Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2164: The Batcast Era

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the “effectively wild” debut of Paul Skenes and the Pirates’ bases-loaded walkathon, an in-development TV series about Ippei Mizuhara, the demotion of Craig Kimbrel and possible trade dangling of Mason Miller, the continued success of Davis Schneider, the impact of replay review on the increase in catcher’s interference […]

You can tell he was a little amped up. He doesn't usually miss with that many fastballs. But he was effectively wild today, so it was good. Effectively Wild Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2164 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined by Ben Lemberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I am okay. Welcome back. How are you?

Thank you. I'm doing well. Thanks for minding the store. Of course. Did you get to enjoy Skeen's Day as long as it lasted while you were away? I absolutely did not get to enjoy it for even one moment. I was in Colorado celebrating my grandmother's 80th birthday, and we spent Saturday moving a bunch of furniture around. So I was doing some heavy lifting and not a lot of baseball viewing, but that's okay. Well, you didn't miss that much. He was, in the words of his catcher, Yasmany Grandal, effectively wild.

And I did play a clip of Grandal saying that at the start of this episode, which I'm always wary of doing because whenever we do that, we then get notified by our listeners every time any announcer anywhere says effectively wild about anyone. And I appreciate the thought and the effort to notify us about those things, but we don't actually play that many clips of announcers saying effectively wild because we would have way too many, more even than we have episodes. It's a pretty common phrase. That's why we called the podcast that. Funny story. we talk about all the time, or a player we were talking about today, in this case, Paul Skeens. So he was good stuff, like effective, but didn't have his good command. And he was fairly effective for the four innings that he pitched. And then he left a couple guys on and those guys scored,

which made his line look worse. He bequeathed, it sounds so regal the way we say he bequeathed a couple of runners. I wonder how that term became kind of the standard for just leaving a couple of runners on. I've never said that about a pitcher. I mean, I know people do. I'm not saying, but like you can say other stuff if you want. You don't have to be so fancy. Yeah, but inherited and bequeathed. Those are kind of the go-to terms, I think. It was really more notable not for his performance, which was fine. Again, he threw a lot of pitches very hard, as you would expect. And he threw, I think, 86 pitches.

And some people were upset that he was pulled. 84, that is. Sorry. But that was way more pitches than he'd thrown in any minor league start this season. You know, he had thrown more, obviously, in the past, like in college. But yeah, if you were expecting Paul Skeens to go deep into games like you were not listening to Effectively Wild where we were tracking his minor league usage. But it was almost overshadowed how good his stuff was by what happened after he left in the top of the fifth when everything went to hell from the Pirates' perspective because the pitchers who relieved Paul Skeens combined to walk in six runs.

Six bases-loaded walks were issued. That seems like a lot. Yeah, it is actually a lot. So Kyle Nicholas, Josh Fleming, and Colin Holderman, the excellently named reliever, they allowed six walks with the bases loaded. That's really not good. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, that was the most bases loaded walks in an inning by any team since the White Sox walked eight times with the bases loaded against the Kansas City Athletics on April 22, 1959. Wow. So that was, yeah, that was a long time ago.

That hasn't happened in quite a while. That game, I noted when I went to look at the box score in the game log for that one, starting for the Kansas City A's that day was effectively wild legend Ned Garver. But he did not issue any of those walks. He was gone by the time those walks were issued. And I'll just read you the game log from that top of the seventh, White Sox batting ahead eight to six with the A's Tom Gorman facing five, six, seven in the lineup. Here we go. Ray Boone reaches on an error. Al Smith reaches on an error. Johnny Calliston singles. Luis Aparicio walks. Bob Shaw is up at the plate. Aparicio steals second. Bob Shaw then walks. Then we get a pitching change. Mark Freeman comes in to replace Tom Gorman.

Earl Torgerson walks. That's the bases loaded. That's the first bases loaded walk. Nellie Fox walks. That's number two. Then Jim Landis grounds out. The first guy to make an out in that inning. He probably felt bad about that. Yeah, like a real loser. Then Sherm Lollar walks.

Another bases loaded walk. Ray Boone, we've batted around. Yes, that is how I define batting around. What are you doing? Why? Mark Freeman here. This was also a team effort. So Brunette issued the walks to Boone and Smith. And then there was a hit by pitch, not even captured in that walk total. So Brunette hit Johnny Callison. So that scores another run with the bases loaded. Then Luis Aparicio walks, another bases loaded walk. Then Bob Shaw strikes out. Someone's got to make it out at some point. Then Bubba Phillips, bases loaded walk. Nellie Fox, bases loaded walk.

And finally, Jim Landis. Again, the victim, two-time victim, makes two outs in this inning. So Jim Landis grounded out twice in this inning where everyone else was reaching on an error or singling or walking or getting hit by a pitch. Jim Landis was the only guy in that inning who put the ball in play and was out. So really must have felt pretty bad about himself. So that's a 10-run inning, I think, and one hit. Yikes.

A single. Yikes. That's not good. No. It's really not good. No. It's really not good. No. You would feel kind of cursed, I think. You would feel targeted.

Yeah. You would feel as if, you know, some outside force were intervening. Even if you're not a person sort of predisposed to believe in outside forces, you'd be like, well, do I need to reconsider? Is someone trying to tell me something? Yeah. Yeah, I think you would. Well, the Skeens part of the game was a little bit better

than the part that followed. And I'm sure that his subsequent starts will be better yet. He will not just be effectively wild, but will be effective. And they went on to win, right? Yes. Didn't they end up weirdly?

I suppose the important part. They did win the game. They weirdly won. Yeah. Yeah. 10 to 9, I think, was the final score. So, yeah. Mission accomplished, I guess. Pirates won, just in a weird way.

We're going to be joined by our pal Mike Petriello in a little bit, who's going to be telling us all about the new Batcast metrics that debuted this week. That's what we're calling it, as you will hear during that segment. But a bunch of new bat tracking metrics now up for public consumption at Baseball Savant, courtesy of Statcast.

And we will get into what they tell us and what they don't tell us and what's still on the way, etc. A few things to run by you before we roll Mike out here. Did you hear about the fact that there might be a Shohei and Ipe TV show? I saw that. I saw that. And you know what it made me realize, Ben? I don't know how life rights work. What's that about?

That's, yeah, that's a good, I think it's, if it's a public figure and it's a very public story, I think you can just do it. You can just do it. Okay. I mean, that, I guess, makes sense, right? Like, we should be allowed to make fun of Richard Nixon, you know? I mean, he's dead now,

so it doesn't really matter as much. Right. You can do the O.J. Made in America or whatever, I guess that was the documentary version. That was the documentary. Right. You can do the OJ Made in America or whatever. I guess that was the documentary version. That was the documentary. Yes. But there was the miniaturist. The non-documentary version. Yes.

Yeah. With David Schwimmer. Brilliant casting. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. Now, look, it's in development. So there are a lot of things that are in development. Yes. They never get developed.

They never get there. This is just the initial stage. Sure. So it may come to nothing. But there are reputable people involved in this. So it's Lionsgate Television. Okay. They're developing a scripted TV series.

I guess it's about Ipe primarily. Tony Award winner and producer Scott Delman, who has credits on Broadway shows from Mean Girls to The Book of Mormon, as well as serving as executive producer on Station Eleven. Excellent show. And former Sports Illustrated reporter Albert Chen, author of the sports gambling book Billion Dollar Fantasy. They're the ones behind this as of yet untitled project. And Chen said, this is Major League Baseball's biggest sports gambling scandal since Pete Rose, and at its center is its biggest star, one that MLB has hitched its wagon on, will get to the heart of the story, a story of trust, betrayal, and the trappings of wealth and fame. Okay.

So, what do you think about the potential here for the Ipe show? I mean, look, I didn't think that a O.J. Simpson show with David Schwimmer and John Travolta was going to be any good. And then it ended up being wildly compelling, although the talk was better. I guess it's important to reserve judgment on these things. It feels too soon. You know, it feels like we would benefit from more information coming out. we would benefit from more information coming out um i know that there's been new reporting on like the bookie at the center of this and sort of what his deal is right so i feel like there's stuff that we don't know yet that i would i would like to be able to sort through with the clarity of

you know reporting and and potentially um a documentarian's approach to the incident rather than have our eventual understanding clouded by the understandable but still not necessarily truthful adaptations that one has to do when you're making a show versus telling a documentary story. Where I'm like, are we going to just end up fundamentally misunderstanding what happened because David Schwimmer's involved? I don't know. David Schwimmer probably doesn't have a role unless he's playing the bookie.

I don't know. Yeah. Be weird if he were playing Yipei or Shohei. I don't think that would work. Yeah. That would be problematic. Yes. But also maybe David Schwimmer should have to be in every sports scandal show

you know and he should have to play like a kind of bumfuzzled incredulous guy every time I made the face you couldn't see it but I did it you know I did the David Schwimmer as Bob Kardashian OJ face I did it and it was funny

you missed it sorry I wonder if they're sort of misunderstanding who the most compelling character in this drama is because it is a scandal that centers around Shohei in that he was the victim of this fraud and is obviously the most compelling sports figure. But like the guy who did the thing is Ipe Musahara. And like, I don't know. Right. I think the thing that's drawing people to it is the Otani of it all. But like Otani was like playing baseball while all this was happening. So, you know, I would be curious how it could be adapted. I would just much rather a really good, thorough documentary about what went on, one that could potentially also speak to some of the other sports gambling controversies, many of which have slightly different flavors in terms of the element of scandal.

