Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 862: Jeff Sullivan on This Season’s Noteworthy Novelties

Episode Date: April 14, 2016

Ben, Sam, and FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan banter about ballplayer humor, then talk about players (including Garrett Richards, Starlin Castro, and Stephen Strasburg) who are doing something notably different so far this season.

He's different and you don't care who knows it Something about it, not the same He's different, that's how it goes And he's not gonna play your gosh darn game I'm different, I don't care who knows it Something about it, not the same I'm different, that's how it goes Ain't gonna play no boss, babe

Hello and welcome to episode 862 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and our beloved Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello, Sam. Yo. We are joined today by one of our favorite writers and internet acquaintances, Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. The reason we want to have Jeff on, other than that he's a delightful human being, is that he's probably the person who is most adept at picking up on player changes at the

start of a new season and also the most prolific. And if a player debuts a new pitch or has a new batting stance or decides to start eating Ethiopian food, Jeff is on it. And we want to have him on to talk about some of the new things that he's noticed this year. Hello, Jeff. Hi, Ben. Hi, Sam. Hello. We didn't say hi before. No, that was a long intro before the hi. That was.

Did you want to banter about something, Sam? I do. I have banter that I'd like to run by both of you guys. Ben, because I've talked about this topic with you before. Jeff, because you're funny. Ben and I have talked about baseball players being not funny, just as a general rule, maybe the least funny class of people. And I know that I'm in danger of by pushing this further. I'm very much in danger of sounding bitter and awful. And I do I don't want to begrudge ballplayers their own personal sense of humor. I have no problem with ballplayers having poor delivery of jokes. My problem is when, is basically with baseball journalism that sees telling me these

jokes or describing these jokes to me as part of their job when they're clearly bad jokes. And it feels like, you know, you should tell me that they're bad jokes, not that they're good jokes. Anyway, there is an article that is right in the sweet spot of this topic in the San Francisco Chronicle that was trying to answer the question of who the funniest ballplayer in both the Giants and A's clubhouses are. And it's 1600 words of descriptions of who is funny and why they're funny. And there is not one funny thing in the article, not a single funny thing. And it is like, it is basically going around and asking people, who do you think is funny in this clubhouse? And then them describing who is funny

and why. But it's like the least funny person in the world is describing a joke that the second least funny person in the world told him. Like not even repeating the joke, but like literally describing the joke, like it started with an anecdote, like that kind of stuff. And it is just the perfect example of why intentional humor in baseball is so fraught. And I just wanted to read you just so that you get a sense of what this article had to work with, the material that it was given. I'm just going to start reading, okay? Sure.

All right. Only in a baseball clubhouse can a game of chess turn funny. That's what happened on one of the many long and monotonous days of spring training during a match between A's pitching prospect Sean Manea and J.B. Wendelkin. A couple of teammates found humor in it. Then a half dozen. Then 20 ballplayers were offering hearty, cynical laughter. Quote, when you get all these people around you criticizing your every move, you freak out,

Manea said. We were under pressure and making silly mistakes. I'd have my pawn in position to take the queen, and I didn't do it. It wouldn't have been so bad if we had made the right moves, but you've got to do whatever you can to blow off steam. So, Sean Manea, one of the funniest guys in the A's clubhouse, didn't take the queen. Such hijinks. So, what we're supposed to believe is that Sean Manea can't even play casual chess under a stressful high leverage environment and he's supposed to take a major league mound for the Oakland Athletics?

It's funny. It's funny. Yeah. No, it's ironic. Irony is often the source of great humor. It's the, I'll let you continue. All right. One more. Because a pie in the face is always funny. True. That's true. Reddick has been targeting teammates since 2012. At least those interviewed on live TV after providing a walk-off win.

Quote, we started with shaving cream, Reddick said, quote, and upgraded to whipped cream, end quote. Now that's funny. That's actually in the article. As part of the quote or a comment by the author? By the author. Oh. And whipped cream is infinitely less funny than shaving cream in a cream pie.

