Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 225: Missing Out on Mariano Rivera/Scouting Scouts

Episode Date: June 17, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss what Mariano Rivera’s retirement might cost us, then talk about whether it’s possible to evaluate scouts statistically.

So that's it after 20 years. So long, good luck. I don't recall saying good luck. Good morning and welcome to episode 225 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast on Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you? Very well. I went to see the Syracuse Chiefs this weekend. weekend. Just to clarify, you went to Syracuse and while you were there, you saw the Chiefs? Yes. That was not my primary reason for going. It's a long drive and the Chiefs don't have a lot of prospects, but I was in town, so I saw the Chiefs. I have a question for you. I haven't been able to figure this out on my own and I've been too shy to ask, but did you just flash your BBWAA card or did you buy a ticket?

I brought it with me thinking that maybe I would go to a game and maybe I would do that. And I had this whole fantasy playing out in my mind where a baseball writer from the big city comes to Syracuse and they roll out the red carpet for me. Um, but I didn't, that's awful. That is an awful thing that you've just said. Uh, but I didn't have to do that because, and I didn't have to have my, my ego, um, smacked down by no one caring that i was there uh because apparently you can just get free tickets to see the chiefs just by asking for them we the hotel that we were staying at just gives away chiefs tickets at the front desk you just ask for tickets to see the chiefs and they pretty much give you as many as you want we got 10 tickets to see the chiefs we're i was with three other people were there 10 ofs. I was with three other people. Were there 10 of you?

No, I was with three other people, and one of them asked for five and got five, and then another one asked for five and also got five because we thought maybe we would... We were going to a wedding, and there would be a lot of people, and we thought maybe we would just kind of throw them in the air and see who fought and came up with Chief's tickets. But, yeah, you can just go.

I don't know how they make money or anything because obviously I'm not going to be a repeat customer as I don't live in Syracuse, so this wasn't really building any business for them. It was just giving me tickets. Well, it's for the hotel, right? The hotel is the one that... I guess.

This is the hotel. The hotel has a deal that... I guess. This is the hotel. The hotel has a deal. Is someone going to stay at that hotel because you can get free Chiefs tickets? It's part of the overall experience. This is what hotels do. I mean, they also probably treated you politely, didn't they? They did, yeah.

Yeah, see, that also is part of the deal. I am likely to stay at that hotel again if I go back to Syracuse. Not really because of the Chiefs tickets, but I guess that helped. Okay. All right. So we should note,

we want to thank everybody who alerted us to the outstanding development in pying technology this weekend. The Mets won a walk-off. And was it Kurt Neuenheis? He did the walking-off, yes. won a a walk-off and uh was it kurt newenheiss he did the walking off yes he did the walking off and he was pied with with a pie pardon me i'm popping with an actual pie without a tin this is what made it for me is that there was no tin it was it you it was proof of pie that there was not even a tin. It appeared to be an apple pie with a nice golden crust.

And so I think I've realized what the next stage in pieing is, Ben. What's that? I think that they're going to attack the Walker offer with pie ingredients disassembled. It's going to be a very deconstructed pie celebration. They're going to pelt him with apples, pour sugar over him, I don't know, cinnamon, maybe shake some cinnamon, flour, douse him with flour, and it's going to be all very artistic in the end. I hope the real pie trend continues.

I mean, it was Justin Turner who did it, and I did some Googling to see how long he had been sort of the designated pie person. It seems like it started earlier this year when John Buck pied Jordani Valdespen just with a shaving cream pie and did it too hard. Jordan Evaldus been just with a shaving cream pie and did it too hard. And then he apologized later and Turner said that he would have to take over the pying duty. And since then he's been the designated pie guy, but I couldn't find any evidence that he had used an actual pie prior to, to yesterday.

So the timing is suggestive because we just did talk about this. Did you ever eat home run pies when you were growing up? I don't think so. A home run pie was like those hostess pies that you get for like 89 cents at the checkout line at the grocery store. Except a home run pie was cheaper, much cheaper. It was four for a buck. And so for a kid, that's a price that you can handle. And every bit is good. And Home Run Pie has both Home Run and Pie in the name. So I could

see for a certain 80s nostalgic kid, a Home Run Pie could also be an interesting way of pieing somebody. Was it baseball branded, the pie? I mean, was it? You know, I don't believe it was. I don't think there was anything baseball related inside. There weren't seams on it or anything like that. So what do you want to talk about? Scouting scouts, evaluating scouts. Okay. And I want to talk about Mariano Rivera.