And some of that is that, like, you know, it feels like we haven't had a good Netflix doc in a while. And some of that is that I just, I don't know that it's a story I need dramatized particularly. It's one that is so sensational on its own that I don't know that it needs that treatment. But again, I probably would have said— Yeah, she could have said that about the OJ trial. documentary which i've actually started revisiting in the wake of his death um is just so it's so good um and and tragic and sad and i think that there you know there is an element of this story that is sort of finding the right balance and how you portray mizuhara and like what what he was doing and how you balance the kind of tragedy versus the chicanery so I don't know I mean like maybe it'll be fine but I also would settle for a doc and one like in a while you know like in a while Ben yeah in a bit that's the way Hollywood works is uh some big story breaks and you know the next thing know, it's been optioned maybe multiple times.

Like when all the meme stock stuff kicked off, I know it's kicking off again. But when it did the first time. It's kicking off again. What? You guys. You guys. No, I know. They're not the only ones, those Game Stoppers.

The many, many Game Stop projects that were in the works, some of which have subsequently come out, right? But fortunately, for all we know, there's only one Ipe project in the works here. It feels more like a movie to me than a series. I mean, maybe it's a mini series, a limited series, but it feels more movie length to me. And also, yeah, we know a lot about what happened. I mean, it's not quite like the OJ trial where there's at least some uncertainty about exactly what went down in the initial crime. Your mileage may vary on how much uncertainty and then, you know, how did the prosecution screw up? And then what were the larger cultural and racial ramifications of it all, right?

I don't know that there's quite as much material here. Now, if they were to get into the lives of the rich and famous and professional athletes and how they delegate responsibilities to their staff, people who work for them, and maybe they trust too much. And, you know, you could tell a story about, like, trust and betrayal and all that, as they said. And it doesn't just apply to this situation. It might be a tough watch, like, you know, in kind of an uncut gems way if it's just following Ipe and his descent into debt. Like, that doesn't sound like something I would necessarily sign up to watch. It just sounds harrowing, right? And there aren't really a lot of twists and turns to this story as far as we can tell.

It's just like he got in and then he got in deeper and then he got in way too deep and then eventually he was discovered and then it all ended and blew up spectacularly, right? I don't know how much depth there is to it and we'll probably get even more detail than we already have before this thing could possibly come out. So, I don't know. I'm semi-skeptical, but given how big this was and how major the news was, I'm sure they'll give it every opportunity. a wider look at gambling and, you know, the integrity of sports, even though this isn't necessarily a situation where the player themselves was actually implicated. Like, you know, if you got into kind of the risks for that to happen and, well, what else is going on underneath the surface that we haven't even learned about yet? Maybe it'd work. Maybe there'd be some stuff to mine, some good material there. Yeah. And I would appreciate a documentarian's Right. You need to be able to talk about the whole sports betting thing. And, you know, there might be some complex mentors there. So I would opt for a documentary. Do a documentary, please.

Yeah, probably one without the principles involved. Although, you know, I guess Ipe is at least ostensibly nominally going to be supposed to pay off what he stole and you know probably never will that's kind of how these things work out as it as it did in oj's case or didn't work out but uh if he could get some money from this then i guess that might be good not that shohei needed that acutely i suppose anyway we will monitor that as we learn more. A couple closer developments. One was about a closer being demoted, at least temporarily and pretty predictably. Craig Kimbrell, at least temporarily removed from the closer role, and he might be back. Who could have seen it coming?

Who amongst us could have seen it coming? Totally unpredictable. Yeah. We said this when he signed. We say a lot of things and we're only right about some of them. We don't remember half of them. Right. And we're probably less likely to remember if we were wrong. But this was a case where when we talked about it at the time, we were like, Craig Kimbrell? Really? Like, especially for a team that to that point had not really spent much and didn't spend much on free agents this past offseason. And yet Kimbrell was the one that they got. And sure, they needed bullpen help.

But was he bullpen help, really? And I mentioned at the time the pattern of his usage by his previous teams. And Joe Sheehan wrote about this in his newsletter too. And I will read a line or two from Joe because he went through and documented basically every team that Craig Kimbrell has played for has decided that they don't want Craig Kimbrell closing anymore, like at least in recent years. And so he summed it up. He said, the pattern here is that every one of Kimbrell's last five teams has reduced his role while he was in their employ, while also watching him blow enormous games that wrecked or nearly wrecked their seasons. And yet the Orioles signed up for more of that. And yeah, he blew some games and then they were like, okay, maybe we shouldn't let him keep doing this. But how does he keep getting away with this?

I mean, he looks good sometimes and he started off okay, but he just walks too many guys and it's always a high wire act and it's always anxiety. It's like uncut gems every time Gabriel pitches.

He has eight saves this year. Like he's not blowing it every time out, but he's often making you think he will even when he doesn't end up doing it. And I just, I don't know. Like I guess the stuff is still pretty good, but team after team just keeps looking at Craig Kimbrell.

And I don't know if they're just looking at the resume or the lifetime saves total or what, but they don't seem to be dissuaded by the fact that all these teams in a row keep saying, actually, maybe not. Maybe we thought better of that. like that you know but it seemed going into the season like it was a predictable potential downside scenario right because it's one that he has actualized many times in the last couple of seasons and so as we said at the time as you just said like we were like why this is these are the resources you have and you're deciding to why would this guy uh yeah like like he should be in their bullpen. But as we've seen, like they are 26 and 14, but they're basically tied with the Yankees atop the division. So, you know, the margins in the East are going to be narrow enough that you can't be blowing games late. You got to win those games. When you're ahead, you should win. That's a big take. Yeah, it'd be nice. And obviously, they were sort of spoiled last year with the back of their bullpen and the relief work that they got from Felix Bautista before he got hurt.

And he's hurt. They don't have him. So, that's not an option. So that's not an option. And now they've gone to Yenir Cano, and we'll see how long Craig Kimbrell is in the doghouse or out of the closer spotlight. But yeah, that was eminently predictable that at some point, and probably not that far into the season, you would tire of the Craig Kimbrell experience and decide that you want him in lower leverage work for a while. So we'll see. The other closer is one who's been far more effective. That's Mason Miller of the A's, who's been dominant and unhittable. And there was a round of discourse about Mason Miller about trading him specifically. And as far as I can tell, there wasn't really that much basis to it. There was a Ken Rosenthal story that said teams are calling the A's to inquire about trading for Mason Miller. And the A's are asking for a lot in return, but they haven't ruled it out, which, okay. I mean, that seems, you know, it's pretty basic.

The A's will not rule out trading him. Teams entertain discussions on virtually all players, as Ken says. So it's not really that newsy, but I guess it's because it's the A's and because they have traded so many good players for no real reason other than the fact that they don't want to compete and they don't want to pay them.

And if anything, they wanted to drive people away so that they could get out of town. It's just another instance of, oh, the A's, they got a good player, and they're already getting rid of him. So that's probably why it generated so much discussion. I mean, it's defensible, I guess, like given how good he's been, the fact that he's 25, he'll turn 26 in August, the injury history, the fact that he throws so incredibly hard that you can only fear springing when you watch him, much as you don't want that to be the case.

Like, it wouldn't be the worst trade candidate if you're the A's. And the A's have been better than last year. They've got some good players. They're 19 and 24 as we speak. They're in third place in the West. They're respectable. You could even say there's some slight chance they could contend for a wild card, I suppose. But if you don't think that they'll do that, I know. Well, I said slight chance. But if you don't think they're going to do that, then he would kind of

fit the profile of someone you might consider trading as like volatile position, reliever, closer, injury prone in the past and also based on his profile. And if you're a team that's not that good and might not be for a bit, then that's a luxury, maybe a closer that you don't necessarily need. So if you could get a whole lot back that would fortify your roster in the future, you could kind of make a case for trading him. Again, like don't give him away. But if someone comes calling with a great prospect package, I wouldn't say he's like untouchable or off limits or hang up the phone immediately or like block the number so I can't get your texts anymore. I mean, as far as we know, that's all the A's did.

They just said, you know, we'll entertain. Sure. They're not even that young a team, really. You'd kind of think they would be because they've been very bad. You'd kind of think they would be because they've been very bad. But they kind of prioritize close to big league ready guys in a lot of their trades. And so they're not really that young. And so I guess their hitters are. Their hitters are like third youngest average age, but their pitchers are among the older groups in baseball this year. So

you could use more youth. If I were them, I have a broader sort of strategic point to make, which is I understand the concern around Miller when it comes to his injury history. It is why he's in a relief role now, right? Although it has meant him throwing even harder. But I appreciate why you might feel that there's a bit of a ticking time bomb aspect with him just because of the injuries he's incurred as recently as last year, right? He was hurt for a lot of 2023. But I think that waiting a little longer in this period leading up to the deadline, you might be able to extract more from a potential trade partner. And you're right. I think what they do with Miller will be interesting in a couple of different ways. The first is the decision to trade him or not and

sort of what that portends for their understanding of themselves. Because while they are better than they were last year, and you can be cute and say maybe they'll contend for a wildcard team, this isn't a good baseball team. So it's not that there aren't good players on it. I think there are. But in terms of a team that's going to be able to hang with, I think, a pretty crowded AL field, I'm skeptical that Oakland is in that category.

