Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1358: Return to Sender

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Christian Yelich vs. Eugenio Suarez and Yelich vs. regression, an inscrutable ad, Jose Alvarado and the apparent increase in aesthetically pleasing pitches, visual differences between 1998 and now, and the significance of the latest contract extensions, then answer listener emails about the Twins and what makes a team […]

I knock you down and then reach out. Reach out. Reach out. Reach out. Reach out. Reach out. Reach out. Reach out.

Reach out. Reach out, reach out, reach out Reach out, reach out, reach out Good morning! Welcome to episode 1358, Effectively Wild, the near-daily podcast from Fangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. That was flawless for your first intro in two and a half years or so.

Uh-huh. Every, you know, you've got to keep the muscles strong, so every morning I'd wake up and say the intro 15 times. It's a good dry run. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I'd do sets, but... It paid off. Yeah. Sometimes I do sets. Paid off. Yeah.

How are you? I'm doing okay. Good. It is a week into the season now, and I think we're going to do one more banter and emails show, and then we'll try to get into a routine where Sam brings the topic. But right now, I'm still feeling a little insecure, and so we're just going to talk if that works for you. It does.

Yeah. All right. So first of all, I don't know. You want to alternate banters? Well, it sounds like you have a lot. I don't know if I have as many banters as you do. So you just lead off. Yeah, I think I've got-

We'll see where it takes us. I think I have three things I'd like to talk about. One is extremely, extremely quick. And this is just something that I have been meaning to bring up each episode as well as to everybody I meet. And I keep forgetting to, which is that I was looking at the prop bets at the Westgate Superbook betting lines, the Las Vegas betting lines before the season. And one of the things you can bet on is who will be the National League MVP and also the AL MVP, also everything else. And the National League MVP, the odds were the same for two players.

So Bryce Harper was the favorite. Nolan Arenado was second. And as you go down the list, everything makes sense, right? It's a good list in a normal order. But two players had the exact same odds of winning the MVP award. And I'm just going to say those two players players and then we're going to move on those two players are christian yellich and eugenio suarez really really yeah and what is that i can't figure out what the mechanism is i wonder if it's i wonder if it's considered very hard to get a second MVP if you have to overperform.

I wonder if repeat MVP award winners basically have to overperform in order to get it. And I wonder if Suarez just gets a huge bump because there wasn't seen to be another good contender for it. And they were a contending team perhaps. But I think that's a stretch. Eugenio Suarez had previously been named on one ballot in his career, and Christian Jelic won the award like 20 minutes ago. Did you say Chris Bryant? Was Suarez ahead of Chris Bryant? No, Chris Bryant was fourth.

He was up there. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So it went Harper, Arenado, Goldschmidt, Bryant, Machado, Freeman, and then Suarez-Yelich. Huh. Yeah. Well, I did think that Yelich was something of a regression candidate coming into the year, even more than the typical MVP, perhaps. But after writing about that this week, I'm no longer convinced that he is, in part because he started the season off with four consecutive homers, which I guess the sports book didn't know at the time. But yeah, still,

you'd take the defending MVP over Eo Eni Ushuares, I think. If you wanted to be the MVP and Genie said that they would give you home runs in four consecutive games at any point in the season, and the rest of the season is just going to play out unaffected by the genie which four games would you want to make the strongest mvp case would it be the first four the last four four random ones in early september when you know that the pennant race is still probably going to be in flux the four that i don't know the lead up to the trade deadline when would you guess is the most impactful four homer four game stretch igame stretch? I think end of the season. Beginning of the season is pretty good too. That's probably second if you can set a team record for most homers to lead off the season. That sticks in people's minds. But I think closer to the voting would be better. So I

don't know whether I'd say the last four games, because you're right, they could be meaningless at that point, or just maybe like four games in the middle of September consecutive. And so what did you conclude about Jelic? And more importantly, do you believe he will slug 600? Huh. Well, he didn't even quite slug 600 last year. He came close, but he slugged like 598. Yeah, but in the second half, it was probably 700 or something like that. So I think I started off by pointing out that he was like projected for the seventh best war of any player this year, but was also projected for the seventh biggest war decline of any player this year. And when you look at the history of MVPs, which I did, he actually had like a perfectly representative MVP season last year. I didn't check, but I wouldn't be surprised if his season last year was like the most average MVP season anyone's ever had, because it was like right on the number of plate appearances in the War and the WRC+. And if you look at the history of MVPs, they tend to decline the next season by almost exactly what the projections projected him to decline. So I don't think that was unreasonable at all. The reason why I thought he might regress coming into the year is that he did have that really strange stat line where he was like the best player ever, or at least the best player on record by far who had hit ground balls on more

than half of his batted balls it's just really hard to hit for that much power when you're hitting the ball on the ground that often but as jeff pointed out last year and as i pointed out again he has started hitting a lot fewer ground balls finally that has always been the complaint about that he hit the ball on the ground a lot that was true right up until like the middle of last season and then suddenly it stopped being true and it hasn't been true since so that's not a huge sample but it's enough to make me think that he will continue to hit for power will he hit 600 slugging maybe not quite but I don't think he'll have a huge decline now Now, is he hitting fly balls or is he hitting just not ground balls? Because I still kept hearing that and I still thought it

was true that in the second half last year, he was hitting an outrageous percentage of his fly balls for home runs. That is true. Seemingly mystical percentage. Yeah. So what is he hitting now? I concluded that probably he wouldn't regress as much as you might think he would just based on the ground ball stuff but he will still inevitably regress just because his home run per fly ball rate over the last like three or four months of of action is 45 which is really crazy like uh no has ever topped 40% in a single season with more than 250 plate appearances. So over his last 270 plate appearances, he's hit 45% of his fly balls out of the park, which is just impossible. So I think that is definitely going to come back to earth,

but he has definitely started hitting the ball in the air more often especially when he hits the ball hard like when everything goes right when he hits it the way he wants it to it tends to go up a lot more than it did before but yeah he's still getting extraordinarily lucky or whatever you want to call it it's unsustainable i think okay i'm sorry I'm still a little confused though here. He is hitting way more. He's hitting a lot more fly balls and fewer grounders. But even so, he is hitting just a ridiculous percentage of his fly balls out of the park.

