Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 78: Quantifying Coaches/Why Some Fielders Look Better Than They Are/How Do We Know What Pitchers Should Weigh?

Episode Date: November 7, 2012

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the importance of coaches, defensive stats, and how we know whether pitchers should gain or lose weight, with guest appearances by Colin Wyers and Doug Thorburn.

Good morning and welcome to episode 78 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg and in Long Beach, California, you are Sam Miller. How are you, Sam? Good, Ben. How are you? Good. Thank you.

We have a full show planned, possibly even a good show planned. It is a reader email show, more so than yesterday's even, which was also a reader email show. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk about one question, just the two of us. And then we're going to call Colin Wires to talk about another question. And then we're going to call Doug Thorburn to talk about another question. And we're going to do it all live, although it won't be live when you're listening to it. So wait a minute. Yes.

You're saying that we're going to do this in one take, no edits? Yes, one giant just continuous. They are going to listen to the ringing of the... Yes, that's the plan. We'll see. This is like that scene in Children of Men. Right, yes. It's our artistic vision for this podcast. It's pretty ambitious, but we'll see how it goes.

So the first question is from Kevin from Toronto, at FlightSimGeek on Twitter. And Kevin says, good evening or morning, Ben and Sam. I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to your baseball discussions as I start my mornings, whether they include crickets or not. My question has to deal with evaluating the performance of a baseball coaching staff in general. It's been generally accepted that a manager is responsible for maybe one or two wins over the course of a season. Growing up in the mid-80s and the early 90s, I remember hearing many baseball people and broadcasters praising certain coaching staffs or coaches for their expertise.

and broadcasters praising certain coaching staffs or coaches for their expertise. Specifically, I remember the Oakland A's staff of Dave Duncan, Dave McKay, and Renee Latchman being heralded for their skill in dealing with the team. Given the advent of more advanced metrics, do you think there might be a way to quantify one coach's skill over another given a time period? It cannot be as simple as looking at, say, one pitching staff's ERA from one year to another and saying a coach was more effective. I realize that interpersonal skills and teaching methods cannot be easily measured

for performance evaluation either. How well a staff performs given the general direction and responsibilities given by a manager and organization would also have to be factored in. I asked this question for currently in Toronto. There has been a coaching exodus, which has confused many fans and media. John Farrell's exit has been something most have been resigned to accept. He was a rookie manager who did a decent job with the injuries to the team and the youth on the roster. His leaving, while unexpected, has been met with the attitude that a manager is just a manager. Brian Broderfield and Tory Leveille's departure from the Blue Jays, however,

has been harder to pin down. They have a good reputation here and elsewhere for being quality coaches. I guess this is all just a long-winded way of saying, is there any way for us to know how valuable a coach is to an organization other than what we hear? Coaches like Don Cooper and Rick Peterson are known for being good. How good is good? Can we measure it?

Is a good staff worth one to two wins over a season or less? That was long-winded. What a great question. Yes. So good that we almost can just let it stand for itself. But we'll try to answer it, I guess. Yeah, he did cover some things that we would probably have said. Yes.

I think that there are probably two difficulties to pinning this down. I think one is that when you're trying to demonstrate significance, you usually want to show a big enough effect that it doesn't look, noise. And I think there's just a sort of a general, you know, desire, certainly, I think, in the punditry. But also, if you're going to introduce a stat, a new stat or something, there tends to be a desire to show a larger effect than a manager is probably capable of. I mean, when you look at, for instance, to talk about the antithesis of a credible stat for this sort of a thing, but along the same lines, when you look at the way that manager of the year voting goes, it goes to the manager whose team outperformed expectations enough the most. And so Buck Showalter will get it because the Orioles outperformed expectations this year by probably 25 wins. And the implication is that he's responsible for those 25 wins or a large portion of them.

