Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 232: Will Park Effects Go More Mainstream?/Yasiel Puig and Hitting .400/Evaluating Player Development/Loaning Players

Episode Date: June 26, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about park effects, player development, hitting .400, and more.

Do you have any explanation for the power disparity on the road in this ballpark? You hit 55 home runs on the road and only 17 at home. Do you think guys change their swings? No, they don't change their swing. I think you look at a ballpark, this is more of a pitcher's ballpark. We know it. It's the same with the team we're playing. show, just out of curiosity, what do you think are the odds that one of us would have brought Brian Cashman telling A-Rod to shut the F up as a topic?

Very high. You think so? I think I probably would have, yeah. You would? Yeah, I think I probably would find something to say about that. Maybe we can do it tomorrow, or maybe it'll just be a stale topic by then. Yeah, who knows? 24-hour news cycle in baseball these days.

Okay, we have several questions lined up. I have a bunch of them dumped into a Word document I'm going to just start reading. This one is from Daniel. He says, baseball is the only major sport where the game is played on a field that varies, often substantially, depending on where the game is played. Basketball, football, and hockey all have uniform dimensions. A 45-yard touchdown pass in Tampa Bay is the same as a 45-yard touchdown pass in Indianapolis, not accounting for weather, etc. Same goes for a three-pointer in Portland or NYC. In baseball, there is so much variance from one park to another, yet baseball is by far the

sport that is most influenced by statistics, both yearly and career. Is there anything else to say about this? Obviously, we can speak to why Curtis Granderson went from an average of 25 home runs in his final three years with Detroit to 36 in his first three years with the Yankees. But will history find his 40 plus home run seasons in Yankee Stadium comparable to Stanton's in Miami? Maybe the question is, how mainstream do you think sabermetric analysis is going to get? Will there ever be a time when a player comes to the plate and the graphic below him on TV gives his

peripherals instead of average home runs and RBI? Which three stats, I guess, do you think would be the most appropriate or interesting? I would like to focus on the park factors part of that. And not on the park factors part of that and not on the larger question

is that ok? do you think Daniel will be he'll be happy that we did something maybe it's an honor so I think it's interesting that park effects I think it's interesting that park effects haven't taken a bigger role in mainstream stats. It just seems like if you ask me what sort of statistical principle would be a really strong gateway for advanced metrics in the mainstream.

Park effects might be what my answer would have been. It just seems so intuitive that very few people really dispute the role of, I mean, really, if you go back, you'll find people talking about park effects, mainstream voices talking comfortably about park effects for half a century or more. about park effects for half a century or more. And so it's not something that even the most stubborn beat writer or columnist is against acknowledging. And yet, there really isn't a mainstream presentation of context neutral stats or park affected stats out there. And that's really interesting to me.

I'm surprised that it hasn't happened, and I wonder if it still will, if there will come a time, if maybe in 20 years from now, when you see the display on the ESPN Sunday night broadcast or on the back of a baseball card, whether you'll see an adjustment or whether, well, and I guess I have a theory for maybe why it isn't, or whether we'll just continue to see raw stats, Colorado and San Diego, presented as though there's no difference. Seems like people are uncomfortable with the idea of adjusting things that actually happened.

Yes. They want to know the reality. They don't want some math geek to calculate what should have happened or what would have happened. They want to know what actually happened. And yet the same people will acknowledge, I think, that there is an effect. I mean, they won't pretend that there's no such thing as a pitcher's park or a hitter's park or that a lefty at Yankee Stadium doesn't have an advantage or something like that. But I guess it's when it comes down to the actual adjusting of, of history,

uh, that seems to give people pause. And I guess, I mean, maybe it's cause there's no, I mean, perk factors are a pretty, pretty standardized thing,

but there are multiple ways to calculate them. And I guess there's, there's always the idea that, you know, they don't affect everyone equally. So that's kind of hard to adjust to because you can apply the, the one size fits all park factor to everyone, but that won't, probably won't capture exactly what's going on. And then can do a handedness park factor and you can get more and more specific but um i guess it's that it's it's hard to pinpoint exactly what their stats would have been and so you kind of lose people when you start speculating it's true i think that probably is the the thing that um non-stats people find the most arrogant and pathetic about us

is our insistence on treating the event as secondary to the kind of more mathematically pure description of the event, if that makes sense. I mean, they really hate it when you start talking about hypotheticals. I think that the idea of FIP just completely repulses some people who think it's imaginary. Even some people who appreciate the logic behind it. And I think to some degree,