Well, there's only three kinds of batted balls. Is he or is he not hitting more line drives? He must be hitting more line drives, I think. but I think he's hitting also more fly balls. I think it's both because he's hitting a lot fewer grounders. And of course, line drives, some line drives can also become home runs. Yeah, sure. The line is kind of hazy there. Exactly. Okay. All right. So, uh, so, um, I, I don't, I don't know if I've had my questions answered, but, um, I like them more than Eugenio Suarez is the conclusion. Okay. Yeah, me too. All right. So I don't know if I've had my questions answered, but I have a- I like it more than Eugenio Suarez is the conclusion.

Okay. Yeah, me too. All right. Let's see. Second thing I want to banter about is actually I need to send you a file. Okay. And then you need to put that file into the system, into the podcast. Okay.

So this is an advertisement from a radio broadcast of a baseball game. And lately I've been reading a book by Roberta J. Newman called Here's the Pitch. I want to read that book. Yeah, it's good. It's a good book so far. I'm not super deep into it. I'm like 70 pages or so, but it's good. I'm learning a lot.

The Amazing, True, New, and Improved Story of Baseball and Advertising. And one of the things that this book causes you to think about, both while you're reading it and also while you're watching baseball, is the way that the advertisements that we hear or that we see reflect what companies think of us as baseball fans and what they think of baseball fans as a population. And so, for instance, early on, the advertising around baseball centered mostly on kind of adult pursuits. You know, cigarette cards, tobacco cards, for instance, were predated bubble gum cards, but then they became bubble gumum cards because the average ball fan was a little bit younger and more likely to be a child. Nice use of ball fan. Thank you.

So this is an ad that I heard on KNBR in the middle of a Giants game. And I've been thinking ever since about what this ad tells me about what people think a baseball fan is. So go ahead and play it. It picks up just a tiny little snippet of the previous ad,.com, and then it transitions very quickly into the ad, okay? Are you listening to it, Ben? I listen right now. .com.

A physician is wanted to work in San Francisco, California, send resume to L. Russell, USACS Medical Group Limited at russellatusacs.com. Must reference job code PHY1. Okay, I've heard it. So this is a ad that played on the radio, and it is extremely complicated. The amount of information that it is giving is extremely complicated the email address is it go back and re-listen to it the the email address is absolutely absurd send resume to l russell usacs medical group limited at russell at usacs.com it is like it's like seven words and then at something and then at something else, which isn't an email address at all. It's like L Russell something, something, something, something at L Russell at something, something, something.com, which isn't an email address. And then it gives you a code that you have to reference. And it just doesn't feel to me that this ad is in any way reflective of the way people consume baseball.

The only way that you could possibly apply for this job with the information that they have given you is if you are going to go on to MLB.com later, pull up the archived radio broadcast, find it, which is very difficult to do because the radio broadcasts don't let you skip by inning. And so you have just this huge block of sound that begins with the pregame show and ends with the postgame show, and then re-listen to it so that you can get the code that you have to reference. At which point you will find out that the email address they gave you wasn't true anyway, probably. And so then you're going to have to do a bunch of digging to figure out what the accurate email address was supposed to be. All this that they can hire a physician who I just assume that there's a pretty good network of like job boards for physicians that is a pretty professionalized industry.

And when a job is open or when a physician is looking for a job there's already things in place besides the eighth inning of a Giants radio broadcast to alert the buyer and the seller so this is uh I just wanted to bring this up as this the the strangest commercial that I've heard so far on the radio this year but also the most confounding because it does not feel like it fits the Steamfitters union, beer drinker, and other things that are often broadcast on baseball games. Yeah. I don't know if that says something so much about baseball broadcasts as it just betrays

a lack of understanding of radio. Like if it were a podcast, maybe. Sure. Then someone can press the button and go back 15 seconds and then you can listen to it as many times as you need to listen to it. But that is not an option on radio. And so it sounds like they would get an extremely low rate

of people actually emailing that address if it is an emailable address to begin with. I agree. It's right. And if it were TV, then you'd have, you know, you figure a lot of people are DVRing. Exactly. But radio doesn't have that function. In fact, watching baseball on TV that has DVR can then be a little bit, it can be disorienting

then to go to either radio or a real life game because you have this moment where your brain wants to rewind constantly and you can't do it so anyway if you get this job call in and let us know okay yeah all right third third and final banter is you saw the jose did you see the jose alvarado pitches yesterday was that like the i saw a gif I think, of a 99-mile-per-hour pitch shouldn't move like this. So Alvarado pitched against the Rockies yesterday, and his outing went fairly viral. Both a pitch that he threw to Charlie Blackmon that was called strike three that had crazy movement in on the lefty. And then also a couple of pitches that he threw to Mark Reynolds, who first sort of ducked out of the way of an outside fastball from a lefty, which you can imagine how that

would look, and then swung and missed by probably, I don't know, three feet on a slider right afterward. missed by probably, I don't know, three feet on a slider right afterward. And I saw these pitches gift and tweeted all over the place, articles written about them, and many tweets about them. And so I got to thinking of a question, which is this, Ben. We know that baseball has broadly changed in the aggregate from, say, 20 years ago. And if you were to suddenly import 1998 baseball here, we would all notice pretty quickly in the aggregate that everybody's throwing two miles an hour slower, and strikeout rates are much lower, and pitch counts for some starting pitchers are dangerously high and so on and so forth in the aggregate but do you can you think of anything where in one

watching one minute of baseball you would be most confused as a 1998 baseball fan where you would you would just have the hardest time explaining like why are they playing that way or how is that possible or what is this strange game that has suddenly been imported to 1998? With just one, you have one minute. You get to watch one minute to be confused. Do you have anything in mind that you have seen recently or that you can think of? Well, something with defensive alignments, I guess, is one option. Just that was pre-shift except for isolated cases.

