also had 56 strikeouts as a starter in 65 innings, which at that point was pretty good. And if I can just get rid of some numbers here in the minors, his numbers were really interesting. He had basically a strikeout an inning as a starting pitcher in the Oriole system.

He barely walked anybody. He didn't give up many home runs. He was one of those old baseball prospectus statistical dolls. The problem was that, okay, so I'm going to guess Fangraff didn't measure this right because in 2002, the measurements were off. I don't think his average fastball was actually 73 miles per hour, but it wasn't that much better. He threw what I recall being kind of like a R.A. Dickey fastball or maybe like a late career Jared Weaver fastball. He threw in the low, maybe mid 80s. That's what I recall. I wish I could confirm that, but I can't believe these numbers are accurate

or if they are, holy crap, no wonder he was terrible. But he was a no-stuff pitcher who had who had i think like a really good curveball and change up the stuff that of course you'd need to succeed in the minors without any kind of fastball i remember being really excited this is back like when jack cussed with it was a big prospect and i thought these two guys are going to like defy the system cuss is going to be a great major leaguer and stevens is going to be a great major leaguer and then Stevens got a little bit obliterated and Cust did steroids and he couldn't do anything but flip his bat when he walked so I remember being quite disappointed and my history teacher was an Orioles fan I got his

hopes up and then they were dashed a little bit but Stevens I wish I think he went up with shoulder problems that kind of cost him the rest of his career according to baseball reference he washed out when he was 26 which is a a bummer but in the minors he had basically a strike at netting two walks per nine didn't give up home runs really interesting had no stuff and i wish that he were around today i guess i don't know what a recent comparison would be but one guy who kind of comes to mind is do you remember instead Jorge Campillo yeah okay so Campillo he didn't even throw 200 major league innings but assuming Fangraphs has these numbers correctly his fastball averaged 85.6 for his career which is not good but he was a change-up guy his change-up was 74.6 and over his limited amount of time he

had a better than average fip x fip and uh his era was right on the average so he had one year of success before he uh i think he also had shoulder problems but he was fun because he didn't throw hard when everybody else was and he still succeeded with the braves and i even forgot what the original question kyle hendricksricks Kyle Hendricks was the original question yeah there are these guys do float around they do exist it's fun to look for them and kind of scout the stat line so to speak but

they are few and far between and I think you definitely have to be careful okay let's close by searching our emails for Adam Lind could you search for Adam Lind I don't you might send or receive more Adam Lind. Could you search for Adam Lind? You might send or receive more Adam Lind-related emails than I do, but if you're like me, it will be the most recent message in your inbox when you search for Adam Lind.

It's a question from listener named Eric, subject line, odd Adam Lind visual. He links us to a tweet. This is a tweet from September, so he's been thinking about this question for about five months now, and he has finally come to us for

an answer. This is footage, nine seconds of footage of Adam Lind at the plate in a mid-September game, and the question that Eric asks is, did he fart? mid-September game and the question that Eric asks is

did he fart? The evidence that he did and I will link to this tweet at Fangraph's blog post in the Facebook group so that you can play along. The evidence that he did is that there is some expulsion

of some sort. How does this only have two retweets? some expulsion of some sort. I need to mute my mic. There's something. How does this only have two retweets? Two retweets and three likes, but maybe soon to have many more. So right after the pitch crosses the plate, just as it's crossing the plate, really, there is something that comes from the vicinity of adam wins behind it might be

behind adam wins behind it's hard to tell because of the perspective but there's something visible and gaseous that seems to emanate from that area right okay i okay okay okay i'm doing this frame by frame there's nothing it's before the ball gets to the mitt there's nothing else there's no other sort of movement or dust in the scene nothing coming from anywhere there's like a glare this is clearly

recorded from a television but it doesn't seem like it's an artifact of the camera work it definitely looks like it's like a chalk fart. I think if you... Is that a thing? Well, no, those are two words I've never put together, but it's kind of like, you know, LeBron's pregame.

Now, if you have an ordinary fart, it's invisible, right? I remember there was one time, you can be represented indirectly. There was one time I was in line at what was then Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, and I was standing in a concession line behind an older man with loose fitting long pants. And I didn't see his fart, but I saw the ripples of the fart in his pants. And I could tell, like, I know what you did, but you don't see something like this. So it's possible he had a very strong fart and there was like chalk on his pants, although that would be a weird place for chalk. I know. I was thinking thinking i i did some research he played first base that day he had not been on base as a hitter he had struck out in his first at bat this was his second at bat of the game

so it wasn't as if he had slid on the bases unless he had made some diving defensive play or something which it's adam lynn so i'm not sure how likely that is. And it would have to be something that was on his pants. And I don't know why you would have chalk on there necessarily. It's a strange place to have chalk. So I don't know. And the force that would be sufficient to propel that amount of chalk in such a visible way would have to be pretty substantial. Right. So I'm thinking in terms of like fumaroles. If you look at certain volcanoes, they don't, a lot of active volcanoes do emit gas.