So there's the decision of whether they trade him or not and what their understanding of themselves is as a result of that there's you know another opportunity for us to kind of check in on their uh scouting and evaluation acumen because the last couple big trades that they've done with high profile guys um haven't necessarily yielded the kinds of um big leaguers that you might want and then i think you're right that they have in the last couple of years when it was still, they were still in this sort of, are we going to contend or not, you know,

before they really tore it down and chipped out all of their big guys and then somehow ended up with like not the best player in the Sean Murphy deal. You know, they were prioritizing close to the big leagues, minor leaguers who could, in theory, help them return to relevance more quickly. But those guys either haven't panned out or have gotten hurt. And it hasn't really worked that way. So I don't want to say, yeah, definitely trade Mason Miller, because I know that if you're an A's fan, you're like, no, but he is so fun to watch and is really good. And we don't necessarily have a ton of that.

So like, let me have this mag. Uh, I am curious though, because I, I think that if they move him, you know, who they move him for,

are they prioritizing more close to the big guys? Or are they saying, you know, let's take dudes who are maybe further away from eventual big league action, but maybe better long-term prospects. Like, that would be interesting. This is a vulture-y perspective, but there is part of me that's like, can't we pluck that guy out of there and put him on an actually good team and see what he can do? You know, public best? I was going to say, yeah, like from a utilitarian perspective, I guess you could always say, well, put the best players in front of the most fans and the most eyeballs and therefore everyone should be on the Yankees and the Dodgers, which is kind of what happens.

But also, no, we wouldn't want that because you don't want to then unbalance the league and have a competitive integrity issue. And it's better for baseball if the stars are distributed around the markets. It's better for baseball if the stars are distributed around the markets. But this team specifically has already burned so many bridges and driven so many people away that I'm sure there are some A's fans now who are like, no, let us have Mason Miller. It's all we got. Like, I mean, they have other good players, too. But, you know, this is the most fun part of a not very fun season. the most fun part of a not very fun season. On the other hand, a lot of A's fans have already washed their hands of this team because they're on their way out of town.

And so, yeah, especially if you're worried that Mason Miller and his arm might not last forever. I am worried about that, yeah. I am also worried about that. Then get him to a team where he can make the most impact while he is still making an impact. Yeah. It's like how I was, you know, the space that was occupying my mind worrying about Matt Brash. Yeah. Matt Brash.

Now the worst happened there. He's having elbow surgery. So now you can just transfer that fear to Mason Miller. Now it's all resting with Mason Miller instead. Yeah. Get better soon, back brush. Also wanted to say, just because we noted the other day that Vlad Guerrero Jr. has not really picked things up, he's got good bat speed. We know that now.

Not that we didn't know that before, but not so good on the squaring up the pitches. He's been a little bit better of late. He's up to a 126 WRC+. It was lower last time we talked about him, so maybe the effectively wild magic has kicked in. But I did want to give some credit to someone we haven't talked about this season, but probably have talked about in the past in a tone that maybe suggested that we thought his success would not last. And it has so far. David Schneider. Yeah. He's kind of keeping it up.

I mean, not quite to the extent that he did last year, but he's had almost the same number of games played and almost as many played appearances as he had in his small sample 2023 call-up when he had a 176 WRC+. And everyone was saying, oh, this is not sustainable, right? I mean, the ex-WOBA is a lot lower than the WOBA and his BABIP is 369 and he's striking out 30 plus percent of the time. Well, here he is and he's got a 143 WRC plus. The strikeout rate has come down a bit. The BABIP has also come down a bit to 339. Still high, but who knows? Maybe he's just a high BABIP guy.

And then his WOBA is actually higher than his X-WOBA, but only by like 10 points now. Even the X--woba is pretty solid as it was last year. I mean, it wasn't bad last year. It was just that he was hitting way over his head, but you know what? He has kept it up. I mean, I don't know that he will continue to indefinitely, but the Blue Jays have been pretty disappointing on the whole offensively. And a lot of their good bats from the past have not been good bats this season. They're below average as a team, which is weird.

You think of the Blue Jays as a good hitting team. And granted, they've been more of a pitching and defense team lately. They were last year, but really now they're having offensive issues. But Davis Schneider is not one of them. It's like Danny Jensen and Davis Schneider leading the Toronto offense, as we all foresaw. It's because Davis Schneider went to Michael Bauman's high school and talked to Bauman, and now he's going to be an all-star. So I think that's just how it goes now.

Well, credit where credit's due. It's only another 112 plate appearances as we speak. But yeah, I mean, he has continued to be a very good major league hitter. And a lot of guys don't do that for even the career 253 plate appearances that he has had

as we speak. So, you know, not bad. It's not bad. He's got a high bar to clear primarily in left, and he's mostly clearing it right now. I think it's the mustache and the glasses. If you only have one, it's like, but if you do both, it's pretty potent aesthetic combo. It is. Yeah.

And then one follow-up on catcher's interference, since we talked about that a whole lot and we talked about the factors contributing to the increase in catcher's interference calls. And we pinned it mostly on catchers moving closer to the plate, sticking their hands out to improve their framing and maybe also their blocking to some extent. And maybe they're trying to cut down on the time it takes to throw a ball to second, etc. However, pointed out by Ted Barta of Sports Info Solutions, the hidden factor behind this rise here could be replay review. in any of our catcher's interference conversations, but there have been quite a few cases where a catcher's interference call was called only on review and the initial call was overruled and then the replay showed that there was catcher's interference. So it's not the primary factor.

I think the ones that we talked about were the primary ones. But as Ted summed up here, in 2023, of the 14 overturned catcher's interference challenges, 12 of them resulted in catcher's interference being awarded existed in 2023, there would have only been 86 catcher's interferences instead of 96 due to the 10 net catcher's interferences added after challenges. So, that's part of it. Yeah, definitely part of it. There you go. Yeah.

It's hard to see sometimes, so I guess it sort of makes sense. Yeah, sometimes it involves whacking Cal Raleigh and having a minor panic attack in her living room. Yes. Yes. Little column A, little column B. Also wanted to note, I was reading something that Craig Wright wrote in his Pages from Baseball's Past newsletter, and it was about pitcher performance versus the best offensive teams of the season. And Craig noted that back in the dead ball era, and then even for several decades after that, it was quite common for teams to rearrange their rotations based on the opponent. So rotations were more amorphous, more fluid, more flexible. And aces would often be deployed against the best opponents.

And so you wouldn't just have sort of the set four-person, five-person rotation where everyone's just following their machine-like schedule subject to health and availability, but you're not really ever tweaking the starting schedule these days based on, you know, it's like you might happen to face a division rival or a great offensive team with your ace, or you might not. They might be facing the worst team in baseball. They're just going to go on their day, probably. But this was not always the case.

And this was actually the subject of an Effectively Wild long ago, episode 812. We talked to Darius Austin, who wrote something about that. And you saw this all the time with like Warren Spahn and Whitey Ford, even into the, you know, 50s, like Casey Stengel would do this. But this was sort of a staple of pitcher usage for decades in the first half of the 20th century. And it is not now. first half of the 20th century, and it is not now. And I was wondering whether you think that could ever come back into vogue or, you know, I guess even like it may have affected the stats of aces from that era, like maybe the Walter Johnsons and et cetera, like maybe they were even better than we think because they were being deployed disproportionately against the best

teams and the best hitting teams. And I guess maybe some wars would account for that somewhat and others might not, but sort of a skewed sample of opponents. So maybe that's something that makes modern day pitchers look even better compared to previous eras that they don't have to face the best teams if they're the best pitchers. But if it makes some sense, I wonder whether we could ever get back to that or whether it's just

too rigid now to even consider it because you move one guy and it would just ripple effect, disrupt the whole rotation, and then you're in trouble. I think that it would really depend on the dudes that you had, right? Because I think that there are guys who might be more comfortable with a more variable schedule and there would be some pitchers who, you know, like think about Clayton Kershaw. Like imagine telling him and his famous routine, hey, so, you know, there may be times where you go or not go and it might change week to week and then it's like oh well yeah he did it in the post in the postseason many times but not to great

effect right and so there's also the reality of like do you have enough arms who are of sufficient big league quality to be that fine and how you're parsing them out and sure you're gonna you're gonna stack the less good guys against less good teams, but do you have enough big league starter arms that you could really do that? Are the mechanics of roster construction now such that you could really move guys enough for this to make sense? You're limited in how many pitchers you can have and you're limited in how often you can move guys up and down from the minors. So I think it would be challenging, but I could see, you know, as more teams kind of either flirt with or deploy six-man rotations, like maybe

if you have a group of guys who have, you know, heightened elasticity that you could maybe dole them out a little more strategically than you would otherwise. But I think it would be challenging. I think it would be hard. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we will be back with Mike Petriello to talk about bat tracking as Matt Berry says on what we do in the shadows, bat! A baseball podcast Analytics and stats With Ben and Meg From Fangraphs Effectively live

Effectively live Effectively live All right. We're back. Or should I say bat? I should not. But I did. And we are joined now. I'm getting worse.