And in fact, there's just absolutely no way that a manager would be responsible for 25 wins. He's maybe responsible for, I don't know, I mean, I guess everybody might have a sort of a different gut feeling about what that number is. But, you know, maybe somewhere between a half on the low end and I don't know, six maybe on the very high end. And so it's you've already like there's there's probably going to be a tendency for any such measures to strain credibility if they go above that. Now, if you get a more realistic number, which is like, say, maybe two wins, well, we, you know, Mike Fast showed two wins for catcher framing. So those are the sorts of incremental improvements that can be shown. The difference, though, is that catch capture framing is a very narrow and specific skill, whereas coaching involves so many variables. I mean, what coaching essentially is, is the

management of billions of variables. It is not one skill. It is the balance of many, many skills. So it becomes much more like trying to measure, you know, it's sort of like more like trying to measure the value of a basketball player where it's hard to know exactly who's responsible for each play because everybody's moving around, everything is interrelated, and it's hard to know exactly how to assign credit. So, I mean, I think for those reasons, it's going to be probably impossible for quite some time and maybe forever to get any sort of precise figure. I think the best you can hope for is just to sort of see which direction things point. And, you know, it might just be that you don't really need to know whether a manager is or a pitching coach or a hitting coach is worth one win or three simply to know that he is either positive or negative might be enough. And it might be the case that there's just not that much variety or range between the good and the bad that simply knowing whether he is good or he is bad is enough.

Yeah, you and I both abstained from manager of the year voting in the baseball prospectus end of season awards, I guess because we both felt that we didn't have the perspective or the inside knowledge to evaluate a manager beyond that very basic manager of a team who exceeded or fell short of expectations. So I guess you and I would probably not be people who are ever particularly confident in our ability to evaluate the impact of a coach, which, well, I was about to say that it would likely be smaller than a manager's, but I guess that's not necessarily the case. It could be. It could be.

It could be much. I think it could be much greater. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there have certainly been instances of pitching coaches who teach a certain pitch. Kevin mentioned Dave Duncan, who's known for that. And so there seems to be some value to that. There were some attempts to quantify Leo Mazzoni's impact on the Braves when he was the pitching coach there, just kind of looking at what pitchers did before and after

they were with him. And that seemed to pick something up, but then he went on and it didn't seem to stay consistent after he switched teams, I don't think. And so, I don't know, it's something that I think would be very difficult to isolate because, I don't know, you'd have to have a perfectly controlled environment almost where nothing else changes except the coach. And that never really happens because players move around and they age and other coaches come in and go. And I don't know, it seems like a pretty tall order ever to quantify that from the outside. But I'm sure you could get some sense from the inside. Okay, just gut feeling. Manager, pitching coach, hitting instructor, and head trainer. Rank those four on impact.

I guess I would say trainer. I don't know exactly the extent that a trainer alone is is responsible for a team's health but i guess i would say at least potentially trainer uh and then kind of leaning towards pitching coach and then manager and then hitting coach yeah i think i would probably go with just total guess, gut feeling. Maybe I would go pitching coach, manager, trainer, hitting coach. I mean hitting coach to me seems like a distant fourth. Yeah, I mean many teams now have two of them. Which shows how important they are. I don't know where I was going with that.

I don't know where I was going with that. I don't know. I think bullpen coaches are by far the most important of all the coaches. I think bullpen catchers are the most important. Actually, who was it? Jeff Passan might have written a profile of a bullpen catcher and how important he was to, I don't know, the giant success or something. And I didn't. I mean, I'm sure that it was a fine piece but i i just read the i basically just read the headline and saw what it was about and i sort of chuckled because i would never have

thought to write that like i said it was probably a great piece but i would never have thought to write that piece yeah uh okay should we we try the first portion of our interactive element here? Let's try it. Okay. So we're going to bring on Colin wires, uh, who has warned me that his voice is not in peak shape tonight. He was not sure he'd be able to go, but I told him that we don't talk for that long and that you guys are used to putting up with listening to me every day. So it would probably be okay. So let's call him and we'll listen to the dialing and hopefully the answering. Here it goes.

Just out of curiosity, why? Why are we doing it this way? I don't know. Maybe we'll edit it out. I don't hear any dialing. I do. I see Colin's picture. Hello.

