Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1203: Bullpen Brawlers and Statcast Crossovers

Episode Date: April 14, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a recent spat of basebrawls, Clint Hurdle vs. Javier Baez and bat flips, Shohei Ohtani’s latest heroics, what bullpens do during brawls, and a fun-fact-free player, then bring on MLB Advanced Media’s Mike Petriello (23:19) to discuss what’s new with (and next for) Statcast, the system’s growing pains […]

So don't be afraid of your anger, I'll eat it with mustard and wine. And lick the blood off your lip, and bruise on your hip, when this pillow fight gets out of hand. When this pillow fight gets out of hand When this pillow fight gets out of hand by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, we've had a lot of fights in baseball the last few days, it feels like. Really have. We missed a couple brawls right after we recorded the last episode. Maybe three brawls? I don't know.

Three bench clearings? Two brawls? It's hard to say where the line is. Yeah, players have their dander up. I guess maybe they're just mad that spring training lasted so long, but still the season is longer and all the games are super cold.

Maybe players are just trying to find a way to stay active. But we had the benches clear a couple times between the Red Sox and the Yankees. There was maybe, I think, a slightly more interesting brawl in Colorado between the Rockies and the Padres. Mountain charge always makes things more interesting. And the glove throw by Luis Perdomo, which was just, that was just, it reminded me of the scene from Saving Private Ryan with the helmet toss. Someone asked me in my chat on Friday, but I'll ask the same of you.

Have you watched video of both of the altercations? Yeah, I haven't broken it down to Pruder style or anything, but I've seen them. Okay. Well, if you were in such a situation, would you consider yourself more of a Luis Perdomo type, where you throw your glove and then backpedal? Or a Joe Kelly type, where you slightly, I guess, approach the man who's coming at you angrily? At least he got rid of his bat. Yeah.

I don't know what I would do because it's hard for me to imagine myself being angry enough to incite a brawl or really participate in a brawl in any way other than just sort of for show or like backing up my teammates kind of thing i can't i don't know it's hard for me i've never been in a real life brawl i don't think so i don't know what i would do in a baseball brawl i have nothing to go on so i guess i'd probably be one of the people who's just like bear hugging someone and holding them on the side kind of like i don't know what stanton and Judge did, not that I'm Stanton or Judge-sized or that many people in the world are, but that's probably what I would do,

just kind of the, I'd be the holding someone else back guy. Considering that the best player on the Red Sox is Mookie Betts, I think we can agree it's Mookie Betts, who's awesome. He's, you know, a littler dude. I feel like maybe if you're the Red Sox and the Yankees, the Red Sox have a distinct physical disadvantage here. That's the last team in baseball you would probably want to brawl with.

Right? Yeah, probably. So anyway, brawls are brawls. I think they're fun and they're stupid. And as long as nobody gets hurt, then there's really nothing wrong with them. Of course, it's easy to sit back and say, well, why are they brawling? This is ridiculous. This shouldn't be allowed.

And stop throwing at each other anyway. But look, baseball players shouldn't throw at each other, and they shouldn't throw punches. No one should ever be angry in the world. You can be frustrated, but anger is an ugly human emotion. But at the same time, as long as nobody comes away from it badly injured, which can happen, you can look at Carlos Quentin, I believe it was. But as long as no one comes away injured these things are kind of exciting i'm not gonna deny that it's fun to have a little change it's good to see the players act on emotion there's not enough of it and granted look at this clean segue it was javier baez acting on emotion that

actually got uh clint hurdle a little upset a little bit, maybe, the other day. There's been a back and forth here where I don't know how much you have read about this. I forced myself to read about it because it just keeps going. So I decided I couldn't ignore it completely. But the other day, so the Pirates were playing the Cubs, and Javier Baez had hit some home runs. And Baez hit a fly ball or a pop out or something, and he threw his bat in a way that was clearly expressing frustration with himself for popping up or maybe not doing more damage with uh with a pitch now wilson contraris also in i think the same game sort of physically protested a strike or a ball that was called against him and clint hurtle didn't like that very much but he said related to baez quote where's their respect for the game the guy hits four homers two days, so that means you can take your bat and throw it 15,

20 feet in the air when you pop up like you should have hit your fifth home run. I would bet that men over there, referring to the Cubs, talk to him because I do believe they have a group over there that speaks truth to power. So Hurdle, I don't, my understanding is Hurdle did not just come out and openly criticize Javier Baez just just out of out of nowhere i think that he was asked a line of questions related to this and now what's interesting is that the cubs and bias have have pushed back and joe madden has pushed back but even in doing so saying uh so joe madden has a bunch of quotes here like uh referring to clint hurdle quote it reveals

you more than it reveals the person you're talking about. Whenever you want to be hypercritical of somebody, just understand you're pretty much revealing yourself and what your beliefs are more than you are evaluating somebody when you have not spent one second in that person's skin. The mistakes of youth are preferable to the wisdom of old age. Joe Maddon had a whole line of cards, a bunch of hot takes, I guess. Javier Baez said, bust my i'm just gonna say ass it's a parentheses but but this is a adult podcast i bust my ass every day to play hard

i don't think anyone plays this game harder than me i respect the game uh i respect whatever but you don't go out there and talk trash about someone i have a lot of things i could say right now but i don't control what's out there what what people talk about me. So Javier Baez is upset. And Clint Hurdle said some things that were critical of Javier Baez. But the funniest thing to me is that even in Baez's quotes, there's the admission that the Cubs did talk to him about not acting the way that he acted on the baseball field and that they told him, don't throw your bat. So I don't know why Clint Hurdle decided to say what he said, but I think from our perspective,

we usually come down on the side of the player who's acting with flair and emotion because we want to see more of that, even if sometimes it boils over into benches clearing brawls. But this is stupid. Yeah, I have not devoted as much attention to it as you have. I've almost tried not to. I mean, I understand why it happens sometimes, why this becomes a thing.

Not because there's anything wrong with players doing this or showing emotion or celebrating. I'm glad that they do and hope that they do more. But I can kind of understand why it might rub players the wrong way at times, not just because of like decorum or because, you know, quote unquote, that's not the right way to play the game or whatever. But like, I can see that maybe it's a moment where a player is feeling sensitive, is feeling like this is a personal affront. You know, if you just gave up a home run or something, there are thousands of people watching. There are who knows how many people watching at home.

The stats matter. There are dollars at stake every time you do something well or do something poorly. You have your teammates' respect and your whole reputation on the line. why it might be a bit of a sore subject at a time like that when a player has just punished you in one way by hitting you or getting you out or whatever it is to then feel like maybe they're rubbing salt in the wound by celebrating quote-unquote excessively after the fact i can sort of see i mean you know like if i were i't know, I'm trying to think of like a real life equivalent and I don't know. I feel like if something good happens to me, if I do something good, I always feel like very conscious of like not trying to celebrate openly just because I don't want to like feel, I don't want to make anyone around me feel worse that like the same good fortune didn't happen to them. You know what I mean?

