Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1395: Trade Dreams and Low Seams

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

In a bonus episode, Ben Lindbergh banters with FanGraphs writer Craig Edwards about Craig’s explanation for the struggles of José Ramírez, and then (11:15) Ben and Craig talk to John Bitzer, founder and editor of the new site Baseball Trade Values, about designing the trade-simulation site, the challenges of valuing players and constructing fair baseball […]

You've looked for something greater than this. I promise you it doesn't exist. And I wouldn't trade places for what I know. But I'll do something for you. No one else is going to do. Hello and welcome to episode 1395 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Bringer. I'm not joined by Sam or Mick today. This is a bonus episode of Effectively Wild. This is one of those weeks where there's so many people I want to talk to and so many topics I want to get to. There's just not enough podcast, so there has to be a bonus episode. So Meg and I will be back with another one a little later this week, and we have a couple guests lined up.

But today I am talking to a few guests too. So later in this episode, I'll be bringing on Dr. Meredith Wills, who just did some really excellent research for The Athletic about the construction of the baseball and what has changed and why the ball is flying so far this year. I think she came to some interesting conclusions, and she will share them with us a little bit later. But first, I am joined by Fangraph's writer, Craig Edwards. Hey, Craig. How's it going? It's going well.

So I wanted to have you on to talk with me to John Bitzer, who is the founder and editor of a new site just launched last week. It's called BaseballTradeValues.com. And it's a site where people can construct hypothetical trades. And the website will grade those trades, will assess their fairness based on the models and the valuations that John has for major leaguers and minor leaguers. It's a cool idea. It's a fun site. I think he's put a lot of time and effort into it. on the models and the valuations that John has for major leaguers and minor leaguers. It's a cool idea. It's a fun site. I think he's put a lot of time and effort into it.

And some of it, at least conceptually, is based on work that you've done. So I thought you would be a perfect partner with whom to talk to John. We'll do that in just a minute. But before we get to that, I have to ask you about Jose Ramirez, because you published a piece on Ramirez this week at Fangraphs. And Sam and I talked about him in an episode last week, and we just talked about almost a full episode's worth about what is ailing Jose Ramirez. He's just the biggest enigma in baseball. Goes from being not very good to being one of the best players in baseball for a few years to being completely terrible this year. And it's become sort of like a sabermetric sword in the stone type situation where people keep writing about him and trying to diagnose what is going wrong with him.

And you are the latest in that line. So what have you discovered about Jose Ramirez's 2019 and what's your diagnosis? Well, you know, I think that it's probably plate discipline or some sort of approach issue. I linked Devin Fink's article from earlier in the year where he talked about what was going on in the first week or so this season was carrying over from last year, and he hypothesized that Ramirez was trying to sort of beat the shift by not pulling

the ball and you know hitting it to sort of all fields and and that that was sort of backed up at the time by his opposite field numbers and you know I found that basically since that time his his pull numbers have gone back to what they were last year, but of course, he's still sort of terrible. So, and you pointed out to me that his agent had said that he had talked to Ramirez, and they mentioned that giving more credence to the shift issue. And what I found, I think, maybe sort of dovetails into that, but that he has a very unique and sort of refined approach to hitting the baseball. You know, most players, you know, the number of pitches they swing at when they're ahead in the count is generally about the same as when they're behind in the count.

They just look for their pitch to hit. But when Ramirez is behind in the count, at least, you know, last season, he swung only at, I want to say, somewhere between 35% and 40%. And that was like 5% to 10% clear of every single other player in baseball, where he gets behind and he knows that pitchers are going to come with their off-speed stuff outside the zone. And he does his best damage on the fastball. And it seems like this season, he's sort of opened things up a little bit and he's swinging at more of those off-speed pitches and he's swinging at more pitches when he's behind in the count

instead of trying to get himself level or get ahead and sort of wait for that fastball in the middle that he can crush. He's swinging at pitches that are more away, more inside, more towards the edge of the zone instead of to the heart of the zone. And I think that it's possible that that sort of approach is robbing him maybe of the power that he used to have. Yeah, it's interesting the tweets you referenced that I sent you that someone else sent me. Rafa Nieves, who is the vice president of baseball at the Wasserman Agency, which represents Ramirez.

He sent a couple of tweets the other night. He said, I had a long talk with Ramirez two days ago. I told him his launch angle has increased every year since 2016 and he needs to go back to line drive mentality. Then I also told him he's not pulling as much as last year. Then he told me he tries to go oppo to beat the shift. We spoke about not trying to beat the shift and just let it rip. He also acknowledged he's been popping up a lot because he tries to go the other way and then gets beat inside.

Kind of interesting that Nieves would put this on Twitter for one thing. I don't know what he thought the advantage was of making this public. I guess it goes to show that they're talking about it or looking for a way out of this. I don't know whether that makes Ramirez look better or worse, but you don't typically hear agents talking about conversations with their players and specific adjustments and what's going wrong with them. So I guess I'm glad to have that transparency if this is an accurate representation of that conversation, but also somewhat surprised. But beyond that, it is kind of curious, I guess, that even the shift could get into a player like Ramirez's head, even after all of the success that he's had. I mean, he's been one of the best players in baseball over the past few years. If the shift is hurting him, it can't be by much because he was getting better and better and better. This slump seemingly started late last year, but he was still an eight-win player coming off a six-win season, coming off a five-win season.

I don't know whether it's that he went from batting 312 and 318 to 270, and he felt like maybe that's the shift. I got to do something. But weird that it could potentially get in the head of a player who's having so much success. Because I get it if you're one of these like plotting lefty sluggers who's just driving the ball into the shift over and over again, how that could be frustrating. But for Jose Ramirez, things were working out just fine. So it would be an odd decision to change things if that is indeed what happened here. an odd decision to change things if that is indeed what happened here. Yeah. Is going to your agent for analytics on launch angle, the new, you know,

visiting with your college hitting coach. I think that it's weird, you know, like you said, that that's something that he would be concerned about, you know, and, and I would, I would think, and I would hope that, you know, there, there are lots of people telling him to do whatever it is that he was doing last year and not worry about the potential free single that's over on the left side. When if you've got five home runs through three months and you had 39 last year, those are balls the shift can't get to. Right. Yeah, that is an interesting question about going to agents for information. Obviously, players can get this stuff from teams if they want to, and teams in many cases are probably better equipped to give them those insights. But also, they may be more comfortable going to someone who they think is even more in their corner or will give them the straight story.

It's something that I wrote about a bit in the MVP machine, just about whether agents will be kind of the next people who will take up the mantle of player development, because that hasn't really been the case recently, that it's all been driven by coaches or by teams and by players themselves. But agents haven't played a big part in that. Potentially they will, they could. It is a niche that they could fill.

But hopefully Ramirez is already coming out of it. That's a possibility. I noticed that even since Sam and I talked about him, things have picked up. And in fact, a little bit before that, just over the past couple of weeks, he's hit really well. And I don't know whether that means anything or whether it's just small sample and arbitrary endpoints but he's as we speak he's walked about three times as often as he's struck out over that time and he's raised his wrc plus by 10 points or so it had a long way to go up but he has been hitting well perhaps he is already coming out of this funk i don't know but sam and i he put me on the spot and he wanted me to estimate essentially how good I think Ramirez is right now. So I guess I will put you on the spot too, having just written about him.

Do you think he is his old self? Is he the replacement level self? He has been this year. If you had to kind of put a value on his true talent right now, let's say, you know, for a full season, what would you give him? You know, I was just looking up his projections and our depth charts say 120 weighted runs created plus the rest of the season and two and a half more. I mean, if I were to guess that that seems about right, I think I would go on the slightly higher side, you know, maybe 125 or 130 and closer to three wins. It seems like he's close. It's just he's a bizarre player because no matter how bad for him his walk and strikeout totals look,

when you just look at a stat sheet, they look good because of the fact that last season he had 15% walk rate and 12% strikeout rate. And so 11 and 13 seems fine, but actually it's kind of a big difference, and it masks that a little bit. And I've got to think that he can't keep doing whatever it is he was doing. He'll do something different, and it'll look something like last year. Although I think if you look at the stat cast metrics, he might've gotten a bit lucky last season. So I don't know that, you know, the 50% above league average is necessarily completely representative of his true talent, but, but I think 130 is pretty reasonable for a player like him.