That was pre-shift except for isolated cases. And so if you saw the whole infield and outfield shifting from one pitch to the next, as occasionally you will see a broadcast actually show, that would be something that would probably set it apart from that baseball. Not that you wouldn't recognize what it was, but it wouldn't be something that you were used to seeing. That's maybe one obvious example. Otherwise, I'm trying to think. I mean, there haven't been major rule changes. Like, obviously, there are slides that are prohibited now, but seeing the absence of a slide wouldn't be something that would give anything away. There's replay, of course. That would just be, oh, okay, there's replay now. Maybe it would have been shocking in 1998 that there's replay of course that would just be oh okay there's replay now maybe it would have been shocking in 1998 that there was replay being used but that's about all i mean it's not like

you can tell like a launch angle oriented swing necessarily just from one swing or something so i think it has to be a pitch more so than a stance or a swing. Yeah, I think, yeah. So my answer was, which you alluded to, but I'm going to be more specific. My answer, I think, is watching an infield shift against Gerard Dyson. Yeah. I think it would be hard to explain to somebody why a guy who had a 530 OPS last year and who is also good at bunting for hits could possibly be a shift candidate. And yet in the year 2019, teams shift against Gerard Dyson. Yeah.

That's hard to explain. Yeah, that's hard to explain. Not in that it's not hard to explain right now, but it would have been hard to explain 20 years ago to somebody who'd only seen the mostly talking about a shift to the straight behind the pitching mound centerfield camera? Yeah. And B, just sort of primed to be more excited because of how GIFs edit things. Right. Well, I mean, there's definitely combinations of speed and movement that didn't exist 20 years ago, right? I don't know whether you could tell very clearly the difference between a pitch that moves a lot at 93 and a pitch that moves a lot at 99, but I think you probably could, even if you didn't have the mile per hour reading up there. I mean, I think obviously pitchers are throwing harder and I think there's

more and more emphasis on spin and movement. And so you are seeing really nasty pitches, at least with greater regularity. I'm not going to say that if you saw Jose Alvarado throw that pitch in 1998, everyone would have fainted or anything like probably the, you know, the best pitches of that time. I mean, Pedro was pitching, then Randy Johnson was pitching, then Greg Maddox was pitching, then like really amazing pitchers were pitching then. But the fact that you have like Jose Alvarado's throwing those pitches now, I think probably separates this time from that time. You might have one guy in a bullpen who could do things that five guys in a bullpen can do today. So that's part of it. And that actually makes me think like, obviously,

baseball is more fun to follow now because we have gifts and we can share these things really easily. Not as easily as we'd like, maybe, but more easily than before. So I wonder whether when people lament all the strikeouts, and Rob Manfred claims that people like strikeouts, which always seems like this conflict I can't resolve. And I don't know whether that is because only people on Twitter and baseball writers mind strikeouts, or whether Rob Manfred is exaggerating or wrong about people liking strikeouts. But I kind of do like strikeouts if it means that we get to see really just flabbergasting pitches all the time, which it kind of does. I think you've said that you like strikeouts because you like what produces the strikeouts. You like watching pitchers throw

these pitches and hitters maybe try to swing really hard and have these titanic confrontations. I like that too. And that's maybe something we don't factor in enough when we lament the lack of balls in play or base runners. I mean, it is a form of entertainment to see someone swing and miss at a pitch that looks like it's defying physics or something, even if it doesn't produce contact, even if the end result is the hitter just turning around and walking back to the dugout, we were still entertained just to see that pitch and to see the swing and the miss. Yeah, Alvarado was like, that was probably the most fun I've had watching baseball this year,

was watching Alvarado come in and just throw pitches that were hard to explain i have some answers for you ben okay so first of all the the email address as presented in the commercial is i'm gonna now say it out loud okay okay l russell usacsacs.com okay so what is that do you there's a thing about somebody who's oh i think there was a mcsweeney's the mcsweeney's i think got an article about inconvenient email addresses and so i'm going to uh yes here it is all right so email addresses it would be really annoying to give out over the phone like for instance mike underscore 2004 at yahoo.com but underscore is spelled out for instance or a this is the good stuff right here a a, A, A, A, A, that's six A's at Yahoo.com. But it's five A's.

Anyway, so. Have you tried to email this address just to see if it goes through? Well, it's impossible. I would immediately get it. There's two ats. It's impossible. Try it. Well, it's impossible. I would immediately get it. There's two ats. It's impossible. Try it. See if it pouts us back.

Well, I think that you would have to conclude that it's either L. Russell USACS Medical Group Limited AT, not the at sign, but AT Russell at USACS.com, or it's L Russell, a C S medical group limited at Russell, a T U S A C S.com. One of those, one of the ads has to be spelled out and it's, that's a bad idea, but I've actually now, I believe I have cracked this code and you're going to want to listen to the ad again and realize how badly written this ad is you're supposed to send the resume to l russell comma usacs medical group comma limited at and then here's where the email address starts russell oh at usacs.com okay so the email address does not start until after the second ad so the email address is not l russell usacs but here's the other thing ben this email address which i have found online this is uh at monster.com there's this basically the same exact language and so they've read this off of a monster.com job posting and on on the Monster.com, where the email address is actually just Russell at USACS.com,

Russell has three L's. So what are the chances that they got a single email as a result of this ad? It's zero. It's zero. There's no way. Now, somebody might have called. Somebody might have called. Somebody might have called USACS Medical Group Limited and said, guys, I'm a little confused. I'm sorry to start

this relationship off on the wrong foot, but I would like to apply for your job and I've been unable to. But there's no way an email successfully made it there. Maybe they're just trying to get the best applicants by making it so difficult to apply. I'm finding, by the way, I am finding lots of references to Russell at USACS.com for job openings, and they're all spelled with three L's. And that's because, Ben, his name is L. Russell. His email address is RussellL at USACS.com, but they don't say that in the commercial they just say wrestle oh man this is devious but not devious just incompetent probably only chance that their only chance anybody will ever successfully apply for this job is if it is one of our listeners in which case i think i should I should get a finder's fee. Oh, man.

Yeah. All right. All right. There we go. That went somewhere. Yeah. Okay. All right.

Here we go. Let's move on. All right. What do you want to talk about? Well, more extensions this week. I thought we were kind of done with the extensions, possibly. And you've written a lot about extensions. Maybe it's time for you to write again about extensions because you've looked at the history of them and the track record and who

benefits and how often it works out and so forth but we've seen some extensions since our last episode ronald acuna signed a extension that was i think, widely regarded as extremely team-friendly. And then the Rockies extended German Marquez. And those are both obviously very promising high-ceiling players who have already been very good. And then there were extensions for Randall Gritchuk and David Bodie. Yeah. And those didn't really fit with most of the others. What had been so surprising was not only the quantity of the extensions, but also the quality of the players who had been signing those extensions and the amounts that they had been signing for. And now suddenly we've got Randall Gritchuk coming out of the woodwork. So it's just everyone. Everyone has signed an extension now.