Something's happening to me. It's not good. It's not good. Is it a dad thing? Been a dad for a few years now. I'm not sure I can blame it on that. Mike, you're a dad. Have you gotten worse with wordplay since you became a father? I can barely string two words together. I have two children. And, you know, at least we've progressed past picture books. And my son is eight and he reads like real novels now. So,

we should have Henry on the show. My son, he'd probably have better words. You should deputize him to talk about bat stuff, because everyone wants to talk to you these days, because you are a StatCast maven, MLB.com's own Mike Petriello. Hello, Mike. We just said hello without really introducing you, but hello. Hey, guys. Can I say I'm disappointed slightly in myself, um just before coming on here i saw on twitter someone referred to all this as backcast i i'm planning to title this podcast the backcast era and i was gonna ask you how did you your your whiff rate on that was was quite high i'm afraid because uh it's right there for you honestly yeah it's right there for you. I'm furious, honestly. Yeah. It's right there. A big miss.

Huge miss distance. You know, bad attacking and all that. It's not too late because you've rebranded StatCast stuff before. So you could always institute BatCast at some later date. Yeah. No, I think we might go back and do that. In fact, I don't remember who said it, so I don't feel bad about stealing it from now on. I independently created it, but you don't have to credit me. So it's

almost miraculous that we have any StatCast information. And the part of me that came of age before we had any of this stuff is just kind of constantly pinching myself and wondering how this has happened. However, it has taken a while for BatCast to become a reality, right? Because we've had StatCast since 2015. We've had Hawkeye as part of StatCast since 2020. 2022 was when you sort of started dabbling in bat tracking stuff. And we actually had you on the show back then to talk about that. And here we are in 2024 when it's finally refined enough to release a bunch of stuff, though not everything yet, to the public. So what took so long? That's not really how I want to... Just why was this

particularly complicated to capture? It's funny you talk about the history because we were like 10 years to the day-ish where they first started talking about what would become StatCast and all of our mutual friend Jay Jaffe said it's OMGFX. And a decade later, I think that's true. Why did this take so long? I think that's a really interesting question. So in 2022, there was some test data in a couple of parks that we talked about. And then it was put into, when I say it, the high frame rate cameras that track the bat. The bat moves at like a hundred feet per second, which is insane. So you need some very, very fancy cameras to do that, which were not put into all 30 parks for our use until last season being 2023. And what I absolutely hope we would do is look at the data in 2023 and then launch something in 2024, including last year's data. And it just didn't work out that

way. You can imagine for something that moves that fast is so sensitive. There's a great deal of data quality work that has to go into it. Like, I'm not afraid of saying that I sort of wish a lot of the 2015 data had been held off a little bit longer until it could have been checked a little bit more, you know, lessons learned from a decade ago. Right. So we went through, got into all the data quality. I mean, even just things as simple as hey where are we measuring the speed of the bat right like when when are we measuring the speed of the bat all that stuff has to be answered you go through it all and then you go through the process of okay how do we put it into the pipeline how do we get it there in realish time what should we

make it look like on baseball savant how we're going to write content about it oh hey it's opening day let's wait a couple weeks and make sure it actually works. You do all that, and all of a sudden, it's like an entire year. But I'm happy this way. I'm glad we waited and didn't rush because I feel like we'd have had a lot of problems to fix if we did. How much intervention is required at this stage to maintain that level of data quality that you were aspiring to? Because, you know, we've all seen enthusiastic tweeters proclaim home run distances that are impossible and exit VLOs that we can kind of immediately sense might be off. And it's often a mismeasurement or calibration issue. So how much actual sort of active intervention is required to make this stuff work every day?

That's a great question. And the answer is very different based on what metric you're talking about. So for example, the bat speed stuff, there's some automated checks, you know, that Tom Tango and Clay Nunnally and Brie Sherman and a couple of other data people have put in, where it's basically like, this is not possible. The speed that has been output, it cannot happen. Just block it at the source or flag it for review. So there's a couple of things like that. You know, home run distances are pretty visible, as you said, because they come out so fast. There's also a similar kind of physics-based check

where it's like, no, that can't happen. Or, you know, it's 900 feet. I don't, that probably didn't go that far. I won't pretend it's all 100% automated. Like there are definitely times where someone on our team, whether it's me or Sarah Langs or Jason Bernard or anybody else on our research team says, hey, this smells weird. We should check into that. And you need someone looking at it and manually reviewing. So there's always eyes on it.

Sometimes those eyes are electronic. Sometimes they're human. But someone's paying attention. You have to make sure that you don't automatically lop off all of Giancarlo Stanton's swings because those are real. He does actually swing that hard. So I just snorted 10 articles to prepare for this segment. Just marathon them and I will link to them on the show page,

including your intro article at mlb.com, which I will also link to. But some people don't like reading, I have discovered. So for those people who like listening to this podcast, can you just sort of lay out the six main metrics that you've debuted this week? Bat speed, fast swing rate, squared up rate, blasts, swing length, and swords. I guess we could start with the basic bat speed. Yes, absolutely. I can give you kind of quick and dirty descriptions of all of these.

Bat speed's the baseline. It's like fastball velocity. You know, it's the simplest thing people want to know. Each swing is measured at the sweet spot of the bat, about six inches from the head of the bat, because, you know, different parts of the bat do move at different speeds. And then the seasonal average for each player

is the top 90, the average of the top 90% of his swings. Because anything below that, you know, it could be a check swing, something kind of the top 90% of his swings. Cause anything below that, you know, it could be a check swing, something kind of weird. It doesn't really tell you anything about anything. Right. And it's not the average speed over the full swing, right? It's the speed at point of contact or closest to contact if you miss. Yes, exactly. Right. I mean, this is frame by frame data, so you can really get down to that like very last frame. So like I said, the average is 72. And then fast swing rate is just what percentage of your swings are over 75 miles an hour, you know, kind of like a hard hit ball is 95. The reason we picked 75% was because that's where if

you look at it on a swing by swing basis, the run value gets to negative or gets to zero and then starts going up to positive. But i later found out and this is completely a happy accident the average home run swing is 75 miles an hour which i'm very happy it worked out that way and that's just what i'm going to start telling people it was i think and that's kind of fun too because it's like you can use that stanton is like the king of this right most guys who swing very very fast they have like 60% fast swing rate or a 70% fast swing rate. And Stanton is like 99%. He will swing hard all the time, no matter what.

I kind of want to go and see if I can find him against a position player throwing an Ephus, because he's still going to swing hard. And I think that's fun. You can get into distributions there. So that was the first two. you might think, wow, okay, so the average is 72, but then a fast swing is only 75, right? Like that doesn't seem like that big a difference. I guess it's kind of comparable to like, you know, hard hit rate is 95 or above exit speed. And then I think the average exit speed is like 89-ish,

a little below 89, which is not that huge a difference, probably similar on a percentage basis. Or, you know, I guess you could do the same thing with pitch speeds. So it's not that big a difference, I guess, between like a regular swing and a hard swing. But then maybe for most guys, that's not that big a difference typically. Yeah, I think you hit on it with pitch velocity, right? What's the average fastball these days? You know, 94 or whatever. And, you know, if you were going to say what's a fast fastball, you'd say 96 ish. Yeah. Same idea. Yeah. Okay. So those are the first two. What's up next? I squared up rate. So I like squared up rate so

much because, um, everybody thinks that stack cast hates Louisa rise because we don't respect batting average guys. And you know, his page is full of blue, right, if you know the color codes and the sliders and all that. And I'm actually writing an article about Louisa Rise right now. And I am going to try to title it, StatCast Does Not Hate Louisa Rise. Whether that gets through editors or not, I don't know. But what's squared up is... You can call it BatCast now, though. Okay, well, yes, it's going to be BatCast.

That'll throw them off. Squared up, yeah, well, what's it? Squared up is basically of the maximum exit velocity you can achieve, which is 80% the speed of your swing and 20%-ish the pitch speed. How much of it did you get, right? If you have a slow swing, like a couple of these arise swings I looked at where he swings like 55 miles an hour, these arise swings I looked at where he swings like 55 miles an hour. The hardest swing you can get to, or hardest max X velocity you could possibly get to with that is like 90 miles an hour, you know? And he gets there. He gets all 90. So 100% squared up. And to do that, you really have to get the ball on the barrel of the bat. You know, you can't get to your full potential

off the hands. You can't get to your full potential off the tip of the bat so it's not exactly talking about the physical location of the ball on the bat but it sort of is in like a little bit of a backing into it kind of way and i think this is people keep asking me like what's your favorite thing that you've seen so far and i'm gonna tell you the answer to that right now when you sort by squared up rate and you get arise at the top and the top 10 is like arise eight other guys who are sort of like arise and also juan soto which is like the best thing in the world you you anticipated my follow-up like yes it's listen here's how i'm describing one soda to people these days what if steven kwan but he could swing 11 miles an hour harder like he's an absolute god

and like not that you needed this to know Juan Soto is very good, but it helps. I think it really like shows him off in that way. Yeah. Well, on the player pages, on the percentiles that everyone loves to look at, we do have bat speed right now and we do not yet have squared up rates.

