Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1059: Is Your Bat Boned?

Episode Date: May 18, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a mid-start adjustment by Clayton Kershaw and answer listener emails about what constitutes a “jam,” pitchers who’ve allowed the most first career hits, how to analyze player problems and improvements, team abbreviations, hitters who homer and bunt, left-handed infielders, whether bats could be causing the home-run surge, and […]

So raise your fists and march around, just don't take what you need. I'll tail and bury those committed and smother the rest in greed. Crawl with me and true tomorrow, I'll drag you to your grave. I'm deep inside your children, they'll betray you in my name. Hey! Hey! Sit down with the fire? Hello and welcome to episode 1059 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs,

and you are hearing the strains of Sleep Now in the Fire by Rage Against the Machine, which, as a number of people informed us, is Matt Albers' entrance song, and I would say a pretty good choice. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? All right. We're going to do emails in just a second, but a bit of banter before we get to that. I want to talk about Clayton Kershaw, because I wrote about him earlier this week, and there is breaking news about him, because as we speak, he has just completed throwing seven shutout innings against the Giants. So this article was prompted by an email from one of our Patreon supporters, Michael, who noticed that Kershaw had changed the way he was throwing his slider in the last three innings of his start last Friday. And first, I'll just say that Kershaw's slider has been his best pitch,

or at least if you look at pitch-type run values and that sort of thing, it has been his most devastating weapon and probably the most devastating slider in baseball over the past few seasons. But Kershaw's slider has been an issue for a while. People have mentioned it. Dave Roberts has acknowledged that it's not its usual self after some games when Kershaw has struggled. And by struggled, I mean by Kershaw standards, he hasn't been quite as unhittable this year as he was, say, before his injury last year.

And people have been wondering why, why he's not getting as many whiffs. And it seems to be because of the slider. This year, he's been throwing it harder and it hasn't been sinking as much probably because he's throwing it harder and maybe he's not finishing it and he's sort of leaving it up and so that seems to be a big part of why he hasn't been quite Kershaw-ian to this point in the season but as Michael noted he suddenly seemed to start throwing it slower in his most recent start. So I looked into this, and this is a problem that goes back to last September when he came off the DL, and right away he was throwing the slider a lot harder and

wasn't moving the way that you want a slider to move because a slider gets whiffs if it sinks and if it has some separation from your fastball and his head regressed in both of those counts and so I noticed that as Michael pointed out in this start he was doing his usual thing and throwing a slider near 90 or so and in the fourth inning he threw three really lousy ones just hard and low lower lowest, and they were all nowhere near the strike zone. And then he comes out for the fifth inning, and suddenly he threw the two slowest sliders that he's thrown all season. He threw the slowest slider that he had thrown since before he got hurt last year, and that continued in that final three innings of that start. He was throwing slower

sliders, getting better movement, and getting whiffs all of a sudden. And so I wondered if maybe he had just suddenly fixed himself on the fly. And it looks like, based on his start Wednesday, that he has. He kept throwing the slider slow, like 87.4, I think it averaged, as opposed to about 90 when it wasn't working so well. He got, I think, four of his five strikeouts on the slider. He gave up three hits over seven innings and was very economical.

And this is kind of amazing to me, not just that he had a problem with a pitch or that he fixed it, but that he fixed it mid-start like that. Just it was bad. And then he went back to the dugout and then he came back out and seemingly had fixed everything. I don't want to oversimplify the situation because he's had good starts when it wasn't working so well. I don't know that this good start was solely because of the slider, but still to fix a problem that's been bothering you for months, just seemingly on the fly mid-start is impressive confusing perplexing

i don't know what the mechanics of that are so to uh officially put a close on what happened on wednesday kershaw threw it looks like 18 sliders average 87.3 miles per hour 12 of the 18 sliders were strikes that's good considering he threw most of them out of the zone he got seven whiffs on the slider out of what looks to be 12 swing attempts so yeah that makes sense 12 strikes 12 swings uh so a whole bunch of whiffs for kershaw against a pretty good contact lineup that the giants have yeah so this makes your story from the weekend more remarkable in retrospect and of course we both appreciate the tip off and had you not hurried to write that

article i probably would have written a similar article which unfortunately i didn't get a chance because now i would have a follow-up so kudos to ben you do things on weekends and i'm just sitting here reading my emails so uh well i was actually visiting dave cameron anyway yeah uh yeah so it lends the story from the weekend to more credence because now the slider really does look fixed like this this makes that evidence look so much stronger now that it's held up and i guess the first thing that comes to mind aside from wow clayton korshaw is this is one of the reasons why you talk about starters who are like having good games or bad games and mitchell lichtman is one guy who's done a bunch of research on like how meaningful a bad beginning or a good beginning is to a start relative to the

rest and the evidence if i were to distill it into a simple point is basically that it doesn't matter what a pitcher has done in a game he's just most likely to perform like himself moving forward in the game the truth is of course more complex than. And if a guy is throwing like five miles per hour slower, then the situation is different. His arm is unattached. But I think that it's... And that even applies to seasons too, right? If you're having a weird anomalous season,

in most cases, you're probably just going to go back to doing more or less what you did before. Oh, yeah. I think it's easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that in between innings, pitchers get a complete break. They just get, you know, if you're out there having a bad start, it could just be some fluky hits you've allowed, or maybe your mechanics are very, very slightly off, and then you just go back to the bench, and then you recover your muscle memory, and then you just go back out, and you

look like your normal self. Anybody can have five weird minutes where you're not doing things normally but if you just give yourself a 10 minute or increasingly in this day and age of baseball 47 minute break in between innings then you can just kind of reset yourself and so kershaw it's not like kershaw just fixed a slider problem immediately when it cropped up because as you said it kind of dates back to when he returned from the disabled list last season so it's weird to have it just suddenly fixed i think we can say fixed because it certainly seems fixed i don't know what took so long but is it really any different from if he had fixed it between starts because how much time do you think he would really need the answer seems to be zero minutes yeah i don't. He doesn't talk about this sort of

thing. From what I understand, he doesn't get into the details of how and why he does what he does exactly. So I don't know that we'll ever know exactly how he fixed it at that moment. Maybe one of his catchers will talk about it. Maybe it's something a pitching coach said. I mean, I don't know, though, because this has been going on for months. So it's not like it was really news to anyone that his slider hadn't been that great. His teammates had acknowledged it. His manager had acknowledged it. I'm sure he was aware of it himself. So I don't know if it was just that he was coming off three particularly lousy ones and he was just feeling so frustrated that he said, I'll just do something dramatically different, and I'll take like six, seven miles per hour off and see what happens. And that somehow fixed him, like if he had to reach a level of frustration that made him want to do something.