We have Colin. Hello, Colin. Hello. Hi, Colin. Hello. now by Colin Wires, who is BP's director of research, which is a fancy term for our head stat guy and the guy who is usually responsible if I sound smart by accident sometimes. So we have brought Colin on because of his expertise in the area of this particular question that I'm about to read. And it's from a listener named Alan.

And he says, I always read and hear how Adam Jones and Curtis Granderson are considered great center fielders by the mass of casual fans. But sabermetrically, they are below average. When I watch Jones, he glides through the outfield, making every catch seem effortless. What do the sabermetrics say that we cannot see on a daily basis as I watch every game? So, Colin, if you can manage to speak full sentences, I have warned everyone that your voice is not in peak condition. I guess, what do you see about maybe jones and granderson in particular

you have written a lot about defense and you have come up with bp's fielding system and you know these things granderson's an interesting case in that last year there was a theory floating around that it was stolen plays, that the left fielder was rangy enough to get to a lot of balls that the typical left fielder wasn't able to make, and the stealing play is away from Granderson. This year, the Yankees have played a bunch of guys out in left who would not necessarily qualify as great fielders in the minds of most people. So you're saying that Banez is not Brett Gardner's equal in left field?

No, no, no. The theory was somewhat plausible with Gardner out there, and I thought it was interesting. With a Banez out there, it's really hard to argue that Ibanez was out there stealing a bunch of plays that the typical left fielder wouldn't make. He was probably making a lot of plays that the typical left fielder would make. They just weren't outs. Fair enough. So it's really hard to say what's happened with Granderson,

but we have two years in a row where he just isn't making the level of plays that you'd expect from him. And with our best convenient theory of plays stealing out of the way, it's possible there's something about the center field in Yankee stadium. That's, um, behaving oddly, either affecting how Granderson plays or affecting how we record things. Um, other than that, though, the best estimate is he's just lost a step and hasn't figured out how to compensate for it.

That said, fielding metrics are unstable. So even with two years of bad performance, we should not be terribly surprised to see him bounce back. Jones actually doesn't rate that poorly in BP's system. He's modestly above average, not great. And assuming we take that at face value, which again, you know, there is a lot of uncertainty in fielding metrics. I'm not suggesting anyone needs to take a few years of any fielding metric that seriously yet. But assuming we take it at face value, the best explanation for what the metric is seeing that you're not seeing when you watch a game is the plays that Jones isn't

making. Because it's really easy to see the plays a player does make and to see how he looks when making them. It's a lot more difficult to see the plays where another player with better defensive skills would have made the play where someone with slightly lesser skills doesn't get to the ball.

What you have to remember, especially with outfielders, is that, especially when you're watching on TV, but when you're watching in a game too, the TV sort of simulates where your eye goes when you're at a ball game, is that you don't see the fielder's initial reaction to the ball. You don't see how he's positioning himself. You don't see how he's positioning himself. You don't see how he's reading the ball off the bat. You don't see his, you know, first few steps,

how quickly he gets up to speed, how he's reading the ball as he starts to move. What you see is him completing the play, either making the out or trying to get the ball as it lands. So what you end up with is that you tend to judge the fielder based on how easy the play looks when you start to see him on camera. So if you have a guy that's taking a lot of bad breaks off the initial crack of the bat, who's positioning himself badly, or who takes a while to get up to speed in the outfield, he's going to look farther away from the ball when you get that initial picture of him than a better fielder in terms of initial response. So you're going to start viewing those plays that he doesn't make as plays a

normal center fielder wouldn't make. Even though you're not really comparing him to other center fielders, you're comparing him to other center fielders who got that initial read and jump on that ball. him to other center fielders who got that initial read and jump on that ball. So unless, and this is why when a scout is at a game, they're not, you know, scouting the pitcher at the same time they're really scouting the fielder. If you're trying to get a gauge on a guy's field and you want to watch him while the pitcher is working, because you get to see all these first step reaction,

you know, sort of things that you don't see on the TV set. I was going to ask you about that because someone asked me about it recently, how I would kind of weigh the defensive stats versus the scout's evaluation of a fielder. And I said something about how I would kind of, uh, trust the,