Yeah. I mean, the Gritchick one is, we're talking about something different, right? I mean, he's getting close to free agency and he's, you know, he's a good ball player who's going to make it to free agency and still be probably a pretty good ball player. So for him, it's probably just not wanting to head into the the free agent environment where power hitting corner outfielders don't do well and i don't know that doesn't feel like that wild of a extension one way or another to me the bode one though is like not what i expected to wake up to and i didn't to be fair it happened in the afternoon. But that was a... David Bodie, man.

The thing about the extensions for young players, and there are a lot of things about extensions for young players, and let's first stipulate that. But one of the things about extensions for young players is that it helps to not think about them as being, from the team's perspective, as being designed to keep the player on the team for a long time rather they're designed to help them trade you they are basically a like trade catalyst because now you're cost controlled you're you're uh under team control for a long time you're much

more appealing to other teams and so therefore after a few years they're going to trade you and i don't i don't know if that's true for Bodie specifically or for any of these players specifically. But when I did a piece a couple of years ago when McCutcheon was on the trade block looking at all the extensions that had been signed over the previous like five or six years or something like that for pre-arb probably players, Maybe it was pre-arb players or maybe it was players who had given up free agency years or something like that in order to sign these long extensions.

And the majority of them end up getting traded. So that's kind of what they're about more than anything else. It's about the team taking you and saying, you're our asset and we want you to be a more valuable asset. And so it's like with Bodhi, the first thing I thought was that this is exaggerated. Of course, this is very exaggerated.

But the first thing I thought was that now that he's cost controlled for a long time, the Cubs will trade him to the Rays at the trade deadline this year to get some pitching help. And then the Rays will wait two years and trade him to the Mariners. to get some pitching help. And then the Rays will wait two years and trade him to the Mariners. And that's what this extension is all about, is getting the contracts in place so that David Bodie can be traded twice.

Yeah. Yeah, that was a weird one that sort of stood out. Presumably, we're just about at the end of when extensions typically stop. Like extensions usually tend to be done in spring training shortly before opening day, and sometimes they bleed into April a little. But I'll be curious to see if this continues at anything close to this pace throughout the season. You would think that maybe these are just the stragglers

who were talking about deals toward the tail end of spring training, and they just didn't get done before opening day. But if this is really a trend toward players just wanting to avoid free agency at all costs now, then maybe we'll see it be kind up for some of these like i don't know for sure but i my guess is that david bode nor probably a lot of the players nor acuna probably walked into the off season expecting to be signing a long extension that gave up free agent years and that it seems it feels i guess like what happened was first you had the bad market for free agents in which some pending free agents thought, well, this maybe isn't going to work out that well for me.

And so they decided to sign extensions. And then once a lot of people started doing it, then a lot more names started to come up as possible extension candidates and that the ball just got rolling. I mean, I don't know, that might not be true, but it would help explain why we've had this run of extensions even late, even after the unofficial extension deadline has passed. It feels like there's a little bit of a market panic, right? Yeah, I think so. So I don't really have set banter because we have so many emails and some of the emails are regarding things that we might have bantered about otherwise. By the way, can I just really quick interrupt and just say that when John Hart was pioneering the early extension for his stars in the 90s, he also gave extensions to a lot of non-stars, like marginal players. And so those are not as well remembered as Carlos Baerga and Kenny Lofton, but Scott Scudder got an extension and Dave Otto got an extension and Jack Armstrong and Carlos Martinez all got extensions as well.

So his idea at the time was not just to focus on the young stars, but to use the club's sort of position to lock up everybody if they could i mean they're they're all they're all like in the logic for why a club would want to lock up a star is no less true and arguably more true for why the club would want to lock up a marginal player which is to say that the marginal player is worried about his earning capacity in his career and what could go wrong if uh something slightly bad happens and the club is willing to take on that risk in order to skim a bunch off the top, right? That seems even more true for a player like Bodhi than it would be for Acuna. Yep, good point. So I don't know what has happened over the last day or two that has caused us to be bombarded with emails even more so than usual, but our inbox

is overflowing here and I guess we can talk about a few of these things because they're sort of early season responses that if we're going to talk about them now would be the time not all of these emails are about Williams Estadillo although a few are so Ezra wanted to bring up the Chris Davis intentional walk. So Ezra says, Chris Davis was just intentionally walked by the Blue Jays in the top of the eighth of a 2-0 ballgame. There was a runner on second and one out. I am flabbergasted.

Set up the double play, sure, but come on. Is 2019 Chris Davis the worst hitter to ever be intentionally walked? If not, who is? Let's stipulate to be intentionally walked, not in front of a pitcher. Right. Because 2018, Chris Davis was actually intentionally walked twice and once was on opening day. So no one knew that he was going to be 2018 Chris Davis. And then the other time was in late June, but it was in the 15th inning and it was an interleague game and he was batting ahead of the pitcher. So yeah, that doesn't count. Who was winning? Who was winning

in the game? I think he was winning. Yeah, the Orioles were winning. So in this one, I didn't look at the circumstances beyond what Ezra said here, but just on the surface, this was not an interleague game, so it was not a setting up the pitcher situation. And Chris Davis, as we speak, after this game, is hitless on the season. He is 0 for 14 with eight strikeouts, and that is coming off, obviously, a miserable season last year and not a good spring training so he is chris davis there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that he is better than last year's chris davis so i don't uh i have an answer for this really i kind of wanted to bring it up to just speculate about why they might have done this or just to express surprise that they did do this.

I mean, I'm sure that there have been truly terrible hitters intentionally walked in the past because in the past, everyone got intentionally walked, or at least it was a lot more common than it is today. It's surprising to see Davis walked in this day and age. Like, I mean, you could probably find, you know, like we got another question about Hal Lanier or the answer was Hal Lanier. Someone asked like the worst ratio of outs to plate appearances ever in a season. And Hal Lanier 1968 is the worst. And in 1969, Hal Lanier, who was still terrible, got intentionally walked. Now, I didn't look. Maybe he was batting ahead of the pitcher at that point. But point is, he was totally terrible and he got intentionally walked a bunch of times in his career. So

I don't have an answer to this really, but I am also flabbergasted that this happened. I have a slight answer because Jim Cott, caught the pitcher is as far as i can tell the last pitcher to be intentionally walked uh-huh before the dh even began and i'm on the fence about whether to say he was worse than chris davis than chris davis what this was so this was 1970 uh he had an ops plus of 41 that year, which is worse than anything Chris Davis has done. And this was in September of that year. So I think that we can conclude that those were his numbers. That was probably a fair representation of who he was.

