Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1648: Squeeze Play

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and FanGraphs author Ben Clemens break down the Marcus Semien, Andrelton Simmons, and Tommy La Stella signings, the Steven Matz trade, and Masahiro Tanaka’s decision to return to NPB’s Rakuten Eagles (with digressions about Japan’s tradition of awarding the uniform number 18 to aces and the greatness of Hiroki Kuroda) before […]

Put your hands together, let your music play, cause it won't be long, and it could all be gone. So take your club boots off, squeeze the day. Hello and welcome to episode 1648 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graafs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Van Graafs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And we are joined by Van Graafs' own Ben Clemens, who is here to explain pitching and also the stock market. Hello, Ben. Hey, Ben. I don't know which of those will be more difficult to explain or more complicated.

It's not an easy assignment that you have drawn here. We're going to talk about what is going on with the GameStop stock and how it relates or doesn't to the Mets and Steve Cohen. Later in the episode, we'll be joined by Dr. Barton Smith, who is coming on to tell us, with Ben's help, about the latest advances in pitch design and development and some complicated physics and the concepts of spin mirroring and seam shifted wake.

These are some fancy new trends and buzzwords in pitching that have been enabled by the new Hawkeye technology that is now part of MLB's StatCast system. Just when we thought we understood baseball, we found out that there was much more to learn. Baseball is a bottomless mystery that is far from solved. We'll get to all of that in just a moment. I guess we could segue in with a little lighter transaction talk. There have been a few moves made since our last episode. I don't know what it was, but this week was just the week of infielders, specifically Tuesday. Everyone had one. There was just a total. It's like in a fantasy draft when people start taking closers or something, and then everyone feels like they need to get one. Every team had to

sign an infielder or two. So they're pretty much all off the board now. Yeah, I think that we're getting to the point where it's going to be uh dd gregorius or bust for a couple of these teams and absent that there are going to need to be some trades made to fill some infield holes because we are we're running out there's a bushel a peck of signings as it were yeah we talked briefly about marcus semien going to tor Ben, you wrote about it, and Simeon's kind of an intriguing case because he's tough to evaluate because he might just be an average player or he might be a star player or he could be anywhere in between there. Do you

have a sense of what exactly the Blue Jays are getting in Simeon? I think that they're getting, like, this is a cop-out, but somewhere between an average player and a star. It's hard to believe that he's going to put up the numbers he did in 2019, an extreme career year, but he made improvements in so many different categories. And all those categories are things that tend to be sticky over time. You don't inadvertently improve a lot of them. But I think he's a lot better than his baseline was before. Now, is that an MVP candidate, the way that he's a lot better than his baseline was before. Now, is that an MVP candidate, the way that he was in 2019? I don't think so. But if they're getting a borderline

all-star for a year and 18 million, that's a great deal. And I think that's a reasonable outcome for Semyon. Yeah. And so one thing with Semyon is that early in his career, he had defensive issues, and then he seemed to correct those issues. And some of the systems differ on just exactly how good he is. But that you add in his playoff stats, suddenly he looks like a pretty good hitter, which you wouldn't know if you just looked at his basic stat line, which is pretty important when we're talking about 2020 stats and with some players who maybe slumped a little in the regular season and then had great postseasons. Normally, we just sort of pretend that postseason stats didn't happen in a normal season. But in this season, it makes up a pretty sizable percentage of your overall performance. So for this year, at least, I mean,

maybe it's kind of cherry picking because someone had a hot October and you just lump it in together, but probably makes more sense than it usually does. And I think maybe you mentioned that if you add up everything he did last year, he was an above average hitter. So we can just pretend that that was the case. Yeah. I know that Zips and Steamer both use postseason stats in their projections. And it's real data. It's against good pitching too.

And this year, it's a lot of the data that we have as opposed to most years. Yeah. He ended up having something like 30-odd plate appearances in the postseason. I think that was like what something like 30 odd plate appearances in the postseason i think there's like 11 of his total plate appearances on on the year and you know like you said ben we're not gonna oh no i can't just say like you said ben that's underspecified isn't it way to say ben's like you've both said um you know we don't want to get overly fussed or dramatic about 31 plate appearances, but we did see him hitting the ball, hitting the ball hard. He had, what, a couple of home runs.

He, you know, he looked a lot more like the guy who was an MVP candidate, and I don't think that they need him to be that. They just need him to be a good, competent bat in a sea of good competent bats and help to shore up some of hopefully some of the defensive issues that they have on that side of the infield so I liked it although I would have liked to see him do a little bit better because I don't know that his market will be dramatically improved the next year but who knows maybe if he establishes that 2019 is more like who he is than, you know, the years before or in the shortened 2020 slate that he'll do better. Could be true. He had a really lousy offensive season, but in about 200 plate appearances. And if you add up his three postseason rounds and how he hit in the division series and the ALCS, and he had like a 1400 OPS or something combined between those two series. And in his case, that's like another 60 or so postseason plate appearances and you add it all up

and suddenly it doesn't look as far off from his typical baseline. So it's something that I have to keep reminding myself when I look at someone's 2020 stat line and it looks like a line like any other, at least in some columns, but then you have to remember that, well, maybe they were just hot that entire time or cold that entire time, and who knows how the other months would have gone. So less predictive power, but one player who has left little doubt in the past about his defensive skills is Andrelton Simmons. And Andrelton Simmons, he signed with the Twins on a one-year deal also, but for only $10.5 million, and it was

reported that the Twins were strong contenders for Simeon, so evidently Simmons was their backup plan. This is one that I have a lot of questions about, because Simmons has just been one of my favorite players, one of most people's favorite players over the past decade, just because of the number of highlights that he has contributed to the Gold Glove, to the Web Jeb cannon. And I think now there is some doubt about whether he is still at that level defensively. And that really makes all the difference with this deal. And if there weren't that doubt, then he probably would have gotten a much bigger deal, but he's had recurring ankle issues over the past couple seasons. And that seems to have taken a

toll. It's taken a toll on his sprint speed, which has gone from above average to considerably below average in the last couple seasons. And I think for the first time really in 2020, it seemed to take a toll on his defensive performance, really no matter what system you look at. But in, for instance, baseball savants, outs above average,

I think he went from like 99th percentile every year to 20th percentile or something. So again, small sample. And if it's an ankle issue that will not continue to recur, then maybe he will bounce back and the twins will have a fantastic defense. But I wonder, I hope that will be the case because I I don't want to say that we've seen the last of Andrelton Simmons as like an Ozzie Smith type defender but kind of concerning kind of worrisome like for a middle infielder to have ankle issues that seem to have sapped his speed that would obviously make it difficult for him to be the Andrelton Simmons we all know and love yeah but if he is think about whatthe-middle defense is going to look like.

That team is going to be so ridiculous. I think it's reasonable to wonder, but I don't know. I just am so inclined to think that a little while removed from bad health is going to make a significant difference in that. It's easier when there's an injury to be optimistic, which sounds strange, but you're just able to look at it and say, well, his ankle will get better. You know how human ankles improve? They heal. Humans heal even in their 30s. So I'm always perhaps overly optimistic that someone will just rebound

from injury as if everyone's bionic and comes back. But clearly the risk that he wouldn't is priced into this contract, but I still think that it was a good move for the twins and it was nice to see them actually do something yeah they had been very quiet those twins hey he had an extra week to recover that ankle that's true yeah he opted out of the last week or so of the season that's right yeah i wondered at the time whether that reflected poor health or ankle issues or whether it was just that the Angels looked like they were out of it or just COVID concerns or who knows what goes into that. But that did, in a weird way, make me almost more optimistic. Like if he was kind of on the fence about playing for whatever reason up until that point, then perhaps that reflected something that was mirrored in his performance. But yeah, I've enjoyed him because he has hit quite well in some seasons and he really

improved as a hitter, became more selective. He never struck out much. And if you can be even close to an average hitter, let alone a better than average hitter with that kind of glove, then you are a star. You are a superstar, even if it's not as obvious on the surface. And as Dan Simborski pointed out in his post, commentators love comparing every defensive whiz that comes along to Ozzie Smith, but Simmons is the only one for whom you can say that with a straight face. And he really is just like head and shoulders above

all defenders at really any position relative to their peers in the period for which we have zone-based defensive stats so here's hoping that there is more where that came from it's funny because it's not like Polanco is bad at short but they they've done this this funny thing the twins a couple years in a row where it's like they went from you know they went from Sanoe at third which is not good to Donaldson which is and Polanco's not bad at short but then they got Simmons so like they're they're suddenly making these improvements and so if he's if he's good that will be quite a bit of fun and if he's not then we'll be sad about it but what are you gonna do yeah and you mentioned Meg that the twins haven't done a whole lot aside from bringing in Jay Hatt. This lineup would still look better with Nelson Cruz in it, and that move may be ahead. Obviously, I worry

about what this means for Williams-Ostadillo's playing time in 2021, and I also worry a little bit about what it means for Luisa Reyes and his prospects in an everyday role, because he's a really fun player, and he projects to have a 3-12 batting average. I know batting average isn't everything, but it's hard to be bad when you have a batting average that high. And his projected average is eight points higher than the next closest hitter, Juan Soto. So that's pretty impressive. As it is, though, this is shaping up to be quite a race at the top of the AL Central. The fancraft's depth charts have the Twins and the White Sox separated by about one win in the standings and in projected war. Anyone have any thoughts on the other high contact infielder who signed a deal this week? That would be Tommy LaStella, who signed a three-year deal with the San Francisco Giants. Yeah, I was not expecting that. Have we seen money on this deal yet? Evidently, it's $19 million, according to Susan Slusser. Okay. All right. okay which that's not a high number no that's fine

i don't know i think that tommy listella is like a perfectly good bat who is fine in the field and someone who you definitely want to contemplate replacing late if things are close because he can be a tiny bit of an adventure out there. He's not terrible, but he's not the best. I think that the Giants are a team that should be making signings like this as often as they can to see if there's anyone who's like competent and inexpensive who might inspire them to jumpstart some of their other rebuilding activities. Because why not? I mean, they have to play someone and they're not going to be especially competitive in that division but maybe they'll find someone who's really useful