Okay. So I'll go first. As everybody knows, Mariano Rivera is doing his farewell tour. It seems to be going very well and quite endearing, I would say. While Chipper Jones' farewell tour was nice because he got all these strange toys and stuff and got to say goodbye, Rivera has been doing this sort of thing where he goes in and meets with the serving staff and the janitors. And he goes and meets with all these people who kept the stadiums running while he was playing. He's also been doing a ton of autographs for the visiting crowd.

And he's also been getting some knickknacks. Oakland recently gave him a surfboard and a bottle of, I believe, Sonoma County wine, but it might have been Napa Valley wine. And so I'll just real quickly quote from Tim Brown's piece about his visit to Anaheim this weekend. By now you've heard Rivera intends to retire at the end of the season and that he wished to meet the people he'd not met before those who'd worked the long hours kept the places running cleaned them up opened the doors and shut them again he'd shake their hands and return their

smiles and tell his stories and thank them for their dedication to performing one job very well for a long time skip ahead three paragraphs he sat among them jim abbott to his left jerry depoto across the way trainer rick sm to his right. The rest were employees, fans, sponsors, the kind of people Rivera sought to introduce himself all season. Where's Alice, Rivera asked. A woman in a dark smock who'd worked 45 years in housekeeping smiled and waved her hand. Years ago, she'd brought her two sons on board. Thank you, Alice, he said. Thank you for being here. And Rivera has also been pitching well,

and this weekend on Sunday, he saved the Yankees' victory, gave up a couple of broken bat singles, and then with the game on the line, one run lead, struck out Albert Pujols on three pitches. And so it's going perfectly. And I just want to note that it brings me no joy whatsoever. And I actually find this to be both perfectly executed and a little bit unfair to me.

I don't think that it's fair that he's retiring right now. He has every right to do it, and he has every right to do what makes him happy. He has no obligation to me whatsoever. But it bums me out when guys do these farewell tours when they're still really good. If this were, I think, Ichiro, for instance, I could see Ichiro walking away at any time at this point. He's not a tremendous ball player anymore. I think I would like to celebrate Ichiro. This is the time when I would like to celebrate Ichiro.

But it feels weird because Mariano Rivera is still maybe like the third best reliever in baseball or something like that. He has the fifth best ERA of his career right now. He is completely dominant. Did you feel this way about Chipper last year too? I felt somewhat this way about Chipper last year. I actually did. Especially with Chipper as the year went on and it became clear that he was still really good. You sort of sense that he was maybe even surprising himself with how good he was like you going into that season chipper was a pretty good ball player going into the season but you know there were there were problems there and uh he seemed like it was more likely he'd get worse than he'd get better and so chipper was maybe getting out before

i got too too terrible. And then he ended up being even better, which wasn't a shock, but it was maybe a little bit of a surprise. And by August, you're like, geez, I wonder if he's regretting this. If he hadn't taken all these gifts, it would be a lot easier. People have asked Rivera recently whether he might reconsider or regretted it or something. And I think he said, no, this is definitely it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, once you take that first gift, you're sort of, you're sort of stuck with it.

I think that you have to just own your decision once you take that first gift. And so I don't know. I mean, I, um, again, I, I mean, I appreciate that it's not my decision, it's his, and I'm going to, I'm going to be happy for him. The nice thing about Rivera is that because of his job, he's one of the very, very, very, very, very few Hall of Famers who's likely going to get to end his career ending a victory, like finishing off a victory.

Very few hitters get to leave on a walk-off, and very few pitchers leave on a complete game win. But Rivera will get to and and that'll be a really incredible moment but um I just think that we're uh and again just like for the millionth time I I get that it's not my my decision and I'm happy for him and and all that but I do feel like as a baseball fan that we are being cheated because Rivera has been, he's basically broken baseball for the last 15 years. He's done something nobody had ever done and he's kind of reset the limits of what we can imagine from a reliever and what we think of from a reliever. And he's now in a position to do the same thing for an old person. You don't know the limits on how long he can do this.