the scout initially, and then give more weight to the stats as the sample size increased, I guess. And then I wasn't exactly sure where, uh, at what point I would take the stats over the scouts if ever. so I, take the stats over the scouts if ever um so i wonder when you would say that that point is if there is a point let me ask a question where are we getting these scouts from uh well i mean presumably professional scouts we're we're stat guys who work for teams now it's it's hard to say without actually having

access to large aggregated amount of scouting data like teams have um because especially for pro guys what you tend to get is a handful of isolated reports from beat writers here and there. And it's really hard to get a gauge on how a player is viewed from a scouting perspective from where we are in the analytic community. And it's really especially hard to aggregate these things in a meaningful way to compare them to the more quantitative data we have. There have been some efforts like Tango's fan scouting report, which I'm very skeptical of because as I said, there's a lot of things that you don't get to see from the normal fans perspective because you're not watching the fielder when he does his you know his first

step or his reaction and those are all things explicitly graded in the fan scouting report so you know it's a question of well where are these ratings coming from if people aren't watching these things? And there's also concerns that, you know, you're not getting a fan scouting report independent of fielding metrics, especially given the typical voter pool for Tango's poll tends to lean more heavily towards people who tend to visit statistically inclined websites. You know, so there's a concern of cross-contamination there. Yeah. Well, let's say that you work for a team, but you don't have access to field effects or anything fancier

than the publicly available defensive systems, statistical systems, but you are able to view scouting reports by everyone who's filed a report for that organization on that player. I guess, at what point do you, I mean, how do you balance the two? Or is there a point at which you would trust the stats in a large enough sample size over the professional scouts whose job it is to decide how good someone is at fielding i think there is i think it's a pretty large point though and then the question is is that fielder the same fielder that he was when he compiled all those

stats because the aging curve for fielding is very different from the aging curve for hitting. It's pretty much a downhill glide. There are very few players who enter the major so early that they do so before they hit their defensive peak. Because it's a lot of speed-based and reaction-based skills in fielding, and those are really the first to go. Developing additional muscle, which helps with things like power, really doesn't, it actually doesn't help fielding at all.

In fact, quite the opposite. There is perhaps a mental component to fielding that you could say increases as a player ages, but realistically, it's almost a straight drop. Because the physical, I think, pretty much outweighs the mental there. thing pretty much outweighs the mental there. So if I have say 10 years of data on a player, I know how good a fielder he was from say age 22 to 32, right? The thing is, is I now have a reasonably large sample size. The problem is, is that he's got 10 years of living on it. If he was a center fielder at the beginning of his career, odds are he's probably, you know, either moved

to a corner or a candidate to be moved to a corner. Or maybe even first. If he's at shortstop, maybe you're looking at moving into second or third. And if you're trying to figure out which guys, say, need to be moved where, your fielding data from 10 years ago isn't going to help you with that. So unless you can find a way to do more with smaller amounts of statistical power you're always going to need that scouting data to get a a point in time snapshot of what the player's defensive talent is right now as a for an office personnel as far as evaluating what a guy has done, I would tend to take the data over the scaling after a long enough run, where I'm going to hem and haw if you try to pin me down on what long enough means. That is exactly what I did, so I sympathize. voice uh you said that we should talk briefly about adrian beltre who is renowned for his fielding skills uh whether you like fancy stats or gold gloves um he is kind of an equal opportunity

good fielder except this year for really the first time he had a below average score according to BP's fielding system. And you maybe wanted to make some sort of point about that. Well, the really easy thing to do when you're looking at fielding is to count plays. It's pretty easy to figure out. At shortstop, if you count assists, you've done a reasonable job of counting plays. You can get more complicated than that, and we certainly do. But assists is going to be very close. And if you look at what Beltre's done this year, his assist totals are very low.

Why did I say shortstop? We all know he's a third baseman. Third base also, yes, are sister even more important at third base and shortstop shortstop might actually make a make a put out from time to time unassisted um but yeah assists are really the way to measure infield plays except for at first and belt trade just doesn't have a lot compared to his peers at third base. You're talking just this season? Yeah, this season.