and can stick around for say three years and then they'll look around and be happy that they have a tommy lasilla on the roster because they're ready to to spend bigger money on better players and have some other prospects come up i don't know I think these deals are always good for teams like the Giants. That seems like a good fit to me. I don't know exactly how he's done it, but going from not striking out a lot to hardly striking out at all and doing that while hitting for more power than he used to, that's always an impressive transformation to me. And I always want to just like talk to that type of player and say, how did you do that? And can we teach everyone else to do that? Because it would be great if everyone, if Tommy La Stella could impart his knowledge and his secret to making

lots of contact and also having the ball go farther when he hits it, that'd be a nice thing to implement on a league wide level. And it's difficult to do. And he's like one of the, I mean, lowest strikeout hitters, walks more than he strikes out. It's a rare offensive skill set. And I guess he is somewhat limited as a left-handed hitter against lefties. And he's been platooned at times and he has some sizable splits but other than that i think it's impressive that he's been able to make that transformation and there aren't a lot of hitters

who have gone in that direction really he also is one of those guys who because he had that concentrated stretch in 2019 with the angels where it felt like he was hitting a home run every other at bat i just assumed that his 2019 and i think he got injured in there, right? He got hurt for part of 2019 I I went to his player page just now and assumed I would see like oh he hit 30 home runs that year and he Hit 16 which in an injury shortened season is fine But I just you know, you have a hot week and it can really warp your memory of a guy yeah yeah and as tony wolf pointed out in his post like only half of the homers he hit would have been out in san francisco evidently according to stat cast so not easy for anyone to hit home

runs there but maybe especially not for him but that's the the extent I think of my Tommy LaStella take. So unless you have any other Ben or thoughts on Steven Matz, anyone, Steven Matz, Blue Jays got a pitcher, I guess. They did. They got a pitcher. That silence speaks volumes. They sent away three pitchers who were kind of like him and uh yeah i think the blue jays still need pitching we've talked about this several times

yeah they have a lot of pitchers but yeah this doesn't really improve the caliber of their pitchers they need some better pitchers to complement the the better pitchers they already have on their roster. I don't know that Steven Matz is necessarily one of them, but sure why not? He had a fine ex-fip in 2020. You can say that about Steven Matz. His ex-fip was right in line with his career numbers. Just don't look at any of the other ones, particularly not in the ERA column, which was near 10 this is like an all

time agonizing view trade package on both sides where it's just 14 home runs in 30 and two-thirds innings pitch that that's hard to do yeah it is hey he had his highest career swinging strike rate yeah focus on the positive if you're Steven Matz. I mean, there are things to like, I'm sure. But yeah, it does seem like they have a whole lot of just sort of interchangeable, like could be a fourth through sixth starter type. So I don't know that this helps with the top of the rotation problem, but maybe helps with the depth at least. of the rotation problem, but maybe helps with the depth at least. So the last transaction that we should talk about is not an MLB transaction. It is about Masahiro Tanaka, who is returning to his original team, the Eagles, in the NPP, leaving the Yankees, not signing with any other rival MLB team. And the contract terms in NPP are always sort of subject to speculation, not

officially confirmed, but it seems as if it's for two years and like 8.6 million per, which would not be a lot compared to what you would have expected Tanaka to get from some MLB team this off season. And you can understand that there may be more that went into that than just money alone. And I think he tweeted that he intends to explain his reasoning and his rationale at greater length at a press conference, but that hasn't happened yet. So we can assume that perhaps it had something to do with the pandemic. And he is someone who went back to Japan in late March

just for safety's sake, understandably, before returning when the season started. So he will be the homecoming hero and he'll get to pitch for the team that he starred for before. And he'll get to get his old jersey number back, number 18, which I think that's one of the coolest things about Japanese baseball is that just aces get his old jersey number back, number 18, which I think that's one of the coolest things about

Japanese baseball is that just aces all have the same uniform number, number 18. That's such a cool tradition, which evidently dates back to the 60s and 70s Yomiuri Giants dynasty, where they would just hand out the number 18 to their ace. I think it started with Suneo Horiyuchi, who's a Hall of Famer, and then it passed to Masumi Kuwata. And now that's something that every team does. And that's something that a lot of Japanese pitchers do when they come over to the States. They have number 18, like Matsuzaka had 18, Hisashi Wakuma, Tsuyoshi Wada, Kenta Maeda had 18 with the twins. And in fact, Tanaka would have had 18, except that when he joined the Yankees, Hiroki Kuroda was on the Yankees and he had 18. So Tanaka took 19 for captain and assistant captain. And now I'm just one of these people who pays no attention really to uniform numbers and I never remember what anyone's number is. And I would if there were like a tradition associated with it. So I think we should steal that. I think we should have an ace number or I don't know we could have like a utility infielder number if you're the utility infielder you're number 33 i don't know just pick a number but that would be a

fun tradition i think because we don't have anything that like the uniform confers status or tells you like a player standing on a team they all sort of look the same would they be would there be a criteria that a bar that they have to clear from a performance perspective before they could have that number, or would it just be your team's ace? This is a very snarky and rude way of asking this question. It's just another way to have the ace discussion. Right.

It's like, he's your ace, but he's not necessarily an ace. Yeah. It's like, yeah, every team, but he's not necessarily an ace. Yeah. It's like, yeah, every team has an opening day starter, right? And that's an honor that you give to someone. But if it's like, Tommy Malone, you're the opening day starter for the 2020 Orioles, it doesn't quite have the same ring to it as if it's like Clayton Kershaw or something. So yeah, I don't actually know the answer to that if every team has an 18 or if like you have to be a certain level to earn the 18, but Tanaka will get his 18 back. So anyway, we don't know exactly how much of this

was a lack of interest or MLB teams ponying up and how much of it was Tanaka's desire. But if it is the former, it would sort of be strange, right? Given Tanaka's track record and his age, he just turned 32 not terribly long ago, and he's been good for a long time and has declined in certain ways, and his peripherals are perhaps not as impressive as they were, but could certainly still help a team. So this, along with Tomoyuki Sugano, not getting maybe the interest that he hoped or at least terms that blew him away such that he would leave Japan to pitch in the U.S. And, you know, Tanaka may be back. I think there may be opt outs or something, or he said he intends to pitch in the US. And Tanaka may be back. I think there may be opt-outs or something, or he said he intends to pitch for the Eagles in 2021. He's left the door open

to make another cross-Pacific move at some point. But would it surprise you if it was teams not meeting that level of interest or exceeding the contract that he commanded there? It surprised me. I mean, that's Mike Miner money that he's reputed to be making, and I don't think they're that close. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I have to hope that his personal preference to return to Japan and some of the other national failings of the US were a greater factor than his failure to secure a more reasonable offer than that,

because not only would it just be a bummer and sort of teams passing on a useful player, it would make this off-season's market even more confusing to me. I don't know how you place Tanaka not being able to secure a more lucrative contract than what he just signed within the constellation of contracts that we have seen that have exceeded our expectations. So it would, if nothing else, make it more opaque to me exactly what is being prioritized and going on. Like, for instance, the Blue Jays didn't want to do better than this. Yeah.

You know, so I find it to be pretty confusing. And I guess the best that we can hope for is that he just found the prospect of returning home to be really compelling, or at least, if not compelling on its own, certainly preferable to staying here with the pandemic still largely unchecked most places. So I don't know. Yeah. And if that is it for Tanaka in the majors, he had quite a good career. And really, I think he's kind of one of the pitchers you can hold up as an example of someone who seemed like he would have to have Tommy John surgery and never did because he had like the partially torn UCL. And often when you hear that about someone and they try rest and rehab or PRP or whatever it is, you're just waiting for the news to come out that they are going to have to have the ligament replaced at some point.

And he never did. And he continued to be fairly durable and productive. So there's at least one counterexample. And I guess his performance on the whole was actually pretty comparable to Kuroda's. And Kuroda, I mean, I was trying to think of an example of a pitcher at his level or a player at his level who which I think you alluded to the other day, Meg. There just aren't a lot of pitchers, you can say, who are kind of in this Tanaka mold, which is why I think it was surprising to us that he went back or that some team didn't convince him not to go back. and quality of American free agents signing with Japanese teams has increased in recent years amid the stagnation of the MLB free agent market. But even so, Tanaka is an outlier in terms of talent. Kuroda, who I just, I love Kuroda. Like what an incredible career Kuroda had. He pitched for 20 years and he was just always good. And he was like always the same level of good, like his FIPS in the US for the Dodgers and Yankees.

I'll just read them out. 359, 358, 326, 378, 386, 356, 360. He was just like the same pitcher every year, pretty much pitched 200 innings a year. And he actually has like slightly better numbers in MLB than he did on a career level in NPB, which is impressive. There was nothing lost in translation there. He was just as good here as he was there, despite the fact that he was already well into his 30s by the time he came over to pitch for the Dodgers.

And so he racked up like 22 war, according to fan graphs, in seven seasons. And they were like his age, what, 33 to 39 seasons, I think. So imagine if he had come over earlier, we could be talking about like borderline Hall of Fame career. And then when he went back to NPB, he pitched a couple more seasons like in his 40s and continued to be great before he finally retired. So he was just always really good. And he's like the closest I can come to thinking of someone who went back while still pitching at a high level, but he was 39 as opposed to Tanaka just coming off, you know, 31, 32. So it's unusual for sure. Did you guys find the commentary that some people had about his contract not being worth it to be kind of confusing,aka's I found this very confusing it depends a bit I suppose on what you're using as your your number for a dollars per win sort of calculation but his deal was worth pretty much

exactly how much war he produced I don't understand why people are fussy about this like Tanaka had a good Yankees career he did exactly what they hired him to do I don't understand I people are fussy about this. Like Tanaka had a good Yankees career. He did exactly what they hired him to do. I don't understand. I was very perplexed by some of the reaction to that. And a good postseason record on the whole too. Yeah, it was just like almost a bizarrely well-valued deal based on what he produced. So I don't know. Everyone should be nice.