It is not, at this point, physically impossible to think that he might break all sorts of preconceived notions about how long he could do this. It's not totally inconceivable. about how long he could do this. It's not totally inconceivable. It's unlikely, but it's not totally inconceivable that he could be a 52-year-old on the All-Star team getting 7.5 strikeouts per walk and a 1.4 ERA. I think he's had one ERA over two since 2003.

since uh sorry since 2000 and uh let's see since 2003 so in a decade he's had one era over 2.2 i mean that's the great thing i feel like with most players even with most great players you can kind of you can probably pin it down within a few years if someone just quotes you their stats from that season you could probably guess at what point in their career those stats came from. Whereas Rivera, there's just, I mean, it really could be, I mean, 1996 was kind of its own thing where he was used differently and pitched way more innings and was really, really dominant. Other than that, though, I mean, from 1997 on, you could pretty much, it's really hard to distinguish between his stats any other season. I mean, his strikeout rate this season is like just above his career average and his walk rate is just below his career average and his home run rate is just below his career average. And he's like always right around there.

So there's really, I mean, I guess he's pitched fewer innings. He's been used more sparingly the last few years. But other than that, I mean, his peripherals are just unchanged from peak. He has nine seasons with an ERA in a.2 run window range. And the range is from.175 it's incredible which is enough to be like top 10 era uh a lot of seasons yeah for a really he's got nine i wrote something about him i think it was before this season and i i said i mean you'd figure that at some point he would have had a season where he just had a crazy babbitt or something and just had a 4ERA or just, I mean,

over 60 innings and over that many years, you figured he'd have one kind of bad luck season where he wouldn't have been that great. And he really has never even had that season. I guess his worst season was like 2007 when he had a 322 BABIP, which is very high for him because he always has a low one, and he had a 3.15 ERA, that's as bad as it's ever gotten for him. You'd figure he would have had one kind of fluky average year in there somewhere, and even his worst year was pretty good. So I think that it's – I think if he were showing, I think, a legitimate – like, so Trevor Hoffman, you might argue that Trevor Hoffman hung on one year too long because his last year was terrible. And I'm looking up what his previous year was, and his previous year, as I recall, was sort of weird because he had, like, no walks whatsoever.

But, you know, there were some indications that he was less effective. So Trevor Hoffman in his second to last year, well, maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Trevor Hoffman had an exceptional year in his second to last year, but before that, his third to last year, he had a very high ERA, and his fourth to last year it was so so so i don't know maybe hoffman is the argument for getting out while you can but i just think if if rivera

were showing any signs of of decline like if he had um you know if he if his strikeout rate were seven and he had you know an era that was around like the high twos or something right now, I could see being kind of happy that he's leaving in a fairly prestigious point in his career. But he's not. And I think that the rarest thing in baseball is to see somebody who really pushes beyond what has been done and can show you something that you've never seen before um and it's i feel like in some way we got cheated because barry bonds was pushed out of the game uh before i had uh i had used him up uh and i now feel like in a way we're

we're being cheated because mario and rever is going to be gone. And so the argument is that, you know, well, there's a few arguments. One is that he's been playing a long time and he's probably like sincerely bored of it and it's probably not that much fun. It's not that exciting. But the argument is that, you know, it's very few people get to leave on top and it's a great thing if you're able to

leave on top. And I don't know that i buy that i i'm trying to think if if uh players who have left not on top uh if you think any less of them do i mean can you think of any players who you you really think wow my my my opinion about his legacy is changed because he hung on for too long. I mean, I thought Biggio's end was a bit brutal because it was four years. It was going for that milestone. But if he'd had two or three years and it hadn't been quite so obvious, and maybe the same with Pete Rose, then I don't know that it would have been an issue.