Yeah. Self-evidently, whipped cream is the least funny of all pies you get in your face. Exactly. Pie ranking. Okay. Funniest pie, marmalade. Is marmalade in a bowl? Is that a pie?

Well, I think a savory pie would actually be the funniest. Gum. Plate of chewed gum. Right? And you just smash it. With all the beards going on these days. A lot of beards. Gum pie.

There's also another, this is not from the article, but another player, another player has used Careless Whisper as his walk-up music, which to me suggests that ballplayers aren't just not funny but actually don't understand the concept of what makes a thing funny. They think that because Careless Whisper was funny when Josh Reddick did it once, that it is simply universally always funny to use Careless Whisper, not realizing that it is the scarcity of the resource that often provides value,

and that it was funny because nobody had thought about this song for so long. I don't even need it. I'm not going to explain why it's funny. You can write an article about it. So you give Reddick credit for being funny the first time. I do. He's a baseball player. I do give Reddick credit.

That was a good choice it was particularly good because uh it it really is particularly unfit for reddick reddick is like basically like a um a wrestling heel like in his his sort of character that he plays he like goes around and he'll just randomly shove a person in the clubhouse like he's he's always looks he looks at you like he's really mad he's got this beard that makes him look really mad. And so yeah, Careless Whisper was a good choice for him. Suspiciously good. You know what today is? It's the one month anniversary of a post that Jeff Sullivan wrote about Josh Reddick. He wrote about how he is not like Willie Bloomquist. We're probably not

going to talk about that post today. That did big traffic. The headline did big traffic. Always throwing the Willie Bloomquist in for... It was actually two Willie Bloomquist posts in one day, as a matter of fact, although that was a Josh Reddick post. Do you think that baseball players are just still making Borat jokes?

Oh, yeah, completely. I mean, Borat is still making Borat jokes? Oh yeah, completely. Oh no, definitely. I mean, Borat is still making Borat jokes. One of the examples of a very funny ballplayer in this article was somebody who does a Matt Foley motivational speaker impression. Well, that brought the podcast to a standstill. God, I'm so bummed out. But i guess if you think about it sort of like pseudo evolutionarily baseball players don't need to have developed a sense of humor and like how many how many arrogant successful jocks do you know well let's stop there how many arrogant successful

jocks do you know but then beyond that what what reason would they have to ever have developed a sense of humor it's just not something that they need to have in their quiver because they can just get through with with uh with their skill and so you get to this high level and like you know maybe brandon mccarthy developed a sense of humor because he was crap for 10 years and he was constantly hurt i don't know i don't know why he should be the uh the lucky one but it's just not something that they need and so then it's made evident when they try to give us these like behind the scenes clips of players or when they try to do commercials and you know every team tries to do funny commercials now right and it's something i don't know when it started when it

caught on but i always i was raised on knowing that the mariners had funny commercials i know the a's have a funny campaign or the giantsants have a funny campaign, but they're always terrible. The deliveries are always so bad, it's like they're anti-acting. And I don't understand how inhuman you have to be to not understand the very basic concept of delivering one line, one line, and sound like a person when doing it. So now the joke in some of these commercials is not just the punchline, but it's how horribly the punchline is delivered, as if it's like, look at this, look at this thing, try to act like it's a human being. Now, buy tickets

for the season. Season tickets is what they're called. Then they try to sell you season tickets. It's bad. The origin story of every funny person is that you did it because you needed a defense mechanism because you were such a loser, right? So that's what you're saying. That's basically what you're saying.

Yeah. So when you address me as a funny person, you're saying that I'm the biggest loser out of all of us. I get it, Tim. No comment. Let's do the rest of this podcast. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So if any baseball player does become funny, that would probably be a negative indicator about his future performance because it would suggest that he had to become funny in order to remain a major league baseball player. They are. I actually think that ballplayers are reasonably, you know, they're reasonably funny. They just can't deliver a joke. They can't do humor. They're funny enough on their own. As you know, we talked about Andy McCauley is the rare writer who sees the sort of more subtle humor that is present in, you know, in a baseball atmosphere.