Yeah. That's similar to what I said and what Sam said. I think we said three and a half or for next year, something like that. I don't know if we're all just smart and playing the averages or just gutless and afraid to say, yeah, he's still a star or yeah, he's done. He's no good anymore. We're just kind of picking numbers in the middle, which is what we tend to do. But that's sort of the prudent approach, even if it's not a very fun one. Except for Jason Hayward. I'm dying on that hill every year. Right. Well, Ramirez is a good example of why it is hard to construct trades, because it is hard to value players. And having just written a book about player development and about the unpredictable changes that some players have made, I know it is difficult to say how good a player has been,

let alone how good he will be, now that there are all these unanticipated mid-career changes that can happen. So it is a difficult job to try to assess trade fairness or how realistic trades are, but we are going to talk now to a man who has taken that task upon himself. So we are joined now by our first guest. His name is John Bitzer, and he is the founder and editor of BaseballTradeValues.com, a site that recently came to my attention. Actually, John brought it to my attention, but I'm glad that he did because it's a really cool concept,

and I am intrigued by how it works and the challenge of building a site like this. So, John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Ben. Happy to be here. So I would ask what made you interested in this subject or what inspired you to talk about trades or try to quantify trades, but I think it's something that we're all inherently interested in. It's something we all try to do in our informal way. So what made you want to make it into a site and to put what seems like a lot of work into building a model for quantifying the value of trades?

I don't know. It's a labor of love. I must love it because I really put a lot of hours into spreadsheets and calculations and all sorts of things. So you're right. No, I've always been interested in it, but it was only a couple of years ago where I started taking a little bit more serious, reading articles by Craig and a few others. I have a background in figuring out kind of how to quantify things. I have an MBA in finance and I worked in finance for many years. And last summer I got laid off from my job. So I had a lot of time on my hands. And while I looked for another job, I really sort of pursued this and said, let's see where this goes. And I just started monkeying around with spreadsheets and numbers and trying to find the correlations.

My goal was always to try to get it as accurate as possible. You know, I think that's where the opportunity, because it's really hard. And I think fans will appreciate the fact that if it correlates to real life, you know, then it's going to be credible. So that's what I've been trying to do. I spent a lot of time with it over the winter. And what I did was I kind of reversed engineered it. And I logged every trade that happened in the off season. And when something was off, I said, hmm, what did I miss here? And I figured it out. It's like solving multiple algebra problems. Basically, you solve for X, then you realize

there's a Y and you solve for that. And then you realize this thing triggered another thing. And so after you do that a number of times and you focus on some key trades that made you ponder it a bit, you realize, okay, and then you have a bedrock, a foundation to work from. And so I just kept doing that until it all started to gel. So now I think it's as accurate as I think it can be. And we're certainly going to continue to evolve it to make it as accurate as possible. We'll look forward to more correlations this summer trade season. I think sort of poking around on the site, one of the more interesting things is how you're taking different frameworks from a bunch of different places, whether it's projections or like you mentioned, the work that I've done on prospect stuff. And you have to put your own

hand on the scale at a few points in time, like you just mentioned. I was just wondering how you make that decision, you know, whether you say, well, second base, there's too many second basemen right now, or there's too many relief pitchers. And that's the question that I have as far as, you know, how much do you just let your model do the work and how much do you have to sort of steer things? Yeah. So is it along the lines of how much of it is objective and how much of it is subjective? Is that a fair assessment of your question? Yeah, exactly. I try to make it as objective as possible. A friend of mine who's a data scientist who's road tested it said, you know, make sure you let the numbers be your guide. If something, you know, surprises you,

let it surprise you at first, but then test it and make sure it's, you know, it matches common sense as well. So, you know, there were a lot of second baseman free agencies, for example, in the off season who didn't get paid as much as you thought if you looked at their war numbers, for example, and you thought, okay, what's going on here? And that's a supply and demand problem, which I said on the site. There were too many second basemen, right? And not enough holes to fill. So they were devalued. And so that's a temporary sort of devalue based on, I think, supply and demand factors in the marketplace. So I had to kind of figure out which variables were temporary and which ones were permanent. Another example would be DHs, you know,

Nelson Cruz, Chris Davis, those guys don't get paid as much if you just look at their award numbers as you might expect, but that's because they're DHs and they have no defensive value. I think we all know that. So in other words, there's a difference between a temporary variation and a permanent kind of variation, you know, in the model. So I had to kind of figure out which one was which, and we'll continue to do that. And there are some, I'm sure they're going to be supply and demand variables this summer as well. I mean, starting pitchers always go for more than you might expect. Relief pitchers, the good ones anyway, tend to as well. So, you know, we've kind of factored that in. We give a low, medium, and high range. And we all kind of, you know, in certain cases like that,

we know that they're probably, you know, certain players are going to tend towards the high range. So we tweak it based on that assumption, and we'll see if we're right. So generally speaking, can you talk about what the biggest challenges are when it comes to constructing a realistic trade? Because this is something I struggle with. It's something I think fans struggle with. Of course, fans maybe tend to be biased at times and want their team to get the best end of a trade. So they do what a lot of fantasy players do. What I used to do when I played fantasy was, hey, take a bunch of junk and give me your good players.

That'll be nice. And I've done roundups in my baseball prospectus days about terrible trade proposals that fans of every team had come up with for someone who was on the market at one time or another. had come up with for someone who was on the market at one time or another. But baseball is not quite as complicated when it comes to trading as, say, basketball, maybe when you have to worry about the cap and all of these arcane rules. But it is still more complicated than most people give it credit for. So what were the big challenges? Absolutely. Well, I mean, to your point, I wanted to make sure that it was as realistic as possible. And so that was why I did so much number crunching, because fans tend to often overrate their players. And so it's kind of providing a reality check on, no, you can't get Matthew Boyd for a couple of junkie players like that. You really have to like pony up, you know.

And we actually put a rule in the site that said, you know, it's kind of a quality for quality rule. You can't just, you know, if a guy's worth, you know, in our calculator, 20 million, you can't just trade 10 guys worth 2 million. You have to get at least one guy in there who's worth at least 50% of that to make it viable or else it will get rejected because it's just not realistic. So we thought of those scenarios as well. And so that was one of the biggest challenges I would imagine is trying to make it not just the numbers work, but match it up to kind of real life motivations. Another friend of mine asked me, so you're assuming that all GMs are rational? And I said, yeah, actually, I have to because otherwise this won't work. But I think they are actually at this point. And that's one of the kind

of the side things I've kind of observed is that over the last couple of years, GMs have gotten much sort of more model driven, more data driven. I think we all know that. They're not making crazy, wild, speculative trades anymore like they used to in the old Steinbrenner days. They're basically making it on numbers. And so I have a sense of confidence that a fair trade will match up on that basis. So I was actually bracing myself after we launched last week for somebody would shout and say no that's not right but i actually haven't gotten a whole lot of negative feedback on some of the valuations i get an occasional poke like this guy maybe is a little higher that one's a little low but otherwise you know for the most part people are buying that our

numbers are pretty much in the ballpark so we'll see yeah i was going to ask you about that rationality because i agree with you that on the whole, take all the trades together and they should be fairly even one end or the other. And I think there's a lot of agreement in how teams evaluate players these days more so than there used to be. But you were talking about going trade by trade and kind of calibrating the models based on that. And presumably there are still some bad trades that are made. Yeah. You don't want everyone to equalize perfectly. Yeah. And, you know, it's not a perfect, you know, line.

Not everything's going to be exactly on the line. It's going to be some over, you know, if you kind of do a spray chart, you'll see, you know, some will be over, some will be under. But for the most part, you want that line to be, that regression line to be fairly consistent. So that's what we're going for. I also, by the way, tested over the offseason against free agent numbers as kind of a secondary double check, because in theory, what you pay a free agent should be retail price. There should be zero surplus at that point. As we know, trade value is largely based on surplus value, which I note on my site. You basically have the projected sort of on-field contribution minus the salary equals

the surplus. But in free agency, in theory, the on-field contribution should match the salary and your surplus should therefore be zero. Now, there are bidding wars and things that vary that, but over time, I was trying to work from that assumption to get as close as possible as kind of a secondary check to see if the numbers were accurate. And for the most part, they were. One thing I think that was sort of creative, I guess, what you did with the trade deadline, because I think everybody sort of understands that where teams are in the standings

means that they might pay more for a certain player. And I think that, I don't know, maybe just talk about how you came to that conclusion to sort of tweak the value for the trade deadline. Yeah. So one point I would mention, I call it the October premium. So if you're trading today, we're getting close to the end of June. So let's just say it's the halfway point since we're close enough. So you're not getting just three months of a player.

If you're a contender and you have hopes of competing in October, you're really thinking you're getting four months of that player. But from a salary point of view, you're only getting three. So there's kind of a built-in premium there if you calculate that difference. And that will change at the end of July. You're not just getting two months, you're trading for three in the hopes that you can use that player for an extra month. So that alone kind of builds in a premium. And that's one reason I think why a team like the Giants thought, well, let's go ahead and wait to trade Madison Bumgarner because when you factor that in, and in addition to the supply and demand sort of market adjustment, you're probably going to get as much for Bumgarner in July as you would have in the off season.

