Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 198: Hitters with the Yips/Power vs. Contact/Starlin Castro’s Future/Reinhart-Rogoff and Sabermetrics

Episode Date: May 8, 2013

Ben and Sam answer emails about what it would look like if a hitter got the yips, what Starlin Castro could turn into, errors in sabermetric research, and more.

because no matter how much the results change, the hypothesis must remain the same. That's science. Good morning, and welcome to episode 198 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus daily podcast. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller, who just saw Prince. How was Prince?

Oh, my gosh, it was incredible. Yeah, I've never seen Prince live, but I've heard stories. Was this one of the ones where he plays for like three hours? It was not. This was about a hundred minute set and it was very rock. It was very crunchy and all rock and he was in guitar god mode. So no synth, nothing like that. No horns, small band, fairly small theater, extremely loud. And I can't hear anything right now. But it was tremendous. It was one of the best things I've ever seen. Cool. All right. It is

listener email show. We are going to take your questions now. We've picked out a few good ones. show we are going to take your questions now we've picked out a few good ones um so do you have one you want to start with yeah sure uh yeah okay so uh this one is interesting and um i thought about actually just asking like jason parks or something and getting an answer so today then i thought it would actually be somewhat maybe less interesting if we if we knew it because then we wouldn't have anything to say you and i wouldn't have anything to say if we just got the answer so um joe uh from california from rancho cucamonga asks do you think a grade 60 hitter with grade 40 power will hit more homers in the big leagues than a grade 40 hitter with grade 60 power some may think the grade 60 hitter will hit more bombsers in the big leagues than a grade 40 hitter with grade 60 power.

Some may think the grade 60 hitter will hit more bombs based solely on their ability, allowing them to run into more balls. Is this trackable? So this is a really interesting question, and I have an answer. But before I had my answer, first I tried to, actually without even trying, I automatically thought up the player for each of those descriptions that comes to mind, the first player that comes to mind for each of those descriptions. And I just wonder, who were the first players who come to mind for you matching those descriptions?

A grade 60 hitter with grade 40 power and a grade 40 hitter with grade 60 power uh i don't know i didn't i didn't really even think of it in terms of actual players i was just purely thinking of it on an abstract level um i don't know who were your who were your guys so for a grade uh 60 hitter with grade 40 power um i immediately thought of placido polanco uh-huh um and uh for a grade 40 hitter with grade 60 power i uh did not quite immediately but i thought of uh dan ugla uh-huh uh okay i guess i guess that makes sense um and so i thought that it sort of was nice that i had those two guys too because they're does polanco even yeah i guess he he's got he's got 100 home runs in the majors i guess he's got 40 power i don't know he had 17 in a season that's weird uh

you know he's he's yeah he's had uh he's had you know he's had some power years he's had some 150 to 175 isolated power seasons and okay you know 50 extra base hits in the season and so he's got i think it's below average but 17 home i don't think you can hit 17 homers in the majors without at least a 40 power yeah i agree i mean if you were 30 you you top out at like six yeah so uh it's it's i think they make a nice comparison because they both have long careers and they're fairly close to uh comparable players overall so um you're not like, I think a lot of, if, if you tried to compare two players, uh, along these lines, a lot of times you'd have one player who's just simply better than the other one and it would be hard to compare them. But, um, Polanco and Uglah are fairly similar players overall. And Uglah has way more home runs than Polanco, uh, does. And I don't

know, I might, I might be underrating. It's possible I'm underrating Ugla's hit tool. I don't know. Maybe he's like a 50 and a 65 or something like that, in which case that wouldn't be fair. But I tend to think that if both tools are Major League playable,

then I think I would go with the power guy. Now, I think an alternate version of this question would be a 30-70 and a 70-30. In that case, I think that the 30 hit tool is probably less... A player with a 30 hit tool is probably a lot less likely to stick in the majors than a player with a 30 power tool but a 70 hit tool. I think that the 30 power and a 70 hit tool will stay in the majors for a long time the other guy is like sort of a coin flip whether he'll make it you know whether he'll have any sort of career at all maybe um and in that case i might take the polanco type yeah i would i would agree with pretty much all of that i I would take the 60 power guy. I mean, the ability to run into more balls that Joe says,

I mean, if you have 80 power and you just can't hit, I mean, if you somehow were given 600 plate appearances anyway, you could probably still hit more homers, I guess, right? Because, I mean, the contact ability and the power ability are two separate skills. So it's not like if you have a low hit tool, you will never make contact with a ball. I mean, you will still hit a ball every now and then you'll hit one far,

but you will have so few other types of hits and you will just be so unproductive on the whole that you will not be able to stay in the lineup. Just, I mean, I guess the, the extreme example maybe is like a Dave Kingman who just has crazy power and just doesn't make much contact and doesn't get on base. And his career ended pretty early, although he kind of went out with with like one of the I mean, a pretty good season, I guess, or at least a high homer season. But what are you arguing about Dave Kingman? Dave Kingman is the good example or the bad example?