And so we have Luis Arise with a one first percentile bat speed, but we don't have his probably hundredth percentile squared up rate. So in that sense, StatCast hates Luis Arise, I guess. We got to update the graphics here to give him full credit. You know, that's a great point. I'm going to put that in the pipeline. Okay. All right. Up next is Blast. Yes. So for squared up, there is no minimum barrier to entry for swing speed. That is why Luis Uribe is fantastic at it. You know, he could swing at 50 mile an hour and square it up and that's great. But also you want to know who does that while swinging hard. You know, it's sort of like the barrels and I'm going to get to why I hate all these names in a second, but it's like the barrels of these names. And so the blasts, it's like the best thing you can do. You square it up, which we define as getting to at least 80% of your possible maximum maximum velocity, and you do it with a hard swing. And you look at the names on this list. I mean, these are your aircraft carriers, right? Like right now, number three, Shoya Otani in blast per swing, number two, Juan Soto, number one, William Contreras, which I found really interesting

and he's having a great year. And I wrote about that a little bit today. So that is squared up with speed. Now, do I love that it's called blasts? No, but I don't like naming anything anymore. And at a certain point, everything becomes an acronym with an X in front of it. Or we take a name that is maybe not as descriptive, but sounds kind of cool. It's hard to find a middle ground with these things. Yeah, I was going to ask whether there has been confusion or whether you're worried that there will be between blasts and barrels. Because we're used to barrels now, and barrels are a batted ball metric. And now we have blasts, which are a bat speed metric or a bat contact quality metric. And barrels, in retrospect, now sort of sounds like it's a bat metric.

Yeah. Sounds like you're hitting it on the barrel but it's not really that so there was a meeting like three months ago where i sort of floated i was like do you guys think we can switch the labels of blasts and barrels is it too late it's probably too late right because like when we did barrels eight years ago i had no idea we're gonna get bat tracking ever yeah and you know if you had known that you could have planned it all out and as much as i thought about it like hey we'll we'll cut the cord we'll rip off the end date we'll switch everything i think it was clearly pointed out that that would just add even more confusion so maybe let's not do that yeah okay we also have swing length swing length is what i'm proud of because i think the other stuff people expected, and I think this is maybe one that people weren't thinking about so much.

And as I said, I think to Meg a couple months ago, this was sort of inspired by an interview that David Lorelai did with Charlie Blackman last year, where Charlie Blackman was like, you know, I know Stanton swings fast, but I'd love to know if he's shorter to the ball than a rise, or not that he thinks he was, but trying to get to what those numbers might be. So this was one I was happy to kind of pitch to our data team. And, you know, we came up with a cool definition of this, I think, which is, uh, the, the distance traveled by the head of the bat. And, um, you know, there's sort of a semi-famous baseball saying where it's like, you look at a new metric, you look at the top and bottom and, you know, you want to be surprised a little bit but you also want it to look like the way you should and when

i saw that javi baez was at the top of this and lisa rises at the bottom of this was like sold book yeah send it send it to the factory and you know i know some people are accurately pointing out well depends on where you make contact if you hit it this part of the zone if you're out in front like all valid all true normalize it there's a ton of data out there in search i'm excited to see people do that but when you're coming up with like one number to rule them all like you kind of can only do so many things to slice and dice it yeah yeah i was gonna say at some point it'd be nice and i don't know if this has to be through stat cast or savant or whether this will be kind of a custom thing that other analysts do but if you adjust, pull rate, because if you're hitting the ball out in front of the plate,

you're going to have a longer swing or height, right? Like a height-adjusted swing length or arm length-adjusted swing length. If you're just like a bigger person, all else being equal, you're probably going to have a longer swing. And that doesn't, it's not a negative necessarily. It's just kind of physics, I guess. And I like this one too, because it's not so clearly good and bad. It's just different. You know, you've got a long swing, you're one kind of batter. And if you have a short swing, you're another kind of batter, but it's very much not correlated to good or bad in either direction, which I find interesting. Yeah. I wanted to ask about the pull piece of it in particular, because you joke about how people don't think

that Luisa Reis gets any respect from StatCast. And the other guy who consistently breaks your models is Isak Paredes, where he's trying to pull everything and pull it in the air, and it has worked out pretty well for him a lot of the time. And so, as you're thinking through the next refinements and iterations, what are the plans to maybe further complicate that one number to rule them all? Well, you can already go onto the site and play with all the filters, right? Both on the bat tracking leaderboard,

there's a ton of filters. It's like a mini search and then also on the actual search page. So if you want to go see like, what's the difference in swing length on fastballs high in the zone versus breaking balls low, like all that stuff's out there. I don't know that we're ever going to go back and like refactor this number to normalize for pull. I mean, I guess we could, but it's kind of a lot of this stuff is so

new to us. And that's why I wanted to make sure a lot of it was available for people to play with in the search, because, you know, I think we do a good job making interesting metrics and supplying them, but also there's a ton of smart people who would think about this in ways I never would or would never have the time to. So I'm fascinated to see kind of what the greater community is going to do with all this because so much of this is new. And kind of to that point, I laughed. Our official giant air quotes released it on this was Monday morning. But for a variety of reasons, we actually had to sort of quietly put it up on Sunday night at 7 o'clock. And within two hours, I saw articles and correlations and everything. So it was fun to see everybody jump right on it. And finally, for now, we have swords, which people who follow Pitching Ninja are probably pretty familiar with. But what is a sword?

sword's a fun one right things can be fun they don't all have to be algebra class and sword is just the art of making a batter look awful essentially like that really deeply uncomfortable swing where if you follow rob you know the pitching ninja on twitter you've seen so for a while he was doing it as a i know it when i see it and we partnered up with him a little bit and said hey what if we could help you define this so it's's funny. We got some of our extra, extra smart data scientists like Clay Nunnally and Graham Goldbeck and people were working on this with us. And we put their incredible skills to use trying to define a very funny thing that came up on social media, which was a sword. So it's defined as it's got to be a swinging strike and it follows the bat. So it's like, you know, it can't go be a full swing. It can't go all the way around and wrap around.

And it's got to be in the 10th percentile or less of swing speed. And I wasn't really sure it would work because it's sort of hard to put, you know, quantify a feeling basically. And I was really pleased. Like you watch them and like, yeah, they make sense.

This is, this is what a sword should be. So more fun than analytical probably, but I also feel like there's something to be said about the skill of making a major league hitter look that bad. StatCast is kind of the convergence of scouting and stats, right? Scouts just kind of used to measure stuff with their eyes that maybe now we can measure to some extent in some cases with StatCast or other tracking tech. And sometimes the eye test has matched what StatCast says and sometimes not so much. Sometimes it's pretty opaque to eyes,

like spin rate, for example, of pitches. You can maybe kind of get a sense of that based on swings, but it's tough. You can't necessarily just see it and say, oh yeah, that's obviously high spin with a fastball, let's say. Other stuff like, okay, exit speed, usually you can tell he hit that ball hard, and then the data says he hit that ball hard. And it's still useful, but it doesn't really flummox you, at least on an individual batted ball basis. would you put Batcast on that spectrum? Have you been surprised by anything? I mean, generally, yeah, okay, it's not news to anyone that John Carlos Denton swings the bat really hard, and it's also probably not news that Juan Soto is really good, etc. But what, if anything, has surprised you or is something that we can't necessarily see with the naked eye? Not that we

can all have our eyes on every game and every swing at the same time anyway, so it's useful even if it matched what we saw. It surprised me that I thought I could possibly think more of Juan Soto to start with because I already thought a lot of him. No, that's an interesting question. I would also throw in the defensive metrics don't match the eye test super well for a lot of people for a lot of reasons and so i would say this this correlates a lot more to the uh yes eye test right as you said swing speed yes squaring up a ball yes uh you know swing length yes swords are entirely about the eye test so for the most part i would say yeah this matches what you would think i think the thing that is maybe going to take a little bit of time for everyone to wrap their heads around because

you know as we're speaking here it's like 48 hours old, right? Average bat speed is cool. And I think it's great that it tells you the names you thought. And at the other end, also the names you thought. But I'm not sure that that's going to be like the most impactful takeaway here. Because, you know, it's like pitch velocity, you know, you can have a guy who throws 99 and isn't any good, and you can have a guy who throws 85 and he can be very good. And there's some correlation, yes, but I worry that we're going to make a little bit too much about that number when I think some of the other numbers are actually more impactful. What else is coming? Because I think I sort of shared both Ben Limburg and Ben Clemens' sort of initial reaction to this, which was, this is so cool, look at all this data. And then, yeah, a lot of that data is confirming with a more rigorous process a sense that we already had of length and bat speed and what have you. But I know that this isn't all that we are going to get and not all we're going to get this year. So what's in the pipeline that's going to potentially further enhance our understanding of bad tracking. Yeah, there's no shortage of ideas. And I think what we put out is already maybe a little

overwhelming. So that's why the idea came up where it's like, hey, maybe let's hold some stuff back and selfishly get more than one bite at the apple, right? But give everybody some time to chew on this and see what they come up with, see what the reaction is, and then have some more things coming out. I don't want to put a date on it. Fingers crossed later in the summer, but we'll see. So a couple of things that are clear would be missed distance, which we wrote about a little bit with test data, like which pitchers missed the bat by the most, which I think is cool.

You know, if you can say, um, Blake Snell, my curveball misses the bat by more than anybody else's. I think that's cool. So I'd love to do that. I think one key part of this that we don't have available right now is attack angle. So getting into uppercut swings, flat swings, staying on plane. There's a couple other ideas. I'm going to ask you guys a question because you are smart baseball people, and I would be interested in your opinion here.