everybody appreciates some part of the logic behind it, but they just find it so, so nerdy to start talking about imaginary numbers. And I appreciate that. When you start talking about imaginary numbers in math, you lose me too. And so yeah, the thing about Park Factors that I find frustrating is that people who don't necessarily want to see an OPS Plus presented out there or anything like that, seem to see park factors as binary. It's either Colorado or San Diego and every park fits into one of those two. And so they're just constantly creating these narratives that don't really appreciate the

nuance that goes into 30 parks at 30 different levels. And so that's why I think it's really nice to have park factors. But yeah, I agree. I think that's why they haven't necessarily taken off because it would be, I think if an ESPN producer, and ESPN has done a really good job, I think, of trying to introduce advanced metrics in their broadcasts and in their various products. But if they tried to introduce the idea that Dante Bichette didn't hit 46 home runs, he really hit 32,

they would lose a lot of people. It would be confusing. It would require a lot of explanation. Unless you've got people who are really bought into it, they're not going to read the two paragraphs of explanation before that. I guess I appreciate why it hasn't happened. I'm I would have sort of hoped that this is where it would have happened. And I wonder, do you think that in 20 years it will have happened? Do you think that we'll see generally distributed park park neutralized statistics out there? Um, I think it will continue to go more mainstream i don't know that that a tv broadcast will ever be the the leading edge of it um because it's just a difficult medium to explain this sort

of thing i mean every time you you cited the park adjusted stat you'd have to go through this whole spiel on how it's calculated and walk people through the concept and there's just no time for that sort of thing, which is probably why you don't... The concept, yeah. Yeah, I mean... The concept is so... The concept is simple. Everybody appreciates the concept.

It's having to explain the math. Yeah. Because I think a lot of people who don't know exactly how these are calculated think that if you're like... Like when they hear that Texas has a particular park factor, factor they say yeah but the rangers have a really good offense and then you have to explain like why that doesn't matter for park factors so the math is hard to explain yeah um so i would i mean i think so if you would if you would ask whatever the equivalent

of this podcast was 20 years ago uh if there if there would be, I don't know, OPS on a broadcast, probably they would have said no, I would think, I don't know. Um, I certainly wouldn't, wouldn't rule it out. And I think, I don't know, I guess it depends on maybe which way, uh, hit effects and field effects and those things sort of go, if they become a part of broadcasts, which I could see happening, then maybe that would be kind of a fertile ground for introducing this sort of thing where you'd have these kind of graphics all over the place where you could say, well, that home run would have been out of, you know, like what, what ESPN's hit tracker site does, um, and tells you how many parks a certain home run would have been out of. Um, so maybe you could start doing that sort of thing on a broadcast if you had the

full trajectory of the ball. And then that could be kind of the way that you lead into talking about, you know, how many home runs a guy would have had on the season in a different ballpark. And maybe that could be kind of the vector for it. Yeah, and war has it embedded. And that's gone fairly mainstream. Right. If it turns out that you see war on every broadcast in 20 years, then it would be acknowledged even if it's not stated. I think that it uh this

just occurred to me so i haven't thought it out but i think it's possible that that recognizing park factors and trying to control for them might actually be like this it's simple and it's not nearly the end the end thing that you do but it might be the the most important first step that you do in evaluating players i I guess it would either be that or positional adjustment. One of those two things is probably the most important thing that we do that wasn't regularly done 20 or 30 years ago. On a more basic level, is it just not looking at batting average? I don't know. I'm not sure that batting average is less um is less useful compared to obp or true average than uh then un un part corrected stats are i don't know

because even if you're but nobody was looking at only batting average to be fair i mean batting average was well overstated but the people who were looking at batting average were also looking at home runs and RBIs, two other flawed stats, but at least they gave you some, they gave you a pretty good, but whereas if you look at Nafee Perez in 1997 or whatever in Colorado,

and then you look at Chase Headley in Petco last year, and you see that Nafee Perez had better numbers, that's a pretty big thing if you're not acknowledging that. Yeah. Okay, should we move on? Yes. All right, this question is from Rob in Toronto. He says,

Say Yasiel Puig and Jose Iglesias both somehow finished the year hitting over 400, which would be more shocking? The 21-year-old Cuban slugger who'd never faced anything above double a pitching or the 23 year old quote-unquote best glove in the minors who will forever hit 200 infielder uh who is also cuban would the story be the slugger puig the singles heating iglesias or about how awesome cuban position players are and how they need to be overpaid forever i think we'll probably end up talking about cuban players later on in the season i i almost about how awesome Cuban position players are and how they need to be overpaid forever? I think we'll probably end up talking about Cuban players later on in the season.