Because, again, he was like still one of the best pitchers at baseball, even when you took one of the best pitches in baseball and made it a not so great pitch he has so many other abilities that he was just fine so maybe it just never got to the point that he felt like he needed to start tinkering because things were working pretty well and then this run of sliders was so lousy that he just got fed up with it i i don't know because if it were as simple as hey throw your slider a little bit slower because you're throwing it harder than you used to throw it that seems like something that could have been fixed after two starts i don't know like a pitching coach or a catcher could have noted that maybe if it's clayton kershaw you kind of give him some deference and you don't

say something to him that you would to a rookie because he's Clayton Kershaw. And I don't know if people kind of tiptoe around him and telling him what to do or making recommendations or suggestions, but it's odd. It's just goes to show you, I feel like I'll probably be using this as a example in the future when I'm talking about weird performances or strange things or how we can't predict anything. The time that Clayton Kershaw just fixed himself right in the middle of a start and seemed to put months of not being quite Kershaw-esque behind him. So I'd love to know exactly how it happened. It's not like it could just be a complete accident because it was like demonstrably different after that. I don't know whether it was a health thing and he just cracked his back the right way and it suddenly felt fine after months of not feeling fine or what the story is.

But it's fascinating to me. Yeah. Here's what I don't get. The problem, if you want to call it a problem with kershaw's slider before so very recently it was that he was going a little too fast and it was dropping less those were like the two predominant characteristics of the worst slider it made it look a lot more like a cutter and so a slider is a pitch that just like every other pitch you try to use the same arm action that you have on your fastball so you're not slowing things down and you grip it in a certain way and the ball comes out a certain way yeah the uh the way the ball comes

out of your hand is kind of instinctive it's sort of natural you can't necessarily think about your wrist when you're releasing the ball every single time so it's it's mostly arm action and grip and i can't for the life of me figure out how kershaw's slider would have wound up harder and moving differently because it's not like he would have just forgotten how to grip his slider. That doesn't make sense to me. He's been doing it for so long. And so I am left to wonder, and I think the probability, it's more likely that he might've been trying to do something on purpose, maybe to have a harder slider. And then at some point he just got fed up and then he decided between things, I'm going to go back to what I used to do. What's more familiar to me yeah what would be weird about that hypothesis

is that it clearly wasn't working for him already but maybe he just wanted to give it a few months everybody's developing a really hard cutter and let's face it if you think about clayton kershaw on paper you think well why not have a cutter that's really hard yeah i don't know maybe it was just bouncing a couple of them that made him say, all right, forget it. The failed experiment. Let's go back to what was working when I was the best pitcher ever, almost. So anyway, it's interesting. I'm glad that he backed up the observation that our Patreon supporter Michael made. And my article doesn't look completely stupid a few days after I wrote

it. That's always nice. So anyway, that's the latest in Clayton Kershaw news. Clayton Kershaw, great again or greater again. All right. So let's get to some emails. Question from Eric Hartman. This is another defining a common baseball term question. And he says, while listening to the Orioles-Royals game, Alec Asher entered with runners on first and second with one out. Joe Angel wondered if we can get out of this jam. Following last week's discussion of a slugfest, I'm now skeptical of misuse of any term and wonder what constitutes jam. I don't think the given situation counts as a jam.

For me, a jam is when a reliever can allow a run while still successfully retiring every batter they face. First and second with no outs and first and third with one out are jams. First and second with one out is no jam. Your thoughts? Okay, well, I actually hadn't thought of a good way to answer this, but maybe we can look at a run expectancy table. Like, where would be your cutoff for expected runs two would be too high because for the record i'm looking at a baseball prospectus has a table that i just pulled up thankfully it was easily googleable if people don't know what a run expectancy table is

it is essentially a table that includes all potential game states and then the number of runs that scored on average after those states were achieved so last year the worst state of course is bases loaded and nobody out last year when that situation occurred then on average there were about 2.27 runs that scored in that inning that is the only base state of the 24 potential base states that has a run expectancy value north of two so would you say that maybe one would be a cutoff if we wanted to keep things simple? I would have disagreed with Eric. I think I would have said, and he has a good definition, but I think I would have just said multiple base runners would be a jam for me. So what's the

lowest run expectancy you can have with multiple base runners? So first and second, two outs, let's say. Yeah. First and second, two outs let's say yeah first and second two outs last year the run expectancy was 0.43 runs that is not very much that is less than uh the start of an inning nobody on nobody out that's 0.51 well then definitely i would say that should not be a jam then i will change my mind i don't think i was also going to say like more than half a run but if half a run is the default basically then that doesn't make sense either. So what about second and third with two outs? Second and third, two outs, 0.58 runs.

Basically, when you need a hit, there's not a whole lot of hits to go around. So if you wanted, okay, well, let's try this. If you wanted to set a cutoff at one, does this situation count as a jam? Do you run around third? Nobody out? For me, I kind of think that jam has to have, I don't know, like imminent threat of multiple runs scoring. And if there's a runner on third with no outs, then of course, the odds are that you will allow multiple runs, right? Or what's the run expectancy of that situation? Run a third, nobody out. the run expectancy is 1.3 okay 1.3 so i mean i can't really think of a great reason why that wouldn't

be a jam it's almost three times as jammy as the default starting state of the inning there is a guy who can score on and out that that seems like a I mean, it kind of almost depends on the game state, right? Like, I guess it's, if you want to say that a jam is independent of score, and I guess it kind of could be as far as the player's stats are concerned or whatever, but it's not really a jam if you have a seven run lead and there's a guy on third with no outs, right? I mean, it's, it just doesn't doesn't feel... So there's kind of like a leverage component of this also, at least as it's typically discussed, I would say. But if you want to take that out of the equation,

I'd say that's a jam. I guess that's a jam. I can't think of a real reason why that wouldn't be a jam. So, okay, let's... You say runner on third, nobody out. Would you lean more pro jam than anti jam? Yeah. But you're kind of on the fence.

