Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 489: Statcast’s Impact on Player Evaluation

Episode Date: July 10, 2014

Ben and and Sam discuss Billy Beane’s Wall Street Journal op-ed and how Statcast will affect scouting and player evaluation.

But there's no one perfect in this universe And though you think I'm weird Don't try and choose me, dear Cause if you want me, you take me for what I'm worth If you want me, you take me for what I'm worth Good morning and welcome to episode 489 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Baseball Reference Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Hello. Hello.

Almost back. He's promoted from single A to triple A, even though he went 0-2 with the 5 ERA and his two single A starts and struck out four batters in 10-2 thirds. But he's close because he's approaching his opt-out date with the Marlins, so they brought him up to evaluate him to decide whether he is worthy of promotion. Huh. I see now that Brad Penny has a Japanese stats page. What's on it? He pitched in Japan in 2012 and made only one start. He flew all that way for one start. That one start went very poorly.

He gave up six runs. He walked three batters in three innings with one strikeout. He faced 19 batters and retired about half of them. And left with a 10.8 ERA. He also that's it. That's it. That's the whole story about him in Japan.

So I wonder if he decided this sucks or if they decided this sucks. I don't know. Maybe it was just a mutual... Cut. He was cut. Wow. Released after one start. Okay.

I wonder what he got paid for that. Probably pretty well well pretty penny? yeah I wouldn't say but NPP contracts are guaranteed you said yes before you said you wouldn't say it

you said yes you would say you should be ashamed of yourself to make a horrible pun like that you should be ashamed of yourself ben to make a horrible pun like that you should be horrified at yourself i'm sorry i apologize to everyone oh uh granting penny's request to be released ah okay penny reportedly had a hard time adjusting to living and playing in japan uh i'm shocked br? You'd think that guy seems like he'd fit right in.

Stereotype. But a stereotype about who? Who was I stereotyping? I don't know. If I said it would reveal my own stereotypes. Okay, let me ask you this, Ben. Which player do you think would fit in worst in Japan? Who would have

the hardest time adjusting to living and playing in japan ah that is a good question thinking of of players with just big personalities like uh nick swisher but uh he's so happy no no nick swisher happy-go-lucky though he gets along with everyone he kind of probably doesn't care where he is. He is essentially like Tsuyoshi Shinjo, except he's American. He's up for anything. He's fun. I don't know if he is really, but that's the impression he gives off. So yeah, I think he'd be just fine. I bet he would be on game shows over there.

He'd be doing advertisements for sport drinks aimed at children. He would probably have he would do some sort of stunt where he was trapped in a vending machine, I would say. So I think he'd be just fine. Luke Scott. Luke Scott's in Taiwan, though. So we know that one can't work because he's actually in Taiwan. Yeah. Might be in Korea.

I think he's in Korea. Do you have someone in mind? Puig? Puig maybe, but I feel like Puig would Get the respect If you're good enough You get the respect of any people So I think that Puig would fit in just fine

I think they would Find him amusing Because he's really good Now if he weren't really good Then it wouldn't work But he is really good So I don't think Puig would have an issue I'm thinking John Lackey seems to me, a guy who wouldn't particularly like it and who

wouldn't necessarily be particularly liked. Okay. I'm guessing. I just have a hard time even imagining. Hasn't been all that well liked here at times. Right. That's true. I have a hard time imagining him eating noodles.

Like I'm trying to, I'm sort of going through each roster and going, can I picture him with noodles? I just can't see Lacky with noodles. Yeah, okay. I don't know. Someone who likes hunting a lot. Uh-huh. Yeah, so all of them. Yeah, right, the entire league could not play in Japan. Anything else?

Luke Scott, 267, 392, 505 in Korea, six homers in 33 games. Okay. It's okay. Yeah, not great. No, not great. Just okay. Okay. Anything else you'd like to discuss?