I almost guarantee that that will be one of our topics at some point. So we don't have to talk about that now. I just wanted to talk about this question because I have one very quick question for you along these lines. The likelihood of Puig hitting 400 this year, the tricky thing is that there's so many numbers banked, there's so many hits and at-bats banked, and I want to ignore those, like just pretend those didn't happen, okay, so both players start from zero, all right, the likelihood of Puig hitting 400 this year is equivalent to the likelihood of Iglesias hitting what this year?

Well, okay, so are we saying that they get the same number of at-bats? Yeah, we're saying they both get 500 into plate appearances. Okay. I guess 350? 350, all right good yeah that's that's good that's not i don't think that's too hyperbolic i i initially this question popped to mind because when i read this question i thought you know puig hitting 400 is about as big a deal as iglesias hitting 300 and then i thought about it and i thought no that's absurd so then i wanted to figure out what the number is and i would go with 361 okay but i mean iglesias is that i mean the idea of iglesias hitting 361 i mean that puts it in perspective they're both

unfathomable but yeah right it's the i really put it i think it really made me think about how incredible it would be i mean how impossible 400 is at this point that it's been 70 years and uh that it's not just some like number that you can strive for that it's really basically unreachable at this point uh so yeah so all right so 350 to 360 for iglesias equals 400 for puig all right good i have that answer answer. Thanks. Thank you very much, Robert, for letting me completely derail your question. Yeah. Well, I mean, the actual question is not really even a question, right? I mean, it's more shocking that Iglesias does it. Yes, the question, yes. The answer to your question is that Iglesias would be infinitely

more shocking, that Puig's lack of experience has nothing on Iglesias' extensive experience as a non-hitter. Yeah, it's not even close. Puig hitting 400 is like probably, I mean, what do you think? Puig hitting 400 is one in 6,000? And maybe Iglesias is one in 500 million. And I'm not exaggerating. I'm not trying to exaggerate. Yeah, I don't think the difference between them would be that big,

but probably they'd both be closer to the Iglesias estimate than the Puig estimate. I don't know. I mean, we could figure that out. We could, yeah. But we won't right now. This question comes from Adam. He says, I'm a newer listener and recently enjoyed the evaluation of Scout's discussion. As a Royals fan, it drew similar thoughts to a discussion I've been having with some friends.

The Royals recently had what was touted as the best farm system in the history of baseball in 2011, but there hasn't been much to show for it. Randy Gisarelli recently had an article about the system on Grantland, which talks about the results of that system. The idea of development is only briefly talked about in the article, but considering where the Royals farm system is now, is it possible that Royals fans are just seeing symptoms of a deeper problem? I'm not an expert, but I guess if most of baseball liked the prospects the Royals had in 2011, there was some form of talent there.

The Royals just haven't seen much of it. Neither Butler nor Gordon are strictly Dayton Moore-era players, in rough order since they were drafted. Hochever, Dyson, Holland, Perez, Duffy, Hosmer, and Crowe are among the highlights of development since Moore started in 2006, yet many other highly touted prospects burned out at some level of the minors. Most of the highly touted starting pitching prospects from that farm system aren't even making it to the bullpen. Could the Royals' struggles be related to a development issue? How can teams accurately evaluate their development processes,

minor league coaches, et cetera? Are there any numerical ways of going about such a task? Thanks and love the show. I hope you have an answer for this because this is a great question and it dovetails nicely with the question that we talked about not a week ago on how to evaluate scouts, right? Didn't we talk about that? Which is why he asked the question. That inspired that. Oh, okay.