Yeah. based on what he produced. So I don't know. Everyone should be nice. Yeah. I guess Kazushii, who is actually the manager and GM of Tanaka's new and old team, the Eagles, he's someone who went back, but he had not pitched at such a high level in his last MLB season. So he's not a perfect comp either, but he was at least roughly the same age as Tanaka when he went back. So those are the major transactions that we didn't cover last time. I guess that means it's time to talk about stocks. Meg, do you want to read the Twitter trending topic that you were telling us before we started recording?

Baseball. Trending. Mets. Mets owner Steve Cohen denies accusations made by Barstool founder Dave Portnoy that Cohen had a strong hand in trading restrictions apparently placed on several stocks today. Yeah. What a weird timeline. What a weird timeline. I don't know that there are heroes. I don't know that there are villains.

But there is a weird tangential baseball connection to a truly bizarre finance story and so mostly because ben and i have spent much of this week talking about this bizarre finance story in our slack and we received some questions about it we thought we'd have ben on to be like hey ben tell our listeners about short sales i I'm going to help where I can. Yeah, I'll sit out this segment. But yeah, Ben, you're a former hedge fund guy, right? You're basically Steve Cohen.

So you're qualified to tell us all about this. Yeah, I should say in advance of this, I formerly worked at a hedge fund. I don't have any stakes in that fund already. I don't have any stakes in GameStop in any way. This is definitely not investment advice, but I'm happy to try to explain what I can. Yeah. And I will do probably a very unnecessary disclosure and say that when I worked in finance, the part of Goldman that I worked at specifically serves hedge funds. I don't have any inside scoop on what went on here. I just have what I'm able to remember from five very, very busy years in New York. So I am also not offering investment advice, although I didn't do that while I was at Goldman

either. So that's lucky. I will disclose that I had summer internships like in high school at Bear Stearns when Bear Stearns still existed and I did not understand anything then and I don't understand anything now so Ben yeah Ben what happened here I guess maybe the we don't have to like belabor this although maybe we will end up belaboring it but I I wonder the first place we want to start is to briefly explain to our listeners who perhaps saw the big short but did not understand it, what exactly selling short in the market actually means. Because I think a lot of people, despite spending much of the week on Reddit, do not understand it still. So maybe we could help them out. I can be Margot Robbie here. Okay. Yes.

we could help them out. So yeah, I can be Margot Robbie here. Okay. Yes. So the kind of stock market purchase that you're probably used to is that you go buy a stock and it sits in your brokerage account. And then potentially later you sell it. Potentially if you're like me, you just leave it there for years and years. There's another thing that you can do, which is let's say that instead of thinking stocks can go up, you think it's going to go down. Well, you can't buy a negative share in something, generally speaking. But there's a thing that you can do called short selling. And essentially what that means is let's say that I think the price of Fangraph stock is going to go down. Sorry, Appleman. But I don't have any, so I can't sell the Fangraph stock I own.

But I know Meg owns some Fangraph stock. So I might say, hey, Meg, do you mind if I borrow some of yourangraph stock i own but i know meg owns some fangraph stock so i might say hey meg do you mind if i borrow some of your fangraph stock and i meg we will not use this term after this but prime broker meg which is what i used to do would say sure ben i'll help you out i have some of that stock in reserve i'm gonna lend it to you for a little while you have to give me some collateral though because you're a shifty character ben i. I think just money in this case. So I hand Meg some money. She lets me borrow these stocks and then I go sell those stocks that I now own temporarily. So I sell the stocks. A week later, Meg says, hey, can I get my stocks back? And so I go buy them back in the market and deliver them to her. One neat thing about stocks

is that they're fungible. So it's not like every stock that Meg has has a little MR written on it, like your lunchbox when you're a kid. Any share is the same as any other share. So I could borrow 100 shares from Meg, sell them, buy back 100 different shares, return those to her, and that's all the same to her. And so that's essentially what short selling is. You borrow from someone who already owns it, you sell it in anticipation of buying it back at a cheaper price later. And then at some undisclosed future point, you buy it back and return the shares that you borrowed. It's not cheap. Generally, you pay tough rates to do so. And I have very little experience with stock shorting. My finance career was in fixed income markets, and it's kind of different there. But it does matter.

It seems that you're right quickly. And that's essentially what's been going on. One weird thing is that this practice doesn't really have a logical limit. So I could borrow 10 shares from Meg and go sell them. And Ben, let's say you buy them. So now you have 10 shares. And I say, hey, Ben, do you mind if I borrow 10 shares from you?

You say, sure. You know, I'd like to earn a little bit of extra money on these stocks that I own. So I borrow those from you and now I go short 10 shares to someone else. And so now I've created 20 shares of short interest

out of 10 actual shares. And so you can end up with these weird situations like what happened in GameStop where there are more shares short than there are shares outstanding. Yep. Which sounds weird.

Which sounds weird. And the risk to Ben, the hedge fund, is that there's really no limit to the losses that he could theoretically accrue if he kept the position open. Oh, yes. That's very key to this story. Right. So in the perfect world, from Ben's perspective, he borrows my shares. He makes some money on the difference between the price when he initially sold them and when he bought them back to return them to me. But if, as it happened here, the share price in the interim starts to go up, Ben might get nervous.

Ben might say, oh, no, I'm not going to make as much money. Ben might be motivated to say, go cover that position quickly so that he can limit the losses or eke out a small profit. Well, if that happens over and over and over again, and you also have people who are just trying to purchase GameStop, either because GameStock, I keep calling it GameStock because GameStop stock is hard to say. This is an episode of stuff that's hard to say. It's going to be a theme. But Ben, isn't part of what happened

here also that in addition to just the normal sort of back and forth that might exist in a price because the price of a share went up very, very quickly and you had more and more funds trying to quickly cover their short positions. And then you also had folks in the market who wanted to buy either because they thought that, hey, you know, when you sell used copies of video games, you're just in a money making business or because they wanted to have a funsy. The price went up very, very quickly. And what is that phenomenon called that I just described really, really well and clearly? So there I think you're looking for short squeeze. I am.

There's a there's one other like much more difficult to talk about thing that played into this GameStop price action as well that I'm going to try to explain quickly. So you can buy something called a call option on a stock. And what that means is, I think this might go up a lot. So I want to pay you some money for the right to buy this stock at $50 in the future, if it's worth more than that. The right, but not the obligation. So if the stock goes up a bunch, I can buy some shares of it for cheap. If it doesn't, then the money that I paid you for this right is just yours. So, you know, I don't exercise my right and we move on with life. I paid you some money and nothing happened.

So if a bunch of people buy these options, call options in GameStop, someone sold them. And that person says, oh gosh, if GameStop stock goes up a bunch, I'm going to lose money because I have given people the right to buy it from me. So they go out and buy some GameStop stock of their own. And the higher the price goes, the more they need to buy, because the more likely you are to exercise your option and buy those stocks from them. And so you can get this kind of vicious cycle where the price goes up, so they buy more. And that drives the price up, so they need to buy more. and that drives the price up, so they need to buy more. And when you combine that with the fact that there were a lot of people who had sold the stock short and were maybe worried about their ability to buy it back and return it to the people they'd borrowed it from, or maybe worried

about the fact that they had lost so much money by selling the stock short and then needing to buy it back at a high price, it created kind of a perfect storm where a company that was worth, I don't know, a billion dollars or so in aggregate only a few weeks ago is worth on the order of $30 billion now. If you pay attention to its market capitalization, which is an iffy way to look at the value of something. So that's what's happening in the weird world of finance. And I think a lot of people are starting to learn things about, say, how the market and the real economy might be decoupled from one another.

But we wouldn't be talking about this if there wasn't a baseball connection, because it would be a weird thing, but it wouldn't be irrelevant to effectively wild weird thing, because we do try to have some sort of guardrail. So what is... I can't believe I'm going to say this. What is the Mets connection to this weird short sale adventure? So I'll try to get this right, but I'm not 100% certain that I have everything right.

So one of the companies that was most notably betting on GameStop's stock to decline in price is a company called Melvin Capital. And the head of Melvin Capital, I don't know the right word, you know, the chief guy in charge, was a former employee of Steve Cohen at his old hedge fund, SAC. He'd left SAC to found his own fund, Melvin Capital, and had, but still knows Cohen, presumably their, if not buddies, then at least, you know, longtime colleagues. Melvin Capital basically lost all their money. I'm not sure of the exact details of that, but they lost a lot more than they planned on this GameStop short and on some other bets gone sour as well. And a few days ago, I think Tuesday, they secured a buyout of sorts from two hedge funds,

Citadel and Point72. And Point72 is Steve Cohen's current hedge fund. And that's the baseball connection. And so it was reported by Reuters that Point72 had suffered a 15% loss because of this, because the GameStop price kept going up as amateur investors, as Redditors were bidding it up. So is that actually something that is going to hamstring him in any way? Is that something that could actually affect the Mets?

Are they trading Steven Matz so that they can save some money because suddenly Steve Cohen is broke because Wall Street bets on Reddit bid up GameStop? No, in a word, no. That's not really, it doesn't seem likely to me at all to be a concern. Hedge fund returns, particularly of the long short equity types that are betting on stocks going up and down are notoriously volatile. And Cohen is not the only investor in his hedge fund. It's not like 15% of his money vanished. He has money in other things. But even given that, investment vehicles change in price. And I think if every time Steve Cohen's hedge fund suffers a loss, we're going to be talking about whether the Mets can afford free agents. We're going to be in for a long one, guys.

