Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 896: Beware of Wearables?

Episode Date: June 2, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Matt Albers’ double and a Stompers success, then discuss the privacy/performance implications of new tracking technology employed by big league teams.

The higher the price, the higher the price. This is what you pay for what you need. The higher the price, the higher the price. It's a new life you see in me. Somebody's watching you. Somebody's watching you. Somebody's watching you Somebody's watching you Hello and welcome to episode 896 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by our Patreon supporters

and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. And I am Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. You sure are. We never did that. We never did the two intro thing. We could have. A lot of things do that. We screw it up often

enough as it is. If we had to coordinate the timing of our intros, we'd probably have to do it over more often. So our man Matt Albers is still catching his breath from his dash around the bases yesterday that spawned dozens of threads in the Facebook group. It was a false save scare because it was not a save opportunity, but it was still a heroic afternoon for Mr. Albers, who had his first plate appearance in seven years and made the most of it, doubling to the wall and scoring after advancing on a wild pitch and then a sack fly. He looked great doing it.

He reached 17 miles per hour, which is probably better than most of you listening could do, even though he didn't look incredibly graceful as he did it. He didn't slide, which he said after the game that he didn't slide because he wasn't sure if he could slide. He didn't know how to slide. So we'll see whether the first save comes before the first slide, as one person in the Facebook group pointed out. Well done, Matt Albers. So he got a game finished.

Yeah, watching him not slide sort of reminded me of this piece that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2000 on the difference between choking and panicking. And I forget which is which, but one of them, I think panicking. Panicking is the one where you sort of cease the ability to think through the act that you have to do. And all of a sudden, it becomes very complicated. Like a simple thing that you've done a million times without thinking becomes a sort of a sequence of discrete actions that become too complicated for your brain to handle. And I one time, I think I might have mentioned this at some point, but one time earlier in my life, I went through a period where I was, I was very afraid of driving because I was afraid of pedal air, that I was going to press the gas when I meant to press the brake. And so that would be an example of panicking, I think.

So when Albers was sort of approaching the bag, you could almost sort of see him thinking, like at first his body is like, this is where you slide. slide but all of a sudden his kind of cognition kicked in and he's like wait so i i would have to do one thing with my lower body and one thing with my upper body and one thing with my and when do i start and yeah and how do i decelerate and it just became too complicated and he just sort of barreled in yeah it was a rational decision really because if he had tried to slide who knows what could have gone wrong he might have missed the bag This way, he just had to motor in there and try not to run over Neil Walker. One of my, the feeling I had watching this game was, it was kind of a weird thing because Robin Ventura brought in his closer to pitch on the road in a tie game, which most managers don't do. They save them for the save situation. And we generally hate that.

We think that that's not an optimal use of your bullpen. And one of the reasons it's not optimal is because if you do that, you're guaranteed to only get one inning from your closer, from your best reliever. Whereas if you bring them in the tie game, you might get two. And if you can get two from your best reliever, that makes a lot more sense. And sure enough, Rob Ventura got two innings out of Robertson, and everything looked good.

And that set up Albers to potentially be the closer because he was the highest leverage reliever remaining. And as soon as—so I'm applauding Ventura for this move that set up Albers to get a save. And then as soon as Robertson was too gassed and the new pitcher had to come in and Ventura brought in Albers, I was like, what are you doing? Who's going to get the save? You can't bring in your de facto closer there.

You got to save him. Bring in Perk. Yeah. Yeah, a little bit of a letdown but not really because scoring the game winning run was even better i think all right anything else you want to discuss uh well i guess speaking of closers and saves and games finished and all that sort of thing i don't know how closely you were following the stompers last night yeah i was I was. I'm very proud of what happened. Yeah. So the Stompers in game two pulled their starting pitcher very early in his third time through the order. And it was a very close game. It was actually, I think, a tie game,

or maybe the tying run was on third or something like that. And in the fifth inning, they brought in their closer, Taylor Thurber. And then the game remained close the entire way. And so Yoshi, the manager, just kept his closer in until the end. And then in the ninth inning, Thurber dominated. He retired 10 straight. He had one base runner, five strikeouts in the first three and a third that he pitched. And then he goes to the ninth and he gets in a little bit of a jam. And there are runners on second and third with one out., and then he goes to the ninth, and he gets in a little bit of a jam, and there are runners on second and third with one out, and Thurber strikes out the next two guys and saves the game.