So let's see how he does and maybe his performance will increase his value a little bit more as well. So there was less of a risk for them waiting because they knew that the numbers there would work out. So that often is the case. Now, not every player will be coveted by teams that are in contention. Obviously, a player has to be someone who makes a difference on the roster. So we have to then, to your earlier question, Craig, we have to sort of subjectively say, okay, would this guy help the roster? Is he likely to be coveted? Yes or no? And if yes, then we give him that extra month. If no, then we don't. So that's just one thing, in addition to kind of the supply and demand factor where, you know, for example, you know, everybody needs starting pitching, or a lot of teams do anyway, and there's not enough good

ones to go around. So those are going to creep up as well. Was there anything that you noticed as you went through the real life trades that consistently was different from the theoretical trades? Just anything that the numbers alone might say, this is fair, this is unfair, but having combed through the actual outcomes, I mean, what's the difference? Yeah. I mean, we were talking about second basement earlier and that was one of them. And there were some trades in the off season that were relatively minor or insignificant, but in my modeling, they were like, whoa, how did they do that? One of them was Oledmus Diaz from Toronto to Houston for Trent Thornton. Using my prospect calculations based on your model, Craig, I was like, Trent Thornton doesn't

look like he's worth that much, but number crunching, Oled Mastias looks like he's worth a lot more. And that's where you get into some unknowns. Then I heard that Trent Thornton has some spin rate going on and there was a lot of buzz about that. And so maybe they valued him up a little bit more, which means maybe the prospect evaluators were a little under valuing him a little bit based on some things we didn't really know, because we're not on the inside of that, what teams know, and that's always a challenge. But there was another thing I think that played into it, which I mentioned on my site, which is roster risk, where you have a guy sometimes who is taking up a roster spot that could be occupied

by a similar player who's cheaper. And that happens a lot. And I noticed that was happening with second baseman a lot. And that played into that second baseman free agency devaluation as well. If you've just got too many veteran second baseman who are at a point in their careers where they're making too much money, and Oled Mestias was starting to project as that, he was in his ARB years, then he's not worth as much. And theoretically, he could have been replaced, similar production, by a younger version of that who's not in his ARP years. So that devalued him a little bit. And so you kind of calibrate them. Okay. Trent Thornton was probably a little bit more, well, it must be a little bit less and, you know, and that's how I worked that out. And then I, then I had to apply that to every other similar situation to make sure

it was consistent and not an anomaly. And so once I did that, I realized, okay, that's what's going on. I mentioned also roster risk in another example, which is the Domingo Santana trade over the offseason from the Brewers to the Mariners, which surprised people a little bit because Santana seemed to have a good offensive profile on the upside for Ben Gamble, who maybe not as much, more like a fourth outfielder type. And Stearns, the GM of the Brewers, literally said in an article, well, that's because he was out of options. And Stearns, the GM of the Brewers, literally said in an article, well, that's because he was out of options. And so that led me to believe that out of options players, you have to kind of discount for that because teams know that. And there's less roster flexibility that more and more teams are valuing roster flexibility.

So from a trade value perspective, you know, there's less leverage and you have to discount for that. So I discounted Domingo Santana's value and it worked out. So then I had to apply that to every other player who was out of options as well. And I started seeing consistency across the board there as well. So now I know to discount for that. So it's another example. I think when you sort of look at the site, if you're going to compare it to something, you're going to compare it to the ESPN's trade machine. And I think most of the use of that is for comparing speculative trade or a potential trade or matching things up, seeing if that's fair. But I'm also wondering if you think that there's some evaluative value to looking at trades that you haven't analyzed yet, but actually do happen and whether or not they're

fair based on the scores that you put on them. Yeah, absolutely. And so we're getting a lot of trade proposals on our site right now on baseballtradevalues.com. And our trade simulator is a very popular tool, which I had hoped it would be. And so I want to see whose trade proposal is the most realistic. And I think that's the essence of your question, if I could, Craig, if I understand it correctly. But I think there may be something else to your question, which is that maybe they're seeing a more likely trade than others may not be based on fit, based on likelihood. What I'm also finding is that fans of other teams obviously know their own players better than non-fans of their teams. And so they may have some insight that other fans don't. And so when you mix those two together, you might get a more accurate trade proposal. And so we're thinking of running a contest to see whose trade

proposal is the most realistic when we match it up to reality, like whose Bumgarner trade comes the closest, for example. We're also thinking of one that's the wackiest trade. Somebody wanted to trade Miguel Cabrera to the Yankees plus $ million dollars to clear the salary. And like, okay, that's bold. That's a contender. Yeah. Something tells me Rob Manfred might not like that one. So you might have to have a commissioner, automated commissioner rule on these things, just like a video game trade simulator does. Yeah. Yeah. Not that well, but. yeah i i will also add one more point which is that i i thought that it could get a little bit too crazy like people would start wanting to trade mike trout and not considering his massive contract right because you're looking at the

surplus value that's above and beyond of that massive contract and i think okay let's just trade trout for boyd or whoever you know and and i thought that's not realistic and so i actually kind of grade him out so you can't trade him because i just thought i don't want to get you know that's just too crazy right that's not gonna happen i'm trying to go with realistic as much as possible yeah still an interesting what if though just you know in terms of what it would take yeah on field value even if it can't happen because he won't want to go or marquee value or whatever. But it's still kind of fun in theory to just see what it would take to balance the scales there because he's so good that even at like dollars per war sort of Trends he has a lot more surface value so much so that it's like off the charts and it's just crazy right but it occurred to me that there's probably an upper limit of what teams will play like they're not going to pay him 100 million a year right even though he might actually be worth it on paper. He's only getting paid 34, 35, 36, right? So because he's already getting paid more than everybody else, but not so much

more because there's no reason to go that high because there's nobody forcing them to. So it kind of created an upper bound in valuation terms, like, okay, teams are probably not going to go higher than that. And so it kind of became a Mike Trout exception that I also applied to other similar, you know, star players like that, who's like DeGrom's contract and sales contract, we're getting into that territory a little bit too, like on paper, they were worth more than, than that. And so we adjusted for that as well. But I also got some feedback from people who said, well, you know, you should make some of these guys make DeGrom available, make sure they're available instead of the none, not tradable category. So I did.

And I thought that's just for fun and people seem to like that. So to your point, it's a good idea. Yeah. So is there any way to model market specific aspects, standings, your playoff odds, your market size, your payroll room, or does that just get too hairy to deal with? So a friend of mine, one of my beta testers really suggested, you know, you should bring in budgets into this to make it more realistic for GMs. And that goes to my Mike Trout point as well. Like you can't just trade from, you have to assume this entire contract and that gets into budget questions.

But I figured maybe later it's out of scope for our site right now. But that sort of thing is probably also out of scope for now. I just wanted to kind of focus on this particular niche, getting the trade values right, having fun with the trade simulator and see where it goes from there. And then maybe in future enhancements, we can get a little more complex with things. Yeah, I think that, you know, that's sort of an interesting part of it because the A's aren't making the same trades that the Yankees are making. And, you know, the Yankees might be willing to pay however many million dollars per war or the while the A's aren't going to budge past that. And so, you know, a potential solution to the

the trout to dig around problem is you just you set their dollars per war more valuable so that a team would have to offer team would have to blow them away basically to to sort of to make that happen. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So we did make some adjustments on that, like that, based on that, but we can't control for what people are proposing necessarily for their, you know, in their own proposals, except for, you know, we have a community feature where you can comment on that and people will say, no, that's not realistic, or that's not a fit or what have you. And to your point, the Yankees would do that, but the A's wouldn't, you know, that sort of thing. And so, you know, there's sort of, our hope is that over time, the crowdsourcing

will correct for some of that as well. Do you know who the current leaders in trade value, according to your model are? Because I was just looking, you can look on the site, go team by team. So I just loaded up the angels and you've got Albert Pujols with a negative 76.8 surplus value. And then on the other end, you've got Shohei Otani at 99.7 and Trout not far behind him. So I don't know if you have it just on hand, but do you happen to know who's like the top five, top 10 type guys? So we're doing a round of updates right now to reflect the fact that we're about halfway to the season. So once we have that, we'll have more sort of up-to-date numbers. And so I thought I would run an article on that.

But I'll give you guys a heads up because what I think it's going to be is the top most valuable player will be the son of a Hall of Famer and the least valuable player will be a future Hall of Famer who's at the end of his career. You can probably figure those out. Yes, I think I can. All right. So another thing I wonder about is, I don't know exactly what data you've used to build this because you're somewhat vague about the exact granular details, but have changes in the game, in player evaluation, in team behavior, does that complicate things as you are modeling on past behavior of teams to

some extent? I mean, the recent downturn in the free agent market or changes in just what teams are looking for, how they're behaving because of budget constraints or self-imposed budget restrictions. How do you deal with just changes and also wanting to bring in historical data? Yeah. So I couldn't go back that far historically because I think, number one, we didn't have all the key data. We didn't have StatCast data. That all goes back to 2015, for example.