It's just they're not punchlines. They're not jokes. They're not intentional. Once you say action, that's when they fall apart, right? It's the performative aspect of trying to be funny that they seem so. of trying to be funny that they seem so. That's interesting. So just like with the chess,

they can perform under pressure only under one given circumstance, but they can't do anything except play baseball under pressure. It's like they're closers who can close, but you have to change the scoreboard. Like you have to put this great Potemkin village so they think it's the third inning. As commonly happens in games.

All right. Well, if any baseball player does develop a sense of humor jeff sullivan will probably post about it that's my segue into the topic of the podcast today which is how jeff sullivan posts about new things that players have done i have counted 17 posts since the start of spring training by je by Jeff about things that are new this season. I'm counting Coors Field doing something new, namely having higher fences in certain parts of the park. I'm counting hitters as a whole hitting more home runs in spring training. I will run down the names in a second just to refresh your memory. But I'm curious, as someone who is obligated to write two posts about baseball year round, regardless of whether there is any baseball to write about,

is this the easiest or best time of year for you as far as generating material? There's definitely something about the start of the season where everything feels so fresh. I was, do you remember the Simpsons episode where they had the chris the uh crusty the clown show and they brought on the wolf and i'm gonna butcher it so i'm not gonna run through the whole scene but what was it like the word of the day was quiet or silence or something and then all the all the alarms went off and the confetti came down and the wolf freaked out and then does this ring any bells anything no well okay well you get the gist but the start of the season is for i'm i feel kind of like that wolf where you just you're just over stimulated and overexcited because there's just stuff coming

in from all angles whereas like a week before there was stuff coming in from not any angles because you know spring training spring training it doesn't matter we can't really do much with it and you're kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel like spring training i thought oh doug fister he's throwing hard again no he's not he he's throwing hard again. No, he's not. He's not throwing hard again. He's bad. He's still bad. So when the season starts, it's like you get these official measurements of everything.

And so all these things you've been thinking about for six months or even things you haven't been thinking about, like Trevor Story came out of nowhere kind of for me until second half of spring training when he was a story. A story. Oh, God, stupid name. Well, and so you get all this information and you think wow this is it's rare i think to be in in this position and think there's too much to write about because usually it's like well i'm going to write another post about willie bloomquist i guess but when the season starts you don't have to because there's like actual stuff people care

about that matters that you can write about sorry willie bloomquist and so it's it's fun to be able to to gather all that and and feel like you have a backlog of material so i love the start of the season and then it gets to about a week from now and you think oh crap i used it all marge gets a job season four seven, save your tweets. So what's your favorite genre of the player change? You've written about new pitches, faster pitches, different swings slash toe taps, different directions of hitting baseballs, and probably some others. What's your favorite genre? So I'm interested in the shift era, I guess is what we can call this. It is interesting to see players who are trying to approach differently, trying to

beat the shift, but I don't think there's actually really anything that happens. You, you wrote about this, uh, last year when Mike Moustakas was beating the shifts, but he was also like the only guy who was beating the shift because everyone else got worse because it's, because it's hard to do and it makes you swing worse. So, uh, because I love pitchers and I used to pitch and I find pitching really fascinating and easier to analyze, I love when pitchers make little changes. Like Alex Wood is easy because he's thrown harder and he has his old arm angle.