No. Okay. By the way, our listener, Rich, who created the sad ucl site sad ucl.co that counts tracks the days since last ucl injury informed me that unless he missed someone it had been 20 days since the last ucl injury prior to bronson arroyos which was a record since he started tracking it. So another reason to be sad about Bronson Arroyo's injury, although maybe Tanaka will be the next guy. Hopefully not.

This just goes to show what I was talking about yesterday. These records, we hardly even notice records anymore. I'm glad he brought it up, but it's sad that we weren't paying more attention. Uh-huh. Yeah, someone in the Facebook group accused you of saying Eddie Murphy when you met Eddie Murray. How do you respond to this accusation? That I said Eddie Murray? I don't know.

We'll have to go back and check the tape. It would be understandable if you did. I made that mistake in my head sort of just because I was also sort of trying to speculate in the Facebook group about whether there had ever been a pairing of superstars in sports and entertainment at the same time whose names and primes overlapped as closely as Eddie Murphy and Eddie Murray because they both peaked at almost exactly the same time. Yeah, Ava Longoria and Evan Longoria, right? Yes, that was the first example that someone mentioned. Someone also suggested the Michael Jackson slash Michael Jordan slash Michael Johnson pairing.

Oh, Michael Johnson. Yeah, which is a good one. I love that. What is this? Is this Kings of Leon? Not Kings of Leon. My Morning Jacket? Is? My Morning Jacket? Is this My Morning Jacket?

The intro song yesterday? Yeah. It's a good choice. Thank you. In case you can't tell I'm going to go listen. I'm going to go listen. Imagine that might make it difficult to pay attention to what I'm saying

But that's okay So yeah Listener Greg Gabrielson Tried to pinpoint when their Primes were The Eddie Murphy, Eddie Murray primes And he singled out 1984 as Murray's prime

It was his best season by baseball Reference war And he says that Murphy 1984 as Murray's prime. It was his best season by baseball reference war. And he says that Murphy peaked in 1985, which was when Party All the Time came out. So that's debatable. But clearly their primes closely overlapped. So understandable mistake if you did make it. Yeah, Eva and Evan.

Neither, I mean, Evan Longoria, you may be someday, he's maybe comparable to Eddie Murphy. Eddie Murray, I should say. But Eva Longoria is, did I call her Eva before? I guess we have to go back and listen to that too. I don't know. But yeah, clearly she did not attain the cultural importance that Eddie Murphy did. Right. Very few have.

I mean, really, if you start with that, there's probably not 30 entertainers who had the impact since Eddie Murphy, of Eddie Murphy. So you're already down to the Michael Jacksons. And what about Prince and Prince Fielder? Not overlapping. Not overlapping, no. I mean, Prince has some cultural cachet now, certainly, but not his most productive period.

Madonna and Maradona. Maradona. Mm, that's a good one. I don't know when Maradona's prime was. Like 88, I think, or 86, I think, is Hand of God. Okay. Yeah, that's a good one. Beverly Hills Cop 4 coming in 2016.

Eddie Murphy's going to make a comeback. All right. My topic today. I'm listening to you. I'm now listening to you, by the way, talk. While I'm talking this is the weirdest thing people should try listening to multiple effectively wild episodes simultaneously i know people listen to us some people listen to us at one and a half speed just to get it over with more quickly, I guess.

So I want to talk about a... I watched Sopranos. I watched the entire Sopranos in one and a half speed. Really? Huh. Yeah. That's interesting. So Billy Bean wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago.

And it was called Billy Bean on the Future of Sports and How Technology Will Transform Sports. And it was mostly nothing that was new to us or would be new to most of our listeners. It was, you know, he talked about StatCast, the new tracking system coming from Major League Baseball, advanced media. He called it the tip of the iceberg, which I don't know that I would say it's the tip.