I guess he actually got credit for the win, but wins the game, saves the game. I'm bringing this up because I have a simple question for you that's actually not related to closer usage at all, but Taylor Thurber was a guy that you spent a lot of time trying to recruit last year. He was at the top of your spreadsheet, of our spreadsheet. He was in the book. He was your guy. You wanted him. And we couldn't get him.

He ended up signing with a higher league that was also closer to his home. And it was a super big bummer for you. And then this spring, Theo signed him. And he was dominant yesterday. He struck out seven in four and a third of this really huge performance. And I wanted to know if you are at all ambivalent about Taylor Thurber's success. If it is just like if you are rooting for him as though he were your own son, if you're rooting for him as you would Sean and Santos and Stoops, your own son if you're rooting for him as as you would sean and santos and stoops or if uh this is like really heartbreaking because he's really good on a team that you have nothing to do with

and you could have had him last summer and like it would and and weather would actually almost be better if he were terrible and you could say oh i would dodge that one no i feel like i do have something to do with the team because of him. I mean, he's there because of the spreadsheet. Just a year later, we're not there on a day-to-day basis anymore, but we're still listed as consultants on the website. We're still following the team, and he's there because of our statistical search for players. And so if he does well, then that further vindicates our method. So I'm all in for Taylor Thurber. And maybe it's not such a bad thing that he didn't end up with the team last season, because if we had gotten him, we might not have signed Dylan Stoops or Santos Saldivar.

So we had to move down our list to guys who turned out to be really good. So it's best of both worlds. I think we get him, and it's great that our fireman strategy has outlived our time with the team. And I'm glad that the fireman is another person that we tried to recruit. So it's very cool. You know, every year I do the piece for BP on the best farm system in baseball 10 years later. And the sort of goal of that piece is always to figure out how long the, uh, benefits of a great farm system,

uh, last, how much, how much is remaining after 10 years, because 10 years seems like a really long time. But if you, if you look at these four teams that I've done this for, you see that even 10 years,

even a decade later, uh, their success is often, um, largely, uh, attributed to where they, where they were a whole decade earlier. And I'm not in any way saying that we were the equivalent of a great farm system,

but it is kind of nice to think that we'll sort of have this growing trade tree or something in a sense that we'll live with the stompers for a long time, even if we're gone, even if the data itself is gone, even if the pitch effects cameras are gone, there will still be a little bit of Sam and Ben in the Stompers, on the Stompers roster. And Thurber's great because he's a guy who we didn't sign, we never met. And yet our rooting interest in the team will be kind of kept going for an extra long time because of it. Although he'll probably just get signed by somebody else in like a week and a half. Yeah.

All right. Okay. So the topic for today was originally supposed to be part of Tuesday's topic. It was going to be paired with our discussion of laser rangefinders. And it was another article that you wanted to bring up, sort of thematically similar, raises similar questions about the way the game is headed and the intersection of technology and human beings and some of the concerns that come up and will have to be straightened out one way or another. So it's the article that BP's Ryan Watt wrote for Vice Sports about how new technology is forcing baseball to balance big data with big brother. And we will link to this in the usual places.

Maybe you've already seen it. But it's a piece about how teams are trying to track things about players that they couldn't track before with wearable technology and various other innovations that are allowing them to evaluate sleep habits or training habits or things that are off the field. They are not strictly related to the three hours between first pitch and last pitch, but they are related to being an athlete and to your performance on the field, but they also intrude on your private life, or potentially they do

And so this is something that the Players Association and the league and individual teams Are going to have to negotiate in the coming years to figure out what is permitted And what is deemed to be too much And we've touched on this topic before to figure out what is permitted and what is deemed to be too much. And we've touched on this topic before. I think we've mentioned the ESPN the Magazine article from a couple years ago, basically the basketball version of this article that was written by Pablo Torre and Tom Haberstroh. And we've talked about genetic testing and whether that would be too much and what the future is there. But you wanted to discuss this, and I assume that you have something to say.

Well, all right. Could go any number of directions. So I don't know. I don't know which one. But so first off, let me ask you, when we did talk about this the last time, it was before the Stompers. And having spent a summer in a clubhouse trying to get players to do things that you wanted them to do, somewhat unusual things that you wanted them to do, do you feel that they are more willing or less willing to do such things than you would have thought when we had this discussion the last time? I'd say more willing. I think if anything, just for the, well, there's a novelty value to these things initially, and maybe that would wear off. But I think at first players are curious about whatever this new device that you want to attach to them does and what it tells them and what it could potentially help them with. So I think they're more willing to try something once than I would have thought the first time.