Career, he's got cobs of them. But this year, they're just not there. And I mean, you know, it's really difficult to speculate as to why they're not there. And it's possible that it has something to do with the distribution of balls that Texas saw. But it's also possible that he's just not making plays.

And again, in one year of data, I would be very hesitant of trying to ascribe a reason to that. But, you know, the way we have our ratings set up is we look at how many plays the guys make and pretty much go from there. We do put some effort into figuring out things like ground ball, fly ball distribution of a team and park factors and things like that. But we really put the emphasis on plays. plays. And you know, it's, sometimes you get results that look weird. And you have to ask,

you know, how well does that result approximate what happened in reality, we believe that the system we have allows us to get the best picture on the long term because you get rid of a lot of the little biases and things that seep in when you try to get too clever with the data. And it seems that a lot of people are resistant to the idea that someone could just have a bad year on defense without really a change in true talent, right? I mean, no one is shocked if someone has a weird BABIP year or kind of a down year on offense. I don't know if that's true. I think a lot of people tend to react more strongly to short-term changes in player.

Like, I remember back in May when everyone was talking about how Josh Hamilton was the best baseball player in the American League and how he was going to win the MVP. And I think this was, like, the month after somebody else had gotten that accolade. You know, yeah, I think people overreact to short-term... Yeah, I think people overreact to short-term changes in a player's performance a lot more strongly than I think the evidence bears out. Because I think true talent changes much more slowly than local fluctuations in performance.

Guys get hot, guys get cold. The thing about fielding is, is one, we are really bad at measuring it compared to offense. So, I mean, I'm not trying to, you know, not trying to say people shouldn't be skeptical of fielding metrics when they disagree from a player's long-term performance. But at the same time, you're right.

I mean, you know, we do recognize there is variation in a player's offensive performance. And compared to offense, there are a lot fewer chances to measure fielding over the course of the season. So, you know, if you believe in things like slumps and hot streaks, So, you know, if you believe in things like slumps and hot streaks, then it's, there's, over the course of 162 games, there's a lot less chance for a defensive cold streak to even out than there is for an offensive cold streak. Because there just aren't as many chances there. So, I mean, there is reason to think that fielding is somewhat more variable than offense um at the same time though yeah we are worse at measuring it so you know I mean I'm not trying to say people shouldn't be skeptical of those kind of results absolutely they should be but I I do think you know you should be at least open to the possibility that the metric is picking up something.

All right. Well, thank you. Sam, do you have anything to add? No. Okay. All right, then. Thanks for coming on despite the voice and everything. Well, thanks for having me. Okay.

We'll have you back again next time we need concrete answers to topics that we usually wildly speculate about. I will let you go now. All right. Thank you. Good night. Okay. All right. That was a full show. Yes, and it's not over yet.

Now we're going to do our next call. This is exciting. All right, let's see how this goes. Calling Doug Thorburn. Bring, bring, bring, bring. Hello. Hello, Doug. How are you doing? Excellent. Hi, Doug. Good to be here, guys. We are joined now by Doug Thorburn, BP's pitching mechanics guru and expert on all things pitching, who listens to the show or does a very convincing imitation of someone who listens to the show. So we're flattered.

Oh, every night. Oh, every night. So we have brought you on to talk about a question from a reader, which pertains to pitching. So this question is from Matt, and he asks, Hey, Ben and Sam, I know that there was a lot made of pitchers getting out of shape and not living up to what the ball club believes is their potential. John Lackey, Fernando Valenzuela. But last year, Tim Lincecum came into Giants spring training 15 pounds lighter due to not eating In-N-Out burger.