I don't think that we're going to think any less of Ichiro. Ichiro's going to make the Hall of Fame anyway, I would think. And I mean, I guess the classic example is Willie Mays, just because he happened to fall down in the outfield and look awkward and like he shouldn't be playing anymore. And people do remember that that and they cite that all the time and that was probably very depressing to watch um but at the same time i i mean has it really hurt willie maze's legacy not not really he's still regarded as as one of the best players

of all time he's still routine routinely cited as as one of the best or the best. And so I don't think it's taken away a whole lot. I guess I wouldn't want to go out that way. I mean, you wouldn't want to go out on the bottom. That's a little different from just not going out on top. But no, I can't really think of anyone, any great player who really, really tarnished his legacy like that. And I always do root for players to keep playing as long as they're really productive. I don't like to see them retire either. I mean, I felt that way a bit about Chipper. I definitely felt

that way about Mike Messina, who was one of my favorite pitchers and went out in 2008. He was great. And he won 20 games for the first time in his career. And he was 39 years old and coming off a great season. And he had shown some signs of decline this season before that. But he looked great. And he just kind of called it quits. And I was sad to see him go because I really enjoyed watching him pitch.

And also because he's kind of a, it's kind of a borderline site or hall of fame candidate. I mean, I think he, he should definitely be in, but he will be a borderline guy. And I felt like he, he probably could have helped his case if he had pitched for another year or

two and kind of gotten his counting stats up a little higher and that sort of thing but i guess with rivera i'm i'm also very sorry to see him go uh but i have always kind of dreaded seeing him decline it's it seems like it would be an especially depressing thing to see someone who just has never been bad and has just been kind of preternaturally excellent year after year to see him suddenly lose his command and start walking people or start giving up home runs and the cutter not working anymore. And then you'd have the whole controversy, like, should he still be closer? And maybe'd be demoted to set up guy and how depressing would that be? So I would have hated to see him struggle. So I guess with him, I mean, the question is how long he could keep going.

How many years are we being cheated out of by his retirement? And I don't know. Cheated is probably the wrong word to use. I mean, he's perfectly entitled to retire. He's pitched for a very long time. Deprived. Yeah, deprived. I mean, if he could go on and pitch like this when he was 45 or something, then we're losing a lot. I mean, I guess the odds are that he wouldn't do that,

that he would start to struggle or just become extremely fragile and always be on the D dl within a year or two and and in that case i would be kind of happy that that he's going out on top because i guess i'd rather i'd rather see us lose like one season of of rivera being excellent and also be spared rivera struggling after that um yeah it's the scope of the unknown that makes it hard if i knew if i had a time machine and i knew that that he was going to be gone by 2015 regardless then i'd say okay great perfect now's a great time i love how you're doing it but there's this little part of me that thinks what if it's 2019 yes like what if you really see something absurd and it's obviously not likely

that you're going to see something so unlikely, but it's possible. It's the very, very rare case where there is something possible here that you just can't ever necessarily count on seeing again. Yeah. All right. Okay. Let's do your thing. Okay. My thing is about evaluating scouts, and bear with me.

I have about 15 tabs open here. is about evaluating scouts. And bear with me, I have about 15 tabs open here. So Bob Elliott from the Toronto Sun, longtime baseball writer, tweeted, I guess it was on Saturday, or no, maybe it was Sunday, that the Blue Jays are letting eight of their amateur scouts go.

And he named all of the scouts and mentioned some of the players that they've signed. And this is, of course, right after the draft, so you figure it's kind of a logical time to let people go if you're going to let people go. And Keith Law from ESPN retweeted a question that one of his followers sent him asking if he had any idea why the Jays fired those guys. And Keith said, new SD, new scouting director, adding his own guys. Lost some very good scouts, though.

And I looked, their scouting director, Brian Parker, is not brand new. They hired him last June. But that's fairly new in that I guess this was his first draft, and he's now had a year or so to evaluate these scouts, and so now he's making a change. You wouldn't want to make a change necessarily leading up to a draft because then your coverage would be all screwed up. So Keith's tweet got a reply from Chris Long,

who was the Padres' senior quantitative analyst for eight years. Up until this past February, he's still a consultant for the Padres and also for the Houston Rockets. He is now a data scientist primarily for JMI Equity, which is a growth equity firm. So he's been a longtime front office stats guy and consultant, and he responded, the real answer is it doesn't matter because no one knows who is or isn't a good scout. So I guess this was kind of your stereotypical stats versus scouts thing, where I guess we have, I mean, so the question is, can we tell who, who is or isn't a good scout?