And of course we had some obstacles. We were just kind of coming in and trying to do all these things in three months. And we had plans to do things with wearable technology and tracking. And we explored some of those. And I wish they could have been a bigger part of the season and a bigger part of the book because we were aware that this is the way things were headed. And so maybe the book would age better if we had found time to do those things. But we just discovered pretty quickly that it was going to be really difficult in this situation. We didn't really have a dedicated trainer. We didn't have a staff who could

keep track of these things and make sure that players were using them and that the data was being downloaded. And so that and just how little time we had in general to do anything was a big obstacle for us. But if you were coming in and getting guys young and drafting them and signing them and then saying, here's your device that you will now wear, then I think players would probably be more receptive to it than I had imagined initially, which is potentially dangerous. Yeah, I think that's a good point. It's easy to say, well, you know, maybe all this stuff could be voluntary. Maybe you could give players a way of opting out of things. Or at the very worst, maybe even if you presented it as mandatory, maybe a club would have a disincentive to put uncomfortable technology into their lives because they would worry that even if the players agreed to do it because you forced them to, they would be rebellious about it or it would hurt your relationship with them.

And I think that that was what we assumed when we talked about this last time. And I think much less so that that's the case. I think that players, for one thing, are in, I think the sport is very authority driven. Players listen to their manager, they do what their manager tells them to, and they're kind of taught and conditioned not to buck that. And so you don't, you know, you don't see a lot of resistance when it comes from the manager. And I think that to some degree, players, especially once they get into affiliated ball and once they get into the affiliated team's farm system, they sort of cede sovereignty over their bodies. They think of themselves as being, to some degree, at the mercy of these teams, their trainers,

their many, many, many, many coaches that are constantly hovering around them and telling them what to do. And so my guess is that if you thought that there would be sort of an implied, you know, veto point in players' will itself, that it wouldn't really be there, that teams could actually impose a lot of this stuff with impunity. And that's, I guess, in one sense, maybe that's good. Maybe we're saying, well, okay, so players are conceding this. It's obviously not a big deal. So why do we even have to talk about it? But in another sense, you could say, well, there's a power imbalance. And just because they're, quote unquote, agreeing to it doesn't mean that it's in their best

interests or that they've rationally thought through whether it's in their best interests. That they might not actually have a perceived vote at all. And we might just be kind of projecting a vote on them. Yeah, because there's a pressure there. Some players really might be into it and might be all for it. But other guys might have reservations ranging from serious to less serious, but they might feel pressured to go along with it because if most of the other players are doing it and they are the holdouts, then maybe they are inviting extra scrutiny. Why don't you want us to track you off the field? Why don't you want us to know how much alcohol you consume and how many hours of sleep you get?

What do you have to hide? And so that seems like the sort of thing that a union would want to protect them from. Yeah. Okay. So point one, players don't have the power to resist that you might think that they do. And so that makes it a little bit more dangerous. Now, point two, is there any downside to clubs actually having this? Why shouldn't a club, I mean,

if a club is paying, baseball doesn't pay for past stats. Baseball pays for the team's best estimate of what future stats are going to be or what future performance is going to be or what the future effect of a player's presence on your roster is going to be. And they're trying to get that as exact as possible. And we don't generally set up barriers to clubs getting as exact of information as they can based on what we've had so far. Nobody is, for instance, arguing a moral case against StatCast that I know of, although you came close two days ago with your olive oil bat plan. But no, I mean, nobody argues that like we need to handicap clubs and their ability to project their players. If two players both hit

27 home runs and had a 842 OPS last year and produced 2.7 more each, we don't say, well, clubs have to pay them the same and they're not allowed to figure out who's going to be better. Of course, they're going to try to figure out who's going to be better and they're going to pay one guy more and one guy less. And the guy who's getting paid less doesn't, I don't think, have any grounds for complaint there, right? Okay. So with that established, why would we think any of this data, which is clearly relevant, or clearly, it's not clearly relevant, it's clearly perceived to be relevant to this decision, why would we put anything in the way of that? Well, you mean aside from the privacy concerns? Well, if you think it's

privacy, but why would you think it's privacy? I mean, and I'm not arguing that it's not, but make the case that it is a privacy concern. What counts as privacy? I mean, and I'm not arguing that it's not, but make the case that it is a privacy concern. What counts as privacy? Well, there's a long history of players who perform on the field and do not live up to your ideal standard off the field. You hear stories about many a superstar who had a hard living lifestyle and was a Hall of Fame player on the field. So there is a danger in trying to make sure that every athlete conforms to some recommended daily amount of sleep or nutrients or fun or whatever it is. Wait, danger because it makes you less accurate in projecting or it's a danger? Yeah, I mean, there's a danger in the analysis.