Perfect. Wonderful. So I have no idea how to answer this and it does seem like it's something that we as a site, that it is our responsibility to figure out how. So I think we should probably start this discussion now, and by the end of this year, I would like to see somebody on our site have cracked this nut. But it is so hard because even with evaluating scouts and drafting i mean this came up when eddie

bain got uh fired by the angels because um you're trying to figure out how to evaluate the picks that you make do you only look at how they do in the majors or do you get credit for drafting brandon wood i mean clearly brandon wood was like the 25th pick or something like that in the draft. And after three years, he was considered the best pick in that draft. He was the number three prospect in baseball. And so does the scout's role end there? If you have a player who reaches that point as a prospect, has the scout completely succeeded? Or does the scout slash scouting department get penalized for his ultimate failure? And it's the same way with the player development system.

I mean, as Jason Parks will note every time he ranks prospects, these are only a snapshot. They do not tell you his entire career. They don't tell you his entire trajectory. And is it possible that the Royals completely botched all their prospects? Yeah, but it's also possible that the evaluations of these players were not really accurate. I mean, we're bad at assessing young talent and trying to figure out how they're going to do three levels up. So I have absolutely no idea how to evaluate the Royals player development system. Yeah, well, when we talked about the scouts and evaluating scouts, we kind of concluded that it's not something we can do,

that it's something a team can do, but it's not something that we can do on the outside because you would need access to all of the scouting reports and all of the information that we're not privy to. Sure, but even if you had all that, you still arguably couldn't do it for scouts because you would have to, you, I don't think you could ever know the right, the right way of measuring success. Like I'm saying, is it, is it, is it major league performance or is it where they are in a year?

Or is it some combination of the two? Yeah. Because the scout does not, I mean, you could argue that the scout has, I mean, you could argue the scout has the most important role. You could probably argue the scout has the least important role. There's, you know, there's 30 coaches working on these guys over the course of four years. I mean, that's a huge amount of stuff that the scout has no say in whatsoever.

And I would imagine that a lot of scouts are watching what happens with, like, I don't know, I mean, just hypothetically, the scout who drafted Hosmer might be looking at Hosmer right now and going, boy, did the Royals sure botch that one. I mean, they, you know, they cost me a marquee name to put on my resume. Who knows? Yes, that is a good point uh i mean you you employ scouts because you think that they have some ability to spot a major league player long before he's a major league player so on in that sense it would seem only fair to evaluate how many of the players he recommends or or says are potential major leaguers actually become potential major leaguers because i mean otherwise uh you could just clock a guy with a

stopwatch and a radar gun and come up with some kind of numerical way to to just put a grade on people um but you're right i mean it's certainly something that could be screwed up along the way through no fault of the scout. Although, I don't know. I mean, there are probably some players who are coach-proof, right? I mean, there's some players who are not going to be screwed up by a hitting coach at AAA who tells them to go the other way or something. They're so talented that even bad coaching could not prevent them from becoming good major league players. And maybe it has something to do with makeup,

which is part of scouting. But you're right. Probably. I guess it might not be that any of these guys get screwed up so much as they don't get the instruction that they need. It might not be that any of these guys get screwed up so much as they don't get the instruction that they need. We don't quite know just how much input is necessary to turn an 18-year-old project into a 22-year-old star. It might be simply making sure that you don't screw anything up and letting his body develop and letting him get his reps. But we don't really know that.

and get his reps. But we don't really know that. It's possible that there are a thousand pieces of advice and coaching and counsel that go into this that are all necessary. So as far as evaluating development, numerically, I mean, you could look at the expected value of all of the team's draft picks, where they were selected in the draft, and historically what those players selected in those spots have gone on to do, and compare those historic rates to what the team actually gets out of its draftees. So you could compare to the expected value of draft picks, but I don't know that I would put that much stock in that. I mean, you would need a sample, a large sample, right, before you start to trust that you're seeing some real sign of poor development

as opposed to just a team having a few unlucky drafts in a row, right? And once you start expanding the sample, then everything changes. I mean, coaches are rotating around and there's a new regime and a new farm director and a new scouting director and everything is constantly changing. So it's not really a great kind of laboratory environment to do some kind of controlled study on a farm system. So I don't know. We can certainly look at teams that have struggled and ask questions about it and talk to people. But I don't know on the outside. I mean, there are people who are

obviously more plugged into these sort of things than you or I, but I wouldn't feel that comfortable making a conclusion. Yeah, so if you were somehow hired to be the Royals general manager tomorrow and you have to decide whether or not to fire their director of player development. Do you fire their director of player development? Well, I would talk to him first. This is why you're a great man. Everybody, this is why I have the best boss in the world. I would not fire him without a word. I would not just put a big slip on his desk. I don't know.

