Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 311: The Postseason Mythbusters Edition

Episode Date: October 21, 2013

Ben and Sam talk to Russell Carleton about whether momentum and previous playoff experience matter, whether bunts are always bad, and the importance of shutdown innings.

This is episode 311, right? It is. So, will you have like a 311 song be the intro? Probably, actually, yeah. Okay. Okay. Beautiful disaster. We could just have you singing a 311 song as the intro.

Good morning and welcome to episode 311 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. And today we are joined again by Baseball Prospectus' Russell Carlton, who has joined us before and who has served as a sabermetric consultant to the show on many occasions. We are recording this on Saturday night for scheduling reasons. It is about to be the top of the ninth in Boston, so we will probably say something about that or note something as it happens. But we have had Russell on here to talk about some of the things that he has written recently and kind of do a playoff Mythbusters sort of episode, because that's the sort of article that he's been

writing lately. And we'll probably do a World Series preview of sorts on Tuesday or Wednesday. But for now, Russell, who has the momentum heading into the World Series, would you say? Russell, who has the momentum heading into the World Series, would you say? Everybody. Because momentum is apparently this thing that's so easy to get that if you just single, oh, he's got the momentum. Now the Cardinals have the momentum. Oh, no, now the Dodgers have it.

It's wonderful how, I mean, it feels like when you're a kid and you take a glove to the stadium and you hope to catch a foul ball, if you catch a foul ball, you might have the momentum. It's that easy to get. Well, the Victorino Grand Slam was a direct result of the Ortiz Grand Slam. They were separated by a few games, but it was a carryover effect, one would assume. And so the Victorino Grand Slam then will produce its own carryover effect into Game 1 of the World Series. Ben, that's about like saying every time I come on the show, my wife has a baby. There is a correlation there. You know what?

So that means in a couple days. Oh, boy. I hope she knows that. Oh, boy. I hope she knows that. Well, okay. Well, let's start with your Momentum article, I guess. And it's been a very fertile ground for Baseball Perspectives over the years, I would say, to look at things that people say without necessarily having any evidence to back up what they say

and looking at the data to see if the data supports those things. people say without necessarily having any evidence to back up what they say and and use it you know looking at the data to see if the data supports those things and i like writing those articles and we've all written those articles i like when you write those articles for one thing because you actually have the the chops to see whether these things are true whereas i will just like ask you when i want to do one. You can just do it yourself. And then the other reason is I feel like you are very open minded about these things, whereas some people would maybe go into writing these articles having already made up their minds about, you know, so and so said something stupid and I'm going to prove them wrong.

you know, so-and-so said something stupid and I'm going to prove them wrong. You are, are very nice. I feel like almost too nice sometimes in your, in your open-mindedness to the things that people say. And, uh, and it's nice to see that because you'll, you'll actually look for reasons why people might say something or a way in which it might be true. And, uh, so, so the, the most recent one you did was inspired by Ortiz's home run. And I guess you could also do the same analysis for the Victorino home run, but you looked at momentum and whether there's anything to that. And what did you find? I found nothing. That's really what it comes down to. I mean, there, it's, this is the time of year that is really bad, really bad amateur pop psychology. And, you know, you, I, you talk about trying to be open-minded and it's the sort of thing where a lot of times what's great is that

these are actually said in ways that you could, you you know you can form a hypothesis you can test it you can pull the data you run the numerical gymnastics and then you know the numbers sitting there right there for you um whether or not it's true so i mean it's it's not so much being open-minded i usually have an idea of what's going to come up but sometimes it's surprising um but yeah the um you know i looked and i said okay let's find um what was it like eighth inning or later and the team was losing um but then they came back and they won the game and that's happened 51 times in the postseason and um if anything i think it actually had a small negative effect on that team in the next game. So, you know, it's one of those things you can check out, you can see for yourself. And why do you think it is that this time of year in particular is such a hot time for these sorts of conclusions that are kind of baseless?