Yeah. I guess I'm like a big jam guy, like a big haul guy. Maybe I'm just on edge and everything seems like a jam to me or something. But all these sound like jams. What about first and second nobody out? Does that sound like a jam? Yes. Okay.

So the difference there, runner on third, nobody out, run expectancy 1.3. First and second nobody out, run expectancy just shy of 1.5. So somewhere in there seems to be for you the difference. What about second and third one out? Second and third one out. Yeah, I'd call that a jam. Okay, that has the exact same run expectancy as runner on third and nobody out. Okay, so that's my threshold, I guess, for jamming.

And this is only one way to maybe address this. Yeah. It kind of reminds me, this is a slightly different situation, but for example, last year, the league average OPS was 739. And there's always a little bit of indecision when talking about counts like uh i don't know oh and one counts or or two strike counts what counts as a hitter friendly count and what counts as a right a pitcher friendly count and there's always been some amount of disagreement over like what's a one one count or a two one count and there's no like really easy way to i guess establish a cutoff like is a one and onein-one count, is that a pitcher-friendly count,

a hitter-friendly count, or an even count? And I don't think that there's an agreed-upon answer. I guess you could use run expectancy for that also. Yeah. Might be harder to look up, but you could use the same method. Last year, what did I say? 739 was the league OPS. After one-in-one counts, counts the ops dropped to 685 after

two and one counts the ops was 803 so that would imply that one one is definitely pitcher friendly and two one is hitter friendly but yeah it gets hard because when you have a an uneven number of balls and strikes possible in in a bat then it makes things kind of messy but anyway back to the jam the jam is what's most pressing here. I feel like I agree with you on the level where I kind of want multiple base runners. But looking at the run expectancy table, which I did not expect to pull up, has sort of changed my mind. Where now I think that the run expectancy healthily north of one counts as a jam. And so I would think that if you inherit a runner on third nobody out that would count as a jam and also i agree that there would be a leverage component because you want the the pitcher to be sweating a little bit and worrying about those runners that

could score so i don't know maybe within three or having maybe maybe tying run at the plate does that count yeah sure that sounds like a decent definition or maybe on deck something like that but tying run not too far off run expectancy north of one and with the game as it is today everybody is liable to go deep even people like freddie galvis and so as hits go down still there are home runs and everything is a threat yeah all right i'll take another question from eric i know we answer a lot of Eric Hartman questions, but the man asks interesting questions. And a lot of them, just in fairness. Yes, right. It's a meritocracy here. Although if you're a Patreon supporter, you can skip the meritocracy and get answers anyway. So question from Eric. I'm at the Jays game and Bartolo Colon just gave up Mike Ullman's first MLB hit.

This has led to a multi-inning discussion trying to figure out how many players have had their first big league hit off of Bartolo. He told us that they later revised that estimate down to 15. And he asks if we have any ideas how to query this. And we didn't really. Sam was also on this email thread and he said something like 3,000 players have had a first hit since Bartolo debuted. Cologne has allowed a little more than four-tenths of one percent of all hits in that time, which would work out to about 13, which is a good estimate. But my go-to solution when I don't know how to query something is to ask someone who does. So I went to Hans Van Sleuten, who is the man behind the scenes at Baseball Reference, and he was able to look this up for me. And I was surprised by the result because I was thinking

that Bartolo would have one of the highest totals of first career hits allowed Ever really just because He is pitched for 20 years He's thrown more than 3,000 innings He is the active innings pitched Leader in the majors and he's Pitched at a time when there are more teams Than ever before more players Than ever before there's Interleague play there are just

Lots of matchups that you wouldn't have gotten Before so I was thinking Bartolo would have A ton of these things and he does not He has only allowed 11 First career hits And that ties him For That puts him in a

32 way tie For the 61st most First career hits allowed Which is not very remarkable at all And the all time leader In this category is a Hall of Famer, Robin Roberts, who allowed 26 first career hits. And a lot of the pitchers at the top of the list, as you would expect, are good pitchers. place is Gaylord Perry seventh place is Steve Carlton and Juan Marichal Warren Spahn Kurt Schilling so lots of guys who stuck around for a really long time this isn't really a reflection of how good the pitcher is as much as it is a longevity thing Levon Hernandez is third all-time with 22 allowed and it is sort of strange that Colon is as low as he is because like Randy Wolfe is sixth all time with 17.

And he pitched, I don't know, like five years fewer than Colon and a thousand fewer innings than Colon. And even like Clayton Kershaw has more than Bartolo Colon. Clayton Kershaw has allowed 12 first career hits. And obviously he's only pitched for what less than half the time that Colon has and he's been one of the best pitchers ever in that time he's not allowing a lot of hits so I would guess that a there's a lot of randomness to this obviously I mean it helps if you allow lots of hits but it's more important that you just keep pitching for a long time and you just happen to face guys who haven't had their first career hit yet. And then Eric also brought up the point that maybe the

league has a lot to do with this because Eric was saying that if Colon had spent more time in the National League, maybe he would have given up more pitchers' first hits, which is probably a good point. I think it just seems like this list at the top skews towards pitchers who pitched either before the DH era or in the National League. So I would guess that there's something to that because there are guys like Dan Heron is on the list above Cologne and just a lot of guys who didn't have the longevity that Cologne did and were pretty good pitchers, but were NL pitchers for at least a portion of their career didn't have the longevity that Colon did and were pretty good pitchers, but were NL pitchers for at least a portion of their career.

So maybe that does have something to do with it, but it's a surprising result. You said Colon's allowed 11. So that means 0.33% of his hits allowed have been first hits. And Clayton Kershaw has how many? 12? Yeah, Kershaw has 12. Okay. So for Kershaw, it's nearly 1% of his hits have been first hits allowed and Clayton Kershaw has how many 12 yeah Kershaw has 12 okay so for Kershaw it's nearly one percent of his hits have been first hits allowed because Clayton Kershaw in his career

has allowed 1,340 hits Bartolo Colon has allowed 3,282 hits so this is not clearing anything up this is just amazement at the fact that Clayton Kershaw has allowed more first hits. We could, I guess, hypothesize for why that could be. Kershaw has been in the National League the whole time. And for all I know, when Kershaw's on the mound, opposing managers are just like, screw it, put this guy in. He doesn't have any hits. Let's give him some experience against Clayton Kershaw. We're going to lose. Anyway, I don't know how much it's worth digging into explanations for what's probably mostly random, but it does seem like there would be a National League effect.