Davis's OPS plus last year was 50. Caught the year before had an OPS plus of 68, which is better than, but Davis OPS plus, if you go back a year earlier, is higher than that. And the year before that, Kott had an OPS plus of 10. And for his career, he had an OPS plus of 37. And so I think all indications are that Jim Kott was a worse hitter than Chris Davis. Would you agree with that? I think so, yeah.

And then let's add on top of that that that the man who he was being intentionally walked to face was cesar tovar who was 18th in mvp voting that year 17th in mvp voting the year before and was in the fourth year of a five-year run of getting mvp votes now he was not an mvp primarily for his bat but rather his versatility and his speed. But he also had a pretty good bat. And that year he hit 300, 356, 442, which is an OPS plus of 117. Focus on that 356 in the middle there, his OBP, because this was a situation where you'll be unsurprised to know Jim Cott was being intentionally walked for situational reasons. This was the 11th inning. So Jim Cott was being intentionally walked for situational reasons. This was the 11th inning.

There were runners on second and third with one out. And so they were trying to set up the double play. But by putting Cott on first, now all Tovar had to do was anything at all whatsoever to get a run in. And any walk, any reaching base at all would force a run in. The Twins also, who had Jim Cott and Cesar Tovar at the time, were already leading. They'd already scored one in the top of the 11th. So this was not a situation where it was even like a still a tie game and one run was going to end the game. So I would say that at the very least, at the very, very, very least, we can say that the answer does not go back farther than 1970. Yeah.

Hal Linear was walked intentionally three times when he was batting seventh. So assuming that the pitcher was not batting eighth on those days, it did happen. Yeah, I don't know. I looked at the worst single- season hitters, qualified hitters, who have been intentionally walked since 2000, let's say, and you get Alcides Escobar, who was intentionally walked. That was probably a batting ahead of the pitcher thing. Probably

most of these are. I wish there were an easy way to separate and look at guys who were not, who were intentionally walked. But this has to be up there because Chris Davis at this point, I don't know what I would project his true talent at, but probably not much better than it was last year than his actual performance was. So this is pretty egregious and unusual at a time when intentional walks are less frequent than they've ever been before. I vaguely recalled Jeff Mathis being intentionally walked to face, I think Dan Heron maybe, and Dan Heron had an OPS one point higher. I think I'm remembering some of these details right. I'm certain that the intentional walk is a correct detail. The rest is up for grabs. So this question also has an expiration date, I think.

Maybe this can be a stat blast. Depends on your answer. I think it's sort of stat blasty. This is from Justin, one of our Patreon supporters, and he says, Trevor Rosenthal has allowed seven earned runs without recording an out over the course of three appearances. This makes his ERA impossible to calculate for lack of a denominator. What's the record for most runs allowed to start a season before an out? How about appearances?

It can't be that high because you would think a guy would run out of slack or get an out sooner than not. You throwing this one to me? Yes. Song? He's playing the song? Yes. All right Is it playing the song? Yes. All right. All right.

They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA minus or OBS plus. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to days to past. This has been widely published. So when this email came in, Rosenthal had only thrown two games without an ERA, and we were going gonna break some news but unfortunately he then threw a third one and so now everybody in baseball is talking about Trevor Rosenthal and his infinite ERA I went back to 1920 I looked for streaks of games to start a season

without recording an out and before Rosenthal Rich hill rich hill was the only player in history or at least since 1920 to have gone three outings without getting an out so he was the first person to ever have an infinite era through three outings into the season rosenthal is now matching him of course this brings up a very complicated mathematical question rich Hill only allowed one run in those three outings. He, in fact, he faced five batters, it looks like, walked three, hit one, gave up a hit, but only one of those runners came around to score. Rosenthal has faced seven batters,

and all seven of them have scored. So he has allowed seven earned runs. So whose ERA is higher? Yeah, technically. I mean, technically they're tied right and yet if you were to sort this leaderboard would you would you have to put them even would you have to put them alongside each other or could you put rosenthal above hill i don't know there were before that there were actually only 30 players who had ever even done this twice, who had ever even gone so far as two games into a season, which is kind of crazy when you think about it.

And none of them had allowed more than seven runs. Rosenthal had already matched the all-time most with five through his two. Peter Moylan allowed five. And a guy named Ray... There's not even going to be a pronunciation guide on this one. Is there? Krawczyk. Do you know how to pronounce K-R-A-W-C-Z-Y-K?

I'd say like Kraycheck or something. Kraycheck, yeah. I think you're probably right. Okay. Ray Kraycheck. So he had five as well. And Larry Sherry, which is a fun name, had five, but only four of them were earned. And then you have about, let's see.

Well, then you have a bunch. Then you have hundreds. Yeah. None of them are fun. So Trevor Rosenthal is a lass on a leaderboard right now at the very top. Okay. Yeah. Well, makes sense that there wouldn't be extremely long streaks like this

because usually pitchers record outs. So this is unusual. So we got a couple of questions that maybe can be paired together because they're about the outlook of the Indians and the Twins, the outlook of the Indians and the Twins, respectively, and those teams' fortunes kind of go hand in hand. So the question from Brad is, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the rather poor start the Indians have gotten off to. Is this the Kluber we should be getting used to that has carried over from October? I'm anticipating a far more competitive race than initially projected. I suppose it could be fun given how bad the division has been in recent And then Dylan says, the second half of 2006 being the most notable recent exception. Now they have maybe the most exciting player to watch in the field in Byron Buxton, a versatile infielder in Marwin Gonzalez, a pitcher in Jose Barrios, who's as exciting to watch as anyone his stuff is going,

Eddie Rosario, who is maybe the most underrated fun guy in the league, a new manager in Rocco Baldelli, who's willing to try new things, and, of course, Williams Astadillo. Thoughts? So, obviously, I think if the Indians are worse than we thought they were or in worse position, that makes the Twins more fun just because they're more competitive and their season's more likely to lead somewhere.