Oh, because everyone's watching. I mean, it's high leverage. I mean, you think about a game that happened back in May, and nobody really remembers what's going to happen, and nobody's going to remember what happened unless some specific event, a perfect game, a no-hitter or whatever happened. But if you look on MLB Classics and the games they have are all from the playoffs. A lot of meaning that goes along with it. So I think that everybody kind of has this competition

to have a hot take on what's going to happen and seeming like they kind of know what's going on. And it's easy to grasp onto these theories that just kind of are generated from thin air and have just been repeated so much that they've become part of baseball lore. If I could stand up for even the disproven hypothesis in this case. I mean, it seems to me that one of the things that makes these so attractive in the playoffs is that there's only one playoff. Like, what makes baseball work is that there's 2,430 games to theoretically even everything out.

In the playoffs, everything really comes down to one game a lot of times or one at bat. And so when you say that momentum, you checked and there was no momentum effect, well, what you mean is that in the aggregate there was no effect. That doesn't necessarily rule out that sometimes there might be a positive effect and sometimes there might be a negative effect. And maybe the overwhelming majority of the time or maybe some of the time or maybe every time except for two, there's no effect whatsoever. But that doesn't actually rule out that there's never an effect.

And so it doesn't necessarily make for good analysis to accept any conceivable possibility and then make it the basis of your narrative. I mean, that's bad analysis. And yet you can understand why it's sort of attractive for people who have to talk about baseball constantly yeah but then you get you get run into the trap of you know oh there's there's never an effect there's never an effect except for this one time that happens to be for the guy that i you know my my team is the exception oh it garbage analysis. There's no doubt it's garbage analysis, but you can sort of see why it's attractive. And you can also sort of see why, you know, from the perspective of trying to disprove it, it's also a little bit of an impossibility as well.

At the end of your articles, you generally do a takeaway that sort of follows the hardcore math stuff. And I thought your takeaway for this article was interesting if you recall what you wrote about why momentum doesn't matter or why it doesn't seem to produce a large effect. I thought, can you talk about that a little bit, about the coping strategies or whatever it is that – about that a little bit about, uh, you know, the coping strategies or, or whatever it is that. Yeah, I think this kind of falls into what I, I like to call the video game blindness illusion of, of baseball. And, um, it it's as if, you know, when, when you're playing a video game, you know, if you want to play the next game, you just, you know, and the next game comes right up. Well, you know, there's, there's, you know, roughly know, there's roughly after the Ortiz home run, the Tigers, I'm sure, went to their locker room,

said a few naughty words and were angry and threw stuff and did all that sort of stuff. But then they also probably went home or that was a travel day and they had another day off and they had a couple nights to sleep it off. And then there's time in there to say, okay, the proper thing to say is that was one game. It sucks. We lost. Okay, we can move on and we can go on to the next thing. And there should be, in any major league clubhouse, there should be some mechanism for doing that. And I, the takeaway I give is that the momentum argument from game to game is kind

of an insult. It's kind of saying, you know, you guys aren't professional enough to, to have those, those coping mechanisms, either personally or organizationally to fall back on. And that,

you know, that's, that's something that you guys just don't have is what we're really saying because that would have been 45 hours later when they set foot on the field for game three that you haven't figured out a way to get past it, which is the obvious thing to do

and which you have to do. I'm curious, Russell, when you go into these sorts of myth-busting type things, I mean, each of these myths, or if you want to call them a hypothesis, or just, you know, passed down piece of wisdom or whatever, it is, you know, it is basically come from a hundred years of, you know, baseball men observing and theoretically, you know, uh, uh, using their, you know, empirical experience to try to draw some wisdom out of it. And so, uh, I, and yet, I mean, as, as it, as has been shown time and again, this hundred years produces things that are totally wrong.

Um, I'm curious when you go in, do you expect to find a, an effect? Do you, do you expect to find an effect? Do you expect to find confirmation of baseball wisdom or do you expect to find nothing? I desperately try to keep an open mind. The nice thing about doing gory math is that in some sense, the spreadsheet does it for you. You can't interject your opinion into what the numbers will bear out. I mean, that's just, that's the way it is. But I will say that, you know, a lot of times when I hear these things, I kind of want it to be false because, you know, it makes for a better article. Because, you know, you can kind of, you can kind of say, Because you can kind of say, oh, I smacked that one down and there's the – I guess the little troublemaker inside me that just kind of wants it to be false. But it's something that a lot of times I kind of expect it to be, and sometimes I'll have a reason for that. And sometimes I'll just be kind of like, you know, I just – I don't even know how that one would fall out.