So I can kind of understand why this happens. I'm not saying it should happen or that I enjoy that it happens. But I do get it to a certain extent why players take it personally, even if they shouldn't, even if it's not intended that way. shouldn't, even if it's not intended that way. And I think this is probably just a transitional stage, hopefully, where this is becoming more common. The game is becoming more international all the time. And in international versions of baseball, this sort of thing is just accepted and no one makes us think about it. So I think that will eventually be the case in Major League Baseball. But people have different customs and different backgrounds and came up playing the game different ways. And in some sense, it's just a reflection of the melting pot nature of baseball that you do occasionally get these kind of flare-ups about silly subjects that I try not to pay attention to anymore.

to anymore so if the cubs with javier baez and several others are a team that plays with emotion and flair and then you we're so accustomed to making fun of the cardinals as being like the stick up their own ass kind of team that plays the right way but are the cardinals going to surpass them is this you know hurdle has been talking about how his clubhouse it behaves differently than the cubs clubhouse is that's how this came up in in the first place he was referring to his own team and then saying oh you see that what that guy did over there i hope somebody talks to him about how he was behaving in the game but that would never happen on our team so do the pirates have a stick up their own ass here are they going to be more play the game the right way than the cardinals because this is ultimately i guess going to come down to metheny and hurdle who's more old school play in one kind

of way and hold hurdle is at least older so that makes him older school by default right yeah i guess the the team identity or certain teams being associated with being against a certain style of play it seems to be kind of fleeting right because it depends on the roster and the roster is always in flux and maybe it does stem from the manager but managers are often changing and a new guy will often replace an old guy or you'll have an old school manager who then gives way to a new school manager who has a different temperament so that kind of thing can change pretty quickly i would say and i think most teams are totally inconsistent about it too

like even if one team takes offense and says, we don't play the game that way, you could easily come up with examples of that team playing the game exactly that way. So I think there's some kind of blindness there on the part of a lot of these players where, you know, they're more sensitive to it when another team does it and kind of give their teammates a pass. I mean, there are times where a veteran will talk to a rookie about, you know, that's not how we do things here or whatever, try to bring them in line. But I think often players, you know, it's like a very tribal thing. It's like when a player is on your side, you kind of give them a pass for behavior that

maybe you would make us think about if it were the other team. So I don't know who currently holds the crown for most stick-up-their-ass baseball team, but I think that crown is kind of passed around fairly frequently. And the common thread here would be David Fries, I guess. I guess that's true. He's the one. So last thing, at least for me, Otani watch, triple. Hit a triple. Basis-clearing triple on Thursday night against Brandon Bauer, which is...

So exciting. So exciting. Not only was it a triple, and not only did he run super fast, like even faster than Luis Perdomo kind of triple fast, but turned on an inside fastball, the fastball that teams have been using to try to exploit him,

and he kept his hands in, and he ripped it. He swung through an inside fastball in the first pitch of the at-bat, swing and a miss, and he sort of overextended. So later in the at-bat, another inside fastball from the first pitch of the at-bat swing and a miss and he sort of overextended so later in the at-bat another inside fastball from brandon maurer it's somewhere in the mid 90s standard brandon maurer fastball and no tony kept his hands in and ripped it into the gap and he kept going so super impressive i don't know if he's vulnerable

against the inside pitch like everyone said that he was it seems like he's vulnerable against no kind of pitch seems like he's perfect but you know he'll still make more outs than than he'll reach base but boy triple is just a whole new element his first triple it was good he was fast and he hit a good pitch to do it so yeah even even on a day where he had one hit just an amazing a tiny day yeah he did slide into third but i don't know if he really needed to it looked like he could have probably made it standing up. I think the broadcast said that he had the fifth fastest home to third time or something like that this season. He's fast is the point. He's maybe not Buxton or Hamilton fast, but he's on the next rung below those guys.

And, yeah, I touched on this in my article earlier this week, and you wrote about it at greater length in your own post about Otani. But the way that pitchers are approaching him, he did have this book on him, this scouting report on him that we were hearing about before the season started. And I remember Eno writing something about it at The Athletic that you should pitch Otani inside. That was kind of the scouting report on him. And they have. inside. That was kind of the scouting report on him. And they have. They've pitched him inside more than anyone else in baseball so far, but he's been just fine. Obviously, it hasn't held him back. And the thing is, they've just been pitching him inside almost exclusively, it seems like. Part of that preseason scouting report was hard inside and then something else low and away,

which is kind of the traditional way to pitch in baseball. I don't know if that's really Otani-centric or not, but it doesn't seem like pitchers have been executing the second part of that plan, which is, you know, don't throw the same pitch over and over again. So there have been quite a few plate appearances where it just seems like pitchers just pounding inside over and over again, and any hitter who's decent is going to adjust to that sort of thing so i will be curious to see whether there will be a shift whether we'll see pitchers start to mix things up a little bit now that he's shown that he can handle this and

just for variety's sake will they give him a different look because he's handling this just fine and it's more and more painful when he's not in the lineup and I'm hoping that he starts hitting higher in the order I guess you know hitting him eighth maybe was one way to take some pressure off him but hitting him higher in the order would get him more plate appearances and he did have some public comments this week that were portrayed as him advocating for more playing time in a respectful way, but saying he hopes that he gets to play more as the season goes on. I think we all do at this point because it's just so exciting. Yep, he's played in 9 of 14 games,

which would put him on a pace for 104 games over the course of a season. But in 2016, with a 140-game schedule in Japan, he threw 140 innings and he batted almost 400 times. So he can handle it. And as long as he's good, and it seems like he's better than good, he's going to play it more often. So Otani Watch is a big success, and we will have another Otani Start to talk about for our next podcast. I'm sure that we will, yeah. And his personality comes through very clearly, too.

that we will yeah and he's I mean his personality comes through very clearly too like just watching him in press conferences watching him in the dugout you know players bowing to each other and just him and Trout is like the the buddy cop pairing of players that I just want to watch all season it seems like he understands English pretty well I was watching him at a press conference and he answered a question without having to have it translated first. And I don't know how comfortable he is speaking it. Not that he needs to, but just, you know, we might get a better sense, those of us who are not Japanese speakers, the more that he is comfortable with English over time. But I feel like he has a lot of personality as a player, which you know does not always go arm and arm with talent and of course he gave his bat away to a six-year-old or whatever before a game and that

endeared him to people i'm just i'm enjoying watching him a lot and really every other story is kind of paling in comparison like you know brawls who cares was otani in the brawl because if not i don't need to know i can i like is it okay for me to bandwagon the Angels? I mean, I'm basically watching every Angels game at in the game the angels are just a lot of fun and you know just seeing what happens with poo holes even if he's not playing well he is chasing milestones and there's the whole drama of is he gonna lose playing time i just i feel like i'm gonna be watching the angels a lot more than any other team this year so i don't know i i guess i'm on the bandwagon. For anyone out there who wonders what it's like to, because we were all baseball fans of teams before we became full-time

writers about every team. And of course I was writing about the Mariners and there was no team I hated more than the Angels in my Mariners days. And so for anyone who's curious what it's like to be a national baseball writer and how it changes your perspective, I'm on the Angels bandwagon too. I'm supposed to hate them, but they're just so much fun i find myself actively cheering for them and enjoying their celebrations all the things that used to piss me off about them now they don't have sean figgins anymore he used to drive me insane now granted he also drove me insane as a member of my favorite team but in any case i find the angels to be delightful this is how things have changed i just can't i can't turn them off i just want to have them all the time. They're making me watch a Royals game basically now because that's just the way that it goes.

from a listener named Jeff who said, and this is something that I've always been curious about, the recent spat of base brawls got me thinking, what are the unwritten rules for bullpens entering a base brawl near home plate? I always think it's funny when the bullpens in the ballpark are next to each other and the relief pitchers run in, opposing teams side by side to join the fight. My question is, do you think there is some sort of unspoken agreement that teams will not engage each other until they reach the fight in the infield? This has to be one of the most awkward situations for players in the game. Wouldn't it be bonkers if someone just came out of the pen swinging?

Would punishment be more severe for a player if they took someone out en route to the main brawl? These shoving matches are usually pointless and dumb, but I'm always fascinated by the weird theater that is kept up by the bullpens in almost every incident. I agree. I am too. So I wanted to know more about this. I emailed one of the only relievers I regularly email with, Burke Badenhop, who used to write for Grantland at least a couple times, wrote about the best and worst bullpens in baseball one time, now works for the Diamondbacks.