That's just kind of the nature of these things. They go up and down in price pretty regularly and kind of stochastically. It's not like he just makes a small amount of money every day by owning an investment fund. Most days, I would bet, are volatile volatile either up or down yeah their exposure on any given day is going to vary sometimes they are going to have days that are terrible sometimes they are going to have days that you know make their entire quarter right so there is going to be volatility here which look i didn't want to say anything about this on twitter because people were getting i and i'm to be clear not claiming a perfect understanding of exactly what went on here, but people were

getting some little things wrong, but everyone was just having a really good time. And I didn't want, you know, you don't want to get in the way of anybody's good time. But since this seems to be winding down as some trading platforms are making it impossible to purchase new shares of some of these meme stocks. And Ben, you have been in finance a lot more recently than I am. Is this like an accepted industry term, meme stocks? Not one I was familiar with. Are we doing meme stocks as a thing? We have to say meme stocks.

Oh, no. I know what they mean. I know what they mean, too. We have to say meme stonks. Oh, no. I know what they mean. I know what they mean, too. I would say that I don't really know what industry terminology was accepted and not accepted.

But if I said that I work, people would have understood what I meant. OK, so, you know, since this is seemingly going to wind down a little bit because some of the the platforms that facilitate trading for small investors are saying no more. You may not purchase this or AMC or Tootsie Roll or any other 90s nostalgia thing that you might have up your sleeve. We figured we would come on and clarify the likelihood that this will impact the Mets. Although I am sympathetic to the instinct of Mets fans to assume that they are just going to get totally jobbed by financial shenanigans again because there as we all know is some significant

precedent of that happening would have been the most Mets thing imaginable I certainly don't begrudge Mets fans a little bit of ugh Ponzi scheme owner to oh hey we have the richest owner in MLB to all of a sudden, oh, no, GameStop stock went up and suddenly we're broke. But fortunately for them, that does not

seem to be the case. So they traded Steven Matz because they had Joey Lucchese already, maybe more so than because Steve Cohen suddenly needed it to cover his losses here. And while we will not give financial advice or investing advice on this podcast, I think that I would at least say that, you know, just like if you're not an experienced trader, just be careful is all I would say. Just be careful when you're trying to fund new thing.

Don't get caught up in the meme and then find yourself wondering where your money went is all I would say just be careful you only live once so be very careful exact opposite of what people take that to mean don't really get do-overs yes yes so ben while we're doing this finance corner there was one more thing i wanted to ask you last year it was looking like like Billy Bean might be leaving the Oakland A's after decades, end of an era. It seemed like he had his eye on perhaps getting an ownership stake, and he has a company, and it looked like maybe he would be investing in other sports franchises, perhaps

not baseball franchises. And so that was where things stood in October. But it was reported in December that that deal still hadn't gone through and it was looking a little tenuous. And now, just this past week, that deal is dead. And I'm reading here from Reuters, the parent company of the Boston Red Sox has ended talks to sell a minority stake to Red Ball Acquisition Corp., a blank check firm co-chaired by baseball executive Billy Bean. News website Axios reported on Monday. So it looks like Billy Bean will be staying with the A's for the foreseeable future and his ambitions to go beyond running a baseball operations department or a soccer operations department and become an owner of sorts have been thwarted for now. So does this mean

anything beyond the fact that Billy Beane will evidently be staying put for the time being? Was this going to be like the future of sports ownership? And this tells us something about where things are headed there. Can he try again somewhere else? Is this a permanent shutdown or just sort of a temporary setback? I don't think it's necessarily a new direction that sports ownership is going in. It's very similar to other teams that have gone public. Now, there aren't a lot of those in baseball. The Braves have a portion or a portion of Liberty Media and the Blue Jays, I believe,

are a portion of Rogers. Yes. and the Blue Jays, I believe, are a portion of Rogers. Yes. But the plan here was essentially to turn, what's the Red Sox company called? Fenway Sports Group or something? Yes.

To turn them into a publicly traded company. And the blank check purchase acquisition is just some kind of gimmicky new way of doing an initial public offering in a slightly different way. Instead of IPO-ing Fenway Sports Group, this company buys Fenway Sports Group, and then it's already a public company. And so bam, Fenway's public. And this is run by Billy Bean and a former Goldman Sachs guy. And so this would have merged the Fenway Sports Group with that company, Red Ball. And then that group, I guess, would have been worth like $8 billion or something.

The vast majority of the ownership would remain with the Fenway Sports Group people. Red Ball, it looks like, raised $500 million with which to buy a, if it's going to be $8 billion total, a 1 16th stake of Fenway Sports Group. total a 1 16th stake of Fenway Sports Group. And the real reason that people do this is because after Red Bull merges with it, then Fenway Sports Group is now a publicly traded company because Red Bull already is. And so it's just a different way of going public in a negotiated transaction where you agree a price with this Red Bull company, as opposed to doing an initial public offering, which is just a way where you offer the shares to a bunch of people all at once instead of one person. Right. I see. And so Bean wouldn't have been able to remain with the A's even if he'd wanted to, because there probably would have been a conflict there because he would have been involved with this group that owns the Red Sox.

And so I don't know what he hopes to do. Probably he still aspires to go on to bigger and if not necessarily better, maybe more lucrative activities. So maybe he'll try again. I don't know that it affects all that much about the A's day-to-day operations if you were to leave or not. But for him, going from this to then being back with the A's who it was reported by Ken Rosenthal, they offered Marcus Semyon a one-year $12.5 million deal and then with $10 million deferred in 10 one-year installments of $1 million apiece. So that's how the A's are operating right now. So you can sort of see why Billy Beedon would want to get out.

But I guess he is stuck there for now i mean he could leave if he wanted to but you know yeah yeah i don't know the exact details of this red ball acquisition corp they could try to buy another team and by buy i mean buy a small stake in they could try to do some other things i don't know what happens in their prospectus if they don't succeed in acquiring the first company a lot of these things have an agreement that they'll just wind back down and return everyone's money but i you know i don't i'm not an investor in red ball i just have no clue what's going on with it so i am not sure what his next move is yet but his next move will not be as a part owner of

fenway sports group i have two questions one I have two questions, one of which is serious and one of which is silly. And I will start with the serious one, which is, in a way, I am a little bit disappointed that this didn't go through because, and here's my question, would this not have given us one more team where we had at least, in all likelihood,

some insight into their books if they had actually ended up being part of... Because this is the question for you, Ben. Does it operate in the same way where we would have actually ended up having some kind of insight? Or is the fact that it is this sort of special purpose vehicle instead of an actual IPO make any of the disclosure stuff different? No, it would. It's a publicly traded company. one thing that i don't know is how the fact that fenway sports group doesn't just operate the red socks right i don't actually have any clue how that would work right so that's so okay so that was my serious question my silly question is how did red ball become the name for this were they trying to riff on red socks and sports ball and they just

combine them into one thing like it is not a very good name it's a truly poor name yeah red ball they're like well you're the red socks and they have a ball maybe it was called red socks baseball corp and they're like that's too many words just uh take the middle out oh boy that helped me understand that a little bit so gilly bean for now remains a baseball executive so uh i guess the last thing that i i wanted to ask because we were talking about tanaka going back to japan and one reason why seemingly is that the yankees didn't make much of an effort or any effort really to resign him and he seemed to like being there and one reason why the yankees didn't make much of an effort or any effort really to resign him. And he seemed to like being there.

And one reason why the Yankees didn't make much of an effort there is that they seem to be going to great lengths to stay under the competitive balance tax threshold. And that is seemingly why they basically traded Adam Adovino for money that they could then mostly pocket, but also use a little bit to sign Darren O'Day. But that's part of a pattern, right? Lots of teams are operating in that way. And the Yankees have gone beyond that threshold in the past, but clearly they prefer not to. And I've always been kind of curious about the lengths that teams go to to stay under that number. And I know that part of it is just that, well, they'd rather spend less, all else being equal, but they treat that number as a cap kind of when it's not a cap.

And Andy McCullough had an article at The Athletic the other day where he asked the question, why do teams care about this competitive balance tax so much? Why are they so afraid of it? And he didn't exactly answer the question. I don't know if it's possible to answer it. But because it is just a tax on the amount over that threshold, and there are some other penalties that go with it. But because it's not like your entire payroll is getting that penalty assessed, it's just the amount over that amount. It usually doesn't actually amount to that much. So do you think there's something to that, that it's draft pick penalties or whatever that teams are really saying, no, this will actually hurt us if we go

above that number? Or is it just kind of a convenient number to hold the line at essentially? Because I've never totally understood why they are so determined to stick to that other than just, you know, generally wanting to spend less if they can. That's a, that's a tough question. Yeah. I think one thing that might drive some part of it, my speculation is if you know that you're spending $102 for every $100 a competitor spends to get the same thing, well, it would stand to reason that if you have the best bid for it, you're overpaying because it costs you more to get the same thing than it costs a competitor. And so potentially teams are just overly relying on that, that, oh, well, when I'm over this, it's inefficient for me to be

signing contracts. I don't find that to be compelling, to be honest. That seems a little bit short-sighted. Teams don't all have the same value of a win. The value of a win curve isn't constant for everyone. But that's one easy reason that you could see. And I can also imagine if your owner calls you up and he says, hey, I see here that you want me to go into the luxury tax penalty to pick up Adam Ottavino. And then like, do you think we could just maybe not do that? Like, it seems like I don't really want to be paying tax penalties. I'm all for spending my money efficiently, but paying taxes doesn't sound efficient. Right. I would imagine it's tougher to justify that as an executive. if you're very bottom line focused. I don't have any idea why teams are so insistent on doing so.