Pitchers are far more likely to have no hits in their careers than designated hitters and so that part i can believe in but still it was a uh a fun question i did absolutely zero research for it because by the time i was going to i saw that sam and ben had already stepped in uh which is great because it means you get to handle this and i had never really thought about it before so i like it yeah i think Kershaw might actually be the active leader in this category which is crazy he's not nearly the active leader in longevity and he is also the active leader in being the best pitcher so very strange that Kershaw would be leading in this category but it seems that he is I think he is wow did you get a readout of who those batters were, or is that too complicated?

No, I did not. Probably could, but have not. Although a post. This is something for February. Yeah, I wonder. Maybe I will get that list at some point. All right, so good question. Question from Ryan.

I'm also a sports writer. I am a main MLB contributor for Inside Injuries A company devoted to analyzing and covering Sports injuries mainly for the purposes Of fantasy sports In a recent less injury focused article That I wrote I started a paragraph with the words

Jake Arrieta has not been very good I went on to briefly analyze the fact that his pitch effects Pitch values have decreased notably And that the drop seems to coincide with a very large drop in velocity. I deduced that he may have changed his approach or maybe it's an injury, but whatever he was doing, it was not working. I felt proud of my very brief article and posted it. Then this afternoon while reading on Fangraphs, I saw an article by Jeff Sullivan titled Jake Arrieta has not been good. After reading this article, I discovered that Jeff found a very different reason that it was his foot placement while stretching toward home plate that was giving him troubles. I guess

in a way this could be considered a change in approach. Jeff later noted that this could explain several other factors, including his reduced velocity. It was at that point that I realized maybe we didn't have completely different reasons that we might both be right, but that Jeff had simply gone a level deeper. So my question is this. At what point in your analysis do you know you've gotten to the true bottom of a question, that there is no level deeper? At face value, we can say Jake Arrieta has been bad. Then we ask why, and we reply because his velocity has dropped. Why? Because his plant foot has gotten out of line. Why? You get my point. When do you stop asking why? Is it when you say because or when you say I don't know

or is there simply a eureka moment when you simply know you've gotten to the bottom of it? Well, I guess sometimes there's a eureka moment. I think it's important to point out that in most of these cases, whenever anyone is doing some sort of analysis like this, a deep dive, we seldom really know for a fact that what we're finding is true or a good explanation now helpful in the arietta case specifically i did receive some sort of independent inside baseball confirmation after the fact that indeed this is a real problem of the cubs and arietta are having and they're trying to get his mechanics in alignment and so on and so forth but let's see i was i was just with dave cameron over the weekend visiting down in bend oregon and we were talking a

little bit about all of baseball you know baseball, baseball life ruminations and such. And the Travis Ocheck article from the other week about Eric Thames came up because we were just talking about things we can do from home versus things that you kind of need reporting for. And in a case like Thames, I think we've all taken a stab at trying to analyze what's going on. And you can say, oh, Thames is better because he you can say oh thames is better because he's hitting better thames is better because he's walking more thames is better because he's chasing out of the zone less often thames is better because maybe the explanation is he's changed a swing or he saw more off-speed stuff in korea we've talked about this stuff before

and then travis sawchick goes in talks to thames does some background and and has identified a psychological component where thames was just doing a lot of studying of how to improve because he had a lot of time on his hands because it turns out Eric Thames does not speak South Korean. So he was quite bored in Korea, read the article, and so on. That's the kind of thing where maybe Thames having so much time on his hands and being intellectually curious, maybe that's the answer to why Thames has been so good. And that's as deep as you can go. But of course, for my position, because I'm not actually doing reporting or journalism, because I'm not a journalist, that would be beyond the scope of what I can do from home. Something like Arrieta, that's easier because you can do a video analysis using the imperfect but still good enough MLB TV archives. Used to be, I think, especially when we were just

getting our hands on newer information, we could say, oh, this guy's worse because he's hitting more grand balls or this pitcher is worse because he's missing strikeouts. That was never a satisfying explanation. That was just pointing to something that was happening. But you still need to go deeper than that, I think. I think that there's no longer much of an appetite for an article that says, oh, this pitcher isn't getting strikeouts anymore that's why he's not good now you have to look for a reason the benefit of doing this as a job i guess is that there's a lot of time to yes doing that just digging and digging and deeping and i i find that whenever under most circumstances if there's a pitcher who's struggling i end up thinking like oh i could do this in two

hours and then you just end up studying mechanics frame by frame by frame and then it ends up going like seven hours and you hate yourself for doing it but i think that every question especially when you're doing a individual player analysis in my own head you need to dig as deep as you can dig given what you have as it happens that usually ends up requiring some sort of video analysis and i think if i can identify some sort of mechanical key then that's the equivalent i guess of a eureka moment because that's certainly as far as i can take it but the question of why a guy's mechanics might be out of alignment that one i can't answer that you would need some reporting or just the null hypothesis of sometimes things just happen yeah i was gonna say a of that. I don't know how much time Ryan has to devote to a post. He might have to churn out a bunch of blurbs on

players. And if you do, then you can't really expect that person to do all the digging that you did. But you started out with the fact that Arietta is allowing fewer ground balls, which is interesting in itself. And that's not something that we could have answered, say, before 15 years ago, or even more recently, probably that data existed, but wasn't easily available the way that it is now. And so that is an interesting clue. Why is he allowing fewer ground balls? Or at least that helps explain why he hasn't had as much success. And then you looked at his cutter slider and how he was maybe throwing that less or having less effectiveness with it, which is, again, another thing that you couldn't have said 10 years ago even, unless you were,

say, at the ballpark every day or scouting every game and charting pitches or something. And maybe you could have answered it then, but that would have required even more time and expertise. And then you went from that to, okay, why is this pitch less effective? And then you had the mechanical component. So it ended up being a satisfying answer that seemed to fully explain things. And then, of course, there is another level, I suppose, where you could talk to Arrieta and find out why that's happening if he was willing to talk about it or you know there is

an answer for why he is doing that presumably like he just happened to plant his foot one way on one delivery and it just stuck and maybe he didn't even notice. Maybe he does know and he's been trying to work on it or whatever. There is some reason why he started doing that and kept doing that when he hadn't been doing that before. But that's, I guess, more than we really need to know. At least it's your job as a baseball blogger maybe to point out that it's happening, but not necessarily to tell him how to fix it. That seems like the Cubs job maybe. And, but it, it's definitely gotten harder to do this sort of thing, I guess, or at least it's harder to do it in a satisfying way because there is so much more data at your disposal. Like you can't even say that someone has a low BABIP or whatever. So he's