And I would argue that we didn't have as many, quote unquote, rational GMs until relatively recently. And I do think that 2017, 2018 offseason was a watershed moment where everybody dug in their heels and said, no, we're sticking to our models. You know, we're not going to make the same mistakes before because they saw too many underwater contracts. And so, you know, you read a lot of books, the Inside the Empire book about the Yankees, even Brian Cashman, that talks about how, you know, he's totally revamped their thinking. And with the Steinbrenner guys, I think it's Howell, yeah, who's running the team now, said very much so he wants it run efficiently. So even the Yankees, who are known to be the biggest spenders, have a mandate to run as efficiently as possible. You might have noticed my fan background is I'm an Oakland A's fan,

so they had to get smarter because they're a low budget team. And Moneyball obviously influenced a lot of teams. But, you know, there was an article several years ago on FiveThirtyEight, you know, where they showed kind of the GMs who had the best ROI. And Billy Beanc was, you know, far and away in terms of, you know, win per dollar than any other team. And I think, you know, you've seen a lot of teams catch up from there. So now I think one of their mandates, and I'm being a little bit speculative here, but based on every single behavior I've seen in the last couple of years, they are very ROI driven. And, you know, I think the ownership has gotten wind

of this as well and said, you know, you have to be, you have to run it like a smart business. And so they are. So that's one of my bedrock assumptions. Now, obviously people can get carried away and, you know, but I don't think we're going to see a Chapman to the Cubs kind of trade anymore where you get Gliberturas back. When I went back and looked at that one, that one was obviously an outlier as people, I think, recognize today. And I don't think we're going to see those anymore just because I think trends have changed. So it's partly based on there's more data available and there's more data-driven decisions by GMs happening all over the place. So I think everyone's kind of sticking to their models. Yeah. And they're always going to be outliers. I mean, the Chapman one, for instance, you obviously had Chapman's off the field suspension

history. And then you also had the Cubs with this kind of once-in-a-century sort of opportunity and incentive to get better, to win a World Series. And there aren't a lot of teams that have that same sort of historical pressure to upgrade. So that makes sense that that one might stick out. So is there a player that you're trying to get on the A's that you play with the play with it yourself? Well, I'm a rational pretend GM. So I'm trying not to make any crazy deals if I'm if I'm the A's, you know, but I'm a I'm a frequent poster on on Athletics Nation, which is the A's SB Nation site. And so so a lot of you'll see a lot of A's proposals on the site because that's a lot of the fans have carried over to this one as well. A lot of people seem to want Matthew Boyd, but David Forrest, the GM, just spoke out to

Susan Slusser the other day looking for bullpen help. But I think they're going to stay within reason. I think they're going to probably look at maybe a Ken Giles, maybe a Michael Gibbons, you know, which is in my valuation model, it's in the three, four, five, six, seven kind of million range. And they're not going to give up a huge prospect like that. Maybe somebody who's blocked like Sheldon Noisy is kind of heated up in AAA and he's blocked at third base by Chapman. So he's probably a trade ship.

So if you can kind of match him up with a team who needs a third base prospect that has a good but maybe not super great reliever, then I think that's a match. Yeah. Speaking of complicating factors because of team trends, we've talked in recent years about how now that teams and managers are more willing seemingly to push their top relievers, let's say harder in October, then maybe those guys are proportionally more valuable. If you're thinking of acquiring a top reliever at the deadline,

knowing that you're going to be a playoff team and that you're going to get X percent of your playoff innings out of this guy compared to y percent of your regular season innings so yeah maybe he's more valuable to you for that reason but yeah again these are these are hard things to to build into a model and yeah and i will say the relievers are the most challenging i think because there is this is no secret you know there's more variability there you'll have good years and bad years and and you know I think it's largely a function of, you know, what they're talking, they're dealing with more intense situations in a relatively small sample size. They'll pitch 20 or 30 innings and pitch badly and they'll get DFA'd. Whereas

next year, they're kind of like, Liam Hendricks was DFA'd last summer, and now he's probably the best reliever on the A's. And so these guys are up and down. And so you have to kind of like roll with the tide a little bit. And so in my modeling, I have to kind of go a little bit more shorter term, like year by year and not so much base it on track record as much as hitters or starting pitchers are, who tend to be a little bit more consistent. So how do you manage the fact that, you know, you're talking about trying to do trade value now, but the fact that Bryce Harper now has a contract that goes for 13 odd years, and it's really hard to figure out how much do you discount whatever his positive or negative surplus is going to be 13 years from now? And

does a team really even care about what the value of that is today? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that is probably one of the hardest things to do because, you know, I noticed that Dan Cymborski and his ZIPS model only, he's hard pressed to even go, you know, three years out because after that it starts to get less and less accurate. So you do have to make some assumptions and you do have to pay attention to the aging curve. And one of the points I make in the about section of my site is, is aging curves are not just performance related, they're also injury risk related. And the older you get, the more likely you are to get injured. And that is kind of an exponential curve that gets bigger and bigger every year, that risk. And so you have to factor that in as well. Yes, there's some speculation there, but you can take some of those assumptions, like how much

does performance decline in general with this type of player? How much does injury risk decline with this type of player, a factor, this type of player and so on. And you can apply it, you know, based on some reasonable assumptions with their productivity and match those up. And, you know, in a way that's, if it's largely consistent with the rest of your model, you can hang your hat on that. And then, you know, that's all I have to do, but it's a very unusual situation to have like a 13 year contract and try to figure out, you know, what their production is going to be in 2028. I don't know anybody who can do that, but we're trying to do the best we can with it. And it's not a normal situation. So we have to take that into account too.

And I don't know whether teams have internal apps like this where you plug in a name and you plug in another name and it spits out a value or tells you whether it's a good trade. Obviously, they do that type of analysis. I just don't know if it's kind of in a programmed way like this or whether they just ask an analyst, hey, what if we did this? Would that be good for us? And then that person looks up the valuations. But you could imagine teams perhaps using this themselves, although there's a lot of information that teams have about players that the public and thus you do not have. And so it might not be as valuable to a team, but you could imagine teams using something like this to scout front office talent, perhaps to see people who have predicted real life trades that happen or have been very accurate at evaluating them or perhaps even combing the suggestions to see if anyone else has any good ideas and if you're a user. So

are you imagining that perhaps something like that could happen? There might just be some savant when it comes to building hypothetical trades that then happen or at least perk front office people's interest. It's like the last starfighter. People think they're playing a game, but it's really a tool to identify the ones with the gift. You know, it's certainly possible. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, we'll run a contest to see whose proposal is the most accurate. And, you know, because that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to match, you know, reality as much as we can.

So I can certainly see that as a possibility. And to your earlier point, I would say, you know, we're not, we don't pretend to know as much as front offices do. We're just actually just trying to mimic what they do for the benefit of the fans. I think there was a gap in the marketplace because you're always getting questions, I'm sure you guys do, and I see them a lot on other sites and chat boards and things. Like, what can I get for this guy? What can I get for that guy? And they never really get an answer that's exact or precise. I definitely don't get one for me. And I'm sure from a fan's perspective it's- I try to ignore those as much as possible

because I don't know. Yeah. But it tells you that there is an interest in there. And I'm just trying to take advantage of that interest and provide a service for fans to say this is a reasonable expectation of what you can get for Bumgarner, if you're a Giants fan, because they're frustrated and they want to know. They want to look to the future and say, OK, what's this guy going to bring? And so some of them think that he might bring a haul. And I don't know that he will because his numbers don't suggest that he will. Okay, but it's not going to be as great as they think. So I'm just trying to provide a service for fans and fill that gap in the marketplace and say, this is what you can reasonably expect. And the more

we match it to the reality, the more credible it's going to be. Yeah. Well, speaking of that, providing a service, presumably you think that the intellectual property you've created here has some trait value of its own or some value. And you are describing on the site pretty openly, conceptually, the framework and how it works and what it's based on, but you're not totally giving away the secret sauce, understandably. So what's the end game or what's your hope? Would it be enough if this is just something that fans like and use? Or are you hoping that this gets acquired by another site or a team wants to hire you as a consultant? I mean, it's a spiffy interface that could be incorporated into something or somewhere, presumably. You know, I haven't thought that far ahead. It's been up for a week and it's doing great. And I'm happy about that. But I haven't even put ads on it yet. I'm still, you know, we haven't even finished building it yet. In fact, we're going to launch a three team trade feature in a couple of days, which I'm looking forward to because I find those to be the most fun when creating a trade proposal. on just getting the product enhanced and finished and done right. And so we can continue to build the audience and have fun with it. And then we'll see what happens from there. I'm not speculating

too far beyond that. I just want to provide a service for fans and hopefully they have fun with it and they think it's credible. Well, you're launching this, I think, at the right time. This is the time of year when people like to construct trades. That's no accident. Right. I can imagine. Not a coincidence. So I'll ask either or both of you about this. I'm just kind of curious what you think we are headed for in the next month or so. Is this going to be a busy market? Of course, we've got the unified trade deadline for the first time here. And so in theory, that should compress some of the activity. But maybe the way that the teams are set up and moves that have already been

made, maybe it's not the best trade market or maybe it is. I haven't fully thought that out, but does either of you have any thoughts on whether we're headed for a particularly busy summer or not and whether that change to the trade deadline will dramatically enhance the activity? I mean, I think that it's going to be probably not as busy as we would hope. I think there's probably too many teams that have their races sort of sewn up that aren't going to be too interested in players that, you know, maybe add half a win or a win over the course of the rest of the season. I think in the NL, I think there's probably going to be a lot of starting pitching moved around. I think, you know, whether it's Bumgarner or Stroman or whoever else might

become available, Boyd, I think that those guys all have the potential to go someplace in the NL, whether it's Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, St. Louis. I think that's where the biggest activity is going to go. And then of course, if Washington decides to move Rendon, that's sort of the other big issue. But given what they did with Harper last year, I'm not sure that they'll actually make that move. Yeah, I would agree with those points as well. I think it's been eerily quiet so far, but I think we're going to see kind of a flurry of activity as we get closer to the deadline. You know, I think there's a lot of teams right now who are still in the bubble. Like, is Arizona a buyer or a seller?