Right. If a club uses this wrong and it makes them worse at projecting performance, then theoretically that club would cease to exist or that front office would cease to exist or that particular means of evaluating players would cease to exist. Or else it'd be, you know, buyer beware. I mean, if you do things dumbly, we don't collectively bargain away club's ability to do dumb things. Yeah, right.

But going back to privacy, did Mickey Mantle are you saying Mickey Mantle had a right to privacy that the club didn't have a right to know what he was drinking or how often he was drinking i mean and i'm not i'm not preemptively arguing that you're wrong or anything i'm yeah i mean teams have always wanted to know those things there are stories about them hiring private detectives to follow players around and make sure that they weren't up all night. But I don't know that he had a right to it.

If you are collectively bargaining, then you might want to assert your right to that just because it leads to a better quality of life if you don't feel like you are being monitored 24-7, if you feel like you can leave the field and you are your own person living your own life. And of course, you know, whatever you put into your body or whatever exercise you do, that will affect who you are when you show up at the ballpark the next day.

But you at least don't feel the pressure of, you know, it's like anyone at work who knows that their employer can check their browser history or, you know, has a keystroke logger set up so that they could check their emails if they wanted to or whatever. That is an uncomfortable feeling for a lot of people. A lot of people don't like that, and they will then switch to a personal email account so that it can't be tracked, or they'll use a proxy server or something because people like to have some anonymity.

They like to be able to protect what they do and not feel like they are under the gun at all times and being monitored and that every move they make will be used against them. So I can certainly see why as a player you would want to protect that privacy, whether it's an inherent right or not. I don't know, but you would want to make it one maybe. And Cole Figueroa, the Pirates player, when Rob Arthur and I had him on the podcast earlier this spring, he mentioned that and how he thinks it's important that players know what they are signing up for and that they are fully apprised of all of these wearables and monitors and, and they know, you know, what,

what can and can't be tracked so that they are not, uh, costing themselves money or, or adding mental strain to what is already a difficult job. Yeah. It seems pretty undeniable that knowing what is being tracked is the very, very, very minimum of, of, uh, you know, kind of what players or clubs are obligated to let players know. I, yeah, I, like, I'm a little, I don't know. I guess I'm, like, it's from a player's perspective or from the union's perspective, then it makes perfect sense to make this a collective bargaining issue.

It makes sense to make everything a collective bargaining issue. Even if you don't care at all, if you can use it to get concessions on something else, then you use it. I mean, you don't give anything away. And so that makes sense. And so I'm not like arguing that like, you know, clubs should unilaterally do this or anything like that. I'm not arguing anything, but I'm trying to figure out if even the, like, if this is collectively bargained in, and everybody's wearing all these wearables, and we have a world, you know, eight years from now, where every gram of nutrition that goes into you is tracked, and where, you know, I don't, who knows, I mean, who knows what, what we might be talking about, but, you know, maybe there's, like, neuron scanners or something, who, I don don't know. That's not two words that don't even probably... In fact, I'm going to say

neuron scanner is a thing. Neuron scanner. What is neuron plugin scanner? That doesn't seem to be what I'm talking about. No, neuron scanner. No, neuron scanner doesn't seem to be a phrase. Okay. All right. You just coined it. No, no, neuron scanner doesn't seem to be a phrase. Okay. All right. You just coined it. Neuron.

Oh, wait. Ryan. Oh, this is from what looks like self-published science fiction. Ryan stepped back. Ryan, by the way, Ryan spelled like Ryan Watt. This is creepy. Ryan stepped back and nodded at Kira, who turned to bring the emotion resonator and neuron scanner online. All right. Okay. Everybody forgive me. who turned to bring the emotion resonator and neuron scanner online all right okay everybody

forgive me uh but uh you know like look there's some line between this and minority report and we're trying to figure out where that line is that we start to just get you know queased out by the very existence of it even if it is collectively bargained um and so i I'm not sure where that line is But the Like if a player Drinks you know at the hotel Bar every night and you're a club And you want to use that to Weigh the scales of how you project that player Or what he brings to your team

Nobody would argue that that is Off limits right or that like a club Should just ignore that if they don't want to I mean you could argue that they should ignore it And that it's irrelevant for projecting them. But it wouldn't be an invasion of privacy, I guess, because he's at the hotel bar.. I don't know. Either way, it's creepy, right? If you have someone looking over your shoulder at the hotel bar and jotting down your order on a notepad so that they can tell the team about it, I guess that is better than if that person were outside your window watching you in your living room doing it. Yeah, no, I know. But just say that hypothetically that it's a guy who just, you know, is well known.