Does it matter when, when you fire a scout? Are they all, not that they're all interchangeable, but that maybe we couldn't tell which ones are good and which ones are bad. Um, and this is interesting. I mean, I've read things from front office people talking about how they are making an effort to evaluate their scouts. I feel like it's an area that a lot of teams are looking into now. And to be fair, I don't know that Chris actually believes what he tweeted. Because Max Markey from BP responded to his tweet and said that it should be possible to evaluate scouts statistically.

And Chris then admitted that there are ways to do it. And he linked to the Wikipedia page for forecast verification, which is just what it sounds like, a way to tell whether predictions are accurate. So scouts produce a ton of data. I mean, they're constantly filing reports on tons of players. They're putting grades, which are numbers and can be statistically analyzed for hundreds of players. And I think you can quickly tell what a scout's tendencies are, whether he is a guy who tends to give high grades or low grades, and whether maybe he grades certain skills

or certain tools more generously than other scouts. You can kind of look, you know, does he put a high future grade on a hit tool or a low future grade on power tool or whatever, and maybe he varies. And by comparing that scout's ratings to other scouts' ratings of the same player, I feel like you can get a pretty good picture fairly quickly of what his tendencies are.

But to tell how accurate he is, you would need some time, I would think, to tell, you know, to kind of look over a long period of time whether his reports proved more accurate than other people's reports. But it could certainly be done. And I just quickly Googled a few of the scouts who were let go, and it seemed like they'd been with the Blue Jays for some time, one of them at least since 2006. One of them was in his fourth season with the team. Another was, I think, in his third season with the team. So there was some sample size there where you could start to evaluate whether these guys were actually good or not. And I found an interview with Alex Anthopoulos, which I hope I can find now.

And it was from February of 2010, so quite a while ago. It was with a Blue Jays blog called Batter's Box, I think. And they asked him, do you have a system or basis for evaluating your professional scouts? With so many new scouts in the organization, can you hear all their voices and recommendations? And Anthopolis said, evaluating scouts is something that I feel is critical, both on the professional and amateur sides. I also believe developing our employees is equally as important. We've begun to implement systems to address both of those issues. So that was early 2010.

It's now 2013. It seems very plausible that the Blue Jays have a method in place for analyzing their scouts, and all of these scouts had been with them for some time. So we don't know why they were let go. Maybe they didn't get along with people. Maybe they didn't have people skills. Maybe they didn't file reports on time. Who knows? But it's possible that they were fired for cause. I mean, any company evaluates the performance of its employees, and I guess scouts, it's traditionally been difficult to do that, but I think there are ways to do that, and I'm sure teams are doing it. So I wonder how, I'm going to just veer wildly in a different direction.

I wonder how likely it is that each of these eight scouts will get another job as a scout, a comparable job with similar benefits, etc. Because I think that baseball theoretically is a pure meritocracy at the player level. You hire the best players you can, and if you can hire a better player, you hire that guy instead. The point is to win games. These guys are very well compensated for being part of this system, which sometimes throws them overboard at little notice. notice. But scouts are not baseball players. Scouts are employees of a company. They are not paid millions of dollars for a year of work. And I think that while it's perfectly reasonable for a company to evaluate its personnel and to get rid of the ones that are not doing

its personnel and to get rid of the ones that are not doing it, doing things right, doing things well, you know, of trying to upgrade their product. It's not quite the same. I mean, there is a loyalty from company to employee that should be there. Because when a regular person, a non-ball player, loses his job and can't find another job, it has extremely significant effects on his life, on his ability to get healthcare, on his ability to provide for his family. In this sort of, sorry for the cliche, but in this economy, if it's hard to get a job, it can be really, really hard to get a job. It's a life-changing, sometimes life-ruining

decision and companies should not take it lightly at all. Now, that's not to say that there shouldn't be people getting fired or laid off or moved around a lot. There should be, but it's a much higher bar than simply saying, we've identified you as a seven, and we can hire somebody else who is a seven and a half. seven and a half. To me, you take on, as a company, when you hire a person, you take on, you own that decision. And if you hire a person who's not the best person at the job, that's to a large degree your fault as the employer. And I think that to some degree, you have to live with it. Now, the question is to what degree you have to live with it. If it's a two, if the guy is performing at a two and you can hire a 7.5 replacement, then you have to do it. That's a significant thing. But if it's a, if it's a small thing, then I think it's not great. So I guess, uh, in,

in evaluating this decision, uh, there, there's two factors. One is, did the Blue Jays improve themselves? Are they capable of making a decision that one scout is better than another scout? I think the answer is probably that they are, that it's inexact. It will often lead them astray. But over the long haul, they get to see, like you said, a ton of data. They get to see not only the players that these scouts signed, which is what we get to see. Yes, which is not, sadly, not enough.