But I forwarded him this email. He says, ha ha, very good points were raised in that email. Some bullpens are very far away from each other, while a lot of them, thinking Baltimore, Philly, now Cleveland, share the same entrance. Not to mention Philly has a zillion stairs and Baltimore has cobblestone steps to deal with. So usually the only rule of the bullpen in a brawl is run as fast as you can to get to the infield. If you're half-assing it, it shows your teammates that you don't care. When you're hauling ass to the fight, you really aren't thinking, just reacting. Of all the times I've had to run in from the pen,

I don't think any of them were for pens close to the other pen, so unfortunately no experience to draw from. It would be a big no-no to clock an opposing relief pitcher if you were both running from the same entrance. I don't think that happens for one reason. Pitchers hate hitters for the most part, not other pitchers. The basic conflict in our game is pitcher versus hitter. So most pitchers have beef with hitters and vice versa.

If a pitcher is going to fight someone, it's going to be a hitter. There's lots of bullpens that are close to each other, and there's ample opportunity to talk shit or start a fight with an opposing pen, but that doesn't happen, so it makes sense that relievers don't fight on their way into a game. He also adds that the one universal rule is pull opposing players away from the fight, never your own teammate. If you're locked up with a teammate, you're both more vulnerable and more likely to get clocked in the face by some crazy guy from the other team. He also says he was texting with a couple current relievers the other day, and they came to the conclusion that baseball fights should be more like hockey fights,

allowed to an extent, but more between just two guys, not letting someone else do the dirty work for you. So unwritten rule, I guess. No fighting with other relievers on your way to a fight. It would be interesting if instead of the Padres and the Rockies brawling, that just the Rockies and the Padres pitchers brawled with the Rockies and Padres hitters but the question is with whom does Shohei Otani identify that's a good question I don't know he might be the the great peacemaker who can go between both groups and and broker some some kind of accord that's uh he's something. He can be the middleman. He will bring peace to baseball.

He will, you know, he's going to accumulate war, but he will also prevent it. Yeah, that's right. So one last thing. I saw this in the Facebook group recently. There was on the scoreboard, I guess, at AT&T Park, there was one of those notes for Chris Stratton, who was starting for the Giants.

And so in the spot on the scoreboard where it usually has a fun fact for the player, and some of those facts are probably very debatably fun. But this one says, fun fact, met his wife while working the scoreboard at a church basketball game. Parentheses, there were no fun facts. Chris Stratton, no fun facts chris stratton no fun facts chris stratton actually comes up very briefly later in this podcast but uh you have any fun facts any suggestions because you've talked about stratton before maybe even written about stratton before as uh potentially a an overlooked undervalued type player you have any any fun facts that you could substitute for how chris stratton met his wife? Well, I think that for a lot of the reasons

that people thought Tyler Chatwood was interesting this past offseason because he has really interesting stat cast numbers and just trying to get him out of Colorado, etc., the Cubs clearly interested enough to invest a lot of money in him. But Chris Stratton actually has really high four-seam fastball and curveball spin rates. And so based on stat cast, at least it looks like Stratton has a repertoire that could get some strikeouts. Now, it's a matter of him throwing strikes and putting those pitches where he wants. But

at least from a StatCast perspective, there is something fun and notable about Chris Stratton, because if it weren't for StatCast, I would think, yep, no fun facts. All right. So we will take a quick break now. And the rest of this episode, which maybe we should have mentioned before now, will be an interview with our pal Mike Petriello, who works for MLB.com or MLB Advanced Media, writes for MLB.com, and does a lot of StatCast-centric stuff. So we'll be asking him about what's new with StatCast, what's wrong with StatCast, what's right with StatCast, and various other subjects. So stay tuned. We'll be back in a moment with Mike. Season may come when your luck just may bring it. And all that you have is a memory. Oh, season may come when your luck just may bring it. And all that you have is a memory. Oh, season may come when your luck just may bring it. Now the season's underway.

It's going to be the fourth season of having StatCast available to the public. And to talk about StatCast, what it's been, what it is, what it will be, and just baseball in general. We're joined by Mike Petriello, formerly of Fangrass, formerly of all of the internet, now have specifically a one place on the internet. But Mike, you said yesterday when we were talking about this interview that you would tell me about the thing that you're working on that I will be mad about. So why don't we just start there wow we are really jumping into it all right let's let's get right to it then I have had an idea I've wanted to write about for like two years but Jeff you have something of a reputation on the internet for being the Simpsons did it of baseball writers

where anytime someone has a somewhat cool idea Jeff has definitely done it first and anyway I had this idea that I wanted to write about, and other people have written about this too, because there's an obvious trend happening in baseball about the decline of the windup for pitchers. More pitchers are going to the stretch. And you, Jeff, wrote something very good about this over the winter. And at the end, you had a line that really stood out to me, and I'm going to quote your own writing here. It's supposed to be a possible trend. It's a trend I can't actually confirm because there's no such thing as a wind up stretch database. And I thought to myself, well, sure there is, we have one.

No fair. You have a real leg up on us. Well, I mean, I haven't actually looked at it that closely, but it's, it's something, like I said, I've wanted to do for a while, but it didn't seem notable without a lot of data. So that is something I want to get to later on this year, hopefully soon, because I think Jeff made all of these very salient points about the fact that that is a change.

And I think it'd be interesting to kind of look at some outcomes for guys who have differed in that. MARK MANDELMANN, How is the database constructed? I mean, maybe it's just like a checklist or a spreadsheet, but is this just all manual observation, or do you have some sort of recording of a windup or a stretch? That is a great question. I don't actually know the answer yet. I've only just started looking into it. I've seen it in the data, so I know it exists. I need to actually investigate

how that is done and how reliable it is, obviously. But I think the first thing to do would be to simply just run the data and see if the guys who we already know have changed because they've talked about it have actually changed in the data. And I think if they have, that'll be a pretty good sign that it's reliable. But obviously, I want to dig into that a little further before we do anything with it. So how else does sort of the sample that is building up of StatCast data? I mean, we all say StatCast era sort of derisively almost because it's not that big, but it's getting bigger. And there are ideas and projects that I think we all thought of, you know, maybe the first year of StatCast and said, well, when we have enough data to do like stat cast aging curves and that kind of thing and look at, you know, maybe how players, I don't know, lose a step over time or something

like that. Are there ideas like that, that you've kind of had on the back burner or on your to do list for a while that just really needed time to become doable? Yeah, I think you're right that it does feel like we've been doing this for a long time. Terms like exit velocity and spin rate and launch angle almost seem like old hat at this point, but it's still really young in the process here. It's like you said, just the very beginning of year four. So if you think about this from the pitch effects perspective, that's basically like early 2011 or so we're at right now.

And there's still so much more that we want to collect. But yes, some of the stuff as far as aging curves, it's easy to do right now. Like when we put out a sprint speed last year, that was pretty easy to do because you're directly measuring something, right? It's just all the guy needs is to be on the field as opposed to, let's say, exit velocity where he needs another skill first, which is to be able to make contact. So that's kind of a secondary thing. Sprint speed, it actually worked out really well at the agent curves.

If you go back and look at the charts I put out, there is a very obvious decline. You are basically as fast as you're gonna be the day you sit on the field, and it is all downhill from there, which I can personally attest to being true. But I do have an idea, which I think will be interesting. As you know, we've worked a lot

on outfield defensive metrics, catch probability and outs above average. What I want to do, and hopefully we can do it this season, is to split up, not split up necessarily, instead of saying what the outcomes are, get to some of the reasons why. So you might say Byron Buxton is the best outfielder in baseball by outs above average, which I believe he is. And I'm hopeful that we'll be able to say, you know, it's this much because of his speed and it's this much because of anything that's not speed, right? So for him, I think it's probably both. I think he's speedy and also a good outfielder. Someone like Billy Hamilton is probably more speed and less the other stuff.