One idea that keeps coming back to me, both because players talk about it, and I actually had a pretty prominent baseball writer ask me about it this morning, is time in the zone. Like, batters are always talking about, I want to keep my bat in the zone longer. And I've been thinking about that a lot. And it's kind of tough. I was actually talking to someone who works in a team's biomechanical department about this. And it's like, you know, if you do it with time, that's just lots of different versions of microseconds, you know, it's not really impactful or compelling. And then also if the goal is more time in the zone, are we just saying that slower guys are good at this and Juan Soto stinks at it? So I don't think I want to do that either. Yeah. And so I have some ideas on how to do it.

I think we have a pretty decent one, but it's funny because people are just like, this is what I want to see. And then the next step is, okay, but what do we actually want to show? How do we measure it? And what unit is it? Is it time? Is it distance? How do we best tell the story? That's what usually takes the longest part. Yeah. It would need to be some sort of like speed adjusted time in the zone, right? To kind of account for the fact that, yeah, you don't want to knock guys for swinging hard, but you want to kind of give them a boost for swinging hard,

but also having their bat in a position where they could actually make contact, unlike John Carlos Stanton much of the time. Yeah. I would, I mean, if I were able to dictate the rollout order, I mean, I would definitely prioritize attack angle over that. Like, I think about what we might be able to do with the combination of length, speed, and attack angle to really start to define barrel variability in a more concrete way and help us to say, like, yes, some guys are at times, you know, they have, gosh, I'm not even,

I don't even have intuitive feel for all of my terms yet, Mike. I'm not even able to like just readily deploy these, but it's like, you might have, you know, you might have guys who are changing their speed in the zone because they're trying to move their barrel around and also react to different pitches coming in in different spots and at different speeds. Being able to say more concrete stuff about that on the public side, I think would be really cool. And I think attack angle would help us to do some of that.

Yeah, I think that's like a given that some version of that will be out there. I don't know that we've actually quantified it yet, but it seems clear that's kind of a must have as part of this whole suite of back cast as Ben calls it now. Yeah, we it seems clear that's kind of a must-have as part of this whole suite of backcast, as Ben calls it now. Backcast. Yeah, we're going to make that a thing, just through sheer repetition and badgering. Yeah. So, something Ben Clemens wrote in one of his pieces, hitters slow their swing and prioritize contact when they get behind in the count. This is something we know but can confirm with these numbers. But,

he says, even though they're squaring the ball up slightly more frequently, that squared up contact is less productive. And that's something Russell Carlton has written in Baseball Perspectives, too, basically that maybe it doesn't make sense to have a two-strike approach. You know, people bemoan, oh, hitters these days, they always swing the same speed regardless, like Stanton, right? He's kind of the epitome of that. And there's some analysis that says, well, maybe they shouldn't, because yeah, you might make contact more often,

but it might be lower quality contact. Now, Stanton, as you said, doesn't really vary his approach at all. Do you happen to know who does more often, who has a bigger difference in swing speed on two strikes and prior to two strikes that sort of thing i i do i don't have a whole list in front of me but um i have two names and one of them i think is gonna just blow your minds away um i don't know if he's qualified anymore he was qualified when i looked at this two weeks ago but the guy who at least at the time

slowed his swing down the most on two strikes compared to everything else is, I don't know if you have a drum roll effect here, Gary Sanchez, which was shocking to me, like just stunning. And as of now, I think, um,

I don't know who number one is on that list, but I know Fernando Tatis does it very well. I know he cuts a swing down by like two and a half, three miles an hour. And, um, there's some guys that don't like Stanton does it. I think I saw Brendan Rodgers doesn't.

Maybe swings harder on two strikes. I don't know if that's Coors. I don't know if that's just nihilism, but he's one of the few guys who doesn't. But I think the league as a whole does cut down their swing by a mile and a half or so on two strikes, which I think is fun. I think that's something for the traditionalists

who don't like that any of this exists. You can at least say, well, they're not trying to strike out. They're trying not to strike out. It's just hard. Right. And as I was saying earlier, the ranges tend to be pretty small. I think it was other Ben who wrote half the players in baseball have a squared up rate between 22% and 29.4%, which sounds like a narrow range. But again, if you're not squaring the ball up fairly frequently, then you're not squaring the ball up fairly frequently, then you're not going to be a big leaguer. But what I wonder is how optimal the approaches of players are, because you would think like, well, players know themselves really well, and they know their skill sets, and they know the sport. And yet there are many times when

it seems like on the whole, at least players have pursued counterproductive strategies, right? I mean, pitchers throwing suboptimal pitches to suboptimal locations for years and years. Catchers maybe should have been doing one knee down catching before they did. You could look at like launch angle and how that's changed, right? So I wonder whether that balance between power and contact is always or usually optimal and whether we'll find that for some guys it isn't. Like either they shouldn't be slowing down with two strikes or they should be more than they are. Because one thing I'm really curious about is just like, well, how much could you change this? Like, okay, Stanton swings hard all the time and doesn't square it up all that often. Luisa Reis doesn't swing hard and squares it up all the time. But does that mean that Giancarlo Stanton could be like Luisa Reis if he just swung less hard? You know, probably not, right? But maybe he could be a little more like Luisa Reis. It's kind of like command and velocity for pitchers, right? Like take a little off and maybe in theory, at least you hit your spots a bit better. And here we're

talking about hitting the ball being the spot that you're trying to hit. So do you think that there will be either like a revolution league wide in that or just individual hitters being like, I shouldn't swing so hard or I should swing harder? Well, first I would say if any hitter was waiting for us to put up a leaderboard, that would be disappointing because you know that the players and the teams have had access to either this information or versions of it for a couple of years. But you sort of hit on an interesting point and I have the leaderboard up in front of me. Here's a free research topic for anybody because I'm not probably going to get to it. These four hitters, Ryan Mountcastle, research topic for anybody because i'm not probably going to get to it these four hitters ryan mountcastle austin riley pete alonso and aljarez montero are exactly at the 50

fast swing rate so half their swings are over 75 half of them are under somebody should go look and say which side's more productive is there a trend there you know and i think that'd be kind of cool and maybe we'll be able to see obviously the other thing that i want to know that we all want to know which will take years to know what's the aging trend look like here, is Justin Turner is very near the bottom. Is that because he's 39 or is that because this is just the way he's always been and he's been Louisa Rice, basically? I don't know. None of us know. That's going to take a while to know, but I think that kind of stuff is fascinating. Yeah. I was going to ask, what does the gap look like between what, maybe not what we have access to right at this moment, but what you guys eventually anticipate public side analysts having access to versus what's available on the team side? Because you're right, they've had bat tracking data for a while. I got a text from someone I know who works for a team and he was like, you guys didn't know about this already? And I was like, right, we don't all work for a big league organization person.

So, no, we didn't know all of this. Well, as far as what the teams have, I would imagine there's a very large gap between the 30 teams. You know, some of them have more than I could even contemplate. And maybe some of them did look at this and go, hey, that's cool. I wish we had that information. So, I don't know. Nice of you not to name names there. No, honestly, I think the last time we talked about this, I might have named names. So I don't remember.

Also nice of you to suggest there's a gap between Coors Field and nihilism. Those are not concepts. Oh, that's not what I know. I didn't mean that. You know, I don't know. I mean, what's interesting to me is less maybe the data available and how it's used because i i think i won't say who but i know one older school manager of a very successful team kind of heard this came out and was like yeah whatever i i don't care that is front office stuff right i use they can use that to acquire players

i don't care about it as far as in-game decision making which is fine whatever he's been a very successful manager i also remember in the last year in the playoffs or the year before, Dave Roberts made what seemed like a confusing pinch hitting choice where it was like Josh Hader and he brought up Austin Barnes. I don't know if I have the names right, but he's asked about it and he was like, well, yeah, this guy throws a high fastball and Austin Barnes has a flat swing and Chris Taylor has an uppercut swing. And that's what the data said. And I thought maybe that would be a better decision, right? So as always, it's not always about data availability. It's about implementation.

Where do you use it? Who's going to use it best? How do you communicate it to the players? This is no different than anything else in that regard. Yeah, I've written about that before, how we basically can't second guess. I mean, we can, but we might be missing a lot of information when it comes to playoffs and starting and sitting and batter versus pitcher matchup stuff. I hope that Joey Votto gets back to the big leagues for a number of reasons, but also so we could get his data here,

because I could imagine he might be someone who takes something off with two strikes. You know, he's choked up in the past and he's a smart hitter. Seems like he knows what he's doing up there. So that would be interesting to analyze. And also, yeah, I mean, if Stanton is off the chart swing speed now when he's 34 years old and well past his prime, I wonder what peak Stanton was like. age as much as you think. Maybe it's other stuff. Maybe it's pitch recognition or being able to actually make contact. Maybe that stuff ages more than just sort of raw swing speed and strength because clearly he still has a lot of that. But that'll be an interesting application

just when we get more data. And it'll also be great when we can compare players to themselves and say, well, is he swinging less hard than he used to? Has he lost whatever the equivalent of losing a step is with swing speed or like injuries, right? We can maybe detect, oh, this guy, he's playing through something. He's nursing a nagging, whatever, like his swing speed was down. We could do that to some extent with exit speeds too, but this will probably be a better measure of that sort of thing.

I would think so. And, you know, like I said, I like the different ways you can tell different stories with this. Not to always bring up Arise, but he's not someone we've highlighted that much. And now you can really tell a story. This is elite back control. He maybe really is the Tony Gwynn of the 21st century. So I'm hopeful people will use that to kind of go about it in different ways. is the Tony Gwynn of the 21st century.