So you don't even really need to analyze there. You can just say like, hey, that Alex Wood is like 2013 Alex Wood. That's good. But like new pitches are really easy and it's fun because then you get to explain that, hey, all these pitches work together. Like I guess this is only kind of a partially new pitch, but Kelvin Herrera last playoffs, literally last playoffs. He's just like, oh, by the way, I have this slider now. I didn't use it in the season, but it's October 8th now. I didn't use it on October 3rd, but now it's October 8th. So I'm going to throw this pitch

a quarter of the time. And since then he's been basically unhittable. He was using it in the playoffs and he's using it now. He used it like half the time just yesterday against the Astros. So now Kelvin Herrera, he throws 98 miles per hour and he has a change up at 90 and he has this breaking ball at like 82. That's just absurd. And it came out of nowhere. So now Kelvin Herrera is just as good as I think you'd think he should be when he just watches fastball you know so now Kelvin Herrera makes sense and uh and that's really cool because you can explain to people like oh even if he threw this breaking ball and it missed and it was a ball that doesn't matter it doesn't mean it was a bad pitch because now the hitter's thinking oh he just threw that thing at 81 oh and that's what 98 looks like and then by the time he's

thinking about what the fastball was he's missed missed it. That's a lot of fun. And do you think that most of these changes are the result of a new ability or a new way of thinking about an old ability? Like, do you think Kelvin Herrera had that pitch in his holster the entire time and just didn't think he needed to use it? Or did he suddenly get the confidence to use it because it's a better pitch now? That one's weird because he only started using it in the playoffs you think that's a really high leverage situation it's rare to see any sort of new thing show up which makes his case kind of spectacular uh i suspect because the royals were so far ahead in the standings maybe maybe this is a conspiracy theory but i feel like it was almost a plan like he was working on it constantly in the bullpen but

maybe he thought well we're ahead by so much there's no sense in me trying to use this is a conspiracy theory, but I feel like it was almost a plan. Like he was working on it constantly in the bullpen, but maybe you thought, well, we're ahead by so much. There's no sense in me trying to use this in a regular season game. I'm just going to wait and take the whole league by surprise. That's still ballsy because it might suck in games, but I guess you could find out pretty quick if it did. So,

uh, in that case, I, I think with pitchers and new pitches, especially pitchers have tried every single pitch ever. Every single pitcher you've ever talked to is probably tried a knuckleball for God's sake or maybe not a screwball, but they've tried almost everything. And for most of them, it hasn't worked or it hasn't worked well enough. And you have a case like Garrett Richards. So he's throwing a change up now and we'll

probably talk about this, but he's tried to throw a change up before and it was bad. So he didn't use it because he didn't need it because he throws 98 miles per hour with his fastball. He was like, well, I tried to change up, but it didn't do what i wanted so i'm not going to use it and i'll be fine but then this spring he was just having a casual conversation with houston street and houston street was like well you're doing it wrong here's how you do it here's how you should do it and then garrett rich was like oh okay and then he did it and he's like oh it works now i'll do this and so it just clicked and what's so interesting about pitchers like is that you have these cases like that where things can just coalesce in an instant in one afternoon they can just develop something and i don't think it really

works like that for hitters it's rare but i think it does happen with pitchers which is it makes them a little more unpredictable yeah so when you i remember your first tweet about Garrett Richards change up and, um, uh, because I'll, I'll believe anything. My first thought was, oh my gosh, Garrett Richards, he's going to be so much better now. And that's probably to the average reader. That is the subtext to any of these observations. And maybe that is the, the mental calculation they're doing in their head is like, well, now is Garrett Richards much better. Do I need to, you know, draft him or, you know, think more about him in my life? And so when I assume that you go into this, you know, knowing that most of these things turn out to be nothing and that baseball players are pretty good at finding their level and, you know, that's who they are for the most part.