Because Dave Kingman had like 410 home runs. Well, he's he's an example of a guy with, I mean, a very high power tool and a low hit tool. I mean, he's a guy who hit 230 or something. And in his final season, he hit 35 home runs, but also hit 210 with a 260 obp or something and then he retired um which is a really weird final season but i mean he is i mean he was worth playing just i guess because of his his crazy power and he managed to have a 16 year career so i guess he's kind of the he's kind of the guy who makes you think that maybe the guy with the 70 power and the 30 hit could have a long career. And out Homer, the opposite guy, the reverse guy.

Yeah, he could. I just think that you have a very high washout rate for that type of player. So the player that I think of for the 37, the first player I think of for the 30-70 guy is Brad Eldred, who is not going to have 400 home runs and is going to retire with, well, he's not technically retired yet, but he's going to retire with 15. And I think a guy with a 70 hit tool uh who's capable of hitting you know 310 for a career is going to get you know a nice 14 year career almost no matter what he does with his

other tools and will get more than 15 home runs yeah okay um all right what's our next question? All right, so the next question is from Chris, who says, the DFAing of Rick Ankeel led me to remember how he completely forgot how to pitch while with the Cardinals in the early 2000s. This caused me to consider how a team would react if one of their established stars were to have a similar drop-off, one of their established hitting stars. Josh Hamilton has been pretty terrible this year year but i'm thinking something more extreme like what if miguel cabrera suddenly lost the ability to make contact and went oh for his next 60 or 80 what would the tigers do how long would something like this have to go on before the tigers benched him or just released him?

Well, I guess, I mean, how would hitter yips manifest themselves? Would he just be missing the ball? He'd be starting his swing like second early or late. I mean, he'd be missing the ball by a mile every time. Yeah, that's the tricky thing, right, is how would it look? look? The thing is that you can't ignore a pitcher with the yips. You can ignore a pitcher who loses effectiveness for a while. Like, uh, you know, there've been pitchers who have hung on long enough to have nine ERAs over the course of the season. But if you're walking seven or eight batters an inning, for instance, um, it's pretty obvious you have to get that guy out.

He's a threat to everybody. And I'm trying to imagine what the most extreme example of bad hitting that could possibly happen if you got... I guess it would... I think it's called focal... I used it in a headline a couple weeks ago. What's it called? Focal dystepsia or something like that? I guess it would be...

Do you remember that? I don't remember now. I guess it would be, I don't remember now. I guess it would probably be if you, I guess if you just lost all sense of the strike zone would just be the equivalent to the pitcher yips. I mean, just not being able to hit the strike zone as a pitcher would be the equivalent of just not being able to tell when a ball is in the strike zone, I guess,

and just swinging indiscriminately. So basically becoming Pablo Sandoval, but without Pablo Sandoval's ability to hit balls outside the strike zone. So you would just get up there, and you'd have no perception of where a pitch was, and a pitcher would just be able to throw you uh you know three pitches two feet outside and you would just swing at all of them and go right back to the bench i guess that would be the equivalent yeah something something vision related would probably be the the closest

comparison if you um you know if you woke up and you couldn't see like Kirby Puckett did and you just didn't tell anybody, it would be pretty comparable because it would be extremely awkward, extremely ineffective, extremely easy to spot, and also really dangerous. But assuming it's not blindness, assuming that it's something that is psychological. This is sort of weird, but there was a time once when I was playing Little League when I for like a day forgot how to run. Like I couldn't really make my feet do it. You know, like my legs could run, but my feet couldn't get the feel for the ground. It was like I was running on my heels but my feet couldn't get the feel for the ground it was