And Dave Rigetti said he was too light. I was wondering if there were other pitchers that have lost their potential, according to the ball club, due to getting thinner. And if a pitcher has an ideal BMI, that would help his potential. to getting thinner. And if a pitcher has an ideal BMI, that would help his potential. So I, off the top of my head, couldn't think of a whole lot of people except for Carlos Zambrano, whose weight has fluctuated a bit and had some notable weight loss and I think pitched worse. And there was some speculation that maybe he needed that extra weight to pitch well. But anyway, my perspective means nothing here, which is why we have you to talk to us. So

tell us things. Well, I mean, it is so much a case by case basis. But I talk a lot about like the idea of functional strength. And I'm also big on flexibility and it's definitely kind of a give and take between one and the other. So, I mean, when you see guys who either drop a lot of weight or they add a lot of weight, it's not always an easy telltale sign as far as what they're going to how they're going to react to that. And I mean, I can think of guys like i mean lackey's a good example actually someone who obviously gained a decent amount of weight this year and it wasn't a huge amount but it looked like it limited his flexibility a little bit uh which is going to have a ripple effect on his torque is going to you know end up resulting in him not throwing quite as hard and it was a really small drop in his velocity it wasn't a real big one

um but those kind of things could definitely be related but then when you got someone like lincecum dropping weight i mean lincecum is actually a good example of this because he kind of he relies a lot on the flexibility thing because he has all that upper body load and everything but he also requires a lot of strength especially especially lower body strength. Yeah, you've written about him at least once, maybe more than once. Yeah, exactly. I kind of find him fascinating because you look at the guy, you know, he looks like he's maybe 170 pounds dripping wet, and you wouldn't expect him to be able to do what he does, but he's really a picture of mechanical efficiency, assuming he's got the strength to be able to do that. So if someone like that drops 15 pounds and he loses some of that strength, it could have a big ripple effect.

And at the same time, he has to be careful not to overdo it on the strength or eat too many burgers and ends up losing his flexibility. For him, he's really sensitive on both ends. Whereas guys who don't rely on that crazy momentum and all that crazy leg strength, they're not going to be as sensitive to weight loss. But with weight gain, you often do get kind of the flexibility issue. So I guess, I mean, if a pitcher lost weight but didn't lose strength, could that still potentially be a problem just because he's kind of shaped differently and and his weight is distributed differently and and everything is

just fine-tuned so perfectly that throwing one thing off can throw everything off even if his kind of overall fitness and strength has improved? I think definitely. I mean, any little adjustment can have that kind of a ripple effect. But I've definitely seen guys who look scrawny but are actually really strong. I've seen other guys who are just really imbalanced, like upper body versus lower body, and you wouldn't think they'd ever be able to coordinate the delivery consistently, but they're still able to pull it off. So it's such a boring answer, but it really does break down to the individual and understanding the individual context. And someone like Lincecum, the only reason he is

so effective is because of all these extreme mechanical things that he does. And that requires the extra strength that requires that extra flexibility. So with someone like him, I think that his conditioning and his diet and all of that is a little more sensitive than someone who, I mean, total contrast. Let's look at somebody like CeCe Sabathia, who is a large human by any means, and yet he still has an incredible flexibility. You don't usually see 300-pound guys like that or guys who are close to 300 pounds who have that kind of upper body, just that flexibility to get that torque. He's crazy. He's the type of player that he might wear his clothes kind of like David Wells, all saggy and everything, but he actually is really athletic.

He knows what he's doing. So someone like CeCe, I would almost, I feel like his baseline is stronger because he doesn't have to worry about functional strength so much. He has plenty of the strength. But his flexibility for a big man like that is just crazy. But I'm sure that he pays pretty good attention to his nutrition. It's definitely one of those things that's underappreciated.

Is a guy's weight, is it really something that, I guess what I'm saying is, does each player sort of have an optimal weight or can they really adjust? I mean is it something that they can control effectively? Can a pitcher add and subtract weight at will with the right nutritionist or does each kind of human being have their own sort of preferred girth and that's sort of where they want to be. They want to find that natural level. I think it's the second one. I think that everyone has their own specific point that's sort of the ideal point and that's what everybody strives for.