at finding their level and you know that's who they are for the most part but do you also kind of in your mind overreact to these things or do you just not care if baseball players are good and so it's not even part of a thing you're thinking about like i don't know how much i don't know how much it matters to you whether you're forecasting garrett richards future correctly yeah uh it helps to not be too emotionally connected to the success of the players. But I know I was, I wasn't talking to a baseball player, but I was talking to someone who had talked to a baseball player. So it's sort of secondhand. But he was saying that in that baseball player's belief, he sees players making all these adjustments. But generally speaking, a player is what a player is and his level is his level as

as you said so you can have this adjustment that maybe you attempt but then usually an adjustment especially if you're a hitter will just open up another weakness and then the league will go after that and then you're just yourself again uh so there's an argument to be made that a lot of these adjustments just kind of allow you to tread water in kind of a different way like maybe you tread left foot heavy kind of a different way like maybe you tread left foot heavy instead of right foot heavy i don't know how to describe treading water so i think that as a fan or as someone reading especially if you're a fan of the team that has a player that's doing something different it's exciting because we're always looking for that

jose batista adjustment that or the cory kluber I don't know, where just it clicks into think now we have a star player. I think that's sort of the subtext to a lot of player analysis, baseball writing is what can we do to make this player a star? And the thing about it is there's very few stars in baseball. There's, I don't know, two, two, a team or something, three, a team. I don't know where you set the level of stars stars but fans want to get excited by these uh big adjustments or big talented players who end up being four or five or six win players or even more than that and usually that doesn't happen but uh it is fun to analyze and i think if i thought too much about the purpose of what i was doing it would probably keep me up at night because you never want to think on that level when you're writing about sports. And you do always try to caveat responsibly and not

make too much of these changes. And I think they're entertaining and informative, regardless of whether the change lasts throughout the season or makes a meaningful difference. But what percentage of these changes do you think you would look back on at the end of a season and say that continued and that mattered and that made a difference? Yeah, there are a few. I know early last year I wrote a post about, hey, Carlos Peguero is doing something different. It didn't matter, Carlos Peguero. I don't know what he's doing now.

I think he actually went to the Cardinals this spring, so I thought, oh, maybe now it's going to click because, you know, Cardinals. But it hasn't. It hasn't clicked. He was definitely doing something different, but it didn't make him good. Early last year, I wrote about, oh, maybe Anthony Goes is going to hit now. Well, no, he's not. He's Anthony Goes. He's not a good hitter at all, and he never will be.

But I like to think that maybe I'm getting a little better, maybe a little more selective. Something like Starling Castro. He's hitting now, and he's a lot more closed as a hitter than he was last season. Last season, he was standing as if he wanted to pull everything, and he was pulling a lot of baseballs. Now, I'm not very good at hitting analysis, and thankfully, there were articles I could use as sources, so it's not like I was just making stuff up. But Starling Castro is clearly trying to go up the middle, go to right center a little more this year with the Yankees. I suspect that's going to help him, and he's not going to roll over on a bunch of pitches outside.

The problem is this probably makes him a little more vulnerable to pitches in, but I think that as long as he sticks with this, I think he's going to be a better hitter, maybe a better than league average hitter, because he's got quick hands and he has enough power to have an all fields approach uh the problem is that you can never tell when a player is going to maybe maybe castro gets ahead of a ball and he pulls a couple home runs and he hits a crap out of it in yankee stadium and i think well now he's going to get in his head that he can go back to pulling and he's going to get pull heavy and you can never really predict when a player is just going to abandon something he's worked worked so hard on because he just got a different idea in his head or maybe he had a slump and and those are things you can't uh do a lot about but i think i i don't know what to write about during the season so much especially when like i don't recap games

i don't think there's a huge market for game recaps anyway. So I don't really remember what else there is to say, if that makes sense. So it goes to performance changes because they're interesting. This isn't totally on topic, but it's kind of on topic. Ballplayers know that they're going to make these changes before you do. Like they got the scoop on you for all of these, right? Do you think that ballplayers, would be better if we, how do I put this? Would they be better at projecting themselves than, you know, zips or Pocota or a projection system? Do you think that they have any extra insight into when

their good year is coming? No, I, I don't. Uh, I, I'm maybe this is an oversimplification. You've talked to more baseball players than I have, but I suspect that every baseball player thinks is going to have a good season. And, you know, in a certain sense, they do because they're in the major leagues. Usually they stick. Sometimes they don't because they're bad, but they're not bad. Anyway, I think that if you ask every player in February, March, presuming they're not coming off some major surgery or even if they are, they will have known that they put in a ton of work. They worked harder than they ever have.