Someone like Jackie Bradley Jr. is not that much speed, I think, and is more, you know, whatever it's going to be. Instincts, routes, first steps, whatever. And I think if we can split it like that, that A, tells a cool story, but B, I think then you'll be able to see the different aging curves on those things. Speed probably is going to decline, but does everything else decline? Do you become a worse fielder in everything other than speed as you age? Does experience actually make that maybe go up? I have no idea, but I think that's fascinating to think about because then maybe you look at these guys and you project them out in the future differently, not just based on who's a good outfielder, but why are you a good outfielder? And I think you can take that concept

and apply it to a bunch of different things. Fangraphs recently rolled out a UZR, Ultimate Zone Rating, adjustment that was good, I think, throughout the UZR history, at least the recent history. I don't know all the ins and outs of what happened. No one will ever know all the ins and outs of what happened. But, you know, some people who care about these things got kind of annoyed because all of a sudden, old numbers changed. Mike Trout became, actually, I think, better.

So that's fun. But with outs above average, that was very exciting when it was rolled out. But recently, you were able to fold in a wall adjustment, right? And it's essentially the Andrew Benintendi adjustment. But clearly, when you're dealing with outfielders, the wall is an important variable. And you have to be able to control for, you know, not all fly balls are equally catchable when there's a whole thing that's right in the way of where your body is and where the fly ball is.

But while I recognize this gets really into the weeds, what is sort of the math that goes into adjusting for where the fence is? Because it sounds like something that's really easy to do until I think you probably sit down and try to do it on a scale of tens of thousands of battered balls. Yeah, I think you're right. And when the Fangrafts UCR update was made, my first reaction was, finally, somebody other than me is getting a hard time about numbers changing. So I appreciated that. Yes, last year we had outs above average. And that is really just the season long accumulation of individual catch probability numbers. And that's catch probability is based on how far did you have to go? How much time did you have to get there? And what direction?

And you put all those things together. And you can can say this guy made a catch that was only 20% likely to happen, that's great, or he made a catch that was 95% likely to happen, big deal, regardless of whether you dive or not. It did not account for the wall, as you say, and that's for a couple reasons, but mainly just because we didn't have the reliable wall measurements at each part of the park in there and available, which we were able to do over the off season. So we ran the numbers and by we, I definitely mean Tom Tango, who is obviously a baseball legend. You know, I give him some feedback, but he is certainly the one doing the hard work along

with many other members of our team. And basically he ran all the numbers. And what we decided is that based on the data we saw, the wall balls would be within eight feet of the fence and making impact no higher than eight feet above the ground. Because if you have a green monster ball that's 25 feet up, who cares? That's not a catchable baseball. And then what we did was instead of comparing all plays, which we'd done in the first year, we split them up into two buckets.

So now the non-wall ball plays are compared only to themselves and the wall ball plays are compared only to themselves. So it was trying to get to a little more of like plays rather than kind of apples and oranges. And, you know, it worked out pretty well. And what I've learned pretty quickly is that there are two very, very different kinds of wall ball plays. There are the plays, you might remember Christian Jelic last year going face first into the wall to Rob Gerard Dyson, I think it was. So for a play like that, where he's

going at top speed into the wall, this works wonderfully. That ball, I think there's now like a 5% play where it had previously been like a 40 something percent play. Where it doesn't work as well, and I'm not sure this is an issue with the metric so much as it is just the reality of baseball, is when you go to the warning track and you wait and you wait for like a six second hang time ball and you jump and you make the play and it looks cool because you robbed a home run. But I'm not convinced that's actually as much about skill as it is about opportunity, especially in some places like left field at Dodger Stadium by the foul pole. It's a four foot wall. So you could rob a home run. You don't necessarily need to make a phenomenal play to do that. So those kinds of plays, it's not as satisfying. But for the plays where you're really

running into the wall at speed, it's worked out pretty well so far. And it seems like over the years, the general philosophy about presenting StatCast information has been not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good in some cases. You know, when a metric is sort of in progress, I think there's been a tendency to kind of show what you have. And I don't know that you're necessarily the one making the decision about when to make something public or not, but it seems like certainly Tom, that's kind of his guiding principle is, you know, we'll kind of put this out in steps and we'll be open about the fact that it's not a finished product and that there will be further tweaks and refinements. And so obviously some, you know, nerdy types, not necessarily us, but people like us will look at those changes or look at some imperfections in a StatCast stat and say, you know, why not just wait until it's perfect, until you've made every last adjustment? And the general audience for StatCast probably doesn't care, doesn't notice those little subtleties, unless it's something really glaring where, you know, the system is saying something that just doesn't match the eye test, which fortunately with StatCast

is usually the opposite of the case. It doesn't really turn out to be that big a problem. So how many, I guess, philosophical discussions do you tend to have about, all right, let's put this out there now as opposed to let's wait until this last tweak is in there? Yeah, that's a really good question. A lot of that is Tom and myself and Darren Willman, who runs Baseball Savant, which is our stats clearinghouse, and a couple other members of our engineering team, which has really grown a lot. We added Travis Peterson, who you may know,

who's I think going to be presenting at Sabre Seminar this year about some updates to sprint speed that he's making. So there's a group of us, but you've asked the right question and there's not a perfect answer to it because you can't really just go into a cave for five years and do nothing and come out and say, okay, here's all this cool stuff. But you're right, if you put things out

that are going to be improved upon, then that means numbers in the past will change a little bit. And even internally, that's an issue sometimes, like with catch probability. Well, we have articles and we have videos of previous numbers from like two years ago, you know, which we're not going to go back and make changes to all of those things. So there is always going to be some inconsistency. But I think you're right that the overwhelming majority of fans don't notice or don't care. Like I think Ender and Ciarte went from like plus 19 outs above average to plus 21. Most people are never going to notice or don't care. I think Ender and Ciarte went from plus 19

out of average to plus 21. Most people are never going to notice or care about that. Maybe you guys did. It's not that big a deal. I think for me, that kind of goes to the biggest, well, the second biggest struggle. My biggest struggle is the same as you guys probably have, which is figuring out what ideas I want to write about.

That is always the toughest thing. The second thing is there are so many different audiences, right? There's the way that you guys want to see it used. And there's the way that like the common fan does. And even beyond just like writing articles, we have a large relationship with a ton of broadcasters, you know? So for television, all this stuff is used in an entirely different way. So it's got to be not only easily explained, but quickly explained and ideally visually explained because some broadcasters are fantastic at it and some are, let's say, less so fantastic at it. So you don't want to have to put too much on their shoulders to explain. So that is a long winded way of saying there's a lot of different audiences to satisfy and they all want stuff kind of at the same time, which is fun.

I mean, it's like the best job in the world. But there are always going to be slight updates. I mean, I hope we never say, here's something that is perfect and it can never be improved upon because I don't think we're so naive to think that that's true. And any improvements we can make, I always think it's worthwhile. I don't think you need to worry too much about articles being changed or looking worse in hindsight because like a few years ago, I wrote an article that was optimistic anthony goes as a hitter you know you just kind of you live and you learn you hope nobody goes through and reads those things so obviously statcast it's a series

of metrics and it's all objective it measures the good and the bad and everything in between but of course you are primarily responsible for the editorial side of things as well. You're doing a lot of the writing that features Tadcast information on MLB.com. It's very fun. We love that you do it. But of course, because you are on MLB.com affiliated, I mean, you work for BAM

and you were just right there on the front page. What sort of editorial pressures do you face in terms of writing something that might be critical of a player versus celebrating a player's improvement or just speaking positively about the guys who are out there? Because, I mean, I'm not affiliated with the game at all any more than the game is aware of fan graphs. But even I feel some sort of pressure to not be too openly critical if someone is having a hard time. I'm not, for example, writing an article about Brian Mitchell and how terrible he is as a starting pitcher. But you know, you're even more out there. So what sort of pressure do you explicitly or implicitly face when you are

deciding what you want to write about? Yeah, I've been pretty fortunate in that regard. I have never been asked to write something that I don't believe in. Like no one has ever come to me and said, hey, can you make this guy look good? And I think this guy stinks because that's not something I'd want to do. And that's never happened. You do have to be a little tactful in the way you phrase some things. For example, I couldn't go out and write a headline that says Matt Kemp is a terrible outfielder, right? But I could write about that and say, here's ways maybe the Dodgers could improve their defense in left field. So it is really about being tactful as long as it's backed up by data and something that's interesting for the fans to read. And I think a lot of it is really about social than anything.