I would say it's a more substantial portion of the iceberg. Maybe it's the tip of the spear. Maybe that's what he was going for. But he talked about how the distinctions between outsider and insider are shrinking as people on the internet get more access to data and do useful things with it and go from being outsiders to insiders. And he talked about how technology will create a shift in front offices where really the shift that has already been going on is very much happening and has been happening for decades now really so that that was not new so much but there was one interesting part i thought that i wanted to talk about and it relates to a listener email that i wanted to answer yesterday but didn't have a chance to. So Billy Bean makes the case in this op-ed,

and I will link to it in the Facebook group and in the blog post at BP. He makes the case that StatCast is going to change player evaluation to such a degree that players who might not have had a chance to make the majors before now might have that chance to make the majors. So he says it could really be a significant change, not just in evaluating the players who are already there, but in determining which players deserve to be there. And so I will quote from this paragraph with the header leveling the field. He says,

having advanced performance data at even the most junior levels will make it less likely. Oh, and he starts with the premise that StatCast or some equivalent to StatCast will eventually filter down to every level, which I think makes perfect sense. We've talked about that before when we talked about whether scouts were an endangered species because this motion tracking stuff is eventually going to be everywhere. He seems to think that the latter, at least, is the case, that this is going to filter down to the minors, filter down to amateur level, filter down to the little league eventually. And so he says, having advanced performance data at even the most junior levels will make it less likely that players get filtered out based on 60-yard dash times or radar gun readings, and more likely that they advance on the merits of practiced skills.

The ability to paint the corners of the strike zone, to swing only at pitches within that zone, and to manage the subtle footwork required of a difficult fielding play is accessible to any player willing to commit to the 10,000 hours rule, the average amount of practice Malkin Gladwell in his book Outliers says is needed to excel in selected fields. A whole new class of players whose skill sets previously were not fully appreciated will be able to reach the highest levels thanks to a more nuanced understanding of their skills. So I want to talk about whether you buy this, whether you think this is the case, and if so, what sort of players those might be, what class of players it is that has not made it to the majors to this point. And scouting and player promotions are generally considered to be, I think, a fairly efficient

meritocracy. And yet Billy Bean is suggesting that, to use the Billy Bean buzzword, there is some inefficiency here, that there is some class of player that is being ignored or underappreciated. And I wanted to tie this to a question that we got from Matt Dickinson with the subject line, can anyone play baseball? And Matt asks, when I see players drafted based on name recognition alone, recently Johnny Manziel, Mariano Rivera Jr., it makes me wonder if teams at their core believe that pretty much anybody can be trained to play baseball at a professional level. A small part of me agrees with this. If you take a young adult who is in above average physical condition and give them the very best

coaching in the world, along with access to premier physical conditioning, nutrition, and equipment, why should we not expect that they could become a professional ball player? The closest example that I can remember of a team actually testing this idea is the Million Dollar Arm kids from India, but that is a small sample. But there are several examples of pros that never really played the sport in their youth. The contradiction to this thought is that teams continue to spend massive amounts of money on their first round draft picks. Because of the money they paid him, Mark Appel will receive the most focused by the Astros training staff, regardless of his recent struggles.

How much riskier would it have been for the Astros to instead distribute the 6.35 million to 25, 50, or even a hundred complete unknown players and see which prosper. So the premise of Matt Dickinson's question about how teams draft, you know, Johnny Menzel or Mariano Rivera Jr. And Mariano Rivera Jr. might be a legitimate draftee. I remember reading something about how he had some promise as a player. And you've looked at how often players' offspring get drafted,

and it happens a lot. And sometimes it's just a favor in the later rounds, but often it's because there's some talent there and because those players have been have been at their professional baseball player father's knee since infancy and have been around clubhouses and been playing their whole lives and been getting the best instruction and so it makes sense that they would not only have pretty decent genes but also the preparation that would lead them to become a good player. The Johnny Mantel case, and I think the Padres drafted him, that's obviously just a stunt. They don't expect him to play or even expect that he could play, but teams have evidently had