Hopefully every player is working harder than he ever has every single offseason. And they're going to think they're in position to have success. But there's just so much that's, I don't know if it's out of their hands, but it's at least in multiple hands, you know, the outcome of everything

is up to at least two players instead of just one. So I don't think that players would necessarily be better because who what is freddie gallivant how is freddie gallivant going to project his obp like you mean like what with what data would he use or like what would the number be like if i had to project his projection for his obp what would i project for that projection like okay maybe this is a bad example because i don't actually know what freddie gallivant has done in his. I assume he sucks because he has a name of a bad baseball player, but let's see. Yeah, so Freddy Galvez has a career average of 240, but I would imagine because he's speedy, he can put the bat on the ball. Freddy Galvez probably thinks he's only 26 years old.

Maybe he could hit 300 someday. Oh, yeah, no. I mean, clearly, Freddy, clearly they're all going to be way over. It's just like your guys' fan projections. Don't you guys put some sort of penalty on them because everybody's too optimistic about everybody? Yeah way over. It's just like the, you know, your guys' fan projections. You have to, don't you guys put some sort of like penalty on them because everybody's too optimistic about everybody? Yeah, yeah, pants are terrible. Clearly you'd have to do like a 60% discount

just because of who you're asking. But I'm wondering if they are even more optimistic at the right times and even slightly less optimistic at the right times. Just knowing, like, I don't know if Garrett, like, does Garrett Richards think that that change-up is going to change his career? Like, you know. But does, or does he just think,

eh, we'll see where it goes. I don't know. Well, I guess we don't have to talk about Richards specifically. I think players were probably, they would be better at identifying the value of maybe of hot streaks and cold streaks, because they would maybe understand what actually went into them. Like maybe this player is nursing an injury or maybe this player is just like literally not seeing the ball very well because he's got Joe

Mauer eyes or whatever it is that's going on. Or, you know, there's off the field stuff. So they could be better about identifying that. But I suspect that they would have too many biases in their own head to do as well as just the objective numbers. And how do you discover most of these things? Because when I picture you at work, which I don't do often, but occasionally, I see you ceaselessly sorting leaderboards and perhaps exporting those leaderboards so that you can continue to sort and filter in some other piece of software. So I imagine that you spend a good deal of time doing that, but you also watch a lot of baseball and you read a lot about baseball. And sometimes you follow up on quotes that other writers get or observations that they make. So what's the origin for most of your work about changes? Yeah, sometimes it's deliberately hunting for numbers

of interest. And that can be dangerous because then you're sort of introducing a statistical bias to your own work and and also that can just go forever because i've i don't know how many false leads i've chased like i was for i don't know three or four days in a row i've tried to write about gregory polanco but i just don't have anything like i don't it gets difficult especially if you're trying to like analyze a swing because players don't always have the same swing so like you'll see posts that have examples of like three swings in them and you think, well, what does that tell me? A player swings a thousand times in a season. So those can be non-starters, but you know, a case like Trevor story, well, that's obvious. There was going to be something written about Trevor story because he hit every pitch for a home run or Starling Castro. He plays

in New York. So that introduces a sort of bias where you want to write about him because it's a, there's a lot of people talking about him. He got off to a hot start. He was just in Chicago. So he's a well-known high profile player who's having a strong start. So you kind of want to write about, there are some players who demand that you write about them. And then there are some numbers that demand that you write about them and they're attached to players. A case like Garrett Richards is really interesting because i think of uh remember a few years ago when a roll this chapman debuted his change up and it was it was hilarious because one player hit it literally in a season and he made an out so that was incredible just because on a very elementary level of

analysis like oh a roll this chapman who has the best arm in sports now he throws a change up like it's just funny i don't even need to explain why that would be unfair. And Garrett Richards is sort of like that. It's like if Noah Syndergaard developed a changeup instead of already having a changeup because he's unbelievable. It's like Garrett Richards throws 98 with crazy movement. His spin rates are insane.