He goes out. He's Mickey Mantle. He goes out and he gets drunk every night. That's just what he does. Everybody knows that dude's a big drinker. And so where does that dude's a big drinker and everybody knows it, bleed into, and we're measuring his electrolyte levels when he gets to work the next day. It's the same basic information, isn't it? Yeah. Another thing is, I wonder when we were talking about whether players would embrace this

or not, I think another reason why they might is that just to get to the major leagues, if we're talking about major league players, just to get to that point, you really have to have a lot of self-confidence. You have to believe that you belong. It seems like every major leaguer believes that they deserve their spot in the major leagues. And if they get demoted or whatever, they are always aggrieved and they always think it's the wrong decision and they've been wronged. So given that kind of makeup that tends to help one become a big leaguer, I would think that most players would think that these technologies would just make it even clearer that they are great. I don't know whether that's the case, but I would think that because data can,

if you're good at your job, then presumably the more data your employer captures on your performance, the better you'll look and the more money you'll make. You and I are working on something right now in that vein, a piece about Santos Saldivar, the Stompers pitcher who was signed by the Brewers because we had all this data that was available on his performance. We had video. We had pitch effects.

We had all these advanced stats. And if that hadn't been available, he wouldn't have been signed because the Brewers wouldn't have known enough about him. And they wouldn't have bothered sending a scout to see him just based on our recommendations. So if you're good and you deserve a spot, then the more ways that that goodness is captured, the better it is for you really. And it's only really if you don't deserve a spot, if you're doing something wrong that will be exposed under this new system, doing something wrong that will be exposed under this new system that it's something to fear so given that many professional athletes have a i think a i don't know whether it's inflated or a justified sense of their own abilities that might be another reason why they would be receptive to these things that they would just think well this is a a new way in which I'll look great. Yeah.

Everybody knows that my electrolytes are the best. Yeah. Right. So it also seems like it's a very different question depending on whether we're talking about Russell Martin or a guy in pre-arb years, a guy in the minors, a guy who is being drafted out of high school, just because the amount of agency in their own careers is so radically different. And there's a lot less, I mean, I don't know, is it, do you think it's fair to say that players who are not in the majors, on balance, given the lack of union representation, given the power imbalance, given how low the pay is, given the lawsuits about wages, is it fair to say that they're exploited or is that too hot?

Yeah, I think they are. I mean, they know what they're signing up for and they're willing to put up with it because they have this lottery ticket that they're hoping will pay off down the road and make it all worthwhile. But yeah, I think it's exploitative. They're making an economically rational decision for their own career. Yeah. It's like any unpaid intern or someone who hopes that it will lead to a good full-time job. And so if you throw on top of this an enormous informational advantage that is arguably intrusive, potentially privacy invasive, and that is being bargained by a union that doesn't actually represent you, then I think that would be quite a bit less ambiguous

or more ambiguous if you're bending on height, but kind of shadier, right? Yeah. Okay. Now, one last angle on this. Ryan talks to John Baker and Baker sort of talks about how, well, I'll just read it. As new technologies raise new ethical questions, it can be difficult to divide labor and management interests cleanly. Incentives align and disalign across the range of complications this new technology raises. Baker, for example, was quick to recognize the ways in which player and team interests

dovetail in totally benign ways. Quote, it's not necessarily that there's an evil motive behind it. He says, the motive behind it is that they want guys to perform their best. But, he cautions, when you come into a situation where you're in salary arbitration, any information that you have that says that a player is not going to perform on that same mark that he's been at before, you bring all that information as the evidence in your argument, everything you possibly can, and you let the court decide. In other words, personal information can become business information very quickly, and one is never fully distinct from the other. Now, again, if I'm the union, I'm pushing to

bargain this because I'm never giving anything away. I'm also pushing to bargain it because it seems like something that a large portion of my members just wouldn't want to have in their lives, that they would find it inconvenient and unwelcome. But as to the question of whether it hurts the economic viability of the union members, do you think that this in any way lowers the amount of money that teams spend on players? Would salaries be lower if clubs had access to information that could help them make more efficient decisions? Well, I'm sure there are cases where this information would help a team avoid a spending mistake. I think it would take a long time to figure out which of this information is meaningful and how much it can really help you project a player. But if you have two guys who have equal performance on the field, and one of them is a big partier who never sleeps