getting lucky. Like That was a perfectly acceptable answer five years ago. And now if you say that, people will say, well, is he decreasing contact quality somehow? Look at his exit speeds and his launch angles. And we may not necessarily know how sustainable that sort of thing is, but it's at least something you have to look at and point out if you're going to give a complete answer. So we've gained the ability to give better, more satisfying answers, but it also takes more time simpler, you could have said, okay, this guy has, this hitter has a low BABIP. He's going to improve. He's been unlucky. Now, with all the information, what's likely going to happen if you have an article is you'll say, oh, this hitter has a low BABIP, but look, here's the stack guest information that backs up that he deserves a low BABIP. That's great, but still, the probability is that he's going to improve and regress up because any low BABIP is likely to come with supporting information. It doesn't just

happen. I think there's not really such thing as a guy who is constantly stinging the ball and not getting hits. That just doesn't happen. Everybody knows there are lineouts and such, but over the sample of a few months, you're not actually going to see that. So what we have now are just new stats that we have to get used to the fact that they will move around. And this is, I guess, one of the dangers of having so much exposure to exit velocities and launch angles and still incomplete knowledge of how to use them, because you can always find now statistical support for any stat that seems way too high or way too low, but that doesn't change the fact that still any extreme data point is likely to regress in the less extreme direction. And so just something to be aware of moving forward. Yeah. This foot plant thing is something

that you've noted before. Wasn't there a recent post you did about another pitcher who was doing something similar? Kyle Hendricks had a different sort of foot issue, but also a foot issue. And I only I like looking at pitching mechanics far more than I like looking at hitting mechanics because I don't know hitting at all. I when I played baseball, they didn't let me hit. It's terrible. I hate it. Hitting is just horrifying, but pitching is fun. And I think that I am sufficiently interested in pitchers and certainly when you get

to do like a side by side comparison of mechanics it's really not that difficult to spot I don't think it's that difficult to spot things that have changed now just because things have changed does not necessarily mean they've changed for the better or worse that's a speculation on my own part but generally

pitching is something that you want to do as consistently as possible and if something has changed usually the pitcher does not want that if a pitcher has his mechanics change dramatically like james paxton we can figure okay that was on purpose but something like arietta i can't think of a reason why he would want to be throwing more across his body it seems horrible that he's even trying to throw across his body at all obviously he's he's made it work but i kind of sympathize with why the the Orioles wanted him to not do that because it looks ridiculous. But he does it, and now he's doing it a little too much, and he will probably fix it for the most part at some point and be good again, if not great again. Yeah, I was going to ask if you've

even anecdotally sort of followed up on this sort of post, even if it's just for your own curiosity. Like when you write about a guy who has what seems to be some minor mechanical problem that you can identify from video, is that something that often that player will then fix if you go back and whether it's because like someone saw your post and pointed it out or because the team was already aware of it or just because he happened to go back to doing the thing that was working? Is this something that you've checked up on at all? Not enough.

I don't have a better answer to that. I guess we'll see Arrieta in a month or two, but I am strongly of the belief that Arrieta is working on this with regularity. And the trouble is I guess we don't have data on how often players fix themselves because there are no like mechanical data points there's just performance which is a very indirect measurement of of what's going on but what we do know and what you can see if you look at any players like history expressed as rolling averages or whatever you want to say that all players except for Mike Trout tend to be cyclical and they will have ups and

downs and players are not really consistent on a game-to-game basis nobody is nobody ever has been and they every player goes through some sort of mechanical rut even mike trout had that one august or something where he his mechanics were a little bit off although he probably just had a broken hand so you know excuses fixing pitching mechanics is definitely not easy. Same with hitting mechanics. There's a reason why sometimes guys have starts skipped or they get optioned to the minor leagues to work on things in a lower stress environment. But someone like Arrieta, who's in his well into his 30s now, and he had a few years established where he was throwing in a pretty consistent way. He's off by so little that it seems like something he should

be able to fix within a few weeks. But really, we just don't have enough information to know if maybe he'll overcorrect or if he'll hurt something in the meantime. And it's really difficult to see. But with a case like Arian in particular, this would probably be worth a follow-up in a month or two to see what's going on. But I would assume his performance will dictate whether or not that happens. And this is the kind of investigation that you get better at the more you do it. You've been doing these sorts of posts looking at what's wrong with a player for a very long time. So you've looked at all sorts of problems that resemble this problem maybe, and you know which resources you can use to find out why a player is not playing as well.

So someone might read your post and think, how did he know to look at, I don't know, maybe ground ball rate is fairly obvious. It's on the main page of Fangrass. But how did he know that it was the cutter or the slider that wasn't working so well? Or how did he know to look at a foot or something? But I guess it's just repetition. It's like with anything else, the more you do it, the better you are, the more ideas you have, the more previous investigations you've completed. And so the more potential solutions you have in mind, like I assume that if you set out to

write about a player who is doing something differently or his results are different in some way, you have kind of a mental database of previous players and posts that you've done even if you're not necessarily thinking of any specific one you've done this sort of thing enough times that you probably say well i'll look at this first and then i'll look at that first and it'll probably end up being one of those things because it often has in the past yeah and there are cases where i'll look at a guy and I think I want to write about this guy, see what he's doing differently. And I was looking like a week or two ago at Kevin Pillar

being like, oh, why is Kevin Pillar suddenly not a terrible hitter anymore? And then I was looking at him and I actually couldn't find anything. I couldn't find any reason to believe that Kevin Pillar is actually better. And so in that case, I just kind of didn't write anything. I didn't think that it was worth it.

But well, I guess I don't really know where this is going anymore, but I will go in looking for things, but sometimes there just aren't changes. So hopefully it doesn't come across like trying to force an explanation because sometimes I just can't find one. All right. Question from Marcus. Here's a question of dubious value. Our favorite kind. Good start. Does either of you have an opinion on why three-letter acronyms, initialisms, are shoehorned for every team? There's only one team in San Francisco, and yet instead of SF, the Giants

are SFG on baseball reference and SFN, although there's no SFA on BP. Likewise, the sole team in St. Petersburg was once TBD and is now TBR or TBA. Kudos to Fangraphs for just using team names. I noticed this happens with video games, too.