And oh, by the way, now he has this thing that's like a Felix Hernandez changeup. And he's just going to throw it now and he's going to use it a lot and of course this is going to make him absurd and you know it hasn't yet but what's interesting about his case is that he's actually used the pitch uh so far so many new pitches that get developed in spring training uh remain there they're like things that happen in vegas but uh garrett richards brought this one out of vegas he's like i'm going to throw this in games and it's it's hard to sort those leaderboards with these things because the the pitch classifications have changed over the years but it's almost unprecedented for a player

to go from no change-ups or in richard's case one change-up last year to some change-ups like usually you'll see a player go from maybe no change-ups to two 3%, clearly enough to be like, well, this is a nothing pitch. I'm just wasting everybody's time. But Richards is throwing it like 9% or 10% of the time so far through two starts, which is interesting because almost no one does this. And it implies that he's got a lot of confidence in the pitch already. And that's going to be something to follow. What happened with Chapman's changeup last year? I did not follow up on that incredible 94% whip rate. Fun fact.

Is it still that or did it just did the changeup find its own level? It's around. I think last year he got hit a little more, but he threw it about the same amount of the time and it's still clearly hard to hit. But when you're Chapman, I guess as long as you're still throwing 99, like what's the point? You don't need it. It was always kind of a luxury thing for him, but he still, he threw it. And I think he kind of goes in phases because his other pitches are so good, but his change up at least by pitch type run value, which is a great way to put off all of your audience. It was actually a little better last year than it was the year before. Not hyperbole, by the way, in case people thought that that was just me putting a big number in a sentence, like literally 94%. That also, by the way, since they just laughed, you think that

now I'm using literally, figuratively as hyperbole. No, the literal meaning of literal, 94%. Nobody chuckle. I want everybody to realize this is serious 94% whiff rate all right thank you okay it's kind of like the whiff rate you would imagine chapman would have in all circumstances because you look at him and think well you could you can't hit that there's there's no hitting that all right so before we let you go work on your PM post, so you've touched on Herrera. You've talked about Castro, Garrett Richards, Doug Pfister. So I want to just read out a few other topics that you've covered this spring to see if any of them is worthy of touching on in particular.

So you've got Brendan Finnegan. You've got Adam Conley. I think Adam Conley counts. You pointed out one thing he did in his first start that might be a new thing. You talked about the Rays hitters as a whole. You talked about Steven Strasburg, Aaron Sanchez, Jason Hayward, Alex Wood, Cody Anderson, Juan Nicasio, Trevor Story, I guess you mentioned, Chin Ming Wong, and hitters as a whole in spring training, as well as Coors Field. Any of those catch your fancy right now?

Chin Ming Wong and Doug Pfister both stand out as good examples of why you should never trust anything out of Florida in spring training. Because the talk was that Wong was throwing back in the 90s, right? That's what I wrote about. And then he has pitched. He's on the Royals, but he's throwing 89 and 90. So he's throwing exactly the same as he did in 2013 with the Blue Jays. So, so far, Chen Ming-Wang, not different. Still very much his older self.

And Doug Pfister, he's throwing slower than he did last year, which is bad. That's not what the Astros want. And we'll see where that goes. But I think the Herrera one, it's really easy to see how Herrera could just be a monster now. Because the Royals need another one of those. I think Adam Conley is interesting. I know this is fresh because I just wrote about him for today, but he's really interesting for one thing because nobody really knows him.