We can't do any of these analytics that teams are doing because it depends entirely on seeing all of these reports, which is too bad because when a scout gets let go we always see or someone reports oh well this is the guy who signed so and so and signed so and so and it always it sounds sort of impressive always because you're always picking out the the best players he signed right um right and it's like oh well well he saw that guy he thought that guy was good so he must be a good scout but we don't know what other scouts thought of those players. Maybe everyone knew that those guys were good, or maybe they were high on some players who didn't get signed who weren't that good.

We have no idea. We have no ability really to assess scouts from the outside. Right. The analysis is in the deep, deep, deep details. So that's one issue. The other issue is whether the Blue Jays did something wrong here or whether they did something unkind that we should judge them on. And we don't know that.

To me, maybe the biggest question is how likely is it that these eight scouts are all going to land with another team in the next week. If that's the case, if these guys are all just shuffling scouts around and once you're a scout, you're a scout for life then i would have no issue with them getting rid of them and treating these as just simple meritocracy choices um but you know i might think of it differently if this were a real significant life life factor for the scouts and the blue jays are um i guess what i'm saying is uh if the blue jays have a an idea of who their scouts are but not at this stage in scouting

analysis a great idea like if we can still debate whether they have good information or so-so information or perhaps uh very early and um like you know uh if they're beta testing a scouting evaluation system and uh sorry it's morning time and using it to fire people, then I would find it a little bit more distasteful. And I guess I wonder how then teams hire scouts because all of the analysis that we're talking about depends on having access to years of reports. Whereas now, I mean, these guys now will go to new potential employers. And I guess, you know, they'll have on their resume that they were scouts for the Blue Jays for however long and whatever they did before that. And these were the players I signed and these were the levels I covered, but those new teams won't be able to look at their reports either. So they won't be able to do that kind of analysis prior to hiring them.

So they'll, they'll be depending on, I guess, how, you know, their experience and how they interview and how they come across. And I guess they will reach out to people with the Blue Jays or other organizations and ask what they think of this guy. But to some extent, they'll be going in blind also, or they will be going in knowing only what we know. But, you know, more because they have more connections and can talk to people. But more of a subjective evaluation prior to hiring them, I guess, and then more objective after hiring them. Some tweets in response to Keith's tweets were like putting this, you know, trying to portray it as a stats versus scouts thing and saying that Anthopolis is a stat guy and doesn't like scouts or something, which is crazy. Because he's hired a ton of scouts and the Bougies have more scouts than pretty much any team. So I don't know whether these guys will get replaced or whether the plan is to downsize.

But the Blue Jays have certainly been a scouting heavy organization since he took over. And I guess it matters at what point in the year guys are let go also, because there are times in the baseball calendar where it's very difficult to get a new job if you were let go. And I guess it's different for amateur scouts than pro scouts. I guess for amateur scouts, this would probably be the best time to get let go, I would think, because it's just after the draft and you have a chance to catch on with someone, whereas if you get fired close to the draft you're probably not going to get added to another team that's already done a lot of its draft preparation and already has its system in place so i would think they'd have a decent shot to catch on somewhere else

at this time of year so yeah yeah it also depends how much i mean ge famously fired something like 10% of its workforce every year. The way that they did it kind of humanely was that basically if you were in the bottom 10% of the workforce, they would go to you well in advance and say, hey, look, just want to let you know you're in the bottom 10% of this, of our evaluations. We're not sure that you have the skills to have a future at this company. And most people don't want to be at a job they're bad at. And you give them, you know, a lot of notice to either get good at it or to find something

else. And it's, you know, it's very possible that the scouting director has been talking to these, you know, to all the scouts saying, hey, just want to let you know, we're evaluating you all. We're, you know, we're looking at making changes in the department. And maybe these guys had a lot of notes. We don't know any of the HR implications here. Okay.

So that's our first show of the week. Send us questions at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. And we will get to them in a couple days.