So I'm hopeful people will use that to kind of go about it in different ways. Yeah. So I was going to ask about what teams have had in part because I wonder how much the public availability of this data, or I guess even the private availability of it, will change how hitters are scouted and trained and what unintended consequences could come from that,

much like we've seen with the pitch velocity increase and maybe the injuries that have resulted from that. This is something that Enoceros brought up in his piece, and he's pointed out that there seemed to be maybe an increase in oblique and rib injuries recently. And Tristan Casas of the Red Sox, he hurt his rib cartilage by turning really fast. He has fast bat speed. And Casas said, the doctor pretty much chalked it up to me being so big, rotating so fast so many times that I created a car crash within my body. That doesn't sound good. It was a matter of time before this happened. He said it was something similar to like a pitcher needing Tommy John, just an inevitable thing that was going to happen sooner or later.

done just an inevitable thing that was going to happen sooner or later. So we've seen so many times, like once you can measure something, you can try to acquire players based on that. And you can try to coach up players to do better at that. So do you expect that we will see or are seeing a similar increase in swing speed? And if so, might that have some knock-on effects? Well, like I said, this might be new to the public, but none of this is new to teams, right? They've all had this information for, I would imagine, some of them several years at this point, right? So if they have decided that it's valuable or not valuable in terms of evaluating or acquiring players, I would imagine that decision was kind of made long ago. So it's not the one right or wrong answer to anything, whether it is player evaluation or writers or broadcasters or anything. It's kind of just another tool in the toolbox, right? It's

something else we have beyond just the outcome on the field to evaluate players in ways both positive and negative. I do think a lot of this paints some guys in a better than expected light or makes them look better than you might have otherwise expected. And I think that's going to continue. But like I said, this will change the way we look at it from the outside. I don't know it's going to change that much from the inside. Yeah, I have kind of a related meta question, which is sort of how you guys think about helping people think about this stuff in the right way, right? Because I think about the evolution and understanding that we've had around something like exit velocity and hard hit rate and how when StatCast data was first rolled out, all anyone looked at was average exit VLO. And then we got a bit more precise and fine with

our analysis and realized, well, maybe we should be looking at EV50. Maybe we want to think about sort of barrel and hard hit rate rather than just pure average exit velocity. But you're still going to get people who, because that's the first thing they heard, are going to repeat it. And some of those folks are on big league broadcasts. So how do you think about sort of helping people understand the sort of good and useful applications of this data versus ones that, you know, might be kind of fun facty, but don't necessarily deepen our understanding of a player's ability? Well, there's not a good way to answer that question without sounding like I'm just like patting myself and the team I work with on the back. So it's, I mean, when this stuff first

came out, like in 2015, a lot of it was just put out there, right? There wasn't maybe a lot of content about it. It wasn't a lot of communication about it. And it was sort of left to everyone to figure out the context and figure out what works. And what has happened in the last couple of years, and I think the people at the League office have done a really good job of this, is increased communication, both with the public and also the people who are talking about it. So there are some regular meetings with the people who run the broadcast networks. Like I had one this morning, right? We talked to a whole bunch of producers, let them ask questions.

What's the right way to tell the story? Where do I get this information? Where should I look for this? How do I tell my broadcaster to talk about it? Because my 60-year-old 10-time all-star batter, who's our analyst, wants to make sure he sounds like he knows what he's talking about i don't think that always happened in the past i'm not saying that's going to alleviate every issue i think some of what you're saying is just inevitable when you're talking about hundreds of different people with different backgrounds and different ways of

approaching baseball but we you know i think ben i forwarded you the the explainer and the infographic that i had emailed to like half the industry last week and hopefully had a lot of context and a lot of explanation as to what it was. And obviously, you know, people will reach out with questions and certainly they do on Twitter. So there will always be confusion to some extent, but hopefully the answers are more easily found now. Yeah. And I think each new thing you introduce, hopefully we've seen something sort of analogous before. Like I was making comparisons in my mind, like, okay, a blast is to swing speed and squared up rate as a barrel is to exit velocity and launch angle. They're kind of comparable concepts and combinations of stats. So that was helping me parse these new ones. of stats, so that was helping me parse these new ones.

Now, a couple things that interested me. One, I think this was in a Medium post I saw by someone, goes by Matan K, who did a lot of analysis based on this initial release of stuff and noted, players with longer swings who also tend to have higher bat speed perform extremely well versus low-velocity fastballs. However, they have a staggering drop-off in both contact rate and contact quality metrics versus higher velocity. In contrast, the short swing players, who also tend to have lower bat speed, don't perform particularly well against high or low fastball velocity, but have a much smaller drop-off when compared with the long swing group, which kind of jibes with some previous analysis we've seen about high contact hitters having less of a drop-off in the postseason. They might not be as good to begin with, but they might be able to handle high velocity more easily than the really hard swingers. And that kind of thing. Again, that makes me wonder whether like when it comes to October, when we're looking at the playoffs and what works in the playoffs and we're always looking for a secret sauce and it's always elusive. I wonder if something like that could come in handy or even might help teams and

players adjust their approach, or if it'll probably just boil down to, yeah, but swinging cards is probably better, all else being equal. So I don't know whether you have any thoughts on that, but I just, I'm really interested in this idea that like bat speed is correlated with whiff rate and has a negative correlation with squared up percentage. So as bat speed goes up, generally whiffs and mishits also go up. But then when you hit the ball, you hit it really hard. So, you know, like, is there any nuance, I guess? And might that come into play in the postseason specifically? nuance, I guess, and might that come into play in the postseason specifically?

You know, I'm interested to see the article you mentioned because, as you said, you've been trying to mainline every article you've seen so far. And I have two, but I haven't had time to do it. So I have a running list of things to read, to catch up on. So I haven't seen that one specifically, so I don't know. But I would be very interested to see if we can try to maybe draw those connections and we do get to the postseason because my guess would be this has already been happening we just haven't really known about it because we haven't had the numbers to look at necessarily so if anything it might be fun to go back to last year or the year before at some maybe controversial lineup decisions or pinch hitting choices and say oh maybe i'm a little more informed on that now maybe Maybe that makes more sense, even though we crushed the manager for it at the time.

And, you know, maybe we'll just be fitting narratives the way we want them to have been. But it's interesting to see if that's there. And I'm sure we'll be looking for that this time. And do you think there will be any applications for pitchers of this swing speed stuff? Obviously, we've had like the pitchers induce hard contact or soft contact, and maybe

does that explain BABIP somewhat? But could this come into play with my favorite pitcher attributes, deception? Might we see that guys are fooled? I mean, yeah, you might have a sword, but also you might just not swing as hard because you're not picking up the pitch as well. I think with what we have now, it's very batter focused. So the spread between the fastest average swing and the slowest for batters is like 20 miles an hour. And the spread for pitchers is like four miles an hour. So I think that says a lot about the batters you are facing, right? So I don't think that speed necessarily is going to tell you a whole lot for pitchers, but how many batter, how many pitchers over the years have we heard talk about i'm trying to keep the ball off his barrel right so if we could go and see

which guys you know do the best and worst at preventing you know squared up rate or blasts or whatever that could be interesting like i can't say i've done that i can't say i've looked at it but i know i uh i tweeted this out yesterday robert suarez from san diego who throws like 90 fastballs somehow has the lowest fast swing against fast swing rate against which is wild to me he's throwing heat all the time and not only are guys not squaring it up or not or not timing it up uh they're doing it with slow swings that's just kind of interesting there's some correlation there obviously but i think the um maybe the next wave of stuff might be a little more interesting for pitchers like missed missed distance, fastballs above the barrel, that kind of stuff. That will all be

a little more pitcher-focused. I guess probably the harder the pitcher throws, the harder the batter has to swing, right? So there's probably some correlation there. If they want to catch up to someone they know throws really hard, then they're going to have to put their Stantonian swing on that thing. So you'd almost have to adjust for pitch speed or pitch velocity, I guess, a little bit too, maybe. And for anyone who's wondering, like, well, how hard could I swing? There were some stats in Eno's article citing a former driveline guy who's with the Phillies now. And I don't know if this is exactly consistent in apples to apples and the same systems, but at least according to their data, the average bat speed in high school is about 65, college is 68, minors it's around 70, and then 72-ish in the pros or in the majors at least. So again, if that's accurate, it might not be that big a difference, but there's a lot more to being a good hitter than just swinging hard, as you will quickly find out if you stand in the box.

The other thing I wanted to ask about is something Tom Tango, your colleague, wrote at his blog. He's been doing some interesting stuff looking at switch hitters from each side. And some guys like Eli De La Cruz, for instance, or Ketel Marte, like there are guys who swing much harder from one side or the other, that that doesn't necessarily mean that they're better from that side because swing speed isn't everything. But he said, think of this in terms of layers. One layer removed from WOBA, weighted on base average, is X-WOBA, expected weighted on base average. Then one layer removed from X-WOBA is bat speed. Bat speed leads to launch speed, which is the key ingredient of X-Woba, and X-Woba leads to WOBA. The more layers you peel back, the more you get to the core of the

batter themselves. So he was kind of looking at like, well, how much does this tell us? You know, we already had swing decisions, and then we had contact quality, and so now we're kind of getting the missing link in between those two, but you could infer that to some extent. But how much more predictive is it? And maybe not that much compared to, say, XWOPA, but I'm really interested in that idea of like peeling away layers and just getting back to like the first cause, the first mover. Like we go from just having outcome stats in the past, you know, single, double, homer, to having more descriptive stats like, oh, you know, line drive, ground ball, fly ball. And then we get more, you know, ex-WOBA stuff like contact quality.