But do you have any thoughts on Cleveland or Minnesota, respectively? I don't feel like his case for Minnesota being a fun team is particularly strong, and he got to choose what he said. I mean, that was the best he could bring. I just don't think that the world stops for Eddie Rosario. I like Eddie Rosario as a player. Is he notably fun? I don't know, apparently, but I wasn't aware of how fun he was.

Yeah, I mean, Nelly Cruz is fun, I think, but not that fun. But fun, I mean. I don't know how fun can DHS be, really. Yeah, I still, you know, to be honest, that selfie thing in the All-Star game left a bad taste in my mouth. Okay. You remember that? Yeah.

Yeah. Kyle Gibson, is he fun? I don't know. You remember that? Yeah. Yeah. Kyle Gibson. Is he fun?

I don't know. I think if I were, first of all, I was forced to pick a flop team and a surprise team in our preseason staff prediction post. And I picked the Twins as my surprise team, which was partly a product of the fact that I could only talk myself into like two teams as surprise teams because either you're good or you're bad right now basically in baseball and there just weren't that many teams I could make a convincing case for as oh this team is gonna be a lot better than people think the twins I could kind of do that and part of that was wondering if maybe cleveland would not be as as good as they were projected to be because of injuries so i do think the twins are fun i mean just having asadio alone makes them

fun for me i think but yeah beyond that they do have buxton who is fun sometimes or it's fun to see if he'll be good i guess maybe not if you're a twins fan i don't know but i think he's fun to see if he'll be good I guess maybe not if you're a Twins fan I don't know but I think He's fun there are some Other young players who are At least interesting on that team and the pitching Staff is I don't know If we were just talking about whether Strikeouts are inherently entertaining

Or not entertaining but I think If I were a Twins fan I would Think this staff was fun Because it's just different from any staff that they've had recently. Like last year was the first year that they actually got out of the basement basically when it comes to strikeouts and now they can strike people out and kind of throw hard. And maybe that is leading to Dylan overrating their fun this year because it's just so new to Twins fans to see their pitchers miss bats but

i think they are fun and i think if you think cleveland is weak and vulnerable then that makes the twins fun because they're just so few teams that are in position to overtake a favorite i am i boy i like i think i think the twins are fun i think i think that the email making the case was was not quite convincing but that in fact it is a pretty fun team but now i'm so in my own head about what is fun the what is fun conversation can be a little bit like the who's overrated who's underrated yeah conversation where you're not really sure what the denominator is and you feel like you decide which side to argue before you really have defined any terms.

And I'm not, so like Marwin Gonzalez to me, I don't think fun. But I don't know why I don't think fun and I don't know if you just flashed pictures of all these guys in front of me and I had a half a second to register fun't think fun. And I don't know if you'd, if you just flashed pictures of all these guys in front of me and I had a half a second to register fun or not fun. I don't know what I would have said. I don't know what my natural response to that would have been. So what makes, uh, what do you think are we looking for, for fun? I think that for fun, we're looking, we would like somebody who has in most cases probably has at least one outstanding tool right is that pretty consistent i would say so like you would like somebody who is 95th percentile at some aspect of the game i think now it can work the other way too where if you have

somebody who is who has no weakness whatsoever there can be a certain funness in that, a sort of a way that his competence carries through an entire game. And you can see him do something good at almost any time is also fun. Like I think Andrew Benintendi is fun, even though I think of him more as a 60th percentile across the board kind of guy. Yeah. And so that can be fun. But really, you want a 95th percentile tool. So Buxton is undeniably fun and Astadio is undeniably fun for those reasons. Youth and extreme age tend to be fun for some reason. I guess one is probably youth for the novelty and the potential upside. and the potential upside, old age for how precarious it feels, and because they look out of place, right? You get the, they don't look, they don't quite look right.

And it's more fun when somebody doesn't quite look right for whatever reason. And other than that, what are we looking for here? Well, it probably goes along with youth, but just newness in terms of being competitive. I think if you've been good for a while, that makes you a little less fun. Like the Dodgers have won six consecutive division titles. I think that probably makes them a little less fun, more impressive, but probably a little less fun just because we've seen them in back-to-back World Series at this point, whereas the Twins have been up and down. They were bad last year.

If you come off a bad season and suddenly you look good or promising, I think that's part of it because we just haven't seen you as much. We probably didn't have that much reason to watch you last year. And so even if you're not new, you're new to us. So I think that's a big part of it. I don't consider outward displays of emotion to necessarily be more fun than not having outward displays of emotion. I support the free expression of outward displays of emotion, but I think that most, I figure all players have strong emotions, whether I get to see them or not. And the outwardness of those displays is temperamental.

And I don't think that I necessarily reward some guys for just having a more expressive face or being a little looser in my own mind. So to me, that's not a big factor. I'm happy for all the ballplayers, whether they're smiling or not. Now, versatility, there are certain aspects. I think that a fun team is a team that gets more interesting later in the game uh-huh and so like i thought that the dodgers last year did have that yeah yeah i thought the dodgers last year were an incredibly fun team for that reason that as the game went on you became more interested rather than maybe less interested

you started to to anticipate okay what's going to happen next what uh how is this game how is the balance of this game going to shift and so i like that i liked the that was the main reason i liked the royals of 2014 2015 for a different reason than you like them which is uh that i liked the uh the the dyson outfield the lockdown outfield when dyson would come in i also liked terence gore uh and i also liked the bullpen. And I don't have a good sense at this stage of the year whether the Twins are doing that. I have not watched every minute of every Twins game.

So, yeah. I actually, and I do like Kyle Gibson. I do think Kyle Gibson is fun. Okay. So I'm going to say fun, fun team. As for whether they're going to beat the Indians, oh, probably. Probably? I don't know

not probably i had to i had to come up with a a hot take they did a piece on espn that that basically called for everybody to give their hottest take and i'm not hot you use your your jose ramirez i did not no i did not have the i don't believe that i i feel it but i don't believe it i want to be talked out of that one and he had the next game i watched in all fairness he put uh two really good swings on two pitches and so uh but i uh no mine was that um the yandi diaz trade will end up flipping two playoff spots uh and then i changed it to could end up flipping two playoff spots because i do still think cleveland will win that division um but it's much less i would say that it's much less clear to

me now than it was partly for a few reasons one is that you don't know how many games lindor is going to play you don't know whether i mean it's now they're saying three weeks or more so who knows right it could be six. And the lineup just looks worse when you say it out loud. Yeah. And all these games that have been played are banked, right? So I argued that trading Yandy Diaz will cost Cleveland the one-hitter margin that the AL Central might be determined by, and that it might provide the one-hitter margin that the AL Central might be determined by and that it might provide the one-hitter margin that the second wildcard spot will be determined by.