Are the A's a buyer or a seller? Are the Indians falling apart or are they hanging in there? I mean, like, you know, there's a number of teams that could go either way. And so that's going to affect the market. And I think that's why it's still kind of stuck. You know, it's still June. So it's not, historically speaking, it's not the time of year when it ramps either way. And so that's going to affect the market. And I think that's why it's still kind of stuck. You know, it's still June. So it's not, historically speaking, it's not the time of year when it ramps up yet. But I do think because of the hard deadline, we're going to see more activity. And, you know, teams consistently say they're looking for pitching,

you know, both in the rotation and in the bullpen. So you'll see a lot of those names move. But I think also they will stick to their models. I don't think anybody's going to go too crazy in terms of pricing. Because I've seen a lot of evidence that suggests that they won't. Even with the Keichel and Kimbrell situations, they were sticking to their guns. And even if a team got outbid by a million or two on Keichel, they were okay with that. They had their number and they stuck with it. So I think that will sort of guide their thinking as well to some degree in the deadline period. I also think maybe you can hang your hat on the fact that rentals are going to move. Boom Garner is going to move. A guy like Tanner Rourke on the Reds probably will move as

well. That you can rely on. Stroman's going to move because he only got a year and a half left. But as you get into kind of longer term guys that have more years of control like i'm not totally convinced boyd's gonna move and he's really the only big trade ship you know the tigers have i know they have shane green as well who's worth uh something as well but but i'm not sure you know if they don't get their price he may not move and you may see other guys like marlin's already said we're not moving caleb smith and he's got too many years of control so there's there's situations like that where you get buzz in the marketplace, but I'm not convinced that some of those guys will move. I think you're going to see mostly the short-term guys move.

All right. Well, I'm glad that you've built this out. I think it does fill a niche and a need in the baseball internet. And I can imagine that many of our listeners will be using it and referring to it and posting links to their suggested trades in our Facebook group. How much time would you estimate that you have spent constructing this or are still spending it? And have you had any help or is this a solo project? Thousands. It's taken me about a year and a half of spreadsheet number crunching and various other activities. And I did hire a very smart guy, one of my guys on Athletics Nation writers, who's also very talented in various aspects of things. So I've got a little bit of help as well. And he's been great. His name is

Josh Iverson. So it's not just me. But yeah, we're doing a lot of it by hand. I haven't figured out a fancy way to just plug in things and watch the machine go. I don't know if we're ever going to get to that point. It's a lot of just hand number crunching. And like I said, we're doing the halfway point updates as well. It's going to take us about 1,000 hours to do that. So we'll split it up between the two of us. So it is very much a labor of love at this point. So hopefully we get it right. All right.

Well, I look forward to seeing the progress. The site, again, is called Baseball Trade Values. You can find it at baseballtradevalues.com. And we have been talking to the founder and editor, John Bitter. John, thanks very much for coming on thanks ben thanks craig see you guys and craig thank you for coming on no problem one other obstacle for john's model one thing that it can't capture teams sometimes trade data which is something i found out about when i was working on the mvp machine here's a paragraph i wrote for the

book that didn't make the final cut but i still think it's kind of interesting wanted to share it with you the quote in this passage comes from John Olshan, who is the general manager of TrackMan, which tracks pitched and batted balls at the college level and in the majors. So here's what I wrote. Today's teams rely on TrackMan data, and while much of it is shared across a global network of TrackMan clients, teams can capture proprietary data, primarily by hosting amateur tournaments or showcases, and keep it off the market, which creates opportunities to trade. Front offices are filled with dealmakers, and the bartering is often intense. Teams are certainly very aggressive

on the data acquisition. Like, hey, we'll send you this game for this game, Olshan says. The volume is pretty impressive. He adds, there was a big trade in 2017 at the trade deadline. Players were publicized, but the data portion never made it to MLB Trade Rumors. So you can try to figure out which trade he's talking about. So that's something that you can't capture at BaseballTradeValues.com. But I think John's done a good job with everything else. So I will take a quick break now, and then I'll be back with Dr. Meredith Wills to talk about what is going on with baseball this year, and why we're seeing so many home runs. Back with Dr. Meredith Wills. Talk about what is going on with baseball this year. Why we're seeing so many home runs. Oh, this will drag us down Better to leave it behind

All right, so we're back, and I am joined now by Dr. Meredith Wills, a contributor to The Athletic, and I think it's probably safe to say the world's foremost baseball disassembler and expert on what is actually inside the cover and how the ball's construction has changed over the past few years. Meredith, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you for inviting me. So you have a new study out. This is, I guess, the third time that you have tackled the topic of the baseball's construction for The Athletic, but this is the most comprehensive based on the most baseballs and I think the most revealing and has probably garnered the most attention of any of

your looks at the subject before. So before we get to the new study, do you want to just tell me a little bit about how you got interested in the subject, how you decided to take it upon yourself to actually unwind baseballs to see what's inside and maybe just a summary of your previous research and findings. Well, I'm willing to do it, but you have to take some of the blame. Is that okay? That's fine. Okay. So what this started with actually was I was already doing essentially charity fundraising work with the Hall of Fame, where I started taking apart

baseballs, because it turns out there's yarn inside baseballs. And so I've actually been making stuff, knitting with the Hall of Fame, which I promise there's a segue here. But it meant that I was already pretty familiar with, you know, what goes into, say, the construction of baseballs and knew how to take them apart in 2017, when, you know, the surge was really, no pun intended, taking off, and saw this great talk that Dr. Alan Nathan gave at the 2017 Sabre seminar, where he specifically was looking at the way that the balls were traveling. And this is, again, almost a year before his, he was the chair of MLB's home run committee, you know, almost a year before their findings came out. But it was pretty clear based on what he was showing that

in particular, the aerodynamics, or at least the way the ball, the nature of the ball for 2016 and 2017 seemed to be the same. Right. And I had a whole bunch of baseballs for 2016 and 17. He also showed the change was during 2015. And I happened to, you know, first of all, Ben, you were at the same conference. And then I'll give Martin Alonso a shout out too, because it's his fault that I talked to you at all, shout out to because it's his fault that I talked to you at all, was he pointed out something that you had mentioned in an article about the construction of the ball, you know, being consequential to the transition from like the dead ball to the live ball era. And that because the source of the yarn changed, it therefore changed how the ball came off the bat. So, you know, gee,

I already know what the inside of baseballs are like. And I thought, gee, maybe it's something about the inside. I needed some 2014 balls as well. And you happen to have a bunch that you'd used for another study that, you know, so they gave their bodies to science. We're very happy about this. But so, yeah, you know, here I've got balls that I know for sure, are from before the home run surge. And then I've got balls that I know are, you know, the construction that you saw for the home run surge, and ended up taking everything apart. I had 15 independent variables.

And then I ended up with 16, almost entirely by accident, it was the last thing, it was the one thing that was not on the list of things I was going to look at in that when I was looking to measure the length of the cotton laces, the red laces for each ball, the samples look different. That's literally the best way I can say it. I said they looked wrong compared to each other. So I looked at the thickness of the laces, because that's what it looked like. And it turns out that the laces on the balls after 2015 were thicker at 9%. But that turned out to be a statistically significant result compared to the balls I had from 2014. And I found this about three days before the home run committee came out with their results saying, yep, we know it's the ball. And we have no idea what's different.