I'm surprised by that. In the Yankees case specifically, weren't they over the last two years before this year? I think so. They got under. And when you get under, it resets, right? Right. And that's one reason there are these escalating penalties if you do it multiple years with the yankees uh they've been over and below and i can't keep track of when they actually reset

it yeah it appears to me they're over the last two years yeah because we had their estimated final payroll and granted not all of this is going to be part of the tax but we had them over pretty considerably so i would imagine they were past the threshold. Yeah. I think the penalties for, you know, I think three-time offenders are actually somewhat substantial. Right. Yeah. One other way to think of it is if they were already planning on not being that far over, you could make some pretty considerable cost savings over future years if you're planning on being over in 2022 say by basically spending a prospect to turn adam adevino into cheaper adam adevino right which is what their machinations

have come down to in the end it seems like you know a lot of storm and fury and they didn't really do that much yeah according to katz which i'm looking to because they have really good historical records on this. So in 2018, they didn't exceed. In 2019, they had an almost $7 million tax on their payroll, which was $234 and change. And so I would imagine that given that we had their 2020 year-end rate at $241, that they would have been over last year. Although I will also say that I am not perfectly clear on how the proratedness of 2020 impacted that. But yeah. Yeah, there is a it is the case that you have incentives to not be a three time

offender. Yes. yes yeah that is something that like what we're saying it's a tiny tax rate on only year over which stops being true once you get into exceeding it three years in a row right and so it does seem that the yankees have become you know repeat dip underers where they'll dip under for a year and then go uh go exceed it again that actually requires some flexibility because if they're trying to do that two years ago they're just nowhere near it right so they presumably have some people who are like, oh, 2021 is a year where we could be under. Oh, 2024 is a year where we could be under. Let's structure our contracts that way. Yeah, I think that I think that there are places where

it does make good sense to be mindful that you're getting deeper and deeper into the penalty. I think that the caliber of player you're going over for is almost certainly part of the calculus here has been suggested, right? That like the idea of going over the threshold for an Adam Adovino, who's a perfectly good reliever, but is Adam Adovino is going to be for a team like the Yankees, hopefully a different calculus than it is

for a Garrett Cole, right? Where it's like the value proposition here is really clear. I think a lot of it is that teams are cheap and they don't want to spend money. And I do think it's useful in these conversations to remember that like this system by which there is a competitive balance tax threshold is the system that ownership wanted, right? So this doesn't have to be the way that we think about competitive balance. This isn't really about competitive balance, but this doesn't have to be the way that we think about competitive balance. This isn't really about competitive balance, but this doesn't have to be the way that we sort of have bumpers on that to make sure that the Yankees aren't just steamrolling the rest of the American League, but it is the one that ownership chose. And I would imagine that a good deal of that is because it gives them good justification to spend less money. So that's a useful thing to remember. This isn't Moses, right? Right. And the Yankees do have, I guess, what, the second highest projected payroll right now

behind LA. They're not suddenly turning into Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Tampa Bay or something, but obviously they have far greater resources. And to see them economize at all it's always you know people say oh niki's cheap george wouldn't have done this but um probably george would if george were still around today i think one last thing to that's worth noting is the worst thing you could possibly be is a dollar over the cap right over the tax rather because then you're getting no benefit from it because you only spent the dollar extra. You didn't get any players that you couldn't have while being under, but you've also triggered repeat offender penalties. And so if you're very near the CBT,

the odds or the incentives are heavily in favor of being under. Which it seems like was a big part of the calculus for New York, right? Because it is, because of the things that go into calculating the competitive balance tax threshold there is some wiggle room right there is some mystery is too strong of a word but you don't know exactly to the dollar necessarily what your obligations are at any given moment given some of the other things besides salary that go into that number and so i can appreciate why there would be sensitivity given what what Ben just said but I also appreciate why the Yankees end up being like a pretty like they're a useful canary

in one direction at least so I get why people get nervous about it all right well I think that concludes the planet money portion of this podcast so if you're all ready to talk about pitching, we will take a quick break and we'll be right back with Barton Smith to talk about the new frontier of pitch movement and pitch design. And I'm probably going to terribly oversimplify this, but for a long time, it was thought that if you knew the initial parameters of a pitch, you knew the pitch's characteristics, and you could calculate the

effects of gravity and the Magnus force, that you could tell how that pitch would move and it would follow a predictable path to home plate. But you always heard scouts and players talk about late movement, and so there was this debate about is there actually late movement or is that just an illusion? And now we have increasingly precise and sensitive technology that can detect the actual movement of the pitch. And it's looking more and more like it is not just those couple of forces that determine pitch movement. There is another force which has come to be called seam shifted wake. So to talk about that, we have Ben still with us because he recently wrote about it. But we are also joined by Barton Smith, who is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Utah State University

and has been something of a pioneer when it comes to describing and quantifying seam shifted wake. Hello, Barton. Hey, good morning. So give us the origin story, if you can. You and your students have devoted a lot of time and effort to studying this. So how did this force first come to people's attention and how was this term coined for it? Well, we started really off in a different area.

The first question I sought to answer is why is a two seam-seam different than a four-seam fastball? Which seems like a really simple question. But we got a three-wheel pitching machine and put them in both ways, and they went the same place. And I started asking people, you know, what's the difference? And I get a lot of very hand-wavy kind of explanations. And that really got me started. We started measuring flow over the balls,

and we noticed that seams did things to the flow. And eventually, we figured out that we hypothesized that you could use the seams to try to make the ball move in a different direction. And after a lot of trial and error, we figured out a way to do it. And then, as you've alluded to, Major League Baseball started using a new measurement technology this year. And that's really what broke it wide open because then it becomes very obvious that this is happening now that we have that technology. And how do you measure that movement of the air over the seams? We have a system that's called particle image velocimetry.

It's pretty common for a guy like me. It's a system that uses a couple of lasers to light up fog particles. We put theater fog in the room and we use these lasers essentially like flash bulbs. But since there's laser sheets, they only light up a plane of air. It doesn't light up the whole room. And so we can see what's happening in the middle of the ball. And we have computer code that translates those particle motions into velocities of the air. And from that, we can see what the seams are doing. So that's one test that we would do.

Those are typically non-spinning balls that we fired, you know, about 10 feet past these cameras. And then once we had an idea of what seams did, we moved into a room where we could shoot the ball 55 feet and watch where it goes. And that's how we were able to prove to ourselves that, yeah, this can happen. And Ben mentioned that technology changes have facilitated Major League Baseball sort of moving into this space. But maybe you can give us a sense of what that technology change from their prior system to Hawkeye facilitated. What were we measuring before and what are we able to more accurately measure now? That's a great question. So I think what happened is we

got stuck in an assumption that everybody just believed. And the assumption kind of, when you say an effect doesn't exist, so I don't need to measure it, you will never see that effect in your measurements. And that's kind of what happened to us. So I guess the original system was called PitchFX, and it tracked the ball. Then came along TrackMan, which is a very capable radar-based technology. And TrackMan could track the ball even more accurately. And it could also tell how fast it was spinning but it could not tell what

the axis of the spin was it couldn't tell if it was 12 o'clock or 3 o'clock or whatever and so it became very common to take the movement data which was very good and a model of the Magnus effect and say well that the axis must be so-and-so. And what has happened with Hawkeye is that the axis of the ball is now directly measured. And so we can compare what that Magnus-based inferred axis is to the actual axis. And when they don't match, that's how we know there's a seam shifted wake effect.

Yeah, like if you think about it, if you look at the ball and you say, oh, if a ball had no spin, it would go straight. And instead it went down two inches and left four inches. Then we used to say, oh, so it's probably thrown with a spin that would make it go down two inches and left four inches. Exactly. With that exact angle. But then when you look at a camera and the camera says, no, it's not thrown at that angle, it's thrown at a different angle. Well, something else is doing it. And I think that was the big breakthrough is we have proof that it wasn't thrown at the angle that the movement, that a Magnus force could create that movement. And in some cases it is, that's what's really neat about the new data. If you look at a

really low gyro four seam fastball, like Garrett Cole or Trevor Bauer, they match exactly. The old trackman system would tell you perfectly what the axis of that pitch is. But when you get into a lot of sinkers and change-ups, they can be radically different. And how was this discovered, Barton? I mean, there was an awareness that there was something weird and wonky going on even before we had the data to detect what was actually happening, right? Well, I was screaming and shouting about it for a long time. Right. So how did you know this was happening? And to what extent did this type of pitch exist even before we could quantify what was happening exactly? Well, there was a lot of hints. What I used to focus on were change-ups from guys like Strausberg. And you can, if you ever watch Scherzer or

Strausberg or many other guys that throw a two-seam oriented change-up at a, you know, at a close to what's called a three o'clock tilt. So that, you know, it's a pitch that should move kind of sideways. You often see them moving down. You can see it with your eyes and you can see, you can see it in the batter's reaction. Then you can really see it in the catcher's reaction. When this happens and it doesn't always, it, it, uh, it varies a lot for a lot of reasons that we can get into later. You can see the catcher being surprised. I was initially telling people, if you think you're looking at a seam shifted wake change up, watch to see the catcher get thumbed and that to me that was a big tip off and and it was common yeah i don't think anyone was confident this effect didn't exist we just had

trouble measuring it at a league-wide level yeah worse than that i had a lot of people telling me no it doesn't exist look the data says it doesn't exist and and it was difficult for me to explain that the data can't show that it exists. The data is predicated on it not existing. Yeah. A lot of analysis of this, I mean, that I did as well, just said, well, we know that we can't exactly measure all the forces going into movement. With the system we have, you just can't get any further than guessing the Magnus movement, but we're aware that this is probably not explaining the whole thing.

I found a pretty wide spectrum of attitudes about that. Some people were open-minded like that, like yourself, and others would emphatically say, no, we know that this doesn't exist. Which very much maps onto other things that we've seen as sabermetrics has evolved, right? Sure, yeah. We've had these various stages of this or that doesn't exist. This is an old coach's tale, you know, whether it's catcher framing or various other things where we had a certain level of granularity in our data that didn't allow us to detect something or even seem to rule out the possibility that it existed or was significant, at least to some people in some studies. people in some studies. And then later we get better data and it turns out that, oh no, the players and the coaches and people who said that this stuff was happening, maybe they actually did

understand baseball better than people who were looking at the data alone. So I'm always interested when something like that happens. And we learned as we go along and we learned that we actually knew these things all along or some people did in this case the people on the ground had a big advantage too in that they could just point a rapsodo at the pitch or point a like an edgertronic camera and actually see hey the axis it's leaving my hand with is different we didn't have that at a league level but people were pointing high speed cameras at their pitches and noticing that the axes were different i don't think they had the you know the the stage fog and the uh the laser to figure out what was

causing it. I've heard a lot of stories counter to that, though. I've heard stories about pitchers that... So I'm going to get a little technical now. Trackman measures movement, Rapsoda measures the actual axis, and it infers movement, and Trackman infers the axis. And so when you had a good seam shifted wake pitch, these two technologies tended to disagree. And it's pretty common for one or the other to be in a bullpen and usually not both. And I think that this confused a lot of people. And I had one pitcher tell me, a minor league guy, I gave up my two seam because Rapsodo said it was the same as my four seam. And so I think there were a lot of exceptions to what you're just saying too. And I definitely take your previous point too, that when I talk to the old time coaches, they're like, yeah, of course we knew this.