You want to be respectful of who the bosses are, so you're not going to go out and tweet, wow, what a stupid trade that was. I can't believe they're this stupid. But I can certainly say, I didn't really like this trade, and here's the reasons why. So I really, I do appreciate that we have that freedom. As you can imagine, there are some topics that other sites will write about that we're not trying to get into, but our goal is to really serve and entertain the fans. And I think we've found out that sometimes fans like saying things that aren't necessarily overly glowing about their team. Like if the team is terrible, you can point out, hey, this guy's actually pretty good, but you're not going to say, oh, no, no, no, I promise this team is great. So there is flexibility

and freedom to be honest about these things, which is great. So another sort of general question about the stat cast approach and criticism you might face is that even especially on the fangraph side and all the analysis there's the the constant conversation about we are talking about these players as chess pieces and you know the the dehumanization argument where i think we've seen pushback from players and and some coaches who have talked about how i think there was an article ken rosenthal wrote recently about jeff banister where he was saying how much he resents the uh the approach of just looking at every single roster as a puzzle.

And with StatCast, in a sense, it's not any more analytical than a place like Baseball Prospectus or Fangraphs, where you're writing predominantly about numbers. But of course, you're now breaking players down into more specific ways. And it's just getting into an even more of a numerical profile for human beings. So I would imagine that you were confronted with this sort of criticism on a regular basis. And how do you respond to it when this comes up? You know, it happens less than you think. I think there is a certain circle of fans where that's true. I think part of it is, you know, I don't really write about contracts and dollars that much

anymore. Not that I ever did in the first place. So that's part of it. But I also think it's really writing about skills. And I don't think necessarily that if you say, look at sprint speed, right? And say, well, Byron Buxton and Billy Hamilton have the skill of being elite runners and Albert Pujols does not, or Brian McCann does not, that that's necessarily a controversial statement. I think that's really true for anything. Exit velocity, Dee Gordon can hit the ball hard, Giancarlo Stanton can. So a lot of it is kind of using it as a scouting tool, really. Like you've had scouts forever clocking home the first times. This isn't any different than that. This is just a different

way to approach it. So I think the more that we can kind of look at it in that view, I think the better. Because I know where you're coming from, but it really hasn't at least come to me that much in that approach. So what's in the works that we should be aware of? I know that recently hit probability was changed in certain ways. It's taking into account the direction of the hit in certain cases, as well as the launch angle and the exit velocity, and sometimes speed is being taken into account also. And I know there have been some rumblings about infield defense coming along at some point as well. Is there anything on the near term that you can tease? Yeah. Well, I can say first that hit probability will be changed. I know I talked

about it on my own podcast, and then we found something of an issue with it. So it ended up being slightly premature. So for the moment, hit probability is the same thing it's always been. But we're hopeful that that will actually change in the next few weeks. All the issue was, it wasn't actually with the metric itself. It was just a very boring and tedious story about whether we could get the database to display it real time on Darren's Baseball Savant site, which was an issue. But anyway, that'll be up soon. The next thing we're

working on, which I'm also hopeful will be up within the next couple of weeks, is a whole lot of positioning, shift tracking, and defensive alignment stuff, which I think is going to be really cool. Right now, the only public shift tracking stuff is at Fangraphs through, I think it's BIS or SIS who does that. And it is only on balls in play, which is fine. But I think we've always known that in order to really evaluate the shift, you need to do it on more than balls in play. So we've got shift tracking on every single pitch. So we're going to do a couple of things with that. We're going to add it to the search query. There's going to be three or four different ways to split it up in the infield,

like three out, three infielders to one side or four infielders to one side, a couple of ways to split it up in the outfield. So that'll be in the search query. So you can slice and dice that in any way you like. And there's also going to be some leaderboards around it. That's going to have some data. And also I think some really interesting heat maps that you may have seen

Darren tweeting out every now and then. So you will be able to look at it on a team perspective from the defense, which team shifted the most last year against lefties and righties. You can look at it for a hitter, which hitter is getting shifted the most, which pitcher is being shifted the most behind. And then there's some cool visuals that'll come with that. If you choose the position, you can actually zoom in on this position and see the starting spot on a field for any position. And it's all these dots based on depth and, you know, angle from left field to right field. So that's cool. I've been playing with it for a little while.

And there's some fun stuff that's going to happen on that. And that will all be public, hopefully, in the next few weeks. Darren's wife just had a baby. So I think that's been taking up a little bit of his time. There's that. And then there's a lot coming as, yeah, as you mentioned, Travis Peterson, one of our new data scientists is really doing a lot of interesting work with sprint speed. I just saw some of his stuff this morning. And it's cool because we've always known that sprint speed is part of the puzzle, right? That's essentially top speed, but not everybody gets

to that top speed as fast as you'd think. Some guys have, you know, we'll call it explosiveness or burst or whatever we're going to end up calling it. So that's cool because it correlates kind of well, but not perfectly. So there's different stories to be told there about guys who get to it fast or don't or, you know, why they're fast or why they aren't. So you're talking about all these new developments. And obviously, these are things that you get to write about, your team gets to research, and you get to present on broadcasts and on the website. But now, when StatCast was first introduced, was it October 2014, maybe even 2013, the Oh My God FX kind of conversation? And it was first unveiled as a coming possibility. there was a great concern on our part that we wouldn't be able to use it, have access to it.

So obviously, we're all very thankful that Baseball Savant exists as it does. But why are you making so much public? Why is this available to us? I don't know how many people are using Baseball Savant, like the common fan, as opposed to us writers who make use of it all the time. But it seems like it would have been very easy to make the decision to just keep this all for yourselves and have that sort of advantage. So I'm by no means asking you to make this private because I would lose my job almost immediately. But what is the idea here

to let people play around with so much? You know, I've never been asked that question in that way before, right? It's usually, why isn't it all public? I don't think I've ever been asked why is any of it public at all. So I appreciate that change of pace. Why isn't it all public though? Okay, the truth is, right, introduced in late 2014, or whatever you said, I was not here at that point. I did not start full-time here until February of 2016, although I wrote on contract the year before. So I was not present for many of those early conversations. So I cannot speak to any of those at the time. But as far as I'm aware, when it first came out, the commissioner said that basically he wants to make as much of this public as we can. And so I think we all saw the three of us might not have had jobs really,

if not for the pitch effects data kind of being out there and being interesting, right? And I think they saw the value in that. And I think they also saw the many different ways this could be useful. Like, yes, obviously the teams use it internally. Most of the teams use it internally. I've heard that some are not necessarily yet, but I think that we know that the teams are using it in that way. And I think it was also seen as being a very cool entertainment tool, which I think it can be. You can just get down to the basics of who is the fastest, which was the hardest hit home run, who throws the ball the hardest, who hits the ball the hardest. I think from a pure entertainment point of view, that's been pretty cool, right? Just seeing the base level stuff like that. And then also, obviously, there's analytical value to it too.