Right. And of course, I'm like, wow, wow, I've got something that's different. This is so cool. So I'd already, you know, new people from the athletic, I went to them, I'm like, guess what, I know what it is. And, you know, I think it was two weeks later, my article came out that showed that there was a difference. It was the lace thickness. Now, that also was interesting. And it always comes back to you, Ben. I love this. I like that too. to the rise in pitcher blisters. And there were, you know, pitchers that no one I talked to directly, but a lot of secondhand communication I had from people about, and I guess Rich Hill was on the record for this, for people saying, you know, they actually thought it was the seams of the laces or whatever. And that thicker laces absolutely could be leading to this rise in

blisters. So it's like, gee, we've got both. We've got one change, and we've got home runs going up, and we've got pitcher blisters. And the blisters, that connection seemed pretty straightforward. The connection to why thicker laces would give you home runs or more home runs was not as obvious. And some of that is because people tend to think that the thick, that lace thickness is the same as seam height, which it is not. Basically what defines seam height is how much leather gets squished under the laces. So if you, you have, it's essentially about the fit of the covers and to some extent how stretchy the leather is to begin with, but the laces themselves, I mean, they, they,

there's a little bit of an effect, but it's, it's really, it's a lot smaller than the leather. So, however, it does turn out that the lace thickness has an effect at the seams. It's just not a height thing. And what I looked at, and this gets back to the construction itself, and that the laces are cotton, it turns out that the way they make the baseballs, the leather, you have to really wet it down to get it to actually conform to the ball. Flat leather, round ball, something's got to give, you make the leather wet. And so what that means is the ball is wet, and you're pulling cotton laces through it. So the cotton laces are wet, and then they dry the balls. And I mean, any of us who've picked up a baseball, laces are tight. You know, I mean, they're like, trust me, and taking apart the baseballs.

You've spent hours and sacrificed your fingers. Oh, not just that. I have gotten more blisters taking apart baseballs. I totally identify with the pitchers at this point. Man, you'd be astonished. I still have calluses that may never go away. But it turns out that wet cotton, if you let it air dry, and particularly if it's stretched, if you stretch it out and you let it air dry, it stays stretched. And we've all had the experience. You spill coffee on your t-shirt.

You go into the bathroom. You scrub it out to get the coffee out. But then you're stuck with a divot in your shirt for the rest of the day because the cotton doesn't shrink back just being air dried. You have to actually put it in, say, the dryer for it to shrink back to the shape that you're used to. And so what was happening, as far as I could tell was thinner laces, they're just not as strong. And so they're going to stretch more. And so what you end up with is you literally would end up with this deformation at the seams. You know, it ends up effectively being kind of like a bulging around the seams. It's not the height, but literally the ball was

becoming, you know, think of it as wider or whatever specifically at the seams the seams became the weak point and the thinner laces turned out to actually be wider near the seams than the balls with the thicker laces now what that does is it gives you a rounder ball a rounder ball is actually going to have less drag travel further hence thicker laces rounder ball is actually going to have less drag travel further. Hence, thicker laces, rounder ball, more home runs, home run surge. And MLB commissioned the study after for quite a while denying that there was anything different about the baseball and insisting that it was the same, in part because they conducted some tests that had been performed previously and didn't show a difference, but those it's the ball. The ball is virtually entirely responsible for what we've seen, but we don't know why. We have a few theories. We have a few possible things that it could be, but we'll have to look into that further. You had already looked into it further, and what you found suggested some possible explanations or likely explanations for what that difference actually was. So why was that not the end of it? Why did you then dive into this topic in even greater depth with more baseballs?

Yeah, well, I guess, and there's actually, hopefully, you know, I can call this as a, as a, you know, some kind of a teaser on a future study that the home runs weren't up during spring training, which again, I also, I don't know, I don't think I referenced this article in the, or referenced your article in what I just wrote, but there's absolutely something you had. I think it was March 27th that made, you know, gee, look the, the, you know, what's happening with the ball, you know, or what's coming off the bat basically in spring training looks an awful lot like last year's regular season. So that's kind of what we all expected. Yeah. Each of the past few spring trainings, I've just kind of used that as a check because

it turns out that what happens in March does tend to predict what happens in the regular season when we're looking at league-wide rates. And yes, it looked like the status quo was being maintained, but there was no sign in the spring data that we were due for another large leap. And then the season started. from 2019 spring training, preferably ones that are stamped as such. If you want to contribute to the greater good of the game, let Ben know or let me know. And, you know, there's actually

some big deal stuff with the spring training. Huh, okay. So, yeah, I'm serious. There really is another study there. But, yeah, so essentially it looked like status quo until what was opening day, March 30th? Is that right?

28th this year? 28th. Jeez. Not counting the games in Japan that were even earlier? My birthday used to be opening day every year. And then they started monkeying with the schedule. And now I have to keep scheduling my birthday earlier and earlier. It's really frustrating.

So I'm sorry. You know, it's just now it's actually minor league opening day right it's really strange but uh so yeah so so opening day rolls around and suddenly the ball is traveling and it was so different that rob arthur had an article out in the first week of april i mean we're like a week into the season and he's already got an article in baseball perspectives showing look it looks like the the drag is is down uh such that we're gonna at the time he said and again he only got a week's worth of data and he said not much yet looks like we're back to 2017 right and to clarify for anyone who didn't read that rob was not dissecting baseballs the way that you were he was looking at the

stat cast data he was looking at the decrease in speed when the ball is released. So if there's more drag, then it slows down more on its way to the plate. And he was able to tell that it looked like the drag was down again, although even he in that initial article suggested that maybe it was back to 2017 levels, but it has escalated even beyond that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, and so but what that meant actually is I was approached by my editors at The Athletic from having done the previous article. And they sort of said, you know, home runs. This might have been, I guess, second week of April by then. But look, home runs seem to be going up again.

Any chance you could take a look at that? And it almost sounded like we're not sure this is doable. And of course, I don't know, I just have this attitude of well, why? Why the heck not? So it took a while, but I managed to track down a bunch of 2019 balls. And kudos to all of my anonymous sources, this could never have happened without you. But what i found was that uh the ball is really different i mean like yes not just not just a little different like with the the you know the laces being thicker which quite honestly as far as i can tell and i i've heard a little anecdotally about this it looks like they just got a new supplier i mean and they just didn't know. And different from last year's ball. The laces look thin, right?

Not from 2014 balls, but different from last year. Right. No, in this case, though, it's not. I mean, well, the laces are different, but that's actually the least of it. In this case, there are massive differences that make them not just unlike, you know, it's not just like that little shift of like one, you know, one lace thickness thing is different by 9%. In this case, there are multiple statistically significant differences that are totally unlike anything that's I mean, certainly, I've got balls going back to 2000. Although the best samples go to 2014. But nothing like it. I mean, so, so different.

It's a completely different ball. I mean, I don't know if we've ever had a nothing like it. I mean, so, so different. It's a completely different ball. I mean, I don't know if we've ever had a ball like this. Yeah. So can you lay out the biggest changes and how you were able to determine those changes? Wow. Okay. The biggest changes, which one? I think the one people have been most impressed with is that the seams are lower, really lower, like half as high on average. And this, what you have to understand is that, first of all, seams have always been, you know, they've always varied a bit, but they've all kind of been, you know, within a given range. This is a statistically significant difference. They're half the height of the average from before, which is going to make a massive change in terms of, you know, decreasing the drag, improving the aerodynamics.

So just literally the ball is closer to a cue ball. It's going to travel further. And that's the biggest one, I would say. The others are actually, I guess, in order of what I think is affecting the drag. So there's seam height. One that is probably comparable to seam height, maybe a little less. The balls are rounder again. And they're not just rounder. They're like round.

I mean, before I was getting that kind of deformation from the laces stretching along the seams. In this case, it's basically zero, it's I think I think it came out as negative point 04% or something outrageous like that. I wish I was kidding. But like, that's how small it is. Granted, that's also how accurate the data are, which is nice. But and if anything, with that negative, it's almost like you've got what you'd call negative, negative bulging, if that makes sense, in that it looks a little bit almost like the seams might be being pushed down into the leather, which would make the seam height then have even less of an effect. Because, gee, you know, even though technically the seams are that high from the leather at that point, in terms of the overall spherical symmetry, the ball is just rounder. Then the last one I found that would be affecting aerodynamics was that the leather is also smoother.

And we've seen leather becoming smoother before. Everybody complains about it during the postseason. In this case, or I mean, people have also talked about All-Star games, things like that. In this case, again, statistically significant, it's a much smoother ball. So those are the three that seem to be affecting aerodynamics. And the key there is that it's not one thing and it's not one small thing. It's three things, all of which are major and all of which are happening at the same time and to the point where those three things spherical symmetry

leather smoothness seam height are all listed in the home run committee report as things that will influence drag right and so it's not like they didn't say lacedictus was going to influence drag. Yes. And so I guess the only factor, possible factor that you weren't really able to examine yet is whether the pill is more centered and stable in the ball, which could lead to less wobble in flight, which would lead to greater carry. But but the things that you did discover account on their own for. Oh, yeah. Even even if the even if the pill was wildly off center, which honestly it couldn't be. I mean, that's that's that's probably too much of a digression. Read the article. But just trust me when I say that it's really, really hard to make a baseball with an off center pill to begin with. So even though Commissioner Manfred mentioned that in his statement, it was the first thing he mentioned. So it got the most play. Right. But he mentioned a bunch of things. And in the end,

he said, we don't know what's causing it. It was just kind of I think it's what came to mind from the Home Run Committee report. Like, yes, as okay, this is one of our options. But that was when it was proposed. That was in terms of physics, yes, that's an absolutely valid way to influence drag. In terms of actual construction, it's really hard to make a pill off-center to begin with. So first of all, I'm not sure they are off-center. And even if they were off-center, I have no clue. I'd love to see equipment that could make them more centered, but I certainly can't think of how they do it. So, yeah.