And there's times that I've kind of been staring at the numbers afterward and kind of going, huh, what do you know? I was wrong. I like the ones where you confirm much more. Yeah, I've had those. To me me all of this stuff has been in my head rejected like after you know after 10 years of reading bp i just assume that anything that that that smells of narrative is is hogwashed and i just i absolutely love it when there's some confirmation of the of the old baseball wisdom i mean i think it's

it's kind of reassuring to think that these guys sort of know something that, you know, that we did miss. And so, like, when you found that, I mean, and obviously this is not a, this was, I don't think you drew conclusions from this, but when you found that Brandon Inge's teammates actually do hit slightly more home runs, like, I loved that. That was great. Like, any time you find an effect. I loved that. That was great.

Anytime you find an effect, I think it's much more enjoyable. Yeah, and we all kind of, as sabermetricians, grew up in the Bill James era where there were just so many of these things that were proven false. I think you're right. There's kind of a reflexive, oh, that must be garbage. You know, that's that. And I usually find myself saying, okay, got to be a good scientist, got to be a good scientist, can't presuppose. And, you know, that's maybe it's something that,

you know, we've kind of, there's things that we just kind of assumed or we've never actually done the math on. And yeah, that maybe they are true. I don't know. Well, if you had found that momentum did matter, I'd like to think that we would have had you on anyway. Well, there you go. Okay, so the next hypothesis that you looked into was whether postseason experience matters. experience matters. And this was one of those times when I want to write an article and I don't know how. And I email you and say, please write this article because I want to read it, but I'm

incapable of writing it. So you looked at this and it seemed like you hear about it all the time, postseason experience matters when you get to the playoffs, you want someone who's been there before. hear about it all the time. Postseason experience matters when you get to the playoffs. You want someone who's been there before. And I hadn't really seen an analysis of the impact on individual performance of players. I'd seen some stuff on whether experienced teams won more, but not so much on the individual player level. So you looked at that, and I have set you up to talk about that now. Well, there was a study that was done in, I think, 2008 by Dave Gasco. And he found some evidence that actually more experienced teams were more likely to win their series. And so there's that. And I mean, I looked through his method and I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. And that made sense. method. I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. And, um, that, that made sense. I looked at it on an individual level and that is, you know, you, uh, Ben Lindbergh, you are the, uh, the veteran of,

uh, three world series beforehand. And now that you're, this is a old hat for you, you Sam Miller, this is your first time. You're just so scared. And, and, and so the, uh, um, And so I looked and I said, okay, does it really matter if you've been there before? And the answer was no on a personal level. So I looked and I said, these guys are generally performing in line with what we would expect from them as far as from what their regular season stats would suggest. And I looked at it a couple of different ways. How many at-bats have you had before? How many games have you played in?

How many – is this just your first postseason, something along those lines? And kind of constantly came up snake, on whether there was an effect. The thing about it was, is that I got some emails behind the scenes and, and people said, well, you know, what about, um, what about something like, you know, maybe you have a team full of rookies and you have a guy who maybe isn't playing much in the, uh, um, uh, and, and he's there to kind of calm everybody down or keep the clubhouse loose or something like that. And in that case, he might not even set foot on the player, on the field. He might be the 25th guy on the bench, but in that way it does. And I would have to say, you know, that's something that I can't directly, at least

not yet, test. And that's something that, you know, maybe there is something to be said for that. But in terms of just personal experience, there just wasn't an effect. So you would still possibly entertain the idea that there could be a benefit to, say, trading for Michael Young down the stretch,

even if you don't think Michael Young is going to make your baseball team better stat wise? Well, if you, if you buy the Michael Young is, is a clubhouse God, um, argument, um, then, you know, maybe there is something to that. I mean, I, I, it's one of those that, you know, I have to kind of retain a, an agnosticism about that I just don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I would entertain that hypothesis. And if somebody wanted to float that out there, that's fair game for investigation. So a couple of days ago, Ben and I argued a little bit about whether David Ortiz's Grand Slam had further benefits beyond just what it did for that specific game. going on the road, facing Verlander the next day,

and disheartened and destitute, might be in a slightly worse space than a team that had tied the series. And so to some degree that was a momentum thing, but to some degree it was just sort of a self-reflection thing. I mean, a team that does something like that might think better of themselves. So anyway, I hypothesized a small enough effect, a 1% effect, small enough such that it could virtually never be disproven. That's my way of arguing.