like i i was running on my heels and i just couldn't make myself run it was very odd uh very extremely extremely odd like jesus montero like jesus montero yes i i was thinking that as i said that but um but i mean when you like it what would be weird is if a batter forgot how to swing, uh, and just couldn't make his body all move in that direction at the same time and, and just lost his swing. In which case, I think in a case like that, uh, the batter would probably be given not more than eight plate appearances uh if it were like if it were like if it were really visually obvious like that now if it were simply an effectiveness it's a different

question now what if everything looked right but miguel cabrera went uh oh for 60 or, or Oh, for 80. He would get, I assume he would get a day off here and there, but, um, it seems like part of, uh, like conventional wisdom in baseball is that you hit your way out of slumps. And so you keep putting them out there. And the other thing about baseball that is proven wisdom is that there's a there's a lot of natural fluctuation that doesn't mean a whole lot and you um it takes a long time before we believe in any trend and i just don't know for sure that even after 50 plate appearances uh like for instance let's say that that he went that miguel cabrera went oh for 50. And Jim Leland benched him for, I'm trying to even think of who the Tigers' reserve third baseman would be.

I don't know who he would be. But let's say he benched him for somebody lousy. Brennan Bosh isn't a Tiger, is he? Not anymore. Well, let's say they traded for Brennan Bosh and put him put him on in the lineup and miguel cabrera on the bench for like for like four games so this is not just a one-day breather i would think that the uh that the the twitterati would be up in arms about the

tigers overreacting to small sample sizes etc and miguel cabrera needs to be out there he's obviously a better hitter than brennan bosh uh So 50 probably wouldn't be enough to appease us. How many would it take to appease us? Well, I mean, a couple seasons ago, Adam Dunn hit 159 and got just about 500 plate appearances. And this season he's hitting 151 and has gotten 120 plate appearances. And Adam Dunn is not as good as Miguel Cabrera has never been as good as Miguel Cabrera uh so I think Miguel Cabrera could hit

you know 100 or something almost indefinitely um and keep his job uh but if he actually went 0 for, I mean, if he just had a hitless streak, completely hitless, man. I mean, I would think that, I guess, I don't know if he looked perfectly fine. I mean, it's hard to kind of imagine how he could look perfectly fine and not luck into a hit every now and then at least. That's the other thing about it that makes it hard is that it's almost impossible to go 0 for 50 unless you're striking out 50 times. Yeah, I mean, you can't.

I think there's one active pitcher, for instance, who has an 0 for career that's that long, and it's like Brad, it's Aaron Heilman. But basically every other pitcher has a hit. Like Verlander's 0 for 20-something, but every other pitcher basically has a hit. So it's really hard to truly go 0 for 50. So it might have to be like your guy Shaq,

who not only went over but struck out in every single at-bat. I think if Cabrera struck out in 30 straight at-bats, for instance, I think if Cabrera struck out in 25, we would take it seriously. If he struck out in 17, I think we might still just look at it as an oddity. I really think that we might not take a day off, but if they benched him for more than two days, I think Twitter might erupt. Yeah, I guess so.

Well, yeah, I mean, as long as... I mean, if the condition is that he still looks fine, and, I mean, if everything is the same about his approach, then sure, yeah, I mean, if everything is the same about his approach, then sure. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, again, it's really hard to imagine that happening to Miguel Cabrera without him having some injury he was hiding that would presumably show up in his swing or, you know, something mechanically off.

If there were no red flags other than the strikeouts, then yeah, I guess if he struck out for every at-bat for four straight games, I guess I would still want him in there in the fifth game, theoretically. Yeah, absolutely. I would too. The crazy thing is that this has never happened. It doesn't seem odd to me that hitters don't get the yips, yeah absolutely i would too uh the crazy thing is that this has never happened that not only has it i mean it doesn't seem odd to me that that hitters don't get the yips because hitting is you don't have to um you don't have to sort of start from a stopped position and figure out how

to create something in the way that pitchers do you're just reacting you're just swinging at a thing that is coming at you and it feels a lot more fluid um so uh but but as an over 50 seems like it would have happened uh by just random chance at some point and yet it has never happened i think uh the longest is 46 i remember joe morgan had like i think a 35 um and craig council almost beat the record a couple years ago or maybe last year and uh he had i think 45 but uh 50 it's interesting because 50 has never happened and if milk if miguel cabrera were the guy who who was the first to have over 50 it would be especially significant and yet you and I are saying that we would just brush it aside as assuming that he looked normal. Yeah, I guess so.