The GameCube was GCN. PlayStation was PSN, etc. There are bigger problems out there, but why use three letters when two would do? Are writers not told to use as few words and letters as needed. And I guess I would say I don't know exactly what the history of these team abbreviations are, but it's probably just to add specificity, right? You have some cities with multiple teams, so you need three. If you're talking about the Yankees or the Mets, you need NYY and NYM or NYA and NYN depending on the site. So if you're going to go with three for some teams, maybe you just go for three with all of them.

Or it just adds specificity in general. SF just stands for San Francisco. And SFG stands for San Francisco Giants, which maybe it will be obvious from the context that you're talking about San Francisco Giants, but it doesn't really hurt to specify that you're talking about the team. So I guess it's extraneous in some cases, but can come in handy at times. Yeah, I would think it's mostly about visual consistency. You don't want to see a two-letter abbreviation above or below, a three-letter abbreviation, especially if you have a group of all 30 teams and then you have a table and then like 28 or 29 of the teams get a three-letter abbreviation and one of them gets two i think that just looks silly so i think that's all but there's still inconsistency between them like is are the nationals wsn or was and that's where i

guess it doesn't matter enough to have like an AP style abbreviation for every team but like you said NYA and NYY could both be the Yankees and as the questioner noted there are bigger problems out there but this is the problem that we're discussing and I don't have an answer for it right now I don't I'm not even really consistent with what I do but I lean towards WAS for the Nationals and NYY for the Yankees I figure better to have the nickname abbreviation than the league. Yeah, and for the game consoles, I don't know exactly why GameCube was GCN. I think it was actually NGC in Japan for Nintendo GameCube, which would make more sense probably.

But maybe it's just like for PlayStation, you don't want to use PS because PS is something else that writers write that means something completely different than PlayStation. So I guess the more specific you get, the less potential for confusion. So that seems like an answer. I don't know. It would be fun, I guess, if you could have the two New York teams vie for who gets the NY. If the Yankees have the better record, they get to be NY. And if the Mets have the worst record, they're like, I don't know, XP.

Nobody cares. Just something else. Another way to introduce competition between them. Because the Yankees and the Mets would really badly want to represent the NY. And then you don't need the further letter. But this seems like a bad idea. And you should ask the next question. Need the further letter but this seems like A bad idea and you should ask the next question

Uh-huh well reddit tells me That gamecube was Not ngc because Ngc was trademarked by the national Geographic channel in the u.s. So that's why it was gcn Don't know why it couldn't have been gc but I don't know maybe to avoid confusion

With something else neo geo I don't know do you have a stat segment Stat segment somebody wrote in Sort of sort of about Francisco Lindor. He was pointing out that Lindor had dropped down a bunt. Lindor also was a good hitter. Good hitter bunting, not a great thing. The questioner was asking specifically about players who have been sort of their team's best hitter,

but also their team's leader in bunts. I was curious about that. It's a very difficult thing to specifically query, so I basically just did some queries for good hitters who have bunted a lot and i wanted to focus just on sacrifice bunts because i don't care about bunting for hits good hitters can do that that's a very different thing sacrifice bunting has sacrifice right in the name so to get more to the point just to start too simply i looked at uh using the play index at baseball reference i looked at hitters i used a cutoff of a an ops plus of 125 and i said cut off semi-regular

playing time whatever looking all time the most sack bunts ever by a good hitter by this quota actually why don't i tell you start at fourth place fourth place here is actually i guess a tie with himself eddie collins in 1916 and also 1923. He had 39 sacrifice bunts in each season. He was also a very good hitter in each season. Second place with 40 sacrifice bunts. Eddie Collins, again, 1919. Eddie Collins seemed to bunt a lot.

But my favorite part about this search is, remember, second place, 40 sacrifice bunts. Second place, 40. First place, 67 sacrifice bunts in 1917 by ray chapman who is well known for other reasons but ray chapman everyday player in 1917 with the cleveland probably indians at that point they were not the spiders anymore right they were the cleveland indians indeed they won 88 games lost 66 ray chapman had 67 sack bunts he had more sack bunts than his team had losses he was a good hitter he had an ops plus of 131 i guess i didn't click to confirm whether or not he was the team's best hitter or even leading bunter that team had 255 bunts that's

too many bunts but in any case he also he was not the team's best hitter because that team had Trish Speaker. But in any case, Ray Chapman shorts up good hitter. Lots of bunts. Now, you might have noticed those are all very old seasons. Yes, the game has changed. So I updated the query to searching what's called in the PlayAndXC integration era, which I probably don't need to explain that and now using the same cutoffs OPS plus of 125 semi-regular playing time at least Brett Butler takes over the lead 1992 Brett Butler had 24 sacrifice bunts while he had an OPS plus of 130 Brett Butler of course not a power hitter more of

a high walk and high singles hitter but he was still a good hitter in 1952 and also 1954 bobby avila had 19 sack bunts while being a pretty good hitter for cleveland harry walker jackie robinson george kell follow that with a bunch of sack bunts still these are mostly older seasons uh accepting brett butler so i did one more update going back 20 years so since 1998 when the league achieved its current total of 30 teams and that leaves me in first place with 12 sacrifice bunts you notice the numbers are getting smaller and smaller 12 sacrifice bunts by 1999 31 year old Roberto Alomar who hit 24 home runs he had those 12 bunts Randy Wynn Marcus Gilesiles, both with 10. Now I decided to do a little bit more out of further curiosity. So I switched over to fan graphs and I went back to 1969, which is what I like to use as

a cutoff because that's when the mound was changed for what we think is the last time, I guess. I haven't measured every mound, but I went back to 1969, looked for a bunch of qualified hitters. I looked for all the hitters who have bunted at least sacrifice bunted at least 10 times in a season and then i sorted all of those hitters by their wrc plus i know this is a different stat than ops plus but think of it as the same thing it's basically the same thing it's just a different slightly different measurement and our leader in that table with 13 sacrifice buns and a wrc plus of 153 meaning this hitter was 53 better than the average hitter i'd ask you for guesses but i guess you have the entirety of baseball history to go through so never mind we have one first ballot

hall of famer rod carew in 1974 rod crew with the 1974 Minnesota Twins led his team in sacrifice bunts with 13. The next best hitter or next highest total was eight. So Rod Carew easily the team leader in sacrifice bunts and also the team's leading hitter. He had the team's highest WRC plus. So that would be one answer for the question asker whose name I have forgotten. Rod Carew, best hitter on the 1974 Minnesota Twins, also leading sack bunter, first ballot Hall of Famer again. He only hit three home runs, so not a power hitter. Rod Crew, never much of a power hitter, but still team's best hitter.

