Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1710: Sticking Time Bomb

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and guest co-host Mike Ferrin of MLB Network Radio and the Diamondbacks’ broadcast crew discuss the D-Backs’ 17-game losing streak and more extended stretch of futility before bantering about Shohei Ohtani’s Player of the Week Award-winning performance and the potential for Ohtani to own All-Star Week, the call-up of (and expectations for) Rays […]

Welcome to Daddy on a blue side of the street Well I've got no chance of losing this day Well I've got no chance of losing this day No chance of losing this time Well, I've got no chance of losing this time Hello and welcome to episode 1710 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast for Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Meg Rowley is off for a few days. She'll be back later this week. So I will be joined by

a few guests. And later in this episode, I'll be talking to Jimmy Buffy, the biomechanics expert that Meg and I spoke to on episode 1601. This time I'll be talking to him about whether Tyler Glasnow has a point about the lack of sticky stuff endangering pitchers and whether I worry too much about Jacob deGrom. And after that, I will also be joined by Graham Stinson, a pitcher in the Tampa Bay Rays system who gave me his thoughts on the foreign substance ban and what the new experimental rules have done to the running game in 8-ball before telling me about the stats company that he recently started, StatStack. But we like

to start with a bit of banter, and it is tough to banter by oneself. So to kick things off, I am joined by the great Mike Farron of MLB Network Radio and the Arizona Diamondbacks broadcast crew. Hello, Mike. Welcome back. Hello. I often banter by myself, but that's just because my wife is tired of putting up with my crap, and so I end up spending most of the time talking to myself. Well, I am happy to have you on to talk to me today, and I am looking forward to talking to you, but I also feel a little bit guilty about asking you to come on because I mistakenly thought that the Diamondbacks were off today. Monday is when we're speaking, which is not the case. Yeah, we have Milwaukee for the first of three tonight. Yeah, so I feel a little bit better about that. At least I'm not making you talk about the

Diamondbacks on a day when you wouldn't have had to. But I am still making you talk about them more than you would have to otherwise. And I don't know where to begin with the Diamondbacks. You've heard the stats. You've shared the the stats But for anyone who has not followed What is going on with them On May 3rd, everything seemed normal Everything seemed fine The Diamondbacks were 15-13 They had outscored their opponents

To that point in the season I don't know that anyone thought they were a great team Or even a playoff team But a competitive team seemingly Since then, they have lost 40 of 45 games, 31 of 33, including an MLB record 23 consecutive road losses, and now 17 consecutive losses overall. And that's the most since Seattle lost 17 in a row in 2011. The record, of course, is 23 for the

1961 Phillies. So by the time people hear this, that losing streak will either be slightly longer or it will be over. But even if the streak is mercifully snapped, it's still been an extended stretch of futility. Things have been bleak. So what is happening here? I mean, obviously, whenever you have a losing streak like this, everything has to have gone wrong and you must have had some hard luck, but what is contributing to this total lack of success lately? Well, I mean, I could give you an answer that would placate a bunch of people who want it to be something salacious and all of that. I could try and give you an answer like that, but it would

be false. The biggest thing, and I realize everybody wants to say that injuries aren't an excuse, but really they are. Yeah. Through the first part of this horrifying stretch, the Diamondbacks were without five of their starting position players, and through most of this last part of it, they've been without four of their top six starting pitchers. And now that they have three, they still have three that are out. The one that

is back is Zach Gallin, who was their best one, but he is still very much in rehab mode. He's basically doing his rehab assignment at the big league level in part because AAA is in Reno. And as the assistant general manager for the Diamondbacks, Amil Saad, I said last week, have you seen the games that they're playing? They're football games. They had a game where they gave up 11 runs in an inning to Las Vegas and came back and won by five last week. So maybe it makes more sense to do those rehab assignments at the big league level. But, I mean, that's the big thing is the offense has not been very good overall,

and certainly over the course of this stretch, they've been one of the worst in baseballs. The starters have been one of the worst in the league and the, in that stretch and the bullpen has been pretty bad all season. So you combine all that together and you end up with a recipe for a lack of success. And then, you know, you have the the the other games too i mean really i think the thing that's incredible to me is that there have not been that many or at least it doesn't feel like there have been that many blowout losses in this stretch yeah there have been some games that

were close late uh that got away especially early on but there's a lot of one run two run three run losses in this mix and so you never quite feel like you're out of a game. It's just that you're kind of waiting for that moment where the boulder starts rolling back down the hill at you. Yeah, right. They're 2-16 in one-run games this season, and a lot of those have been during this stretch. And just within the past week, they lost a 9-8 game after leading 7-0, and then they lost a 9-8 game after trailing 9-1 so I don't know which of those feels worse when you I can tell you which one feels worse yeah definitely the one that they were leading 7-0 that was the one that definitely felt worse

yeah well they're losing all kinds of games obviously and yeah when all those one run games are going against you I mean it's not luck, but it's definitely more luck based than other games. And so you could chalk it up to partly just the universe being a cruel place. And Carson Kelly is out now just to add injury to insult. He has a fractured right wrist after being hit by a pitch from Walker Bueller. So that doesn't help. And as you mentioned, they're playing the Brewers now, so still good opponents now. So it's not going to be easy to snap this streak. So the thing I think that mystifies me is that this team is not tanking. You know, if the Pirates or the Orioles were doing this, I mean, the Orioles are kind of coming close to doing this. But if we were talking about one of those teams that came into the season with zero chance and made no effort to be competitive, not that the Diamondbacks were ultra aggressive this past offseason, but they contended fairly recently and were bringing back most of that team and hoping things would click. And yeah, they weren't going to go into it expecting to unseat the Dodgers or the Padres necessarily, or it turns out the Giants.