So I'm going to real quick run the odds of Miguel Cabrera going 0 for 50. So what do we think Miguel Cabrera's true talent level is? On base or average-wise? batting average yeah uh gosh say at this 3 3 10 320 yeah uh i'm looking at his his his career stats yeah i guess yeah 320 seems about right at this point so it's about one in a billion that it would happen in a 50-game stretch, by chance alone. All right. Okay, next question is from Matt Trueblood.

It's about Starlin Castro. I'm wondering what you each make of Starlin Castro. Tuesday, as in yesterday, I think, marks the three-year anniversary of his Major League debut, which was a resounding success. And, of course, he has flashed star potential in each of his three more or less full big league seasons. The only thing is it's three years later and he hasn't become a star. He's useful, don't get me wrong, average to average plus defense at shortstop, average to average plus bat. But the MVP candidate people

occasionally mention hasn't shown up yet. His intentional walk rate has been static, his contact rate has degraded, his power has ticked up but not exploded. He's a hacker who can absolutely bash breaking balls but doesn't usually catch up to really good fastballs. He's 23. This is technically the first age-appropriate season of his life. We know historically that guys who are even average regulars at 20, as he was, end up being stars more than half the time. Does it worry you that he's stalled out this way? Do you think batters who fundamentally lack the ability to do more than programmed pitch-taking

face certain obstacles in reaching that top echelon that others don't? He's had just over 2,000 MLB plate appearances and owns a 263 career TAV true average. What do you think his true average will be over his next 2,000 plate appearances? Well, yeah, I mean, it's disappointing to me. I would say, that he hasn't improved, but only because I, like every baseball fan, am a monster, and I want everybody to do things that maybe aren't actually in their DNA. Yeah, I mean, there's an assumption that players are going to get better as they age, that 20-year-olds are going to be better when they're 21, when they're 22,

when they're 23, when they're 24, when they're 25, 26, when they're 27, and then level off at that point and then find some sort of decline phase. And that's true if you look at all players as a group, but Pocota doesn't do that. If you ever look at a young player's pakoda it's sort of jarring at first because you'll note that a player who has five wins at age 21 is projected to basically have five wins a year for the next 10 years that um that the growth on for an individual player is not assumed that there's a lot of things that go wrong,

and a lot of players do peak early, and a lot of players just hold steady. And when you're talking about players who are extremely good at age 20 or 21, that's especially true. Players who play at an MVP level at 21 usually don't play at some sort of super mega MVP level when they're 27. They just keep playing at roughly that level and hope that they don't get hurt.

I wrote a piece just a blog post, an unfiltered post, maybe a year ago about Starlin Castro's likelihood of making the Hall of Fame based on one data point alone, and that data point was played appearances at

his age level, and it was like 50-50. If all you knew about him was how many games he played, you didn't know anything about his physicality, his scouting reports, or his stats. You just knew how long he played, how many games he played in the majors at that point in his career. You'd say it was something like a 50-50 chance he'd make the Hall of Fame, or maybe it was slightly below that, as I recall. or maybe it was slightly below that as I recall. And I think that it's probably with another year of no apparent growth,

I think that's less likely. And I wouldn't bet on Castro to make the Hall of Fame. Right now, he's sort of building this career that is like we talked about a few days ago the guy who is perfectly consistent for maybe 18 years and gets to a warp level that is hall of fame uh counting warp but doesn't remind anybody of a hall of famer cassero uh hasn't helped me out hasn't made an all-star game right uh i don't know i don't know who's made all-star games i don't either i only know who should make all right in may uh so he hasn't he's made two oh my goodness gracious well that helps and he wound at 20 and he got mvp votes one year uh really yes barely yeah he got mvp vote

one year uh and he's got some black ink although part of the black ink is caught stealing. And three of the other four are playing time. Right, and the playing time, I mean, that will not get better. I mean, he played 162 games last year, so that can't get better. As he ages, he's likely to play less, I guess. I mean, maybe not immediately, but and, and the fact that he's a shortstop who's, who's defense is I don't know, it's, it's fine now. Aside from the, the occasional thing that makes everyone mad because he isn't watching a pitch or something. But I mean, at some point, probably, I don't know,

by the time he's 30 or something, he will be playing a different position, I guess. And so I feel like it would be hard for him to be the, the guy who is, I mean, he's been worth three and a half, four ish wins according to our stats the last couple of years. So I, I mean, he's been worth three and a half, four-ish wins according to our stats the last couple of years. So, I mean, it would be hard for him to do that at a different position, I think. Yeah, so here's, I think, what I think about Castro. Castro and Elvis Andrews came up at roughly the same time, are roughly the same age, and