Lots of bunts. Second place, I will say 1972 Joe Rudy. The 1972 Oakland Athletics, Joe Rudy was not the team's leading bunter. He was in second place on that team. He had 15 sack bunts. Burt Campanaris had 20. So it was Campanaris who led the team in bunting while being a bad hitter. Joe Rudy was second on the team in bunting while being a good hitter.

In fact, the best hitter, very slightly better than teammate Reggie Jackson. Going on down the line, we've got 1995 Craig Biggio. He had 11 sack bunts, a WRC plus of 145. We have that 1999 Roberto Alomar season again, a 142 WRC plus, 12 bunts. Brett Butler shows up up there. But in any case, oh, 1999, Tony Gwynn, he bunted a lot also.

What do you know? Derek Jeter is up here. He bunted too much. Yeah. Paul Molitor bunted sometimes. Lindor shows up in 2015. Francisco Lindor did buntunt sacrifice bunt 13 times i'm saying sacrifice a lot in any case the big takeaway for me is rod carew who at least for one season was his team's leading sack of bunter and also leading hitter so

is francisco lean door the next rod crew i see no reason not to believe that all right good question question was from colin so thank you colin thank you colin all right question from a couple people one from gregory one from randall who's a patreon supporter who says if the balls aren't juiced what about the bats this is a question i've gotten from a few people i can't remember if this possibility has already been debunked and i admittedly don't know anything about MLB bats. Do they all come from a single supplier? Gregory said basically the same thing. If there's a weight to a Forbes article from, I think, last year about Marucci bats. Marucci is a bat manufacturer that has evidently taken the major leagues by storm. And if not the most popular bat supplier is very close to it and seems to have dramatically increased its market share at around the same time as the home run spiked, which is interesting, at least. The bat that Jose Bautista is flipping in the famous bat flipping

photo is a Marucci bat. Evidently, that was good publicity for them. So they've kind of taken a lot of Louisville Slugger's market share. And so that seems like it should be at least something worth looking into because there are quotes in this article from the co-founder of Marucci, Kurt Ainsworth, who says that he heard from players, these bats are hard. They look like furniture. They sound different because there's maple and ash harvested in Amish country. They're shinier because of a Finnish quote quote refined with proprietary techniques used for making furniture and automobiles

and also quote when the players would hit you wouldn't see ball marks because Marucci bats are aggressively rubbed with a giant cow femur. That's something that I hope no one ever says about me. I was aggressively rubbed with a giant cow femur,

but evidently mixed the wood more resilient to blood force. So all of those things sound like reasons why those bats would hit the ball harder. One of them doesn't. I don't know. That's completely taking co-founder of Marucci at face value, which is probably not a safe thing to do because he's promoting his bats. So I don't know that any of that is true, but if any of it were true, it would be a reason.

Anyway, I sent this article to Alan Nathan, the same guy who I consulted about the balls. And Alan says it has been his experience that wood bats pretty much all perform the same based on lots of laboratory testing. Obviously, if you have a metal bat or a composite bat or something like that, that could affect things dramatically. But one wood bat, one type of wood to another, based on his experience, doesn't seem to make that much difference. Now, I don't know whether he's tested this specific type of bat and whether there could be a small difference. And the small difference is really probably all you'd need to produce a big effect. So I don't know that we can rule it out, but I haven't seen any studies about this specifically in the last few years or any

evidence one way or another. So short answer is probably not, but I don't know for sure. Did you say Kurt Ainsworth, like the Kurt Ainsworth? Yes, that's what I said. Kurt Ainsworth. I don't know how many Kurt Ainsworths there are in the baseball circles, but Kurt Ainsworth, former big time Giants prospect. Yeah, same guy. He was, yeah, he came up, he was in that same system was what jerome williams jesse foppert was that those years yeah where the giants thought they were going to have their big

three and then kurt ainsworth was traded for sydney ponsoon sir sydney ponsoon in july of 2003 traded along with ryan hanneman and damian moss you people don't need to know this about kurt ainsworth but i will say that by the way Kurt Ainsworth made his professional debut in 1999 with the Salem Kaiser Volcanoes who will be hosting our beloved eclipse event now in the bat making process I understand I'm opening myself up here maybe there's like I'm going to be well-actualized about this because there's a scientific reason but where in the process do you think they're like okay we're going to get the wood we're going to trim the wood we're going to refine the wood we're going to polish it wood. We're going to trim the wood. We're going to refine the wood. We're going to polish it.

But wait, they're not done. We need to do something to make sure these bats are playable. We need to get a very specific bone from a very specific mammal. And we need to just rub it. And we need to rub it aggressively and assertively until we can hit a baseball. And we can hit it far. And we can hit it consistently. Why?

Where in the? Who were they talking to? Where they decided we need to rub this wooden bat. It looks like a bat. You can hold it right now. But hold on. We need to rub this bat with a cow femur. Okay.

Not a cow thigh bone. Well, I guess that is a cow thigh bone. Yeah. Good news. I have video of the bats being rubbed by a giant cow femur. I'm going to send it to you right now. Please tell me there's a caption to this video that explains the science. Let's see.

I'll have to listen to the sound. Yeah, he's really rubbing that bat against that giant cow femur. I don't know if it's a giant cow, a type of cow, or it is just a giant cow femur? I don't know. Okay, so let's see. We've got this woman, Marucci's chief hitting officer. Okay, let's see. Albert Pujols, label. But is this Bryce Harper rubbing the bone? Yes. No. Is it? Is that Bryce Harper? Yes, it is Bryce Harper. Yes, it is. Bryce Harper's rubbing a bat. Bryce Harper rubbing a bat with goggles on because, you know, sparks, I guess, and earplugs. Why does he have goggles and earplugs when he's just rubbing a bone with a bat?