Yeah. So we know that about a year ago, MLB bought Rawlings, the company that manufactures for baseballs Because some of the ranges of Allowable baseball specs were just so Wide that you could have dramatically Different behavior with two legal Baseballs so do we Know do we have any theories About how we went from last Year's ball to this year's ball now That MLB is in control of the process

Because one would Think that if MLB approached this With greater scrutiny and there had been all this attention to the home run raid and the part that the ball had played, if anything, I would have expected things to go in the other direction. That's what I did too. We have exacerbated what was happening before. Yeah.

Believe it or not, I think they did exactly what they promised in that the smoother leather is the sort of – and this in a way goes back to those postseason balls. I don't think it was thought out much before, but if you're going for more uniformity and sort of think about a higher quality, you're going to put more effort into smoothing the leather. But it's not like you can unsmooth it. So if you're going for smoother leather, it's a uniform smoothness, it's going to be a uniform smoothness that is smoother. So I think they've upped the quality control on the technically the term is skiving, which is basically scraping down the leather. I just think skiving is kind of a cool word for doing that. But so for skiving the leather, I think that has somehow been improved such that those standards are now better and are probably comparable to what we always have used, or not always, but have used in the postseason for some time. And by the way, this is not the

first time that Rawlings has actually worked on improving this shaving down of the leather. In fact, it's even in the Home Run Committee report. I recommend everybody track down the list of manufacturing changes that's in there because it's remarkably revealing once you know what you're looking at. So they've already done this once and it's listed as a process improvement. So in that case, yeah, I think the leather smoothness is absolutely improved standards and quality control. In terms of everything else, one of the things that Rawlings does regularly, and I mean, they've been open about testing prototypes, particularly for improving pitch or grip, which I find interesting, considering i didn't realize there were pitcher grip issues

before this season but clearly some of the they were prototyping pitcher grip stuff in spring training so i'd love to talk to someone from rawlings about that well they do want to have right they want to have the sticky covers so that they don't have to rub the balls down with the special kind of mud right so they're trying to develop something that will replicate that effect. Okay, I have to do an aside here. Frankly, that to me sounds like robot umpires. Can we just keep using the Delaware River mud? It's just fun.

Yeah, I like the Delaware River mud. There's nothing wrong with the Delaware River mud. It's an awesome thing about the game. Only this river can yield the mud that we use on the baseballs. I love it. Oh, it's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, no, keep the mud that we use on the baseballs. I love it. It's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah.

No, keep the mud, please. You know, just all of the sameness, you know, the game isn't about sameness. It's definitely not. You've identified what seems to be the explanations are, you know, certainly sufficient to explain what we're seeing. And so for the leather smoothness, the thing that's much more interesting, honestly, is that the rest of it, the lower seams, the the rounder ball, and also something we didn't go into, which is the thickness of the laces are actually back

to that pre 2015 thickness. So people like, you know, Marcus Stroman, or Aaron Sanchez is unfortunately, probably now cursed with blister problems but a lot of the guys who were getting blisters because of the laces oh look the laces are thinner again we haven't actually heard those names getting blisters so you know kudos to mlb for actually taking that seriously but interestingly enough that lace stretching thing doesn't look like it happened this year. The laces are thinner, but the ball is rounder, which seems like a contradiction based on the previous results. However, one of the things that I because I brought up air drying in that article in September, you know, as opposed to, say, throwing your T-shirt in the dryer and the cotton shrinking back, I think what may have happened, and again, this is a hypothesis

on my part, but it would fit into the kind of process improvements that Rawlings has done historically and that we have data showing they do. I think what they may be doing now is drying the balls under a hot airflow, basically doing the equivalent of putting them in the dryer because whatever's happening, the laces are no longer stretching. And the only way that you can get cotton to dry without stretching is to dry it with heat and moisture removal, basically under hot air. What that also means though, is you're not going to get that kind of deformation or bulging near the seams. And the laces are probably also just going to sit tighter,

meaning the seams aren't going to be as high. So that one process of changing the way you dry the laces could explain all the rest of the changes. So having documented this and having these concrete explanations, in theory, obviously, MLB has read your work. I don't know whether they've done similar work themselves or whether Rellings has, but you've taken some of the mystery away from what's happening here. And in theory, there shouldn't be anything preventing MLB or Rawlings from undoing the changes that it a matter of saying, hey, make the balls lower quality, undo these process improvements that you did, or whether it's just, hey, make the seams higher, et cetera, et cetera. There shouldn't be, you know, if MLB decides that they want the home run rate to be lower, now that you have explained why it's higher, then in theory, undoing that should be possible, right? If they decide that they want the game to look a little different than it does right now. Oh, yeah. I mean, one thing that does come to mind is I don't think the leather smoothness is as important as they think it is for quality. I mean, and in fact,

we're seeing that as a side effect already this season because we're now using the home run ball. Let's just call it that, the home run ball. We're using the 2019 ball. It's now also the ball in AAA. Yes. And suddenly the AAA numbers are outrageous. I mean, 50% is like the low number. I've seen anywhere from 50 to 68%. And I love the 68%.

It's like, look, it's actually a standard deviation off. That's awesome. But anyway, I mean, outrageous numbers. And I remember actually going through and calculating like the per game rates. Now, granted, a lot of PCL clubs are at altitude. But you also have to realize that these aren't major league hitters. There are a lot of really good home run hitters. Hi, Cody Decker. But they're, you, but they're not in the major leagues. And yet the home run rates are, as far as I recall, comparable to the major league 2018 home run rates.

Now, what you have to realize, though, is that a minor league baseball, it's not like the MLB balls where every third pitch, maybe, if that, they replace the ball. You go through tons of balls in major league baseball that's like part of the point in my the minor leagues they pretty much use until the cover falls off or they end up in the stands they use the same balls for batting practice they use for the games they're completely dinged up scuffed everything and yet these incredibly scuffed balls appear to be flying out of ballparks by hitters who are not necessarily as powerful as MLB hitters, but at close to 2018

MLB rates. So if you've got scuffed up baseballs that are flying out of parks like that, I suspect the leather smoothness is not that big a deal. If they could take the leather, I mean, it wouldn't necessarily help with home runs, but pitchers are having grip issues this year that slick leather is hard to i mean seam seam heights the other problem for pitchers but slick leather is hard for pitchers to grip you know i mean i there's a john lester i think mentioned at one point that like he actually had by digging his fingernails and he ended up with a piece of the leather from the ball came away in his fingernail because he had to dig his nails in so hard to get a grip on the ball yeah well if leather smoothness isn't affecting the home runs and you want to keep the home runs came away in his fingernail because he had to dig his nails in so hard to get a grip on the ball.

Yeah. Well, if leather smoothness isn't affecting the home runs and you want to keep the home runs, can we just go back to the lower quality smoothness thing? You know? Right. Let the guys grip the ball. Yeah. Let the kids play, right?

One of the first studies that Rob Arthur and I did on this at 538, I think we compared AAA production and hitters who went back and forth between AAA and the majors. And at that time, the balls were different. And we saw that AAA hitters were hitting more home runs in the majors than they were in AAA, which didn't make sense that they would hit more homers in a tougher league. Unless the ball's different. Right. Unless the ball is different. And now the balls are the

same. And so the home run rate has skyrocketed there too. And so there's no mystery anymore about why this is happening in the larger sense. I kind of enjoyed digging into the subject when there was still an open question of, is this even the ball? Or is it one of the many explanations that Rob Manfred was proposing at the time, batting orders and launch angle and pitchers not having control or whatever people were suggesting at the time? I kind of enjoyed debunking that and making it clear that it was the ball, and you've taken it a step farther and you've showed exactly what it is about the ball. And so I think now the ball, I guess, is in MLB's court. What do we want to do? I feel like I should apologize, by the way, for taking away your opportunity to ask all those questions. Yeah. Well, I kind of miss when there was still some mystery about is it the ball or not.

But there was then the mystery of what is it about the ball. Now I guess you've removed even more of the mystery. So now I'll have to, I don't know, look into dark matter or something and try to figure that out. We can talk about that off the air. Yeah. So I think that this is all, I mean, really fascinating that this has even happened at all, because of course, 20 years ago, there were the same conversations about, is the ball different? Is that causing these at the, record home run rates?