With a big enough data set, you can get extra 1%. But in baseball, you'll never get a big enough data set. But I'm just curious, if you would... That was a lot of sounds and no words. How would you look at that question? If you wanted to figure out whether teams that are trailing in a series do worse than expected from that point on. How would you approach that? Because a team that's trailing in a series might also actually just be the worst team. They might be trailing because they're the worst team.

Well, I mean some of the times that's just having a good control variable. That's okay. Some of the methodology that I like to use is specifically controlling for what's the better pitcher matchup. And if you've got one team that just has superior players, well, of course the other team is going to look really bad whether they've somehow managed to be ahead or behind. And they're more likely, of course, to be behind. likely of course to be behind um but you know it's actually you know what you've set out and i kind of joked about it with a bigger data set and you're right that you're just not going to get a big enough data set to examine exactly what you want especially in the context of the playoffs because there's only you know 20 some playoff games per year and and then and that's only in the wildcard era, and you go further back,

and of course, you go way back, and it just used to be a best-of-seven-world series, and that was it. So as far as getting sample size to work with, that's the issue. I mean, it's actually more a case of you're just not going to have the data set to support it rather than a methodological issue. Because you could look at, okay, let's code for team is behind in series. Team had a heartbreaking loss, however we want to define that. And you can look at, okay, what was the performance? Was it better or worse than we expected or the same? Was the performance, was it better or worse than we expected or the same?

But as far as if you're hypothesizing that it's just such a small effect that we just won't have the statistical power to do it. And then there's also the fact that if it's that small of an effect, why do we care? Because every win is worth $5 million, Russell. Well, I know, but, and I, I know, and you can, I mean, you can write a book on catching that extra 2%, but you know, that's a, it's, if, if you're really only getting, you know, that's kind of explaining 1% of, uh, of your variance, then, um, you know then I would personally rather focus on the variables that are catching a lot more than that. There aren't many variables, though, that are catching a lot more than that. I mean, most things that you could conceivably talk about in any given game are going to

be 1% or less. I mean, like Miguel Cabrera going from, you know, MVP level to replacement level is barely more than 1%. I mean, if you're going to talk about, you know, holding the runners on or something like that, I mean, that's what, that's what people talk about. That's all basically 1% stuff over the course of a, of a given game. We have time to fill. Well, it does. And I guess, I guess some of the frustration is that we try and chase these things down. And yeah, I understand you kind of want to, any little edge will do. But I think that there's, from what even prompts me to kind of do Mythbusters to begin with, is that there's this

idea that I think there's a bigger talk to variance explained ratio than there should be. And, you know, we spent a lot of time analyzing these tiny little details that, yeah, even if there's an effect there, don't explain all that much in terms of the variance, but, uh, um, but we, we sure talk about them like they do. And when, you know, instead we should be, Hey, you know, this guy's not a very good pitcher and yet he's being used in high leverage situations, and that's dumb. And that right there, you can only say that so many times, and so I understand you have to talk about something else. But there's this illusion that because it gets talked about more, it's more important. And I think, you know, I'd like for people to keep those types of things in perspective. All right. A couple other things that you've

written that are in the same vein, not playoff specific exactly, but definitely deal with things that have kind of had the spotlight shown on them in the playoffs. The earlier one was about bunting, and I was happy that you wrote this because it's something that kind of frustrates me when there's sort of a reflexive reaction to bunts. You, manager, bunter, bad, fired. Yes, exactly, yes. And you'll see that whenever, you know, if you're on Twitter,

whenever a bunt happens somewhere in the world, that will be tweeted probably. And maybe there will be articles written about it. And it seems like it's based on this outdated understanding of what sabermetrics actually says about bunting. So some other people have looked at this. You, you also looked at this. What, what did you discover? Yeah. I mean, part of it is that there it's always kind of been based on, you know, runner runner on first, nobody out is more valuable in terms of runs scored and how many runs we can expect to put on the board then runner on second and, um, and one out. And, you know, that's kind of, that's the classic bunt. You bunt the guy over to second, you give up the out and you take two shots with him on second and hope you drive them in. And, uh, and so you kind of look at the run expectancy table and you get that. And, um, uh, in the book, um, MGL did some, uh, some really good work. And I remember reading that chapter and kind of go and like, it was one of those moments where I went