It's not always visible, but sometimes it is visible. You can see an active fumarole with the naked eye. And a lot of times that will be water vapor. with the naked eye and a lot of times that will be water vapor so it's possible it's possible that there's some sort of like therapeutic steam insertion that maybe takes place between innings like the the expression don't blow smoke up my ass that has to come from somewhere i don't know who would want smoke blown up their ass but it would then have to come back out yeah uh i think so you could have like a a water fart, which seems like almost impossible. It could also be one that's commonly seen is sulfur dioxide.

You can see that with the naked eye, but that seems like it would be an odd mixture of chemicals to be in Adam Lind's body. But I don't know. I don't know a lot about Adam Lind, but I am. I don't know a lot about Adam Lind, but we now have visible evidence of what was a fleeting but seemingly legitimate active fumarole emitting from Adam Lind's rear. And it's under the radar because, again, two retweets, three likes. I want to retweet it, but maybe the problem is that Major League Baseball doesn't like us using videos anymore on our Twitter, videos or GIFs.

So I don't know. Okay, listen, Major League Baseball and MLB.com, I'm not actively retweeting this. I am only talking about it. I am encouraging other people to view the tweet. It's not even a manual retweet. It's like a verbal retweet. This is a verbal retweet, think Basically coming from both of us It will be linked in the Effectively Wild

Facebook group This is the most important footage That I missed from 2016 Whatever it is happens at A pivotal decisive climactic Moment This pitch is about to be decided And you can imagine that there might be

Some kind of clench taking place at that precise moment. And perhaps there was something expelled. I like that he tweeted at Root Sports Northwest to ask if Adam Lind farted smoke as if they would confirm or refute. And you can see visible in the top of the chyron, in the top of the image, that Jerry DePoto was in the booth for this inning. So I regret not asking him about this. This is in September.

So I should mention the three Twitter accounts that are shown here. There are no replies to this tweet. It was retweeted or liked by someone with 27 followers, someone with four, and someone with seven. And the person who tweeted this has 29 followers. So this basically doesn't exist as far as Twitter is concerned. Looking at things, so this is the first pitch of N at bat. It looks like it's Tony Sip. Is that right?

Yeah, I think so. On the mound, lefty for the Astros. So first pitch, maybe it's a fear fart. This is in the middle of September of what was a bad year for Adam Lind. So maybe he was a little upset. He could feel his career kind of slipping away. It's cutting across his body, the pitch. It may have looked like it was heading for him.

Right. He took the pitch, which is an important detail. He thought about swinging. And then as he checked his swing is when he apparently farted. So it's possible that he caught himself. My girlfriend sometimes gets surprised by hiccups like she doesn't know they're coming and then it surprises both of us when they happen. I wonder if he couldn't tell.

It can usually have an inkling, right? But maybe he couldn't tell this is going to happen and then he held up because I mean let's face it, the breaking ball was pretty hittable. It's like thigh high over the middle of the plate, first pitch. So maybe this even cost Adam Lind like a double or a home run. And under the close observation of Jerry DiPoto, who's discussing this plate appearance in the booth. Bino is the new inefficiency. Sadly, Adam Lind is not on Twitter.

So we can't ask him directly that way. Is there any sort of response from anyone else? No, Catcher doesn't flinch, just a beautiful framing job by Jason Castro. Yeah, just because it emitted chalk doesn't necessarily mean it made a sound, I suppose.

That's true, although, I mean, I don't want to, look, I think we can probably conclude Adam Lind is not a quiet farter. He doesn't have the build of one. Maybe I'm stereotyping. Alright. This is

important, so I'm glad we talked about it. We report. You all decide. Let us know what you think. And I suppose... September 9th. What else? Hold on. You've got more? I don't know. We're doing this live.

September 19th. What did Adam Lind do in that game? He had struck out once. He had played first. I don't know if he had made a play. This wasn't September 19th. This must have been September 18th. Even though the tweet was sent on the 19th. The 18th he faced the astros so he had struck out his first two at bats against doug fister which last year that's a little bit humiliating let's be honest yeah so

lind early on in the uh the first inning lind struck out against d Pfister, five pitches. In the third inning, struck out, four pitches. Doug Pfister, fifth inning. Oh, okay. What does he do against Tony Sipp? He singles. What does he single on, a line drive? The very next pitch, somebody was feeling relieved by the circumstances. It's possible he had some sort of gastrointestinal distress

through the first four and a half innings of this game finally relieved on live television very next pitch just a line drive single up the middle what does adam lind do for the rest of the season from that point on adam lind if i can just get this no that's not this is less dramatic than I wanted it to be, but Adam Lind over the rest of the year, including that at bat, he goes 13 for 42, which works out to a 310 batting average. Wow. Yeah. So this had been building up for some time, perhaps. Yeah. I wonder if Adam Lind had some serious problems that kind of held him back.

And yeah, very next pitch. Maybe not a coincidence. All right. Well, this is one of the few questions that even StatCast can answer. I don't think it's sensitive enough to pick up on this, but maybe someday. We look forward to your responses and opinions, and we will end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have done so already. Jem Oregon, Nathan Wamser, Dan Cardy, Sean Newkirk, and Sander Glick.

Thank you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. And you can reach me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will be back on Friday with the preview episode for the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox, so we will talk to you then.