So I think you could probably understand it's very hard to strike the right balance between should it be all private to the teams or should every last drop of it be out there? I am fortunately not the man who is ever going to make that decision. So I go with what's been decided, and I think it's been pretty good so far. I think it's given the teams so far. I think it's given the teams enough to keep to the vest that they can come up with their own cool measures and I think we've put enough out there that it's really helped to change the way people view the game. I mean, obviously, players are talking about spin rate and launch angle and all kinds of stuff like that. My dad asks me about it. So I'm hopeful we're striking the

right balance there. Was there anything left on the list you were reading down before? If there was anything interesting remaining, please keep going. There's like 10 years worth of stuff. So the little hiccup with getting hit probability out kind of held us up from a couple of things. But as soon as that happens, then we will be able to, that will also update expected weighted on base, which is my favorite, most powerful stat with just the worst name. I mean, that's kind of the part too, that's hard to get on TV, but it's like, you know, analytical people already use WOBA pretty extensively. So it's kind of hard to go back and change that now. But anyway, the point of that was

once we do that, then we can come out with a stack cast version of an expected ERA, you know, whatever we're going to call that, which, you know, if you think about something like FIP, it was cool, but it did not account for batted ball quality on non-home runs. And this will. And, you know, when I tweeted about this recently, I saw someone say, you know, do we really need another number to say like Clayton Kershaw is great or something like that? Which fair, I'm not going to push back on that. There are a lot of those numbers. But I also think of this one as being something that it's so obvious for us to be able to do. We have this quality of contact. Why wouldn't we try to improve on something like FIPP? And so what I'm hopeful is that will be something that will be pretty easily understood by people

because everybody loves an expected ERA thing. And I'm hopeful it will tell a little bit of a different story. I don't really want to go back and just repeat other really good metrics. Like, you know, we haven't really done much with catcher framing. We probably could, but Prospectus has done such a good job at it. I don't know that there's a whole lot more to add to it. So we're trying to get to the stuff that the, uh, the data allows us to get to that we haven't really been able to tell before one example I had, this is.

Probably like really in the weeds and maybe only interesting to like Jeff is a catcher's interference. Also. Yes. No, I want to know what fields are the most difficult to play. And I don't mean venues. I mean like, you know, left field in Chicago or right field in Arizona or whatever. And I think we might have the data now to be able to do that. And if I can, if I can come up with the right way to do that,

then I can hopefully go talk to some players and have them tell me, oh yeah, I hate that place because I don't know if the sky is high there or there's a bad back trapper win. I don't know, but I think that would be pretty interesting to do. And then the other thing I'm working on right now, this is kind of a broadcast thing, but if it works, we'll put it on the site, is re-envisioning the way you express pitch movement in terms of horizontal movement and vertical movement because nobody really understands the concept

of the theoretical spinless pitch. It's so esoteric. You can't explain it to anybody. You can't look at this killer breaking curveball and say that dropped like four inches. That doesn't work. So I think we're trying to put gravity back into it, but I also, we're working on comparing it to similar pitches of velocity. So there's that. There's a million different things. There's infield defense, as you said. That's hopeful for this year as well. That has just taken longer than expected because you can imagine infield defense is way, way harder to do than outfield defense. There are more players in a smaller space, but that is something that we have made some progress on,

and I'm hopeful we'll put that out there as well. Someone was asking me last week about how to explain the horizontal and vertical movement numbers that we have access to and use and i just it's like i damn it i don't want to have to do this again because like there's no we've had this we've had this conversation for like more than a decade now trying to explain it's relative to the spinless pitch that nobody throws it's kind of like a slider but it's different it's just zero zero so then positive movement means a lot and like it's 10 years and no one has come up with a way to just cleanly say, this is how to explain it. It's because it sucks. Like, as long as you know what it means, it makes sense. But boy, it's annoying. Yeah, it's problematic. So I don't know, maybe who knows if what we come up with is even better or

not. But I think it's worth exploring anyway. Yeah. So a question that I get fairly often that I can't answer, but that you can, is that you've alluded to the fact that most teams hopefully are using some of this information. And of course, we have information that we get to use publicly. But do you provide teams with different data than is made available to the public? Well, they get the raw data feed. So what they choose to do with that, they can do anything they want with it. So, you know, I look at us as like the 31st team. You know, we all get the same raw data feed.

So they probably have different versions of stuff we have done publicly. And the thing is, I can't give you a more specific answer on that, not because I don't want to, but because no team is going to come ask me about anything. Because then if they do, then somebody outside their walls will know what they're working on. And they are famously close to the vest on all this stuff so everybody gets the same feed all 30 teams what they choose to do with it or do not choose to do with it is up to them as you can imagine there is a very

wide disparity of teams some of whom have massive engineering departments and some of whom have extremely tiny departments so they don't all do it in the same way they're not all looking for the same thing. They probably measure it slightly differently. I think the only time we really hear from them is when there's something that they have questions about or an issue with the data in some way. But as far as metrics go, no, everybody gets access to one big pipe, and from there on, it's up to them. I know the data quality department isn't your, well, department, but there is one,

and it's recently expanded quite a bit. And you've hired people from BIS slash SIS, Ben Jedlovec and Graham Goldbeck, who was formerly at Sport Vision. And so there are a lot of efforts in that area. And so can you say anything about kind of, you know, what internal conversations occur if someone writes an article, you know, there was a Gerald Schiffman article at the Hardball Times recently looking at sort of park adjustments last year and stat cast data, or if someone writes something about, you know, location data being slightly off or something. I mean, there's, I guess, an expectation that everything will be perfect and there will never be accuracy problems, even though this is all

totally sci-fi futuristic stuff that we're dealing with here that we never could have imagined having a little more than a decade ago. But to what extent is that sort of stuff scrutinized and discussed internally? Yeah, we see a lot of it. What I always get a kick out of is sometimes I'll see some of these articles and I'll kind of pass them around. And invariably Tom's response, he won't even care how mean anybody is to us. He just cares if the methodology of the article was sound. So the one you're referencing from Gerald, I think was of the Hardball Times, I time read it and he's like, yeah, this is really good. Gerald did a really good job, almost like being a professor providing a review of it. Yeah. I mean, some of those things, I never get his name right because I don't know how

to say it, but Andrew Perpetua has written a lot of good stuff at Fanagraphs along these lines. And for the most part, it's valuable to have another set of eyes on this kind of stuff. And sometimes we'll see it and we'll say, oh, that's good. We should look into that. And sometimes we'll see it and say, no, that's just not correct in ways that you can't always publicize. I think our biggest issue is, in a lot of this stuff, the demand of having to do it in real time, right? If you think about pitch classifications or home run distances, you know, it's great if you can wait until the next morning to do some of this stuff.

It's really hard when it's got to be dynamically ready within like four seconds. So that is something that I think invariably is going to cause some imperfections, I guess is the way you would say about it. And you're correct. The data quality team has expanded. Ben Jay, who I think is on a cruise right now with his family, is doing a really great job so far. Whenever anybody hears we hired Ben Jay, their first question is, why didn't you hire Ben Jay like a year and a half ago? Which,

fine, fair. But yeah, he's here and he's added some really great people to his team. Some people with a lot of experience in this sort of thing. So just having them around has really helped. And I think you've probably, you might not have noticed it, but I think so far, I'm kind of speaking off the cuff here without any data to back this up. So far this year, home run tracking, I think, has been a lot better. A lot fewer of those balls have been missed, so that's nice. I'm hopeful that this will continue to improve as time goes on. So why didn't you hire Ben Jay a year and a half ago?