oh wow mind blown my life just changed and I'm sitting there going okay and some of that is when the manager calls for a bunt

a lot of things can happen yeah a lot of the time it's just you know the batter's out, the guy goes to second, and that's kind of what we've grown to come to expect. But, you know, sometimes the guy throws the ball into right field, and sometimes the batter beats it out for a hit, and sometimes, you know, well, sometimes he bunts into a double play, and, you know, those things do happen. And the weird good things happen enough and they are valuable enough that it almost makes bunting worth it or at least break even in certain situations. are asked to bunt aren't that good a hitters to begin with. And so we,

we shouldn't expect as many runs from their situations. And once you factor all that in, it's just, I mean, it's still, they're bleeding away some, some runs. Um, I didn't put this in the article,

but just something I thought of afterward is that you're probably talking about your average manager is bleeding away about half a run a year. And, you know, and, and, you know, if, like you said, if there's a bunt somewhere, about your average manager is bleeding away about half a run a year. And like you said, if there's a bunt somewhere, there will be a thousand people calling for the manager's head and bunting is bad and hunt the bunt and whatever. And there's a disconnect again between what the effect size is and the amount of fury that we do that we devote to it.

I kind of understand the fury that is, that is devoted to things like bunts and, and lineup management because even if the effect isn't large, if it's proven that it's counterproductive, then why do it? Right. But with bunts, it seems like a lot of times when we're saying it's counterproductive, then... Why do it? Right. But with bunts, it seems like a lot of times when we're saying it's stupid, it's not stupid. Yeah, I mean, there's a game theory aspect to it too, which is what MGL threw in there was,

you know, if they know you're not going to bunt, they can sit back. You know, the third baseman can sit back and not have to worry about it if he thinks it's in his head that you might bunt maybe he cheats in a little bit and now if you swing away

maybe you've got a little better chance to shoot one right by him and you kind of have to play those into account and so even if we start off saying no bunts ever and a manager came out and said before the game, I will never, ever bunt on my mother's grave. I will never, ever bunt. Then that's actually a strategic advantage that he's giving over to the other team.

Yes. So you've got to keep him honest. Okay. Final myth or final hypothesis, and I'm excited to hear about this one because I haven't actually read the article yet. It will probably be up at Baseball Perspectives on Monday. So if you're listening to this, then you can go read it. But this is about shutdown innings. And this is something that I've been wondering about for quite a while.

And I've seen it everywhere in this postseason. quite a while um and i've seen it everywhere in this postseason i guess it's tbs is just kind of flashing shutdown inning era at at various times throughout the game um i was i was it's it's gotten so pervasive that i actually thought about renaming this podcast the shutdown inning uh you know you might the it might be mistaken for a political podcast. Right. I think, yeah, so I mean, I've heard about this concept forever, but I was listening to a Blue Jays broadcast in May. And it was, of course, Jack Morris talking to Buck Martinez about some pitcher who had not been good at this and had been coughing up runs the inning after his team takes the lead. And it's very demoralizing. And I put that in my idea file where it sat for the next six months or so until I emailed you and said, please find out something about this.

So I'm curious about whether there's any benefit to a shutdown inning over and above just any scoreless inning and whether there are actually pitchers who are good at this who are more effective than usual in the shutdown inning or if all we're really talking about is random run distribution and pitchers who are just good at preventing runs period yeah so i when you sent me that email, I'm like, okay, I can go with this. And I found actually some interesting things in terms of one, okay, we know that some guys are just better at putting a zero on the board than others. That's just, that's something you got to do.

So I controlled for that. I'm like, okay, let's start with that. What percentage of the time does this guy, would we expect this guy anyway to get a, to put a zero up there? And then I coded for, okay, is this a shutdown situation? So team just took the lead or they tied it. I think I had in my syntax and I tried a couple of different

ways and it came up the same way each time. And it turns out drum roll. Um, I'm building, I'm building suspense here. This is Chris, you know, half the people have already read the article and they're like, come on, we already know what he's going to say. Um, no, I actually found that, um, you're actually more likely to throw a shutout inning after your team either ties or takes the lead in these shutdown situations than we would expect you to otherwise. And this is league-wide. Everybody gets this effect. This is kind of the – this is the aggregate effect, if you will. Roughly what size effect or what percentage increase in likelihood of throwing