I don't have sound on in the video, but he's definitely just rubbing a bat against a big bone. I have sound on and he's saying that it sucks to be a rookie and he's got a giant stack of bats that he has to rub with a giant cow femur i guess that's a rookie hazing sports illustrated called bryce harper the most exciting prodigy since lebron but he's got a lot to learn about boning bats hey bryce when they called for those bats they wanted them this season not next season could you bone a little quicker i'm working as hard as i can right now okay i sure hope you play harder than you bone you know what do you want to do hard as I can right now, okay? I sure hope you play harder than you bone. You know what? Do you want to do this? Don't talk back to me. Shut up and bone.

Caption here. All Marucci wood bats are bone rubbed by hand! Check out Bryce Harper as he bone rubs the Marucci wood bats. This seems like another... Okay, first of all, I don't know the signs of rubbing a bat with a bone, but also, like, the whole bone rubbed by hand. Who cares who's doing the rubbing? Who cares if it's hand crafted?

This isn't some sort. This isn't a meal. This isn't an entree where we want to know that people slaved over it for seven and a half hours. If it's absolutely necessary that you rub all of your bats with a giant cow femur. And as long as this isn't pseudoscience, which by the way it is, it doesn't matter who does it. Why have someone whose job is to rub bats with a cow bone? Do they use the same bone? Do bones get worn out? Like, is there a very specific, I'm going to, I, there's, okay, this is the Friday podcast topic. I need to go into more of this and figure out why this bat is rubbed with a bone. We have to have a follow-up.

YouTube's top recommended video when I was watching this first bone rubbing video is another bone rubbing video, which is from ESPN's E60, apparently. It's Albert Pujols touring the Marucci Bat Factory in 2011. And it shows his bats being rubbed with what does not look like a giant cow femur to me. It looks like a fairly modestly sized cow femur, but about a minute 15 into the video, there is a definition. It says boning, comma, verb. This might not be the definition you know for that word, but it says to rub a bat with an animal bone in an attempt to smooth and harden the surface, which is interesting because it doesn't say that it does smooth and harden the surface. It just says in an attempt to smooth and harden the surface. For all we know, it might not do either of those things.

See when he's boning it. See how it presses the wood down Uh huh Every time you press it down See it makes it look shiny but you're pressing the wood Uh huh Yeah that's pretty small You can get much harder than that piece of wood right there

Yeah But I don't know I shouldn't assume that there's science behind this This is baseball players and they wear Magnetic necklaces. Do they still? Maybe. Yeah, you know, they seem a little less common. I haven't noticed. I know it was like all the rage. Yeah, I wonder. That's something I should look into.

But yeah, this is, I don't know. I would assume that a bat manufacturer has a reason for rubbing their bats with a bone. Like it doesn't seem like that's something you would do just for fun. Can't speed up the production. I don't know if it's one of those things where they think it will make it sound like their bats have some special ingredient

that other bats don't have. We have the, we're the cow bone bat guys and they don't even rub their bats with cow bones. We're probably going to get emails. So if you know about rubbing bats with cow bones or any sort of bone please do let us know if you are a boning expert maybe we could uh hold on hold on if you're a boning expert please don't send us emails we could maybe have you on the podcast so let us know i i'm very curious about giant cow femurs now. On the Bryce Harper video

that you sent me, it's a YouTube link. Looking down in the recommended videos on the right, I see four videos down. Bryce Harper shows off the Marucci Cat 5, just bats.com. Are those bats rubbed with a giant cat femur? I don't know.

A giant cat? Would that be like a leopard or a panther or something or just a large house cat that's harvested for its bones I'm not going to click on the video but I think the evidence proves pretty conclusively that yes they're all robbed as giant cat people all right I'm guessing we'll return to this topic at some point in the future so so let's move on let's do one more question, who says, with the shift against lefty hitters, putting an infielder in shallow right field, how long will it be until teams are comfortable developing or carrying left-handed throwing infielders on their roster? If your throws to first base are coming from that angle,

the handedness of the thrower is either irrelevant or it could actually be beneficial to be a left-handed thrower. Since it seems like Most of the throws to first are on balls hit to The fielder's left side this really seems Like a chance to open the door to more left-handed Throwing position players who don't hit enough To be an outfielder or first Baseman which is an interesting point

Of course I'm a fan of the left-handed Catcher and I'm hoping to see That come back at some point in the future I think Max Markey, formerly of the Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus, currently of the Indians, published a good article a few years ago at BP about left-handed catchers and how it seems like they might get a framing advantage and that that might outweigh any potential throwing disadvantage, which might not be all that huge to begin with. So I'd like to see that. What do you think about the left-handed throwing infielder in the shift era? Well, I guess that even though

it might make sense in certain situations, when you have defensive alignments that go against what's traditional, then of course it opens the door for things to be treated differently. But in this case, even now, left-handed batters remain in the minority. And so you'd have guys who most of the time aren't shifted in that same way. And I haven't even thought all the way through just live on this podcast about the various advantages and disadvantages of being left-handed or right-handed for that position. But you're still not actually shifting out there even the majority of the time. It's still, I mean, in certain games sure you'll you'll face a lot of

left-handed batters but nevertheless right-handed batters are still the majority population and so you will not have guys shifted over in that direction and so i think it still wouldn't make enough of a difference but certainly when you have things thrown out of whack as defensive alignments have been then it forces you to at least re-ask yourself the same questions that you've been asking for 50 or 100 years. So I can see it, but I certainly don't think that it is anywhere right around the corner. I wonder how big the disadvantage would be. I don't know if there's a good way to figure that out, maybe with StatCast you could or something, but like you'd think that the benefit to being able to play a guy who has the range for

an infield position, but not really the bat for corner outfield or first base, or maybe he's blocked in center or something like you're getting some value there, being able to get an above average bat at the position. And if he can cover the ground, I wonder, I don't know if there's always a better position you could play him at, but in some cases there probably isn't. And I wonder how many outs you would lose over the course of a season because of the suboptimal throwing angle. Well, I guess you have some research to do for another Ringer article. Yeah, that would be a tough one. Yeah, there's not a really easy way that I know of to do a search by handedness.

Certainly not by throwing handedness. That gets a little complicated. Yeah. All right. Well, we will leave it there. So thanks for the questions. Keep them coming. All right. Here's to more boning. By the way, Jason Vargas gave up six runs in four innings on Wednesday. Would have been a bad time to do that Jason Vargas post. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include James Anderson, Matthew Kane, Christian Thomas, Mark Gunther, and James Okoye-Corin. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

We're approaching 6,000 members. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. You can email me and Jeff at podcast at fangraphs.com or message us through Patreon. We will talk to you all very soon.