I don't know. I am not the man who's making – I can tell you that I personally have hired literally zero people. I don't know. I am not the man who's making, I can tell you that I personally have hired literally zero people. Well, no wonder its system isn't perfect. Start hiring some people. So I am curious about how personally reliant you feel that you have become on StatCast data, just as a writer, but also just as someone who follows baseball, like if StatCast suddenly disappeared or if you were cut off from it in some way, how difficult would that be for you? Because I often think about, I mean, I've spent basically my entire career writing in the PitchFX era, in the tracking era, and have really never known a time. I guess, you know, Jeff started blogging maybe before that stuff was available. But for the most part, we've always had this information at our fingertips. And I always wonder if we were doing this decades ago, would we have a career?

Would we be writing anything? Would anyone care what we were writing? Not that we are solely relying on the stats or that we're, you know, just sort of spitting out tables or graphs exclusively. I think we try to incorporate, you know, video and talk to players and reporting, but often the impetus for an article will start with a stat, or at least it will incorporate a stat in some integral way that I think enables us to maybe, you know, learn something ourselves and teach the reader something that they might otherwise not know. So I don't know, if StatCast went away, would it feel like you lost a limb or something at this point? Would you be able to continue and find interesting things to write

about? Or would it just feel like you just don't know enough anymore and all the color has gone out of the world? Well, if StatCast went away, I might not be able to pay my rent. So I think that would be my major concern. I'm hopeful this is never a scenario you have to worry about. Yeah, as far as I know, that is not something that's going to happen. Yeah, I can tell you it has changed the way that I view the game. And partially that's just because now it's my job to pay attention in that way, for sure. But I think things like exit velocity, it's hard to look at

a crushed home run and not immediately pick up your phone and try to look at the exit velocity. Like, I think that that has become, you know, it's on scoreboards now it's on broadcast that has so immediately become a big part of the game that I think if we didn't have that, I mean, it's, it's as ubiquitous as pitch velocity is now. That's why whenever I hear anybody say, oh, it was a home run. I don't, why do I care how hard it was hit? I'm like, well, do you care how hard the fastball was thrown? Because it seems like you probably do. So I think in stuff like that where it's so easy to look at it in essentially real time, if we didn't have that, I do think we would be missing a lot.

And I'm hopeful that as the years go on, there are more things that are out there where you feel about it that way. Because as I said, a lot of this is just, it's measuring some of the baseline skills. And we know that if you hit the ball hard, it's a skill. And if you don't, it's not. And I'm happier to know about that now because you can write about some of these players, especially early in the season. I don't want to write that Gary Sanchez is hitting a buck 50 because I don't care. I know that's not who Gary Sanchez is.

But like I wrote yesterday about Carlos Santana, who's hitting a buck 50 and is like fourth in the hard hit rate. That's something we have available where we didn't. And I think if we didn't have that, you know, I could probably go back at stuff I wrote like 10 years ago and cringe. And this would probably be part of the reason why. Yeah, I can remember articles I wrote in cases like that before we had exit speed stuff where someone had really lousy numbers and I would actually like literally watch every padded ball and feel like that one probably should have been a hit. That one was unlucky. That was what we had to do back in the

day. Kids, kids these days, they don't have to do what we did. If I'm remembering the story correctly, our friend Dave Cameron, one of the first things that got him noticed is when he wrote about Felix Hernandez throwing I think first pitch fastballs yeah and and I don't remember what the number was it was like 20 something plate appearances or whatever but he didn't have the data so he actually had to go back and queue up the video to every single one of those plate appearances and mark it down on a notepad and it probably took him forever and it's that's fortunately not the kind of thing we have to do anymore.

In spring training, I would write articles because, you know, you always try to find anything to analyze in spring training, even though it's nothing as evidenced by Shohei Ohtani and Ian Happ. But anyway, I would come up with these ideas of things to write about, like Lucas Giolito, for example, and I would come up with this theory. Like, this is this spring. This is a month ago. And then I would have this theory, and then I'd think, well, now what? I can't do anything. What do i have to use my words this is ridiculous like when i was in college this is like 2005 2006 i remember i was really interested in uh in release points for some reason something stuck out i was looking at matt thornton video so this and before he was good and then bad again so you know everything circle of life i don't know i hope

matt thornton is happy but i remember i wanted to measure a release point so i would get very specific screenshots of matt thornton at or around release and then i would take a shot and put it in ms paint and then count the pixels across horizontally and vertically and then i would make a note and then i would do a screenshot for the next pitch and i'd be like it changed but it's just it would take hours to get a post of like three matt thornton release things are better that's the point things are better than they used to be yes we are we are living in the future and i prefer it here uh for some reasons so obviously we we love to use exit velocity launch angle expected duoba is a powerful tool

i love it catch probability do you have sort of a pet favorite, like a tool that you think is just underutilized or underappreciated that is out there for anyone to consume that people just don't seem to play with very often? I think it might be expected WOBA just because the name is so terrible. I think if you have to know what WOBA is in the first place, right? Like an easier way to do this would have been expected OPS, but that's obviously flawed for a number of reasons. And then you have to explain, well, it's based on the exit velocity and launch angle of every single batted ball and the expected outcomes. And it includes strikeouts and it includes walks. And also here's what WOBA means.

And then someone has blacked out in front of you. So I think the really in-depth analytical person like yourself probably gets some real value out of it. I think it's a very powerful tool. But because the name isn't great, I think that's hurt us a little bit. And, you know, we could change it to something like, I don't know, real average or whatever. I don't know that's actually going to be better, but for me, like whenever I'm looking for something, that is the first thing I look at. I look at hard hit rate, which is also great. Obviously it doesn't include contact, which is something you need. And then I look at, I look at barrels

as well, which we have as our perfect combination of launch angle and exit velocity. Because I think if we've learned anything, hitting the ball hard is good and hitting the ball in the air is good, but hitting the ball hard in the air is actually what you really want to do. So those are my first places I go. And it works for pitchers as well. I want to see who has the lowest allowed in all of these things. So you've written and talked about StatCast All-Stars and StatCast Hall of Fame, and you'll induct certain plays and certain players into those things on your podcast or at MLB.com. Is there a new entrant?

Is there a new player? Maybe, I don't know, a new rookie for 2018? Or I mean, obviously there's Otani, obviously, but other than Otani, I guess, unless you just want to give us some Otani stats, which you're welcome to do. But anyone who is kind of peeking your eye stat cast wise so far this season, whether new or because he's doing something different? Yeah, you're looking for the capital letters, my guys, the guys that I know everybody around the office with. And in the past, that has been Seth Lugo, for example. Who's doing pretty well now.

Yes, he is. I like him very much. One of my guys is actually going to be one of Jeff's guys, and that is Franchi Cordero. I am obsessed with Franchi Cordero. Great outfielder, elite sprint speed, crushes the ball. I know you wrote this over the winter, Jeff, but even just, I think yesterday, two days ago, he hit two balls like 112 and 115, which is like Anthony Rizzo didn't do that all of last year, hit a ball 115. So, you know, is he good? I don't know, but he's got the skills there. I would basically take everything I just said

and also transpose it to Jorge Alfaro for the Phillies. Crushes the ball. The best catcher arm in baseball. I think that's one thing I forgot to mention is you can find all the catcher metrics live at Baseball Savant now. Pop time, arm strength exchange. That is all live for each of the years of StatCast, which has never been out there before. Alfaro has an absolute cannon. He airmailed the ball in the center field the other day, 94 miles an hour. It was the hardest we have ever tracked a catcher throw.

He has like 150 career plate appearances and like 35% of them are strikeouts. And he still has four of the five hardest hit balls of the Phillies I've ever had in the last three years. So there's that. And then two other guys, I would say one is he's old news now, but Jose Martinez, I am extremely bored. The Jose Martinez train. I wrote about him last year, basically saying he's not a small sample size wonder you look at expected weighted on base. And he was like a top five dude. And so far he's a dude.