a squirrel ascending do you do you remember well that that's the thing i and i'm not sitting by my computer right now but it was not it was not a huge effect is the issue is that it's kind of it's kind of like oh that's no there's a little bump there and it's not you know i mean it's it's not, you know, I mean, it's, it's nothing to, um, it's nothing to kick and scream about. It's, it's just a little one. It's, it's significant. And, you know, so there's, so it's at least out there, but, uh, you know, I, I interpreted that as, you know, we, the narrative is that, you know, you're, you're some brave warrior who's now gone. And of course that all important momentum, you know, you have, your team has seized the momentum, and now you are snarling at the other team who's trying to steal it back. And it turns out that actually the other team, that you're actually more likely than we would expect you to be to throw a shutout inning or a shutdown inning as the

parlance goes. So, which is kind of cool. I hadn't expected that one. And then the other issue was, okay, well now, past the fact that you just threw a shutdown inning, that's a good thing. I mean, there's no way around that one. Past that, is there anything extra about it and so i looked and i'm like okay and again very it turns out the answer is yeah there's a tiny tiny little effect it's it's just gonna

make sam happy because he likes these things are confirmed yeah it's you know it's i mean it is it is there it is tiny and you do get and it then it depends on how you define it and sometimes it comes up significant and sometimes it's not. But there's kind of enough there that kind of – yeah, I guess there's a little bit there beyond just the fact that you threw a scoreless inning and that's cool. And, uh, and, and that's, uh, that's cool. Um, so, you know, there's there again, this kind of gets into the talk versus talk, uh, amount versus importance, uh, debate or issue that we, we talked a little bit earlier. Uh, but that's, uh, it's out there. It's, it's interesting. And I, um, you know, this is one of those ones I went into.

I'm like, this is going to come out as total crap, and I'm going to hate Ben for sending me that crap. I've got to write another myth buster, there's no effect sort of thing, and I'm just going to look like a pompous fool who's just here to shoot things down. And then now I get to write an article that's a little bit more, a little bit more, you know, there might be something to this. And have you had a chance to answer the last question, which is whether this is a skill or not or just something that happens sometimes and not other times? Well, here's the thing is that I looked and I went through a lot of the stuff I've done in the past on reliability.

And I said, okay, how many innings do we need before we have a good idea of whether or not you're good at this sort of shutting down? And just for sample size purposes, I had to take it back to the definition was your team just scored, whether or not you took the lead or you tied or something like that. We're not going to deal with that right now. Just after your team scored, can you hold the fort? And it turns out that you'd need something on the order of about 260 innings before of these possible shutdown innings, before we can tell whether you, you know,

what your reliable estimate of your true talent. And if you think about it, so I mean that's... A few seasons at least? Yeah, it's a couple seasons worth. So, you know, we want to know, okay, what was his shutdown percentage this year? Well, that's going to be a little misleading because that's going to bounce around.

So I think you can honestly start talking about certain guys on a multi-season basis. And over the past few years, he's been particularly handy with shutdown innings. And maybe if you want to talk about a career or something like that and you brought up Jack Morris and maybe if I have time I'll go back and take a look at his stats and see whether he was good at those shutdown innings or not, above and beyond what he normally did. So at this point it's one you know, that's, it's,

it's at this point, it's one of those things that's not really good on a seasonal level. But I think in a broader context, you might actually be able to draw some sort of conclusion from it. Interesting. Okay. Well, that will be my next email to you. If, if you don't include that in the article, I will ask you which, which pitchers have been good and bad at this. don't include that in the article, I will ask you which pitchers have been good and bad at this. Okay, well, I'm glad we could end on a not completely debunked note. And so that article will be up Monday at Baseball Perspectives. You can go back and read all of Russell's articles. His column is called Baseball Therapy. Some of these recent myth-busting ones have been free for non-subscribers, so you can go read those,

and then I'm sure you'll be convinced to subscribe by the end of the article. We have a couple days until the World Series starts, so we'll do some discussion of that over the next couple episodes, and you can send us emails at podcast at baseballprospectus.com. So thank you for joining us and sharing your wisdom again, Russell. I got to go because my wife's going into labor again. We won't have you on for a while. We'll give you a break.

All right. Thank you. Take care.