some success with this tactic. Jeff Young wrote about this when the Padres drafted Johnny Mantel, and he pointed out that the Rangers did this with Russell Wilson. And then immediately after drafting him, they started printing up Russell Wilson Rangers jerseys. So this is a thing that you can do. You can just draft some famous person, some famous amateur from another sport, and then you can have a jersey with his name on your team's jersey, and then you can sell some of those, and maybe you can make some money, and it's probably more than you'll make out of, you know, whatever other 30-second round draft pick you would have taken in his spot. But Matt's question about whether anyone can be a player,

you know, anyone in reasonably good condition, given the best coaching and all the other advantages that one could give a player, you know, anyone in reasonably good condition, given the best coaching and all the other advantages that one could give a player sort of dovetails with what Billy Bean seems to be saying here that, that maybe there are practiced skills that could get a player to the majors and that these have been neglected because, uh, scouts have been overly focused on actual physical tools as opposed to practice and the benefits of practice. Are you buying this? Well, Ben, in answer to your question, I definitely did say Eddie Murphy. It's clear as day I said Eddie Murphy at least the first time. For that reason, I didn't hear much else that you said.

I did. No, I heard the last few minutes. I heard everything after you stopped reading the Billy Bean article because I had also read the Billy Bean article. So I didn't particularly need to hear that block quote. But you asked about 75 questions. And so I don't know which one you want me to answer at this point. about 75 questions and so i don't know which one you want me to answer at this point uh-huh uh i i did say i actually thought about talking about that billy bean article yesterday when i thought that i had to come up with a topic uh and it was the the same part of the article that stuck out

at me because i the only i thought original part i mean you know yeah people who read about baseball all day quick yeah quick quick tangential question why Why did he write that, do you suppose? Like what do you think was the audience for that? Didn't it almost feel like, I don't know, like maybe Major League Baseball Advanced Media arranged it or something, and he was just supposed to be the famous guy who was promoting their new product maybe?

Could be, could be. It was sort of weirdly timed to nothing. Like, why is he, why did he write it? Why is he writing op-eds? Who was it for? It was fairly generic. It wasn't sure, it wasn't clear what, I mean, it was fine. It was, there was nothing wrong with it.

It was many, many, many, many people, many readers of the Wall Street Journal learned something from that and bless his heart. But I couldn't figure out what the audience was or more than that what the purpose was. So do you know? I don't know. My only other theory is that he's just sort of trying to position the A's as a team that people reading the Wall Street Journal, maybe people who are working in business and have the sort of skills that would be useful for baseball analysis. And maybe they harbor some ambition of

making that transition from business to sports. And they pick up the paper and they see that Billy Bean, the GM of the A's, wrote something about how front offices are going to need to hire lots of people who were not former players to take advantage of this new data. And maybe he hopes to be the one who gets the resumes from those people. Jeez, I guess. But, I mean, the guy wrote Moneyball, for Pete's sake. Right. Yeah.

You'd think that would do it. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. It does seem it kind of came out of nowhere, but I think that scouts aren't as interested in skills, or they are interested in it, but to the extent that they're able to put it in perspective. I mean, when you're looking at a 15-year-old, the route that he takes to the ball is interesting,

but it's not nearly the most important thing about him because his skills are not anywhere close to major league ready, and they never will be unless he has the physicality to perform. These guys are elite athletes. They are huge, strong people, capable of doing things that most people cannot do no matter how much you train them. And the fact that a player can,

a person who practices real hard or has some natural intuition for a certain part of the game might be able to, you know, I don't know, take bigger leads and get back to the bag or, you know, have command of his pitches or whatever is interesting. But for a 15-, 17 year old it's not that interesting i mean that's basically like you might as well look and see whether his stats are really good and there's a reason that stats for 15 and 16 and 17 year olds aren't that interesting they're not playing against major leaguers and the skills that can make you stand out there are certain skills that don't that don't go up the ladder as well and we you know we all know the experience of seeing the pitcher who has command and a change up who can absolutely dominate in rookie ball in short season ball a little bit in