They were fine because they never had these measurements in the first place. They were never clouded by measurements that they didn't fully understand. I'm curious in your conversation with pitchers. sort of might be a silly question because so much of pitching and pitch design is figuring out ways for guys to have both mechanics and grips that they can easily replicate over and over again. So there's some consistency, but how replicable and consistent do you find this behavior to be for a guy who has say a seam shifted wake fastball? We have to come up with a better way of describing this because that's a, that's a real mouthful. But how much consistency sort of pitch to pitch is there for a guy who has a pitch that falls into this category? That's a really great question. And it varies a lot. I see like

a lot of seam shifted wake pitches are splitters. And they vary all over the place because this effect is sensitive to the orientation of the ball. And as you can imagine, the splitter pops off your hand kind of randomly. And so you'll see a wide distribution on those. There are some pitchers that seem to be able to do this well and do it really repeatedly, but it is really a big tip-off that someone's doing it when you see it's not very repeatable. And I think that's because they don't know what's causing it. They don't realize that they have to be very careful with their orientation or they can totally ruin the effect.

So a lot of pitches you see are very scattered. And then there's a handful of people like Zach Grinke's changeup is spot, you know, it's very, it's super repeatable and works really well. So how many pitchers approximately do this regularly or intentionally or unintentionally? I know, you know, Saris wrote about this recently and he had a table of seam shifted wake sinkers and change up versus non, oh boy, this is hard to say, non seam shifted wake sinkers and change ups. Wake lifts? Seam? Wake lifts? They all have wakes. Yeah, that doesn't work either. We got to come up with new words.

Well, movement and axis synced or something. Yeah, I don't know if that's it either. Sorry, Ben. Traditional. How about if we just call them traditional? There we go. Yeah. Anyway, the ones that identified as seam shifted wakes were just a small number. So do you know what

percentage of pitches fall into this category or what percentage of pitchers? Yeah. First, you have to draw a line. How much axis shift do I need or deviation, as I like to call it on Savant? How much of that do you need before you call it a seam shifted wake pitch? And I kind of pretty arbitrarily pick 10 degrees because I think that a batter can notice 10 degrees. And I'm looking, these numbers were in our baseball prospectus article and I'm scanning it right now trying to pick them up. But I estimated on sinkers, it's most of them. In fact, the vast majority of them, I think I came up with something

like 92%. Changeups, it's about 50%. And I think that could be 100% easy. I think that the people that aren't doing it should be doing it and it's not hard to change. I'd also argue that every pitch has this force to some effect. Right. So I'm talking about the ones that are beyond 10 degrees of effect. Yeah. But every pitch has this happen some. Right. So the interesting part to me was that about 20% of four seam fastballs have it. And and I think those are often described as having some cut. Yes, agreed. And it seems to work a lot better with two seamers than four seamers. It's it does. You can.

We're kind of feeling our way in the dark still. But here's my current thinking on it, that at about 90% efficiency, you can get a lot of movement on a two-seamer from seams. And for a four-seamer, you have to go to an even lower efficiency than that before anything happens. And generally, when you do that, you're giving up movement. But you can change the direction of the movement. So let's say that someone had a high-speed camera and was sitting in minor league parks watching prospects, like say a lead prospect analyst, Eric Langenhagen, and he was trying to tell from the high speed that he takes

whether an organization was playing around with this with their guys and trying to encourage them to better optimize some of their pitching with theme-shifted wake in mind. I did it. I said it all and I didn't stumble once. Is there anything that someone could look for beyond the data itself in terms of the visual presentation, how a guy is pronating or supernating

that would indicate, oh, he's trying to figure out a grip that allows him to manipulate the ball in this way? I think what I would look for is people that are throwing with less than 100% efficiency and switching between two and four seams. I think to me that would be the tip off. I see a lot of two-seam fastballs that have high efficiency and they don't do a lot. I've seen one recently that went the same way as the four seams do, which was really interesting. so so i think uh i like to

tell people anything's possible with this you can do nearly anything but what we're currently looking at are pitches that kind of are riffs on just a traditional grip and uh so every you know the the current data is heavily biased towards the grips that we teach kids right that's where you start and so so we haven't really started getting beyond that yet. But yeah, if you look through Savant and look for a pitcher that has a sinker that moves the wrong way, because it seems you'll find someone that's doing, there is one out there. I won't mention his name, but that was a real kick because it really validates what I've been saying. Hey, this thing can go in any direction you want.

So there's been a lot of debate and discussion about how much of spin rate is inherent and how much of that is just some quality about the pitcher that can't be changed or controlled absent the use of foreign substances. But this is something that in theory anyone can do. And even if you aren't doing it every time if you're doing it every now and then then theoretically if you figured out how to harness it you could keep doing it i mean is there any reason aside from i guess pitch selection and certain pitches maybe not being as conducive to this or it not being as advantageous to certain

pitches but is there anything holding a pitcher back from doing this other than just not having put the effort in to, you know, get in front of the high speed camera and the Rep Soto and all of those things and figure out how to hold the ball so as to take advantage of this? I think the biggest impediment to it would be somebody that's been following the orthodoxy right now that says that you need to maximize your efficiency. So if you're 100% and that's a good thing, right? That works real well for the four-seam fastballs. But if you're 100% and you can't dial that back to 90, you can't do this. One thing that I find very interesting from reading your research as well is

how sensitive this is to very marginal changes in grip. Especially if your efficiency is high, that's true. I think if your efficiency gets lower, which is to say you have more gyro, it gets more forgiving. Can you define that for people who may be wondering what does he mean by efficiency or gyro? How do you make your spin more efficient or more useful? Yeah, that's a really good question

and hard to explain without pictures. But basically a 0% efficiency pitch spins like a bullet. Or Tom Tango likes to say like a football. And I think that both of those visuals work real well. And 100% efficiency would mean pure backspin. Like a tire on a road. Right. Yeah, I like that.

Never heard that one before, but that's really good. And so then you have everything in between. And lack of efficiency or more gyro comes from, a lot of people will say, describe it as not keeping your hand behind the ball. If your hand gets a bit off to the side, then you'll spin it with less efficiency. And efficiency is a problematic word because it implies good. And I'm sitting here saying that you don't want it if you want this to happen. So efficiency is a word that it really comes from the point of view that Magnus is everything. And so it's how much of the spin goes into the Magnus force. Yeah. So Savant has started to call it active and inactive spin. And that's also inaccurate. Yeah. But in a less in a less judgment i have about 40 pages of emails between me and tom tango about that please read them aloud no don't do that yeah i i feel like

claims that you know saying that it's efficient makes it sound like that's good and and i said well active also makes it sound like it's good to me i prefer transverse and gyro i think that's the the cleanest way to say it yeah but it hasn't really caught on yep can be part of our new set of words i think that one of the things about this that is the most exciting for me is that there's this i think general sense at least on the public side of analysis that a lot of the big kind of analytical questions have sort of been answered, or if we want to be more optimistic, that sort of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. And I think that people have been concerned about, like,

what is public side baseball analysis going to look like five or ten years from now? And now we have this treasure trove of both new information and also sort of a new perspective to have on what makes a pitch good and to help us understand how it is moving and characterize that movement, I think, more accurately. So this is a very broad question, and I think you'll each have potentially different answers to this, so maybe you can take it in turn. But what is the next big thing that you are hoping to sort of unpack and uncover when it comes to this? And is there, you know, is there a particular kind of data that is going to be more useful to you in solving that question, a mode of analysis? And maybe we can start with Barton and then go to Ben.

Okay, that's a great question. It is very broad. So, yeah, first of all, I totally agree that, you know, all of a sudden we have a whole bunch of new things to look at. And I think that what's going to be important to public analysis is trying to determine what's the effect of this on a hitter. You know, does this make your pitch better? Alex Fast had a really good tweet the other day, and I don't know if you saw it. Seam shifted wake isn't necessarily a good thing. You know, more is not necessarily better. And I think this trying to discover under what circumstances does it actually improve the pitch's performance is something that the community can really wrestle with.