And when they're not there, they're just at sort of a fraction of that level or they're at a percentage of their efficiency of what they can do. And a lot of times, you hear the stories every single spring training guy shows up best shape of his life. And, you know, one out of every hundred times that turns out to be true. But if he's in a case where a player actually has peak athleticism, peak conditioning, he's in what he would actually consider to be the best shape of his life. With some pitchers, you'll see a difference, but it won't always be positive. I mean, one guy could even increase strength,

and maybe he tries to start leaping like Timmy, for example, and all of a sudden his timing becomes messed up. The thing I notice the biggest for me is the functional strength because without functional strength, the guy has no balance. He's not going to be able to sustain posture, and that's the essence to repeating the delivery. If he doesn't have lower body strength, he's not going to be able to sustain posture. And that's the essence to repeating the delivery. If he doesn't have lower body strength, he's not going to get the same stride every time.

If he doesn't have upper body strength, he's not going to be able to sustain the same arm slot or the same spine position. So he's going to be kind of all over the place. When I think of really strong pitchers, the guys that come to mind aren't even like the big yoked guys. It's's guys like cole hamels or or matt kane who look for you know better or worse like pretty much like a normal human being but their ability to repeat the delivery with the with basically no head movement and they have incredible torque incredible flexibility they do the same thing every stinking time they put the ball exactly where they want to to me that's functional strength those are some of the strongest players in the game so i was gonna ask i mean i guess with mechanics that the general attitude is if you see a problem and you can catch it early and

correct it like after a guy is drafted or when he's still in the lower levels then maybe it it makes sense but by the time he gets to the majors or if he's been in the lower levels, then maybe it makes sense. But by the time he gets to the majors or if he's been in the majors for a while, if there's a mechanical issue that you think might lead to injury down the road, but he's been successful with it, it seems like the prevailing philosophy is if it's not broke yet, at least don't fix it. And that tinkering with it could do more harm possibly. So is that basically the same attitude with weight or body composition? Is that if a guy has succeeded at a certain weight level, it doesn't make sense to try to change that? Because I know, I mean, when fans see a Sabathia or Wells they

think well he's good but what if he were in better shape maybe he'd be more durable and he'd last even longer and and also it seems like there's a real bias for prospects coming up to want to put weight on them almost always so I guess if a guy has succeeded at a certain weight level, as long as he's not exceeding that level, do you think it would ever be advisable to try to get him to lose weight in the hopes that it would improve him, even despite the risks that it might make him worse somehow? I think a change like that, especially at the major league level, would be much more common than a mechanical change. I think there's a lot of fear with the mechanical changes. They don't want to do the wrong thing or maybe a guy was going to get hurt regardless because of workloads or whatever.

But because they made this mechanical change, now that's going to take the blame. It's very much risk aversion to just not mess with the major league level, especially with things like timing. to just not mess with the major league level, especially with things like timing. For example, I think every pitcher could be better if he had more momentum, and most pitchers would do better with more leg strength. However, once they get to the majors and they have their timing down,

if they've already shown success, I wouldn't necessarily mess with that. I think with the nutrition stuff, it's easier for them to make a change because there's less pressure on it, and if a guy kind of adjusts and puts on a few pounds, you might see a performance change, but you won't necessarily blame an injury for that. So I think there's more interest in doing that. However, with the mechanics stuff, yeah, guys will definitely be very careful. And it's definitely

not a blanket statement as far as not touching mechanics at the big league level, but for the most part, they're hands off. The players are definitely expected to have already reached that point, whereas minor league nutrition and minor league conditioning, that stuff is a joke. A lot of these players don't really get what they need until either in spring training or when they're working with the training staff to really understand what they need. And with the teams, it comes down to a cost situation of is it i guess was it russell's article just recently about uh yeah about diet i love that he approached that

and just started asking these questions as far as is this an area of efficiency that teams are missing where they could be ponying up a little bit of money and actually seeing great performance from their guys even if it means they spend a little bit on guys who don't end up making the major league roster, isn't that worth it? And my contention is yes, but, you know, I'm kind of biased that way. Sam, got anything else? Nope. All right.

Well, then we will wrap up what has been a very long episode and a good episode because we didn't talk that much and other people did. And, Doug, you'll only have to listen to the first half hour or so of it unless you want to hear yourself speak which if i were you i probably would uh so thank you for for joining us and we'll be back with a shorter much less exciting show on thursday