low a not as much in high a he's a reliever in double a he's got a 5.5 ERA in AAA, and he's terrible in the majors. And it's the same pitcher all the way up the line, but those skills don't play up as much. And I think scouts are pretty good at putting those skills in perspective. So I was having a hard time imagining the kid who's going to be so attractive because you have his inch-by-inch readings that wouldn't otherwise be notable. I couldn't really think of it. The only way that kid wouldn't already be being recognized is if he doesn't have the body to be a major leaguer, and he's still not going to have the body to be a major leaguer. Yeah. The he he gives of being able to to paint the corners by practice. I mean, assuming that's the case, assuming you could you could refine your control to to that degree that you could reliably hit the corners.

you still need to be able to hit the corners at 90 miles an hour or something. It's not like if you throw 75 and you practice enough that you can actually put it on the black that you can make the majors with that skill. It's also not like scouts aren't able to tell that you're hitting the corners. It's conceivable, I guess, that scouts would never bother to watch you, that they would see you throw 77 in your warm-ups, and then they'd turn their back to you in a subtle act of protest, or they would just leave without ever seeing how well you paint the corners. So maybe if every player from age 14 on up was being constantly measured by 37 cameras and doppler technology that we would have all that data in a spreadsheet and you just

sort and you'd go oh well this guy at the top we've never looked at him and then you could go look at him and maybe that would be worth it but I don't know I have a very hard time believing that there's this class of players out there that is not getting picked up by Major League Baseball's nets. And, you know, like I always think about Joe Posnanski's idea that the Royals, when they were really bad, should have like only signed right-handed pitchers under 5'11 or something like that. Right. Because they're, you know, why not? You might as well try something crazy. It probably wouldn't work, but nothing they were doing was going to work. And so, yeah, maybe, I mean, you might plausibly make the case that there are some 5'10 right-handed pitchers who are getting overlooked, but not a lot of them. I mean, some 5'10 right-handers do get to the majors and they pitch really well. They do that because they

throw hard, have an idea what they're doing. 30 scouts probably went out and looked at him. Some of them showed interest. Somebody signed him, spent six years developing him, and because his performance at each level was good enough to merit a promotion to the next, he eventually reached the top of the game. That's how it works, and I imagine it works pretty well. Yeah, and it's not like you can out-practice the naturally skilled players either,

because the players who make the majors are not only naturally skilled players either because the the players who make the majors are not only naturally skilled but they they have put their 10 000 hours in or whatever the the number of hours and i i read uh i read the david etz epstein book the sports gene recently um it was it was really interesting and the stuff about the 10 000000 hours rule makes you kind of question it. I mean, it, it, it might be something like that on average, but for some people it's 4,000 hours for other people it's 20,000 hours. So it's, it's not really a, anything close to a hard and fast rule, but, um, the, the players who, who make the majors started out maybe with the natural skills necessary to make it, but they also put in an extraordinary amount of time. So it's not as if someone could just really outwork someone who makes the majors.

Players who make the majors worked really hard to get there no matter what their natural skills were. I met somebody the other day who played against David Wright growing up and also Ryan Zimmerman and did some showcases and was in the travel ball circle with them and said that David Wright basically had no friends. Everybody thought he was a weirdo and he was totally antisocial because all he would do is just go home and take batting practice like that's all he did all the time yeah right so it's yeah it's tough to outwork people who are are wired that way and of course the that's a partially a genetic component to whether you're willing to put those hours in is something that is to some extent hardwired um by the way that that chapter about that in the sports gene is excerpted and

available online at si if you search why mlb hitters can't hit jenny finch you can find it there so so wait wait i want to make one. Can I make one? Yeah. I would like to argue the counter now. Okay. And you mentioned the thing I wrote not that long ago about baseball offspring. And for most people who are listening who didn't read it, I'm looking at the numbers. And yes, none of you read it.