And then the final guy who I'm really proud of this guy because last week I mentioned him to a former general manager and he had no idea who I was talking about, which makes me think that I actually found somebody, is the perhaps most interesting player on the Miami Marlins. And that is Tehran Guerrero. And I don't know if you guys know him he's six foot eight he throws a hundred miles an hour he's got a nasty slider and he looks like he has absolutely no idea where the ball is going at any time he's the guy who actually broke Kevin Puecky's hand the other day but he also struck out back to back to back already yeah well he also on opening day he whiffed Bryant Happ and I want to say Wilson Contreras. And that's impressive. And what I really, maybe, like Ben, this might be perfect for you or someone you know. I want someone to go back and do an oral history of the most interesting trade that has happened in the last 15 years. And that is, at the time, it was known, I think, as the Andrew Kashner trade. This is the deal with San Diego and Miami in 2016. known, I think, as the Andrew Kashner trade. This is the deal with San Diego and Miami in 2016.

So it was Andrew Kashner. And then that was the deal where Colin Ray made like one start for Miami and they had to swap him back. So Terran Guerrero was in that deal. But who was also in that deal was Luis Castillo, who was the guy who got swapped back and forth and then ended up getting traded to the Reds. And Luis Castillo is awesome. And I find everything about that trade fascinating, mostly because of Te'Ral Guerrero. Don't forget that Carter Capps was in there too. Yes, Carter Capps and Josh Naylor. But yes, how could I forget Carter Capps? You see, it's more interesting than I even remember.

We answered a question on an email episode recently about what types of player or what specific players tend to get overrated in this era by stat people like us. And we sort of thought, well, maybe it's guys who have impressive stat cast stats but haven't translated it into actual performance yet. Like maybe guys with good spin rates or exit speeds, but for one reason or another just don't really have the traditional numbers. And I'm wondering whether you think that there are guys who will just

always look good via StatCast, but not actually be good, or whether those things always eventually come into alignment. Because StatCast stats should be predictive. They should, in many cases, reflect the true talent and tell us who is good or will be good. But are there cases, do you think, where someone stands out in a certain stat cast stat and it's just kind of a curiosity or misleading in a way? Absolutely. I think this kind of gets into the difference between stats and metrics and measurements, right? Like in terms of outcomes,

if you are great and expected weighted on base, it's almost impossible for you not to be a great player because that is measuring the actual outcomes. In terms of skills, yeah, I mean, look at like Jorge Alfaro. Like I said, he's got a cannon for a throwing arm, crushes the ball as hard as anybody in baseball. He also strikes out like 40% of the time. So if he doesn't make contact, literally none of the rest of it is going to matter.

He will not be a big league baseball player. Going back to Seth Lugo, he was notable because he threw these insane curveballs with a very high spin rate. And that made him interesting in a way that a 34th round pick at a centenary college should not be interesting. But until this year, he was never that good. Like an elite curveball spin rate is a very interesting tool, but it does not by itself make you a good pitcher. Now it seems like he might be a good pitcher, but it's almost as much because of his two-seamer than it is his curveball. So I think it really depends on which metric you're looking at. I mean, if you go to some of these skills and they're really interesting

and you think maybe I can use this skill and make this guy a big leaguer, that's cool, but it does not guarantee that you're going to be a great big leaguer just because you can hit the ball really hard or you can throw the ball really hard. So before we let you go, we're not going to ask you for any team win predictions, but I am going to quiz you on your own personal stat cast awareness. So I'm going to go through a few leaderboards because I figure you're probably looking at these boards all the time. Some of this should come naturally, right? So we'll start with average exit velocity this year for a minimum 25 batted balls in play. Who do you think is number one?

For 2018? Yeah. Let's see. My only question here is whether Otani has 25, and I don't think he does. He does not. So I think it's Juan Moncada. You are one for one. Okay.

My breakout pick this year. All right. You and only you. Who has this year's lowest average launch angle uh please tell me it's ian desmond uh he's third lowest uh walton wong is second lowest uh who has the lowest launch angle um i'd be shocked if you knew this yeah i mean it's uh i i don't know all right it's jonathan Jonathan VR. So I'll take... Okay. He's close. Do you happen to know who is the highest?

Is it like Randall Gritchick? He might not have 20... Oh, no. He's ninth. He's seven degrees behind the leader who happens to play in New York. He's an outfielder. He's Cuban. Is it Yohannes Suspidous? Yeah, he's the only one. Okay. an outfielder. He's Cuban. Is it

Yohannes Suspidas? Yeah, he's the only one. Okay. This season again. Who has the greatest extension? So difference between effective and actual pitch velocity. Tyler Glasnow would be my first guess there. You are correct. Yeah, he's at a plus

1.9 miles per hour, which gives him a 5 mile per hour perceived velocity advantage over Brad Hand, who's at negative 3.1. So Brad Hand, not extending, although he never has. Okay, who this season has the highest average four-seam fastball spin rate? Oh, that is a great one. What's the minimum on that? Well, the minimum is none, but I'll tell you that the leader has thrown 79 of these so it's well let's see my usual go-tos for four-seam spin are Verlander or Scherzer but I think it's going to be like Chris Stratton because you already talked about him before incorrect so Carl Edwards

Jr. is second he's in second place behind I believe this guy was taken in the rule five draft he's a reliever for the angels oh Luke Bard it's. It's totally Luke Bard. There you go. Nailed it. Yes, Luke Bard is a favorite of David Adler, who is one of our researchers here. I did not know he was number one, but yes, it's definitely Luke Bard. Yes, we'll race each other to articles. And the last

thing I will quiz you on, this is now for 2017, who last season had the fastest for catchers exchange? This is actually a tie. That's a really good question. The fastest exchange last season? Yeah.

Well, let's see. I think I had looked at this previously, and the year before it was David Ross, and I think it was Chris Stewart. Is that right? Yeah. He's technically tied, but he is number one. Who is he tied with?

Salvador Perez. Oh, that makes sense. In conclusion, you have done fantastically well at the StatCast quiz. It turns out you know your own product like the back of your hand. Good for me. All right. You can catch Mike, of course, on the StatCast podcast. Make sure to, in your podcast app, set it

to, I don't know, 1.2 speed maybe if you have it at 1.5, something like that. We're trying. Yeah, I've been able to understand everything you said so far, although we're listening in real time, so maybe it's not the greatest test, but you can catch him there. You can find him on MLB.com,

on MLB Network, on Twitter, at Mike underscore Petriello. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, guys. So these days, it seems that not only do we discuss Shohei Otani in every episode, but he does something in between our discussion and the podcast being posted that merits an update. So at the beginning of this episode, Jeff and I talked about how the Angels should move him up in the lineup or when that might happen. Turns out it happened on Friday. The Angels bumped him up from eighth in the order to seventh, and he rewarded them and us by going two for four with a double and a single.

That double came on a very inside pitch that he just muscled out to left field. He remains amazing, and I remain riveted. I'm sure we'll have more about him next time and every time. Also, the suspensions for the brawl between the Padres and Rockies that we talked about earlier were handed down. Seven players were suspended. Luis Perdomo and Nolan Aranato got the heaviest suspensions, as one would expect, five games apiece. So that will do it for today and for this week. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and pledging some small monthly

amount as the following five listeners already have Jeff Liggett, Peter Mazziak, Jake Pruner, Tim Wolfe, and Alex Roche. Thanks to all of 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 contact me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. So we hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

Enjoy Shohei Otani Day on Sunday. And we will be back to talk to all of you early next week. Vive le week-end, c'est l'enfer, c'est le week-end Vive le week-end, c'est l'enfer, c'est le week-end