have done, in a lot of ways, roughly the same thing, which is to play a ton of games at a really young age. Now, Andrews, I think, is in a lot of ways criminally underrated because he does things that don't generally get you MVP votes. And he plays very good defense. He runs the base as well. And he stays on the field at a premium position. And so far, yield at a premium position and so far that's more or less what castro has done but andrews is a guy who i can see uh playing a very long time while doing just that very thing and so you could imagine a situation where andrews plays 15 years and builds up 55 warp uh just by doing what he's doing basically basically, and adjusting a little bit for age, but basically being a very good defensive shortstop and base runner and hitter. Castro, though, really from, I think, a very young age,

what you imagined Castro's route to the Hall of Fame was was not staying at shortstop as a 10-home run hitter for 15 years. It was he's going to get bigger, he's going to fill out, he's going to turn into a monster with the bat, and he's going to be Alfonso Soriano, except he's going to be better. He'll move to left field, he'll hit 38 home runs, he'll be a fantasy stud, he'll get MVP votes, he'll drive in runs, and he'll be that guy.

And at this point, now that he's 23 it seems a lot less likely that we're going to see that now but there's still a few more years for that to happen it's just that it's just it so far his his his um his path has not taken him where you imagined his best case scenario was going to go and so when you start projecting a few years into the future for him you see decreased defensive value you see him moving off the position. You see him not developing a left fielder's bat and becoming like Alphonso Soriano as he's been the last four years instead of as he was the four years before that or six years before that. I don't know. I wonder if we are underrating the extent to which he has developed offensively.

I mean, he has not walked more often or become much more selective. But, I mean, he's added a fair amount of power in his first two seasons. I mean, his first season he had 500 play appearances. He hit three home runs. He had a 108 isolated power. And then he added 20 points of isolated power in each of the next two seasons. So that, I mean, last season he was hitting 14 home runs in more played appearances, of course. But, I mean, that seems like a pretty decent development.

That seems like a pretty decent development. I mean, for a guy in his early 20s to add 20 points of isolated power each season, I mean, if he could do that a couple more hitting, you know, 20 home runs, over 20 home runs as a shortstop with, I mean, you know, something close to a 200 isolated power or something. I mean, that would be impressive. He still has to do that, of course, but other than just, you know, his first 30 games or so of this season in which he hasn't really taken a further step i mean his first three seasons sort of suggest that he has that in him or he has that trajectory and uh i don't know i mean last last season his his babbitt was down like 30 points or so. I haven't looked into it.

I don't know what his batted ball profiler was or anything like that. But, you know, if that was just lower just because it was lower, then if you kind of give him the same BABIP that he had in his first two seasons, then I think his line would look pretty impressive, and maybe we wouldn't be asking this question. Yeah, fair enough. That's all fair. I think we'll revisit. I would imagine that...

We hate making predictions, but Matt asked for one. I guess we should make one. So he's had... Oh yeah, true average for the next 2,000. Right, so he's had a 263 true average his first 2,000. I'll say 273. Okay, yeah, I was going I'll say 273. Okay. Yeah, I was going to say about that too.

Okay. All right. All right. Should we do one more or are we out of time? Well, I don't know. You're the one who decides we're out of time. Should we do the Reinhardt-Rogoff one? Yeah, sure.

So this is from Ryan in Tampa who says, I don't know if you've been following the media coverage of the Reinhardt-Rogoff study. Ben, have you been? I have. national economies and debt. And without getting into the details, it was a big deal. It was much talked about, and it seemed to have policy implications. It basically said that once you reach a certain point of a certain amount of debt, you're screwed. Too detailed.