Hate you all. It's depressing when you look at the traffic numbers on an article that you wrote and you really said it's a lot less than the number of people who listen to this podcast. It's almost a betrayal. Why are you guys not reading everything we write? That's the thing that we like. This is the reason that we do it. We're much better at that. Yes.

We do the podcast so that we can subsidize the writing and got it all backwards anyway uh what i found as you'll recall ben is that if you are a major league ball player you have a one in four chance of having a child who is drafted which is incredible like isn't that incredible a one in four chance of having a kid who is drafted. And that's not even if you have a son, right? That's just just right. Exactly. You might not have any children. And yeah, you might not have a son. And this is not these are not all stars. These are like all players that i sampled 120 players that i sampled uh spread across the baseball population of like the 1978 season and one in four of them

had a kid who got drafted um anyway uh so then we broke those into different categories because as you mentioned some of these are nepotism picks. And so I wanted to basically try to filter those guys out. And you have a one in, what, I think like a one in 13 chance of having one of your kids be a major leaguer, which seems to me to be clearly not a nepotism pick. If you make it to the majors, you earned it, right? Nobody makes it to the majors as a nepotism favor um maybe i don't know i'm trying to think anybody heroes junior heroes right um that's the one i was just googling he he did right didn't he make uh let me see um yeah he made it for uh 11 games and 16 play

appearances with the Reds. Yeah. That could be one. That's a pretty compelling case. What did he hit that year? He was 1997, and before he was called up, let's see, he was playing in AA mostly. He had a 905 OPS in AA that year. And he was a third baseman. So I don't know.

But yeah, probably. Right, he was 27. Yeah. So that's a good example. Anyway, though, the point is that I was trying to filter out the nepotism picks, and that was one of the ways I did it. I was trying to filter out the nepotism picks, and that was one of the ways I did it. But one of the guys who made it to the majors was Dusty Wathen, who wasn't even drafted. And he made it to the majors.

And to be undrafted and make it to the majors is already, you know, that's a long shot. And so my guess is that Dusty Wathen probably was signed as a nepotism pick. Like my guess is that, well, I don't know. My guess when, when thinking about this at the time was that he probably was signed, that he got some contract to, you know, play on some team's short season club as a favor to his dad or because maybe not as a favor to his dad, but because, you know, they recognize the name. That's the other thing. These aren't nepotism pigs, necessarily. They're either favors, or you recognize the name, you know, he's got good bloodlines. That was the point of the article, actually, was the value of bloodlines, not the nepotism

pig. It was hardly even, why am I, I keep talking about the nepotism pig, but it was hardly mentioned in the article. It was not the point of the article. Anyway, Dusty Wathen. My suspicion is that if Dusty Wathen's dad weren't a big leaguer, he never would have been signed. That's just my guess. And his name did get him signed, my guess is. And he did make it to the majors. And so that goes to the point that Bean is making, basically, which is that getting your foot in the door, there are certain biases that determine who gets their foot in the door. And some of the guys who

get their foot in the door end up surprising everybody and upending all of our expectations and making it to the majors regardless. So if Bean's point is that there are some guys out there, a handful of guys out there who don't get noticed, who would get noticed if they excelled in some aspect of the game that is more easily measured than observed by scouts, and of those handful of guys, an even smaller handful might develop under the tutelage of big league coaches and nutritionists and strength trainers and pro baseball aspirations and paychecks

could develop into something. And so that seems reasonable. I guess I would say it seems reasonable that some players, a very small number, a very, very small number, that you could imagine that there's some all-star in the year 2042 who owes his career to Major League Baseball, advanced media, but not sport-changing by any means is what I would say. but not sport changing by any means is what I would say. Yeah, and you'd have to devote a lot of extra resources to those players. I mean, Matt's question about why the Astros didn't just give that $6 million they gave to Appel to 100 unknowns,