And then we have swing decisions and we have swing speed. And I don't know how much further back we can go in the chain of like actions that produce an outcome. Is it then like a neuro scouting type thing which some teams have done where it's just like wiring up a hitter's brain and being like what neurons are firing in there to decide even whether you want to swing before you actually decide to swing like i don't know how much farther you can go than that other than like sequencing your genetic codes i guess which probably sounds like it could be problematic

in some ways. But it seems like we're almost as abstractly removed from the outcome as we could be. Breakfast choices, perhaps? The contents of a man's soul? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to say that we have tracked everything that can be tracked, because I think we know that's not true. But the teams will always track more things than we will ever care to put out publicly, because sometimes I feel like we've already gone too deep for a lot of people. And then I hear from the extremely nerdy people who are like, can we go deeper? Can we have fingernail length? Can we start measuring all this other stuff? So honestly,

a huge part of my job, if you go back to the beginning of that question where you sort of summed up what tom was saying is uh figuring out how to say that on television and um it's not always easy i can tell you that i know that the bat tracking stuff requires you know we wouldn't have been able to do it without the hawkeye cameras because of how many frames you have to be able to capture per second so i'm curious if you anticipate a time when we might be able to use this for evaluation of minor leaguers, because obviously there are a lot more ballparks that might be difficult. Is there any hope that we will get prospect bat tracking information? I can confirm I have not heard a single word on that.

Please don't take it as gospel for me that that means it can't or won't ever happen. Because you asked me five years ago, I would have said bad tracking. I don't think we're ever going to say bad tracking. That's too complicated. So I don't know. My guess is no or not anytime soon. Because as you can imagine, those cameras are very expensive, and they take a lot of maintenance and people making sure they're calibrated just so and so if you add dozens or hundreds of minor league parks to that that's a huge endeavor so i'm not going to sit here and say never but no i have not heard a single word or noise about that happening anytime soon all right well i wonder whether at some point we'll get projections that are just based on bat stuff and swing decisions. The way that we have Stuff Plus, for instance, which is just based on a pitcher's stuff without considering the outcomes of the pitches, you could probably do something quite similar.

And I'm sure teams have just for swing decisions and swing speed and swing style, right? Before you even make contact. Who needs X-Woba? We can go back even further and make it even more abstract. And someday we'll just have wars that are based on like what the player was thinking when the game was going on, as opposed to like what they actually did. If they had done something, you know, if they had

decided to swing, how good would they have been? And it's just writing baseball Gattaca. I know. When you put it like that, Ben, I think it's an important reminder. We love baseball so much. When you say it like that, it sounds like we don't. We love baseball. All I do is watch baseball all day long. And I'm not trying to come up with baseball wars here. Yeah, it's like we don't need to just simulate the entire season and call it a day. We actually do want them to play the games so that we can enjoy them.

All right. We actually do want them to play the games so that we can enjoy them. All right. Mike Petriolo will be continuing to work on Batcast and bringing us more Batcast metrics. How many more times can I say Batcast in this segment? I guess that's probably enough. And we've already had you on twice now to talk about this stuff. So I guess the next rollout, maybe third time's the charm.

We can have you on yet again. You can just keep dispensing little bits and pieces and we'll keep having you back on the podcast. Perfect. Thank you. All right. A few follow-ups for you. One, to paraphrase Drill, issuing correction on a previous comment of mine regarding the baseball team, the Rockies. You do not, under any circumstances, got to hand it to them. any circumstances, got to hand it to them. I said at some point in the stat blast on episode 2163 that the Marlins had lost three out of four to the Rockies when those two unsuccessful teams matched up earlier this year. Listener Daniel Mesa wrote in to say, I don't know that I should be defending the Marlins at all this year after how they played in their choices, but the reactionary

Marlins fan inside of me had to chime in and say that we did not lose three out of four to the Rockies when we went to Denver. It was a three-game sweep by the Marlins. So it was. I think I was mistakenly looking at those two teams' matchup from last May. My bad and the Rockies' bad. Also, one of our beats for a while was outfielders deking runners on tag-up plays. We talked about it theoretically at first. Could an outfielder pretend to catch a ball high up and then crouch down and catch it lower and a runner on third, anticipating that the outfielder would catch the ball at a normal height, would leave third base early, and then you could catch them out on that? Well, of course, it happened shortly after we discussed it, if I'm remembering the sequence correctly. This was something Kevin Kiermaier had come up with, called it the KK play. Yes, I know.

Maybe don't say KK play too fast. And then it was actually pulled off by a college player. We talked about this in June 2022, episode 1857. Spartans left fielder Jordan Lala kind of camped under the ball, held his glove high, then crouched down and deceived the runner on third. Well, something sort of similar just happened. Listener Gabe wrote in to say, I expected this to be discussed on the show, but hadn't heard it mentioned. So I thought I'd share it. There was a discussion some time ago about an outfielder faking like he was going to catch the ball up high only to wait and catch it down by his waist. But this looks even more effective than that. This being a play pulled

off by Arkansas center fielder Peyton Holt to fool Florida runner Brody Donae into leaving early and then having to go back to third, tag up again, get a late jump, and be thrown out at home. This was kind of a pump fake. He faked that he was going to catch the ball before he did and then ended up catching it slightly lower at a fairly normal height. But later than it had initially looked like he was going to, pushing Holt back. Plenty of room. Looking to tag will be Donate. Catch made. A little pump fake, and he fooled everybody. Now a late break, and the throw home is in time.

Paint home with a pump fake on the catch. The runners had to reassess, and he ends up with a double play. That is the ultimate deep. Chris Brody, have you ever seen that? I've seen it before, yes. I've never seen it work. Mike Yastrzemski tried this once in the majors unsuccessfully, which we also discussed on the show,

but you don't see this stuff so often in the majors. Maybe because the stakes are so high. Maybe because runners would be less likely to fall for it. Maybe because it would be considered Bush League by some. But, you know, I think it would work sometimes. I applaud the ingenuity. And this version would probably be regarded as a little less Bush than the classic KK play. Also, although I did several stat blasts with Ryan last week, we did not cover all of the stats that he has blasted.

Sometimes he just tweets them, which you can find at rsnelson23. Sometimes he just tweets them, which you can find at rsnelson23. One he did before Mike Trout got hurt. He was asked about the fewest runs batted in at the time of a player's 10th home run of the season because Mike Trout's 10th homer produced only his 13th RBI. Not a lot of angels helping him out at the time. Well, Ryan found, as far as I can tell, the furthest anyone has gotten in a season with all RBIs coming from solo home runs is five, which has happened thrice. 1940, Vince DiMaggio did it. 2000, Jeremy Bernitz did it. And 2004, Adam Dunn did it. Jose Altuve and Edouard Julien made strong runs at it this season. To answer the question about Trout, though, yes, that is an extremely low ratio of RBI to homers. In fact, as far as Ryan could tell, it was the

lowest ratio of RBI to homers, minimum 10 home runs in history. There have been a few cases of 10 home runs and 14 RBI. In 2018, Franmil Reyes had 10 homers and 14 RBI and then went to 13 homers and 17 RBI or a 1.308 RBI to home run ratio. So Chowdhury had the single most anomalous RBI to homer ratio in history for a player with at least 10 homers at the time. If you lower the minimum to nine, then in 2009, Garrett Jones had 11 RBI on nine homers for an RBI to homer ratio of 1.222, beating Trout's 12 RBI and nine homers. And more recently, Ryan answered a question that we got from Patreon supporter Ryan, spelled differently, R-I-O-N, before I had even forwarded it to him. Ryan, the Patreon supporter, said on May 12th against the Mets, Ronald Acuna Jr. got on base twice, which is good, but was picked off both times, which is not ideal,

especially considering Atlanta was eventually walked off. Then on the very next day, he was picked off again after walking in the bottom of the first. So he was picked off in three consecutive times reaching. This makes me wonder what. So he was picked off in three consecutive times reaching. This makes me wonder what the record for being picked off in consecutive times reaching is. Three sounds extremely high. Is this stat blastable? And yes, Ryan had already answered the question on Twitter. By his count, that is only the second time

that has happened in the history of baseball. On May 26th, 1916, Benny Kauf was picked off three times in the same game. Otherwise, without precedent. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access

to some perks. Andrew Nixon, Ben Zimmer, Michael Berger, Matthew Scully, and Phil W. Thanks to all of you patreon perks include access to the effectively wild discord group for patrons only monthly bonus episodes playoff live streams prioritized email answers discounts on merch and ad free fan grass memberships and so much more check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild if you are a patreon supporter you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, never fear. You can contact us via email, send your questions and comments and intro and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at

facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWpod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show notes for links to upcoming Effectively Wild listener meetups at MLB ballparks across the country. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. We'll see you next time. You might hear something you never heard before. Hello and welcome. What? What was that?

Oh, no! What do I normally say? The fastest we've ever abandoned an intro. Usually we get a little bit further in before we call it off. Oh, Lordy. I think you were on the right track there. Yeah. You said hello.

That was a good start. Episode 2164. All right. Let's try again, shall we? We'll be a little tasty treat at the end of the episode. Okay.