So the answer is probably no, but maybe yeah. Yeah, I know the first week has been weird in a lot of respects and the standings are kind of upside down in some places and the Yankees are a losing team and the Red Sox are a losing team and the Astros are a losing team and the Cubs are a losing team and the Orioles are a winning team. And I know that's all strange, but you know, we're talking about six, seven games here. There's almost nothing that can happen in that period of time that makes me change my opinion about anything. Obviously, if you're the Yankees and you lost a bunch of players to injury, that makes you worry more than it would otherwise.

Or if you're in a division like the NL Central, which is extremely competitive, and you have the Brewers get off to a 6-1 start and the Cubs get off to a 1-4 start, and suddenly they're already four games back that might matter a little bit but we're just talking tiny differences here so there's just uh nothing i could get too exercised about hey are we gonna do that other one the other stat blast that yeah that russell goldstein patreon let's yeah let's do that let's do it this is as, as I mentioned, from Russell Goldstein. He says, My friends and I created a term a long time ago called a true win for a pitcher. A pitcher gets a true win when he pitches a complete game and hits more home runs

than runs he allows. We were curious if you could find out how many times this has been done in history, which pitcher has done it the most times, and if it's possible, a breakdown of the number of different permutations of these. For instance, hit two home runs, allow zero one runs, hit one home run, allow zero runs, etc. And I don't know if this was, I guess, not prompted by this because

he created this a long time ago, but we have seen a couple notable pitcher offensive games in this past week with Bumgarner and also Zach Granke with his double digit strikeout and two homer game, which was pretty impressive. Yeah, we have, but we did not see any true wins by his definition. Ah, no true wins. Okay. Because a true win has to be a complete game. Yes, that's right. So this, I really like the concept of a true win. and now that he has given me a name for it. You sometimes hear that a player has done that, or that a pitcher has done that,

or maybe not a complete game, but homered and also threw seven shutout innings. And I've never been that captivated by those things happening. But now that there's a name for it, I actually really like it. And so I want to keep thinking about true wins. Unfortunately, no one's going to get them anymore. Right. That's exactly right. He has named this after perhaps after the last one has ever been thrown. We don't know for sure, but it could get there. So to answer his questions one by one, there have been 207 true wins that I found throughout major league history. These are complete games in which there were more, the pitcher hit more home runs, not just drove in

more runs, but hit more home runs than there were runs scored they are in three permutations because nobody has ever hit three home runs as a pitcher and also allowed two or fewer runs i think one pitcher did hit three home runs but he allowed i think four or five, or maybe it wasn't a complete game. So there have been four two-to-one, two-homer, one-run true wins, and four two-to-nothing, two-homer, no-run wins. Not that the score was necessarily two-to-nothing, but that there were two homers and no runs. And then the 199 others were all one-homer and a shutout. The most recent one was Steven St strasburg in august of 2017 before that

madison bumgarner in august 2015 before that clayton kershaw on opening day in 2013 so we've had one every two years and really we've had basically one every two years going back to 2000. There were, there have been five this decade, there were seven the previous decade, and there were four the previous decade. So the pace hasn't actually slowed all that much. While shutouts are much less common, complete game shutouts are much less common. Maybe pitcher home runs are more common. I don't know. They were more common though in previous generations, much more common. So remember, we're talking about five a decade here across Major League Baseball. Bob Gibson is the true win champion. He had six of them. So he had six. He's the champ. A bunch of guys have had four, including Claude Passo in the 1930s and 1940s and dizzy trout and don trysdale and earl wilson and i think that's all

uh schoolboy rowe i think had four maybe he had three and so that's the answer to that question okay i like it bob gibson six true wins all-time champ yeah i like the term me too i wish we had more cause to use it these days. Yeah, I wish we thought of this sooner. Yeah. No active player has to. It seems like Jacob deGrom could get a true win one of these days. He doesn't.

You know, he threw one complete game last year. Is that all? Yeah, that's all. He had a 1.70 ERA, and he threw one complete game. Baseball is very different. Yeah. All right Alright maybe one more here I have on hand So this kind of goes along

With something that we talked about Briefly last week but Michael says I just watched Travis Shaw try and fail To bunt against the shift The Brewers broadcast team mentioned That the Brewers practice bunting every day, but it's just different against live arms. And then if you fail once, a hitter gets

frustrated and is unlikely to attempt one again. So my question, if a team is serious about combating the shift with bunts, why don't they try more earnestly to create a game-like scenario? For example, hire a handful of pitchers who wash out of the minor leagues but can touch 90-ish on the I don't know. I think something we've probably talked about before just in the than your typical batting practice pitcher, who is often just a coach who's around. And I think there would probably be some benefit there. Obviously, you're not going to get a near big league quality pitcher to throw you batting practice because that kind of pitcher is going to have something better to do. But I think there would be an advantage to seeing real pitches, competitive pitches,

out of a real release point with real movement, maybe from a regular distance. So I think all of those things make sense. And I would really just like to see some team go all in on working on bunting. If they're going to do do it maybe they'll decide that it's just not worth it that the opportunity cost is too high but i would like to see now that we've gotten to this era where shifts are extremely prevalent you know you're gonna see them you know

there are going to be times when you want to lay a bunt down it seems like we've passed the point where there would be some reward to actually purposefully practicing bunting against the shift and not just doing the couple for show bunts to lead off your round of bp and then actually attempting to do it for real against real pitching which is an entirely different matter well so first let me just say that you're if you get them to not if you keep bunting enough that they're going to adjust back to you, then they're not going to adjust the whole infield. They're just going to leave the third baseman closer to his position. And my feeling about the shift, which might not be true, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense of it is that most of the value comes on the three side, right?