and doesn't take care of his body, and the other is a machine who does everything perfectly, then you would probably want to spend more on the second guy. I assume you'd be rewarded for that. The party guy, sure, the party guy would lose money, but the other guy would presume, might, I don't know if he would or not, but might get money. And so if you're a union and you, I mean, if you're a union, your basic goal is to have, probably your basic foundational goal is to have as much of the money going to your members as possible. And we talked about this in another instance, I forget what, but whether the goal is to just get the most raw money into the pool for your players, or if it's somehow to protect individual members as well. I would say, and I'm sure there's, I bet there's tons of research about this, but I would guess that the more efficiently

clubs can make decisions, player evaluations, the more accurately they can say who's going to be good or bad, the more they would spend. And that in fact, the pool of money that teams would be willing to spend goes up with the more certainty that they have about how well they're spending that money, which is not to say that I think this great technology or anything like that, or that it's good for players. But from a financial perspective, I would bet that there would be players who would be losers in this scenario, but that the player pool as a whole would actually get more money. Just a guess. Yeah. Well, and I'm kind of curious about how much of a difference this will actually make for most players, because it seems to me that,

A, a lot of this stuff is known in some way, right? I mean, if you are in great shape, everyone knows you're in great shape because you take off your clothes and you put on your uniform. And so it's not exactly a mystery to the team who is in the weight room every day and who takes care of their body. That is known to everyone. And if someone has a particularly, you know, notable off the field lifestyle that is often known in one way or another too, because their pictures show up on Deadspin or players are friends with everyone on the team and they know what these guys do and that filters to the coaches. And so I wonder, you know, I'm sure there are some guys who are just doing a really great job of faking it and have a really destructive lifestyle in some way that is not immediately obvious.

But for most players, I would think there's not a ton of mystery to who comes best prepared to play. And so that's one thing. And then I would think that the players who are most eager to embrace these things are the players who are already pretty into this stuff. Like when I wrote about the Pirates a couple years ago and how they were using these wearable sensors to monitor their exercise programs and talk to Russell Martin, and he was very into it. But Russell Martin is the guy who shows up in the best shape of his life every single spring somehow. So he was already the kind of guy who was looking for every edge and trying to be in the best shape possible. And so if you take someone who doesn't have those same instincts and you say, well, here's your wearable thing,

and it will tell you whatever information, how much you slept. Whatever information, how much you slept, I don't know whether that would and catch them early enough that you could help them form good habits that they might not otherwise form you know once you make the majors you are a finished product in many ways already yeah all right i don't know if we settle anything i potential for weirdness. I'm not yet to the point where I think there's a lot of weirdness in this. Honestly, I'm probably more skeptical on any of this actually being useful

at this point. I think it's probably the impact is actually probably overstated. Because you have a lot of incentive. If you're the club and you're using it, you have an incentive to oversell it to the players, maybe even to the media.

If you're the vendor, you obviously have an incentive to oversell it. If you're the player, you probably have a placebo-ish incentive to oversell it. And if you're us writing about it, you have an incentive to oversell it. Nobody's really got a great incentive for saying, yeah, but it's all kind of just sugar water. Plus, these guys already have such an infrastructure set up to help them perform in an optimal way. Even if they don't have a thing with a blinking readout attached to them, they have a trainer who is determining their workout program. They have maybe a chef or nutritionist who can plan their meals down to the calorie. So they already have a lot of ways to optimize their performance that are not based on wearing something.

So, yeah, I agree that I'm sure there will be ways in which this will be useful down the road But I don't think it's Revolutionizing anything yet Alright, Ben Billy Hamilton, I'm finding an example Of Billy Hamilton reaching peak speed Of 21.8 miles an hour On StatCast Matt Albers yesterday

Oh, I was going to ask you to guess Higher or lower than you thought When I was watching him run He runs well Yeah, I thought he to ask you to guess. Oh, yeah. No, 17. Higher or lower than you thought? When I was watching him run. He runs well. Yeah. I thought he was really getting up there. So not that surprised. I mean, surprised that he did run that fast.

But once I had seen him run, not that surprised. Yeah, that's exactly my feeling too. I was surprised to see him move so well. He's a big guy. Yeah, he was not out to lunch when necks were handed out Alright Alright indeed Alright so that is it for today

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