I guess I'd have to, I mean, a lot of people come in with their own guys already, right? They've been in the game for decades. They have people that they trust and they know they work well with and they respect and admire and they kind of want to surround themselves with those people. So maybe you replace the guy anyway, just because you have some right-hand man ready to slot into that position. But if not, if you're just looking for the best candidate and don't really have one in mind, I guess you would kind of just have to do some sort of audit, I guess, of your whole system and interview everyone and find out what they're doing

and what they're teaching and emphasizing and maybe even talk to players and get feedback from them and, I don't know, talk to everyone at every level and maybe talk to some people, retired, I don't know, assistants, special advisor types who've been around the game a long time and can can tell you what they think about how the system is set up i mean it's such a cop it is it is uh would i automatically i wouldn't i wouldn't automatically fire someone based on on just their results no um all right good there you go that's solid answer okay i wouldn't either all right well

although i wouldn't because i don't think the state of our evaluation is there yet i would hope that by the end of the year we would have made enough advancements on this that i might feel comfortable you mean firing at baseball prospectus or at baseball prospectus yes i am i am i am i'm challenging our team it's like a kennedy going like Kennedy going to the moon by the end of the 60s or something. By the end of 2013. Or more like George W. Bush calling for switchgrass for alternative fuel. Okay, well, I didn't make this pronouncement. You put the timeline on it, but we'll do our best.

And Russell's listening, so he'll probably have this written up by the end of the day. In three and a half hours. Okay, we got a whole bunch of emails, and I can't read them all because they're all very long, but we tend to get these clumps of thematic emails for some reason by just about the same topic, and it doesn't seem like it's usually prompted by something we said maybe it is but we we get these kind of similarly themed emails all at once and this week or the past couple weeks we've gotten three separate emails one from Wes one Matthew, one from Luis in Guatemala. And they all asked about loaning players.

I don't even know which one to read. I guess I'll read some of Wes's here. My question, okay, so he's saying in his fantasy league, he's seeing a lot of renting of players. Losing teams will loan a player to a contender in exchange for draft picks or prospects, with the understanding that the star will be traded back to the original owner for keeping at the end of the season. My question is whether or not this would be possible in real baseball, and if not, should it be? How exciting would it be for Giants fans to hear that they've acquired Matt Harvey,

Zach Wheeler, and David Wright for the stretch run? Mets fans might not like it in the short term, but if they come away with cash, a prospect or two, and are getting their guys back at the end of the season, wouldn't that be kind of a no-brainer? Teams would have to agree on usage plans for pitchers, but otherwise these guys are going to be playing anyway. Why not have them contribute to championship runs? The benefit to the teams is obvious, and while players don't always love

moving around, you would think that many would support the chance to win a ring and a postseason share and to play on a better team. Someone asked, and then Matthew's question was whether the Yankees should trade Cano and then attempt to re-sign him, just kind of loan him to another team until the end of the season. And then Luis was sort of drawing a comparison to soccer where teams loan players to other teams, and he's saying that it would just be like on a team that has young players that are blocked by major leaguers and they can't have starting jobs,

but they don't want to stunt their development or something. They would just loan him to another team with playing time limits, and then he'd get the experience, and then he'd come back. So that was the theme to these three emails. Do you have thoughts? Have you ever been in a fantasy league where this has happened? No. I have.

I did it once. I orchestrated just such an agreement once. And I think the answer to this comes with how crappy I felt while doing it. I mean I definitely felt guilty. Like it completely felt like I was circumventing the spirit of the rules. It was like not something I was advertising. It was like kind of a was advertising. It was like kind of a, it was a conspiracy cooked up between two people. And we can pretend that it was all according to the bylaws of the league, but we both knew it was like, let's hope we don't get caught

before people figure this out. Right. Um, so it, I don't know why, I don't know quite why it feels so dirty, but I mean, rental is already kind of a dirty word in baseball, I think. When you talk about players who were gotten for... Not like Matt Latos is our spiritual guide or anything, but like Matt Latos complaining

in 2010 that the Giants had added all these players, which was absurd, so I really shouldn't have brought the Matt Latos up. It feels weird. I don't quite know why it feels weird. There's certainly the risk factor involved. If you're the Mets, it would feel a lot different if your player got injured while playing for another team than it would playing for your team.