More than where the third baseman is. It doesn't matter the the where the third baseman is that it doesn't matter that much where the third baseman is like obviously they prefer to have him where they had him wherever they're putting him so by making him adjust then you've done something to thwart them but that the the real value would be in for instance getting the shortstop to get back to where he was playing and that's not going to happen with a bunt correct me if i'm wrong am i wrong it sounds right all right so there are three only there are really only three possibilities here one is that players aren't interested in committing to bunting against the shift that they have decided that it's not worth it that there's not enough upside or maybe there's not hardly any upside and the reason that they don't do this scheme that is being described for us

is that they don't want to. It's not worth it for them. They're not really that interested. Another is that players and teams have determined that it's much harder to get good at bunting than we think it is. And maybe they have been practicing and maybe they could even bring in regular pitchers

and they could practice all the time, but that at the end of the day, it's just hard. It's hard to get that bunt down against major league pitchers, whether you've practiced a lot or not. And that when we see a guy try it and fail, it's not for lack of seriousness, but because it's just a tough thing to do. And I think I most, I think I probably lean more toward that. The third is what this question presupposes, which is that these players are being irrational

and they're not taking their careers seriously. And that's that they don't want to do the hard thing, which is work. And I guess I could buy the irrational part of it. I guess I could buy that maybe they, that this hasn't, that the option hasn't occurred to them or something. I could buy that maybe they that this hasn't that the option hasn't occurred to them or something but what I have found about most ball players is that they want to do more work like to them the frustrating thing is that there isn't more they can do to get better like these guys are incredibly driven and they do an incredible amount to get better. They all have grit, you know?

And if you gave them another way that they could get better, I think at this point, I don't know if this was true. I don't, I'm not sure this was true 20, 30 years ago. I don't know when it became true. But I think at this point in the sport, these guys are all out there trying to find more they can do, more work they can do to get better. And so I kind of have a tendency to reject the possibility that there is a lot here to be gained,

because I think that they would be doing it, in my sense. I don't know. I might be wrong. Well, if their teams aren't putting them in the position to be able to do more, might be wrong well if their teams aren't putting them in the position to be able to do more i mean the suggestion here in the email from michael is to hire competitive pitchers to throw you practice to do this which is something that at least during the regular season you would need your team to put in place and maybe teams haven't been appropriately aggressive enough. Maybe they've thought that players wouldn't take to it when they actually would, or maybe they have underrated the impact,

or maybe they have correctly rated the impact and they've decided that it's just not worth it, that you'd have to pay this pitcher too much, that he'd hurt himself. I don't know what the objection would be, that it would be too hard to find the right guy to do this, who would actually be an upgrade over a batting practice pitcher, but would not be so good that he would want to pitch professionally instead of throwing

batting practice to a major league team. So I don't know exactly what the hangup is there, but I could imagine it making sense potentially. Yeah, I could imagine it making, I'm not ruling it out. I've got a lot of poorly informed suppositions going on here, but I think that if players want to do this, then sure, you could say, well, if the team's not going to give me a guy throwing 92, then I can't fulfill this email. But there are other steps along the way that players could either take care of on their own. I mean, they all work out during the offseason. They all try to make themselves better ball players during the offseason. And there's always a kid in town who's throwing 89 back home from

college or whatever. And there are other things that the team could help you with right now that you have at your, at your convenience. And so, so it, uh, I don't know, my guess is that it's a little bit of column one, a little bit of column two, and a little bit of option four, which is that they, that, that they are kind of probably a lot of them are kind of working on this a little bit and it hasn't really paid off because maybe there's, i think honestly i think it's hard to bunt yeah i think so too but if you're going to try and it seems like more players are trying i haven't seen or asked for the numbers on that but we have obviously seen some players try to get bunts down against the shift and so if you have decided that it would benefit you to get a bunt down against the shift and that you're

going to use a valuable real plate appearance to try to do that then i think it behooves you to do whatever you can you know within a reasonable amount of practice time to make that a credible attempt and i don't think that everyone who is attempting one of these bunts in a game has actually put the work in to increase the odds that he can get that bunt down i'm sure some of them have and maybe some of them look good doing it and maybe some of them practiced and still look bad because it's hard but there's got to be some of them who were just thinking yeah i'll give it a shot without actually preparing and putting themselves in a position to succeed. Yeah, if I were a counselor to a ballplayer who wanted to do something about the shift, what I would probably recommend is anytime you've come up in a low leverage situation, your team's up or down by maybe more than five runs, then put a bunt down.

Do it, you know, do it 20 times in situations that don't matter. And you'll A, probably be getting a lot better at it. B, have a better sense of whether it's a workable strategy. And C, those 20 times, those are 20 advanced scouting reports that have been sent around the league and maybe that's all you need to to do all right and uh since you answered the question about true wins i just wanted to read my answer to this one because bruce asked us whether justin verlander has a chance to win 95 more games which is how many he needs to get to 300 and i did quick play index, and I found that only six pitchers who've debuted after 1970 have won at least 96 games from their age 36 season on. Verlander needed 96 entering his age 36 season.

He is 1-0 this year. So the six who have done it, Clemens, Maddox, Moyer, Wells, Johnson, and Colon. So it is extremely rare that age 36 or older pitcher can accumulate 96 or more wins after that point. And it's obviously getting harder all the time for starters to accumulate wins. So it's not impossible. And if you were going to bet on someone to do it, Verlander would be a good guy to bet on because he's held up really well. He seems to be about as good as he ever been. He is in good shape. He takes care of himself. He seems driven. He uses all the latest analysis to make himself better, but it's probably not in the cards.

Could be. And I know he said he wanted to pitch till he's like 45 but he'd either have to do that he'd have to essentially i mean he won 16 games last year when he probably should have been the cy young award winner so he'd either have to do that six more times or be less good but still pretty good and actually pitch until he's 45. So I don't see it happening, but it's not impossible. Goodbye. Okay. Talk to you next week. See you, man.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. Bill Huang, Esteban Rocio, Joseph Ralston, Allison Organ, and Patrick Eschenfeld. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast at vangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. I may not have to remind you of this because the emails are coming in at probably an unprecedented pace

right now for whatever reason. We're all extremely curious, but we appreciate that. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can pre-order my book, The MVP Machine, which comes out two months from today as I speak. Can't come soon enough for me. And Meg Rowley and I will be back with one more episode this week. So we will talk to you soon.