And there were basic tests performed at the time just to look at the coefficient of restitution of the ball. Was it bouncier? Was it springing off the bat more? But that was where it ended. There were some people who dissected the ball in a more limited way and found some difference to earlier eras. But we didn't have StatCast at the time, and you couldn't assess the drag in a kind of convenient way the way that you can now. And we didn't have some of the instruments, and maybe we didn't have the online community with people like you who are willing to do this work because there's an audience and

a hunger for this information. And so there's just no way to hide it or to obscure it. And when something changes, it's not, well, the gods decided that there would be more home runs this year. We can quantify exactly why that is. And it's harder for MLB to persist in saying, it's not the settled, it'll be interesting to see what happens next and how MLB responds to this. And I should ask you about this just because I get this question a lot. You've documented these changes in the ball, and this affects how the ball carries when it's hit. And so people will ask me all the time, how does this affect the ball when it's thrown, pitched balls? What I've heard from Rob is that the effect is much more minimal there because you're talking about 60 feet, 6 inches as opposed to 450 feet. So you don't see the carry difference that maybe there is a very slight difference in the speed reduction on the weight of the plate. And as you're talking about the grip and everything and the seam height, I mean, that could affect spin.

everything and and the seam height i mean that could affect spin do we know anything about how this affects pitching and and how that could be exacerbating the offensive environment that we've well i i do think that the i mean what what you will run into and and again i early season numbers are probably better for this before because they're they're and again not my show there there are absolutely ways where you know there are reports of pitchers finding ways to compensate for the slicker leather. We'll just leave it at that. But, yeah, I mean, certainly early in the season, we were seeing walk rates up, hit by pitches up, wild pitches up. And that corresponds to what you would expect if people were having grip issues and command and control issues. And also, and I even have a quote from Sean Doolittle in the article about people were

having trouble with spin. You know, essentially break wasn't working for some guys. Now, it's more subtle than that because ultimately it does depend on a guy's grip and what he pitches. It even depends on where he pitches. I mean, obviously guys at course field are going to be affected way worse because there's just not as the seams aren't as high. So even if you spin the ball just as fast, it's not going to break as much. There's just, it doesn't have enough to grip the air. One thing I will say that I'm, I don't know if it's just

timing or if it's because of this ball. I mean, I think it's a little of both is all of the discussion with the netting. That's that I think is a much more serious problem this year than people are giving it credit because the reason those balls are traveling as far as they are is they're just not slowing down as fast. That's what the error, that's what the lack of drag means. It takes the ball longer to slow down. So what that means is that a line drive hit into the stands 20 feet past third base, which in the past we would have thought, okay, that's just a hard hit ball. Now it's deadly. And so the idea of extending netting is actually really smart because the ball is, I mean, the ball coming off the bat is at a point where, yeah, absolutely dangerous is fine.

I mean, I think in just in today's Astros game, was that it? There was a two-year-old who was hit in the head? Yeah, that was the previous incident, but we learned more about what happened and what the after effects were and how serious they were. So, yes. I knew it was a report from today. Yes. Same kid. All right. We're going to still bad. Yes. But but yeah, so I'm actually I'm glad that that's coming up. And I know there are people out there. By the way, thank you, social media. So far, you guys have been lovely. I'm expecting everybody to come down hard on me on netting. And I will freely admit that Yeah, you know,

I like the idea of not, you know, of having the opportunity to catch that line drive. On the other hand, there's a limit. And if the ball is in a position to hurt you, even if you, you know, are prepared for it, then yeah, you know, if, yeah, I don't know, maybe we should put like seats in front of the netting for the really crazy people and have them sign waivers. Yeah. That's all I can think of. Yeah. Well, the response to this has been sweeping. I've seen a lot of people discussing it. I think you have pulled back the veil a little bit here.

Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain. And it's kind of complicated, the issue, because we can't talk about just the juiced ball anymore or the aerodynamic ball or whatever you want to call it. We now have multiple incarnations of juiced or aerodynamic balls. You know, they're aerodynamic for different reasons. They're carrying for different causes. So you have to talk about the pre-2015 baseball and then the post-2015 but pre-2019 baseball and then there's another baseball so we've been in this high home run era next year too yeah well you would think it it would just because there's all the scrutiny and and now that you've put these things out there then you would think that mlb will be taking a closer look at this but yes now

we have to specify which juiced ball we're talking about in this era, because this has persisted long enough that now we've got multiple stages of this movement. So I'd like to, I'd like to think that, that cause, cause the, I mean, last year I wouldn't have known, you know, to the idea that the, the, the idea that the ball was confirmed as the source of the home run search for 2017, you know, if I found lace thickness as something, it would have been like, gee, this is cool. I have no idea how this – it wouldn't have been a meaningful result. It was only a meaningful result because of the home run committee's report. this case, I feel like the order in which things are happening is actually beneficial, because I'd like to think, you know, first of all, yeah, you know, I'd like the Home Run Committee to look

at the 2019 ball and verify my results, or validate them, I shouldn't say verify, validate them, you know, but but the point being, you know, here, look, we've made your life easier. Here are three things that you can take a look at four things um but yeah so as opposed to trying to figure out if climate change is having an effect right well i'm glad that you've stuck with this and continued to dig into it and and massacred many baseballs and well and and you know the the hall of fame ultimately will get all the yarn for uh for uh fundraising you know this is this a lot of this is still a sorry it's a knitting pun here work in progress but the whole idea of having that baseballs to begin with you know before i did the study was because of the yarn because of making

knitting things out of the yarn for fundraisers for the baseball hall of fame because it is a it's a chair i mean it's a it's a it's a museum it's a 501c3 it's not like mlb supports it so so yeah i mean ultimately uh we're gonna go from from i guess science to art in a way but ultimately it is going to go in support of a good cause so yeah right kind of cool and this is how science is supposed to work. Maybe it's less consequential in baseball than it is in other fields, but this has been kind of a collaborative group effort. Someone writes something, points out something, suggests a hypothesis, someone else confirms or refutes it, looks at it in a different way. And bit by bit,

we've come closer and closer to the truth. So this whole experience over the past four years or so of trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the baseball, I think it's kind of a nice example of people who care about something, perhaps devoting more time than we should have. I don't know, but we really were curious and wanted an answer. And there's just this kind of collaborative ethos of trying to get to the bottom of this. And I think it's nice. Maybe it doesn't matter as much that we figure out why the baseball is going farther than it does how we get carbon out of the atmosphere or something. But this is an example of how human beings working together can figure out what is going on when there's some sort of mystery. And that's the kind of thing you can apply to any mystery. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I will admit I'm enjoying the conjunction of science and baseball in a way that's making everybody excited.

You know, it's like, yay, science! And we actually have baseball fans saying, yay, science! And I'm just like, I want to cry. This is wonderful. Yeah, it's nice. You know? Yeah. Well, I will link to the piece.

Everyone should go check it out in all its glory, all its whisker plots and various displays. I did try pretty pictures. I actually really like my, you know, time-lapse thing for measuring leather smoothness. My friend Cameron Adams did a really great job on those pictures, and he's going to love that I just gave him a shout-out because he was so psyched about doing that. So yeah, they're pretty pictures too, but yeah, they're a lot of plots. It's just the way it works. So, yeah, they're pretty pictures too, but yeah, there are a lot of plots. It's just the way it works. Yeah. Well, everyone, go check it out.

Give Meredith the clicks. Give The Athletic the traffic for funding this effort. And I'm glad to have you on because you've enabled us to keep our streak. We've had an astrophysicist on back-to-back weeks now because we had Sam Schultz from The Padres on last week. So we'll see if we know any other astrophysicist on back-to-back weeks now because we had Sam Schultz from the Padres on last week. So we'll see if we know any other astrophysicists for next week. I'm not sure how long we can keep that streak going. Is Dave Tagan available? Yeah. Well, yeah. He's answered questions for us. So maybe that counts. I mean, he's the only one who comes to mind off the top of my head who is definitely baseball related. Although Josh Koch almost finished his degree

in astrophysics. He's an interesting... Next time you see him, ask him about that. Yes, unfortunately. He probably cannot come on podcasts. I'm sure he can't, but I'm just saying

personally ask him about that because he and I had some interesting discussions a number of years ago. Yes, and I'm sure all those discussions are now proprietary to the twins,

unfortunately for us. Probably, yeah. All right. Well, thank you for doing this research. Thank you for coming on to talk about it. And I'm sure I will see you at Saber Seminar. I can't wait. All right. Thank you so much. machine how baseball's new non-conformists are using data to build better players if you like it please leave us a review on amazon and goodreads it helps us out you can also support this podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild following five listeners have already pledged their support jason allen ryan corkreen zach sheffield darren fessel and emma eschenfeld thanks to all of you you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild.

You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. And you can contact me and Meg and Sam via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance on this non-regularly scheduled episode. And this week's Worth the Podcast is not over yet. Meg and I will be back with another episode soon, so we will talk to you then. Lovers forever, face to face My city, your mountain, stay with me, stay I need you to love me, I need you today

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