And there's just something not quite organic about it. I guess maybe then the team that is playing him would maybe be on the hook for his contract or something. Kind of like Mark Teixeira's injury right now is being paid by the WBC because he got hurt during the WBC. So it's sort of like he was loaned to that team by the A's. So it's sort of like he was loaned to that team by the 80s. Yeah. I mean considering this is basically a business transaction, the risk could be priced into the cost. So I don't think that that's a deal breaker or anything like that.

But psychologically I think it would feel worse if that happened. But so I don't think I'm going to talk myself into liking this idea because it feels weird. But I will now present what I think is the best argument in favor of it, which is that it's inefficient for the sport, for the business, to have good players playing games that don't matter. And basically to have some of your best players essentially wasted for months, sometimes even multiple seasons. of your best players essentially wasted for months, sometimes even multiple seasons. And it would be certainly more efficient to get your best product on the highest possible stage as much as possible. And the playoffs would be a lot, well, arguably the playoffs would be more interesting if you had a higher volume of better players. The playoff, the pennant race would arguably be more interesting if you had a higher volume of better players. The playoff, the pennant race would arguably be more interesting

if you had a higher volume of your better players involved. And just in general, I think, I mean, these guys are so fragile and their careers are, you know, relatively short. You want to theoretically get a guy, you know, a Hall of Famer as many high profile moments as possible. So I think from that perspective, everybody wins in the sport. Player wins, both teams win, and the other 28 teams have just as much opportunity to do it. From a business perspective, it makes sense for everybody involved. It just, I don't think, has an emotionally satisfying conclusion to it. And I think at the end of the day, you just probably lose a certain realness, a certain authenticity when you have teams that are not just haven't

been together for that long but you know are completely artificial, that they are by contract broken up at the end of the deal. It would be like the Marlins in 97 if you knew the fire sale was coming. I mean, you didn't know it was coming. So you can say, oh, well, that was horrible for baseball. Now multiply it by about a thousand. If you had known it was coming at the end of it, it would have just been so brutal to watch that run. I mean, nobody would have enjoyed it. It would have been miserable for every single person watching the Marlins win those games, knowing that it was fake, that it was just this super ephemeral, forced arrangement. Rationally speaking, though, it's a great idea.

I think that there's something irrational about baseball. Yeah, it does make sense on many levels. But yeah, I don't think anyone would like this. And ultimately, that's kind of important. Whether baseball fans would all just universally hate this. They already don't like it when a team is perceived to have bought a championship by signing free agents. And those are players who are actually on their team. Those are their property. They have paid for them. They're not going to any other team. But people already don't like that because there's this sense that it's not the right way to, to put a team together, that it's just the, the rich teams exploiting

their, their wealth and, and kind of taking a shortcut to it. And there's also the sense that it's like, it's harder to form loyalties to certain players now because there's more movement. And maybe, maybe there's, maybe we're moving towards less movement and more players who will be spending their whole careers with teams. But for most of the free agency era, it's been just more and more turnover. And that gives rise to the whole root for the laundry saying. But people like to root for actual players. They like to get attached to players. They like to, I think, now, especially as we were talking about yesterday, people like to follow the whole trajectory of a player's career from the low minors to the upper minors and kind of anticipating him being a prospect and improving with your own team. And I don't know whether you would embrace a player who went somewhere else, won a championship, came back. I don't know.

I don't know how it works in soccer. I don't know whether people hate this loaning or not. I know nothing about it. So maybe that would be informative if we knew something about that. But yeah. Yeah, I could imagine scenarios where it would make more sense in the minors, where the championship comes secondary to the development. If you had situations where you wanted to get a player more advanced,

more games at a certain position or something, I could see that pretty easily. And that seems, well, maybe, like you said, we don't really know the soccer scenario. That seemed to be an implication of the soccer scenario. Yes. Maybe not. Yeah, I don't know.

We don't like it. All right. Last question, unless you want to answer more. Oh, you didn't want to answer this one even. Okay. Well, this one is from Marco. Oh, this is a good. Come on. This one's too good. I don't want to rush it. Save it. Save it. All right. This is a good one. I want to talk about this one at length sometime because this is actually Marco. If you're listening, this is a topic that I've wanted to write about in a in a in a long read for a very long time so let's not waste it okay it is a good one it's a good one you guys are being deprived right you got your wish the show is over um you can send us more emails for next week at podcast at baseball perspectives.com we will have two more episodes this week and we will be back with the first of those tomorrow