So then three years later, a grad student was trying to replicate it for an assignment, not a big deal, and realized he couldn't replicate it, does a little bit of digging and realizes the Reinhard Rogoff study is basically based on a spreadsheet error in Microsoft Excel. I don't know specifically what the spreadsheet error was, but basically there was something wrong in the math and the entire premise of the piece was wrong. And it took years, three years or two years before, or maybe one year, I don't know, but it took a long time before anybody realized it. And so this thing that everybody was like heralding and accepting as fact was not true at all,

based on basically a pretty simple glitch. So Ryan asks, how do you think the mainstream media would react if a few sabermetric publications suffered similar credibility issues? Would casual baseball fans revert to adopting a Mitch Albon album? Like every time I see that I read Mitch Alborn every time I cannot see it as an M. I see it as an RN. Mitch album-like outlook on the game, putting more emphasis on heart on Reason.com, I think it was yesterday, about a government study on Chinatown buses. And, you know, there was a study a few years ago, I think, by the NTSB that concluded that you were seven times more likely to die in a Chinatown bus, in like a curbside bus, than kind of a Greyhound or one that stops at a station more upscale. And so they've been cracking down on these companies and putting them out of business because they believe they were so

unsafe. And then basically the same thing. Someone recreated the study and found that it was just garbage. It was just, I mean, bus lines were misclassified as curbside and not curbside. And the statistics were just incredibly hazy and sloppy. And the conclusions weren't valid. And so I think this probably happens pretty often just because when a result comes out and it's newsworthy, there's only so many people who are going to dig into the numbers and try to recreate the study, especially, I mean, the greater the credentials of the person authoring the study are. And I mean, I think it's happened in baseball, too, actually. Jack Moore wrote an article for Sports on Earth on this very topic, and he used, I mean, to poke the finger at ourselves before our time at BP, I guess.

But BP, a few years ago, basically forecasted Matt Wieters to be amazing, one of the best players in baseball right away, just because it was kind of overweighting his double-A performance. There was an error. It wasn't really akin to an Excel error, I guess, but it was an error. And it produced a newsworthy conclusion that a lot of people heard about, and it was not correct. And I think this happens all the time. And yeah, I mean, I think if to the extent that the mainstream media is aware of these things, it could cause credibility issues. I mean, just the fact that there are three versions of war or warp, three win values, and those are those are not different because because each one has an error. Those are not different because each one has an error. They're just different approaches. And that has certainly been used, as you should we believe it? So yeah, I mean, definitely.

I think this could be used as more fodder for an album-like outlook on the game. I think if it were a... Well, I'm not sure what would be a big enough deal to get this sort of attention. what would be a big enough deal to get this sort of attention. I mean, a lot of the things that get published in Sabermetrics are pretty small-scale stuff. There's not a lot of game-changing things happening right now in sort of the literature. So I don't know that there's anything that would be such a big deal

that it would shake anybody's faith. I also don't think that the types of people who would be looking to pounce take sabermetrics that seriously to begin with, and they probably think that all the stuff that gets published is just done by amateurs and not done by any sort of professionalized army of analysts or anything like that. I think they just think that it's all a joke. So I don't know that it would radically shift any minds in that sense either. But I think it would be a bigger deal if there were some sort of like fraud scandal, more than if there was a spreadsheet error.

But I don't know. I mean, it's a good question. I don't really know the answer to that. I also think that things are, you know, I think that there's probably a lot of mistakes that get made, but I find that there's a real, that a lot of things get replicated in our community in a very good way. And so I'd like to think that this stuff isn't happening too much.

And the weeders thing is a good example. I mean the weeders problem was – I don't know if exposed is the right verb, but it was discussed in great detail. There was pushback. There were competing claims before Wieters had even played a game in that projection. And as I recall, I might be wrong about this,

but as I recall, the translation problem that was underlying the bad forecast was resolved fairly quickly too, like maybe shortly into the season. So I would like to think that these problems don't linger and that nobody expects everything to be perfect. I think there's a, ideally there's a healthy sense of doubt about everything that we think we know.

And, you know, it's sort of trying to just move toward accuracy. Nothing's ever 100% accurate. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of informal peer review. So I guess the less interesting your conclusion is, the more likely it is to go unreplicated or uncorrected if there's an error. But it's not interesting anyway. So it's not really influencing how anyone thinks. But yeah, I mean, anytime someone puts out some study that changes the way that people think about the game, people absolutely test it. So if you did make some major error, it probably would be ferreted out pretty quickly.

But yeah, I guess, I mean, yes, if there were, I don't know, if there were some tenet of sabermetrics, some like cornerstone belief of sabermetrics that say had been around since like Bill James's time or something and were suddenly discovered to be completely incorrect I feel like maybe that is something that a columnist would seize on but it's hard to imagine something like that lasting this long just with the amount of scrutiny and other people both intentionally

and unintentionally duplicating the work alright we're done we've got a couple more shows this week we'll be back tomorrow