And I think will turn up great answers. Personally, though, that's not my thing. And I'm not very good at those things. I still don't. I've never stood in the box. I don't really fully understand what it takes to fool a hitter. So personally, what I'm more interested in, and we're working on this right now, is to complete our model on how seams work. We have a model that we're working on. We have to

fill it with some new data that we're currently taking. And once we have that, I want to generate what we're going to call the seam shifted map of the world which is every single combination of axis gyro orientation speed and and something that can just we you can tell to investigate every single possibility and tell me what the low hanging fruit are and i think that that will turn up pitches that we've never thought of before and to me that's that's really exciting yeah i'm not sure what this means for kind of the public side analysis of existing pitches. I basically agree with what Barton said there, that people are going to look through and try to strip out the amount of seam-stretched wake movement, the amount of Magnus movement, and what the extremes and just the whole range of those two different types of movement mean for a pitch's success. those two different types of movement mean for a pitch's success. It's going to make it a lot easier to analyze Kyle Hendricks, for example,

because using kind of Magnus spin-based analysis of Kyle Hendricks, you just go like, I don't know. Right, he's magic. He's good. It seems like he's really good, and I don't know why. I think that that's kind of the next kind of low-hanging fruit step forward on the analysis side is to say, hey, now that we have all this observed spin axis data, as in how does it leave his hand? We're just going to be able a lot better to understand which pitchers get the most deviation or like which deviation does each pitcher get and which of those combinations are most beneficial. get and which of those combinations are most beneficial. I'm very interested for the seam shifted map of the world, the idea that you can just find every combination that could make a

neo screwball or whatever you want to call it, like some kind of motion that no one's seen before. That's way more exciting in the long run to me than looking at what pitchers already do and seeing what's good. The pitchers kind of know that, right? what pitchers already do and seeing what's good right the pitchers kind of know that right right and and now that we you know so as of i'm pretty sure that in 2021 hawkeye will collect orientation data too and eventually you're going to get that and so very quickly the public's going to be able to correlate gyro and orientation to um to these motions and and you'll figure out what works and what doesn't uh but what what they still won't have is pictures that people didn't think to try. And so that's why I think that that will be the,

to me, the interesting part. Yeah. I think one aspect of this that is exciting, but also intimidating is just the level of detail and complexity, especially for someone who talks and writes about this sort of stuff occasionally. And Ben, you do this all the time. I wonder how you think about how to delve into this and make it palatable to readers and understandable to readers, because the kind of analysis that we do, player analysis, has just gotten increasingly complicated because the data keeps getting better. And there's always another layer that you can look at right so in the past it was just like you'd had the very surface stats in the box score and then we keep getting further and further away from the actual results

and looking at the process and now more and more aspects of the process and so now if you're writing about a picture and you're saying is this this guy going to be a better player? Is he going to break out? Now it's not enough to just look at, well, his FIP was lower than his ERA. So that means that hopefully his ERA will be lower in the future. And it's not even just looking at batted ball characteristics, or now it's not even looking at velocity or pitch selection or movement. Now it's like, how exactly is that movement produced? Could it be better? Is he a candidate to change his grip a little bit and suddenly be much more effective? So it's just like this ever deepening rabbit hole that is sort of, I mean, it's exciting if you have a lot of time to devote to this and interest in it, but it's also sort of

scary if you're just someone who's trying to understand baseball now or win your fantasy league or whatever. So I guess, Ben, how do you think of that when you're just writing about a player? Because you could devote like a week to looking into anyone you're writing about, but you can't actually devote a week to that because Meg will be mad at you because you haven't filed yet. So how do you balance, I guess, just like the depth of information that's available now and the desire to be clear and enlightening, but also just not get lost forever in all of this? Well, I think that increasingly you need to separate being descriptive about what's happening and being predictive about what's going to happen. I think

that's something that I've found increasingly in my writing is, I think it's very fascinating to explain to people who maybe haven't thought about this, what it means for a pitch to move due to the Magnus force and what it means that there's other movement than that. And I think that's very interesting. And like using Kyle Hendricks, again, as an example, it's very fascinating for people to understand why he's able to do this. And I think that there's plenty of untapped potential in just explaining the things that are going on in baseball. I think becoming predictive about it is increasingly becoming a very difficult game, a game that public side analysis is just at a huge disadvantage to the coaches who are actually

talking to these pitchers about. It was easy to say, like you said, this guy's FIP is low and his ERA is high, right? But that's gone now. And so, like you said, this guy's FIP is low and his ERA is high. That's gone now. And so now if you're predicting that someone's going to change their pitch types, well, unless you've talked to that guy about changing his pitch types, you don't actually know if he's going to. And then you're kind of betting on whether a team's development group or whether the pitcher's independent ideas about how he's going to develop his pitches differently are going to change. And I think if you delve too far into that side of things and picking pitchers who could exploit seam shifted wake by changing their grip, that's more of a player development thing than I think a lot of writers are doing these days. But if you're trying to explain why this thing happens or why, for

example, Jordan Hicks, who has 97.6% efficiency on his two-seamer, doesn't seem to miss many bats or prevent hard contact as much as you might expect. Well, I think we're getting much better equipped to do that. But I don't think it's going to be easy to make predictions about the future. I think this data, if anything, makes it harder to, even though it's more descriptive. Yeah, can I make a couple comments on that sure i i that's good i agree completely i think what this does is make the life of a pitching coach much much harder yeah and because there's there's a lot of new thing a lot of new knobs that you didn't know about and you can look around and see guys like hendrix that are

turning those knobs and being very successful with them. And I want to use a counter example. Another big seam shifted weight guy is Julio Turan. And he had a terrible year last year while he was doing this really well. So I think that the difference between them to some extent is how they use it and what they understand about what it's doing. And in the one case, you have, you know, really optimal understanding. And in the other case, I suspect you have very poor understanding. I'm curious what your perception of the gap between the public side understanding of this and the team side understanding is, because I think that there are organizations we think of as being particularly adept at pitch design and player development when it comes to pitchers.

And there are orgs that do that less well. Could you tell me your list of the ones you think are good? Or is that the... I'm serious. Well, for instance, we tend to think of Houston as being pretty good at developing at least a particular kind of pitcher, I think might be the way of describing that. Although I'd argue that they're very good at developing the kind of pitcher who throws with maximum transverse spin, throws four seams high in the zone that exactly track the axis of movement.

So kind of a different thing. Yeah, it's a different kind of good at pitch design than an org that I don't know if there's an org that has particularly adapted this yet. But you know, we tend to think of Houston that way. I think that there's a growing consensus in the prospect community that Detroit is figuring out some pitch design stuff in a way that is going to be useful on the prospect side. I agree with that. And so I, I am curious, you know, I don't want to attribute their savvy to an early awareness of seam shifted weight because, you know, as Ben just said, this doesn't mirror the kind of fastballs that we're necessarily seeing in Houston. But what is your sense of that gap between what is known on the public side?

And by that, I don't mean by someone like me. I mean, by someone like you and how teams are starting to think about and implement this. It's hard. You know, teams keep their cards close to the vest, obviously, right? Yeah. So it's hard to know. But I did take a little tour in March of a few facilities in Florida and talk to them.

And I think that, you know, the feedback I get is that they're all pursuing this to a very large extent. And I think that they're smart people and they know how to do it. So in terms of how much success they're having, I'm not really sure. I completely agree that this is more of a player development issue. You know, you don't find too many successful pitchers that are interested in knowing anything about this because they're already successful. provide a way to maybe save someone's career or to take your pool of pitchers and say, these are guys that don't spin the ball well and don't throw super hard,

but maybe there's a way to develop them. And I think that that's happening. But in terms of teams, when you go looking through the data, there are a couple of teams, and you mentioned Detroit. They have quite a collection of guys doing this, and I don't know if this is a coincidence or not. And the other one I keep coming back to, and I know that they're all over this, is Atlanta. Interesting. Where Mike Vest works now. Yeah. And I think he has a lot to do with this.

So, Ben, we've talked a lot about how each new analytical breakthrough tends to favor the defense first and pitching primarily and how because hitting is this reactive activity and historically hasn't had the same level of data associated with it it's harder to apply that information in a way that helps hitters and as we've discussed we don't exactly know what the effect of all of this will be it's not as if everyone's gonna suddenly start seam shifting and guys will go from being terrible to Cy Young winners overnight necessarily. But one would think that understanding this process and these forces better can only help pitchers and hurt hitters, right? Is there a counter to this? If pitchers start doing this,

they figure out how to refine and harness all of these things and they figure out the optimal movement and application of these forces. In theory, that could only exacerbate the issues that everyone talks about with lack of contact and increasing strikeout rate and all of that, right? I mean, is there any way in which this will not make that problem worse? I think there's one specific way and that's that there were a lot of pitchers already doing this, but hitters didn't have a good concept of what they were doing. Okay.

And if you could make a pitching machine that could throw a Kyle Hendricks sinker. You can't. But if you can in the future. Yeah. There isn't one currently. Yeah. As I understand it, it's very difficult to create pitching machines that can throw balls with gyro spin, right?

That's right, yeah. But if increased understanding of these phenomenon make it easier for pitchers to rep or for hitters to replicate it, and again, right now you can't, that would be one way that hitters could counter pitcher's current advantage. That said, yeah, most things that you learn that you can do to a baseball benefit the pitcher, not the batter. I just had a thought though, that's really, I think one way what this is going to do, hopefully, is put some pressure on the sport, really, to develop that pitching machine that you're talking about, the Kentra gyro, because

now people are going to realize the pitchers have a weapon and our current machines can't replicate it. We need one that can. And it is feasible feasible i know two people working on it and i think they're having some success and i think what they're the only thing holding them back is a bunch of teams walking up with checks saying hey we want that right now right yeah i completely agree with that like the one thing that'll help hitters long term is knowing that this exists right but that'll not help them short term because when pitchers learn this exists. But that'll not help them short-term, because when pitchers learn it exists, they can just do it. Or they can theoretically learn how to do it.

One thing we really haven't talked about explicitly, and then we keep coming back to Kyle Hendricks. So when he throws his four-seam and his two-seam, he spins them exactly the same way, and they move in different directions. So every cue that the batter is looking at to try to figure out what he's about to get is going to lie to him. He has no way of distinguishing those two. And Kyle Hendricks also has two change-ups he does the same thing with. So that's what the hitters

are facing. And now they know it, like you said, before he was just magic. And seam shifted wake is not the only new pitching buzzword that has come out of Hawkeye and these new ways of evaluating pitching. Spin mirroring is another one that you're hearing a lot these days. Ben, can you explain what that means exactly and how that might be applied? Yeah. Generally speaking, if you can imagine watching a spinning baseball, and this is obviously not great podcast content, so I apologize for that in advance. You can kind of pick up the fact that it's going white, red, white, red, white, red in a blur pattern that you can somewhat recognize.