maybe they would have gotten a good player out of those 100 unknowns but they would have had to somehow have four more farm teams also just to, just to play those unknowns and then coaches for time and money and effort you have to pour into turning him into a polished baseball player so that's something to consider also um just generally i mean i would my my guess about the stat cast stuff at the major league level is that i mean i'd be surprised not shocked but surprised if it completely changed our evaluation of of players even of a a small group of players I mean my my guess is that uh it will refine our understanding of players and and I'm just just assuming that we actually get access to everything and we get to see anything or the people who do. correct that uh that this will allow us to have much greater precision and much less uncertainty so that we can come to conclusions in in smaller sample sizes but i would i would guess that it

wouldn't completely change that many evaluations of players because even if you even if you compare like the the evaluations of really dumb defensive systems, the ones that are not, say, based on, you know, batted ball charting or anything. They're just based on, you know, the pitcher and the batter and maybe certain guys' ground ball rates or something. But it's not actually based on video scouting and charting where every ball went and turning the field into zones. Something like total zone, I think, correlates pretty well with something like UZR or DRS over a large enough sample. And I would expect it to be the same sort of thing. The zone systems are more accurate, more precise. They give you the answer in a smaller sample than something that is not based on that methodology. And StatCast would work much the same way, that we would just have smaller error bars on our evaluations, that we'd come to the numbers more quickly, but that they wouldn't necessarily be, you know,

a negative instead of a positive in all that many cases. Well, Ben, I don't know that I agree with that. I wouldn't rule anything out. And I'm not sure I agree with that at the major league level. But my, my, my bigger point is that, um, that it's not that useful in changing that, that at the major league level, I think it could tell us a lot about the interaction of these players at the non major league level, I think it could tell us a lot about the interaction of these players. At the non-major league level, the further away from it you get, the less it matters. I mean, it's such a different sport that performance bowling assessment technology so that you can really measure how good all these guys are at bowling before you draft them for your baseball team. It just how they bowl isn't all that important. And to a certain degree, how they play baseball in high school isn't all that important either. I mean, it's important, but not all that important,

as you can see by, you know, the original question that, you know, was asked about athleticism and whether anybody can play baseball. So anyway. catchers maybe even more than pitchers right because we had we had no equivalent for for you know catcher framing stats prior to pitch fx we just didn't know that it was that valuable we didn't know which guys were good at it and what it could be worth and the fact that it could turn a catcher who didn't look like a good player because he didn't hit very well into a valuable player because he framed very well with With pitchers, that's not really the case, right? Like we've learned a ton about pitchers and pitching from PitchFX, but is there a pitcher who we now know is good because of PitchFX

who we wouldn't have known was good before? It doesn't seem like there is really. I mean, you know, a pitcher who doesn't allow runs and strikes guys out is a good pitcher. Everyone always knew he was a good pitcher. Now we can tell more quickly, maybe, now that a guy is a good pitcher or has the potential to be because of what he throws. But there aren't really a lot of guys who it completely changed our evaluation of, at least that are coming to my mind right now. But I hope it does completely change our minds about certain players.

It would be more interesting. Good point. Okay, and by the way, I figured out why that Billy Bean op-ed was in the Wall Street Journal. It was part of a series. It was called Journal Reports colon Leadership. So they had a bunch of thought leaders in various fields

write about the future of whatever their field was. So Taylor Swift wrote about the future of music on the same day that Billy Beane wrote about the future of sports. Huh. Tomorrow's topic. Yes, okay. Did you say it was all going to be like Smash Mouth I haven't read it yet I hope so

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I mean, when I was a kid, I just remember there being records broken every year. There were like eight to ten records that we paid attention to every year. You know, like the guy who had i remember eddie murphy breaking the home runs uh sorry uh most times hitting home runs from both sides of the plate in one game record that was a that was a record we paid attention to man