He's a non-top prospect who pitches for the Marlins. Like everything is, all the ingredients are there for no one to give a crap about Adam Conley, but he comes up, He's got a decent fastball. But if you watch him, it's really easy to think like, oh, it's like a little Chris Sale. And he's not going to be as good as Chris Sale. That's absurd. But it's one of the fun things. I like that Baseball Prospectus has those pitch-of-excel leaderboards.

I use them all the time. They're fueled by what? Brooks Baseball? Pavlidis? Dan Brooks? They're great. And I like going into that because you can look at uh at all the fastballs all the left-handed fastballs and adam connelly is left

handed and he throws a fastball like most pitchers and you can sort all the pitches by horizontal movement and so if you do that it's very obvious that okay adam connelly has this exceptional fastball it has a lot of run to it unlike unlike most fastballs. Okay, so then you take those fastballs with the most run, and you sort them, and you say, oh, Adam Conley gets the most rise out of all of those fastballs. So then you can look at that and think, well, holy crap, maybe this is sort of like deception, where he throws a fastball that hitters don't see ever, because he throws this fastball that has rise and run to an extent that no one else is throwing in the major leagues. And I don't know how much that means, but it's really interesting to think, well, maybe this is going to make, maybe this makes it a swing and miss fastball.

It's just an ordinary 92, 93 mile per hour left-handed fastball by the numbers. And he's just this ordinary pitcher by his profile and his numbers. But if you look at the fastball itself, you think, well, this could actually be a weapon because if hitters don't know how this pitch is going to move, they're, they're wired to think about all these other left-handed fastballs that aren't adam conley so every time they see adam conley they're going to be thinking well that ball is doing something weird and so he's just for that reason alone i think he's going to be interesting to follow because i don't know what that means but i i think it's kind of exciting in a in a dorky way that i'm sure only like 500 people are going to read that post today or

something because it's it's adam conley but like that detail. It kind of got me excited yesterday. Yeah. And the Strasburg post, which is about his new slider, semi-new slider, that's like its own genre, sort of a pitch tinkerer, like a Phil Hughes style sort of thing where every year a certain pitcher will shelve the same pitch. It's like perpetually being shelved. I like that one because right after the game, Strasburg's like, no, I'm not throwing a new slider. It's like, but you are. It's very obvious from anyone who watched the game

or has a computer or even the at-bat app. It's like, no, right there, that's a slider. What does he think he's doing by denying what he's obviously doing? I don't know. Opposing hitters maybe who aren't looking at his spin axis? But what do you think those opposing hitters are doing? Do you think they're listening to Steven Strasburg's postgame interview or being like, oh, my coach said he has a slider now? I don't know.

Hopefully they're reading your post, which has been known to happen. Do you follow up often on, like you wrote a post about Jason Hayward and how in spring training he seemed to be pulling balls more, which seemed like a possibly notable change in that Jason Hayward seems like someone who maybe could have more power than he has shown in the past and suddenly he's pulling lots of balls, maybe he's going to hit for more power. How often do you check in on something like that to see whether you were prescient or just premature yeah definitely less often if i'm wrong uh then i'd definitely leave those alone but i do i'll try to follow up and i'm sure i'll follow up on garrett richards probably like four times this year if he keeps throwing change-ups because as you can imagine it's great to follow up because it means you have something you can write and an idea is the most precious resource as any sort of baseball writer. Right. Okay.

I think you have fulfilled your obligation, as Carson says. Yeah, thanks, Carson. Yeah. All right. So you should all read every word that Jeff Sullivan writes at Fangraphs and every word that he writes on Twitter at based underscore ball. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you underscore ball. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you,

Ben. Thank you, Sam. All right. That's it for today. It was a pleasure to talk to Jeff as always, by the way, if you're wondering why Jeff hasn't written about Noah Cinder guard this

spring, probably the player who's debuted the highest profile change, a new slider, which seems almost unhittable. I was wondering that too. Turns out Jeff wrote about Noah Cindergaard's new slider last October. So about five months before everyone else did. Never doubt Jeff's ability to beat everyone else to a story.

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