If you've ever watched a baseball, that's what happens. It spins fast enough that it looks like a blur, but that blur has some features. Now, if you spin a baseball one way and then spin it exactly the opposite way, so if you can imagine perfect backspin or perfect topspin, those patterns with the exact same seam orientation, the patterns don't look different. They just look like the same blur, more or less. And so pitchers that can do that, that can exactly mirror their spin, have an advantage over hitters because hitters see spin. If you ask any hitter, they'll say that they can see spin,

but they actually can't see whether it's going up or down or left or right if you're mirroring left and right. And so if you see this pitch and you say, oh, that's spinning like his four-seam fastball that has a bunch of backspin and rides, and it's actually the curveball, which has a bunch of exactly opposite topspin and dips, well, you're going to look foolish. And so pitchers who are able to throw spins that perfectly offset each other have an advantage. Now, before 2020, we were inferring that based on the movement, like Barton was explaining earlier. And so we might say, well, one pitch moves down due to the Magnus force, we think, and one force moves up, we think, due to the Magnus force. So they're probably mirrored. But if one of them was seam shifted,

then they might not actually have the opposite spin that you're looking at from home plate. And so by having Hawkeye's new technology that looks at the actual visual axis, the observed axis of spin, you can better say, oh, these two pitches are spinning in opposite ways. Now, there's a problem with that though.

Hawkeye is recording these in opposite ways. Now, there's a problem with that, though. Hawkeye is recording these in two dimensions, and that's not sufficient to describe spin. As Barton has been saying repeatedly on this, there's two types of spin. There's transverse spin and gyroscopic spin. And just because your transverse spin is all backspin doesn't mean that, you know, if Hawkeye tells you all the transverse spin in this ball is pure backspin, that doesn't tell you everything about the spin. It doesn't tell you how much gyroscopic spin it has, what its active spin percentage is, or transverse spin percentage again. And those two pitches would look different because the seams would be different and the

seams would be spinning around a different axis. So they'd just look different to the hitter. So the next big thing in this is going to be able to see a 3D spin axis. So they'd just look different to the hitter. So the next big thing in this is going to be able to see a 3D spin axis. As in, imagine a pole drawn through a ball that the ball is spinning around. Where is that pole in three dimensions? Right now we're only getting it in two dimensions. And so it's a little less useful. So it's going to get more complicated. But also will help us understand these things better. Yeah. I would also say if I goofed that up, Barton, please jump in and correct me.

I think I got it mostly right. But I agree with your description. I think Hawkeye is measuring that third dimension. Yeah, it's just they're not releasing it publicly. Yeah, they've begun putting the aggregate of a certain pitch on Savant a couple weeks ago. So you can see generally what's kyle hendricks's efficiency on his forcing but not pitch by pitch oh do they have the 3d axis on there they they have active spin and tilt so put those two together and that's a 3d axis yeah so let me ask you this and i don't

know if this is related at all but we've talked a lot about sticky stuff and foreign substance use and what that can do to spin rate. And there is a development in that case of the ex-Angels visiting clubhouse attendant who had been supplying foreign substances to Angels pitchers and visiting pitchers alike, Brian Harkins. His defamation suit against the team and MLB was actually dismissed this week. So that will not go forward. I don't know whether that means we'll be hearing less from Harkins going forward or perhaps maybe even more, but this will continue to be part of the discussion about pitching and baseball and strikeout rate and all of that. Does sticky stuff interact with what we've been talking about at all, whether it's seam

shifted wake, whether it's seam shifted wake, whether it's spin mirroring, does this enhance any of these effects or are they related or is it unrelated because it just might enhance your spin rate, but not necessarily help you take advantage of these forces and effects? Based on nothing, I think it's the latter. I mean, that helps you spin the ball. I think there is a possibility that a large swath of stuff on the ball might affect some of these things, but it would probably also be visible. Yeah. It is worth saying that if you already know the correct way to throw a ball to spin it with gyrospin and get some seam shifted wake,

spinning it with more gyrospin is going to give you more wake. Up to a point. The data I've looked at so far seems to say on a two seam orientation that the more gyro you put into it, the more change in direction you get up to something like 60% gyro. Sorry, I think I misspoke there. What I mean is let's say you have a consistent percentage of gyro spin. Let's say you're throwing it with 40% gyro. Okay. And that doesn't change.

If you add total spin, like if you spin the ball more, but keep your same gyro percentage, I believe you'll have more weight, seam shifted weight movement, right? No, I don't think so. I don't think it cares about the RPM at all. So that's why I say, you know, this is a great player development tool because if you have short fingers and you can't spin the ball as well as some other people, here's a tool that doesn't matter to. Well, yeah, that I misunderstood then. That's really interesting. All right. We're all learning as we go. I think from a player development point of view,

it's just huge. That is huge. Yeah. I think a bunch of guys that are heading for the scrap heap could potentially become another Kyle Hendricks. What would make me feel very satisfied is if five years from now, there's 20 guys in the league throwing 88 miles an hour and baffling people. Yeah. That would be nice to get some diversity and variety, which is something that we talk about a lot, the value of just having players who do things differently so that we're not just watching a bunch of guys come out and throw 97 nonstop. If there were more Hendrixes, that would be fun, even if the effect is not any different, even if they're striking out tons of guys too. So is there anything that we have not touched on, either explaining how and

why this works or particular pitchers who seem to do it well or were pioneers here or the implications and the ramifications that could come from this if you both know more than I do? So you may know the things to talk about that I don't even know to ask. We could talk about a few players. We mentioned a few names that seem to be doing this a lot. My favorite is Brad Keller of Kansas City, who has a four seam, a two seam, and a slider that's heavily affected by seam shifted wake effects. And his slider is very unusual because it's a little bit slurvy to begin with and the seam effects cause it to break downward which is pretty unusual so it's a very firm downward moving pitch quite unique so I enjoy him and I think he has a bright future one other thing that we haven't hit that I

think super important there are pitchers that use these effects to gain movement rather than just change its direction these are higher efficiency guys. And I'm talking about sinkers in particular. And the best example that I know of is Dustin May, who everybody gawks at that sinker. I think that's why that thing moves the way it does. Yeah, I would say Zach Britton's another person who I enjoy watching from this perspective. I'm writing that down now. who I enjoy watching from this perspective.

He's- I'm writing that down now. He doesn't have quite the extreme difference in axes or like difference in the axis that he throws it with and the axis that it ends up moving with. But he's been very consistent with it and it's worked for him for a long time. So I find that interesting. He's another, you know,

sinker only kind of guy who makes it work. So yeah, so if you go looking through the leaderboards for how much deviation there is He's another sinker only kind of guy who makes it work. Yeah. If you go looking through the leaderboards for how much deviation there is between the axis and the inferred axis, May will never turn up. It's like 10 degrees. He's way down the list, but I think it's a mistake to say, well, that's not important in that pitch because it doesn't change its direction much, but I think it adds a lot of movement and maybe Britain's another one of those. I guess my last question, and forgive me if this betrays sort of a fundamental misunderstanding of some of this, but I wonder if this puts an

even greater impetus on the league to have some consistency in the actual physical characteristics of the ball. To what degree does variation in manufacturing potentially impact a pitcher's ability to impart seam shifted wake on, on a ball? And is there a scenario under which they goof with it so much that this becomes a less effective tool to the extent that it is an effective tool for the guys it is for the pitches they throw while using it? You really put that one on a tee for me, Meg. I think it's unbelievable to me that the ball varies like it does. And so we already know

that it has a huge impact on how far a ball flies. Sure. And now we also know that it has a substantial impact on these effects. And so every time a pitcher picks up a ball, he's playing roulette. He has no idea what he got. I think you can learn to feel for it. But this is a crucial aspect of the game, and Major League Baseball has made no attempt whatever to control it. And I think it's nuts. Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. Yeah. Yeah. And also, this could bring the sinker back, right, to the extent that the sinker has fallen out of favor. Like there have been a lot of articles about how everyone's throwing sliders now instead of sinkers. And maybe this is something, if the sinker is a pitch that can be benefited by seam shifted wake more than most, does that mean we will start to see more sinkers come back and movement in that

direction? I hope so. But I think even more than that, if you see guys that only throw sinkers, I think you'll start to see them also throw a four seam because it has that potential of moving radically differently and looking exactly the same. So I think if you're only throwing the sinker, you're probably missing out on a lot of what this can do. So i i think if you're only throwing the sink you're probably missing out on a lot of what this can do so one example if you want to look at that is brandon woodruff who added a sinker i believe in 2019 when he switched to starting from only relieving and had tremendous success by changing from four seam only to sinker four seam and if you go ahead and look at his axes on it they're pretty similar he's doing exactly what you're talking about.

Right. Most of them I look at, they're the same. There are a few people that actually change their 2-seam a little bit, but most of them are the same, and I think those are the ones that really can benefit from this. And it's not just sinkers either. Exactly the same stuff applies to change-ups. Change-ups are just the same pitch, a little slower,

tilted a little more. And the seam effects, the 2-seam versus 4-se are just the same pitch, a little slower, tilted a little more. And the seam effects, the two seam versus four seam do the same thing. They make them move in opposite directions. So if you have a changeup that has, say, 90% efficiency, like Kyle Hendricks does, you could throw a two seam or four seam and get it to move differently. And he does that. If you look at his data, it looks like it's obviously there's two different pitches lumped into one category. frontier of analysis that no one knew or suspected, or if they did, it was just not something that could be quantified at that point. And that's good, I guess, that we still have a lot to learn about the sport. It's fantastic, right? It's not just this. It's also, I mean, I'm interested in deception, which is another thing that Hawkeye seems like it could help quantify, hiding the

ball, that kind of thing that you've always heard hitters and pitchers talk about, but has been tough to quantify in any way. So all of this lies ahead and perhaps it will continue to break baseball, but at least it will give us stuff to blog about. So I will link to a lot of the research that we have talked about today. There are a lot of great explainers and pieces with pretty pictures, which, as Barton said, can make this a lot easier to understand. So check out the show page at Fangraphs. Check out the links in your podcast app if you want to read about this to supplement your understanding of it. And you can read Ben at Fangraphs. You can find him on Twitter at underscore Ben underscore Clemens. Thank you very much, Ben.

Thanks for having me. And thank you very much, Barton, who is on Twitter also at NotRealCertain, which is a fitting handle, I suppose. And you can also read a lot of his ongoing research at BaseballAero.com. Thank you, Barton. Thank you very much for having me. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, Barton. Thank you very much for having me. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

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