But for them to be the team where all of this has gone wrong, I guess it's maybe kind of created a conception that they are not trying to compete when they are, which I guess makes it worse in a way that this was not the plan, but also better that at least they're not intentionally trying to do this. Yeah. So I think you make a really good point in that this is actually kind of similar to the 2018 Orioles, right? That was a team that was trying to win. In fact, some of my MLB Network radio colleagues actually picked the Orioles to win the division that year, and then they ended up with, what, 117 losses? So this was a team that was going to be competitive. Now, had they rolled back their payroll from a season ago? Yes.

I mean, a lot of teams obviously did in the aftermath of 2020. They didn't maybe have the resources to be able to build depth into the organization quite like you would like, but it's also very difficult to build enough depth that when you lose four starting pitchers at one time to be able to do that you know I grew up in Chicago and I remember in 1985 there was a time when the Cubs had a very very good team they were coming off a division title in 84 they'd led the division I think at least at the all-star break in 85 and they were still playing well late in that month

when they lost all five starters in the span of a week and ended up on a 13-game losing streak. And so, like, that'll do it to you. So, yeah. And in fact, I saw some people trying to say that this was, that, you know, that this team was tanking. And I really bristle at that because, if anything, they have gone out of their way to not tank over the course of the last several years. Like, you could have seen many an instance, you know,

even going back to 2017 when this current front office took over to tear it all the way down. And certainly it would have been within the bounds of say what Seattle did or the White Sox or maybe even the Phillies and saying, okay, well, we didn't make it work with this group. Let's spend four or five years walking through the desert and hope it turns out. But this front office definitely believed that one, that's not necessarily a guarantee that you're going to get out of it. And two, that there was enough talent to not do that. And they are committed to trying to put a competitive team on the field every year. It just has not worked out and it has not worked out in pretty spectacular fashion. Yeah. So does the way in which it has not worked out change anything about the team's strategy, either heading into the deadline or going forward? Just before we started recording, I this changes anything about their understanding of themselves and where they stand in this division short and long-term, but are you expecting a more aggressive teardown of sorts in the next few weeks because of how the wheels have completely come off? Yeah. I don't know that I would expect

anything that was more aggressive than what I anticipated if they had been out of the race i mean you know you mentioned escobar and he's he certainly sounds like he's the guy that's been they've been getting dinged on the most he also left the game with a quad issue yesterday and is getting further testing today so which you know to add insult to injury that's right like a pretty valuable player and tremendous clubhouse guy who a lot of teams were certainly interested in, you know, that he's getting a little bit further testing. And hopefully it's minor and Escobar is back in there quickly. But, you know, he, Joaquin Soria, whose numbers don't look great, but also is, I think, throwing his fastball the fastest or second hardest that he ever has in his career and just has not had a chance to pitch consistently.

I mean, they've had like six save opportunities, I think, something like that. I think they've had six saves as a team. So, you know, those guys, I think there are more veteran guys that are on multi-year deals that they would be willing to look at, you know, in potential trades, but they would have been anyway. You know, so those would be more like the, I think of the Peralta Ahmed category.

But again, I think it's unlikely. The Marte one is really fascinating because, you know, there's a real problem with any Cattell Marte rumor in that it is impossible or virtually impossible for any team to put together a package that can acquire him when you're talking about a player that, you know, projects as like a five win or five plus win player who also has three years of control left. And those player option years are for a grand total of $18 million or club option years are for $18 million. The, the, you know, if we, and in fact, I would, maybe there would be somebody at Fangraphs that would be willing to look at this. But just in casual conversations with people, that contract, and he is such a valuable player, that you really can't match up or even start to have a conversation unless you're starting to talk about guys at the very top of the national prospect list. And if you are talking about those guys, it's probably not

enough by itself. And because the team that's acquiring the prospect is taking on the risk, and you're hoping that most of those guys end up with a player the caliber of Quetel Marte. So I think from that standpoint, it makes it very difficult. Now that said, Marte, Josh Rojas, who's had a really nice year, Pavin Smith, who's had a very good rookie season, Carson Kelly, give you a pretty good offensive core. And Zach Gallin, and I think there were enough good things, even though his fielding independent numbers weren't as strong as what his ERA was when he got hurt the first or the second time. Taylor Widener looks to be a piece that you can help to build around. And even Madison Bumgarner, when he's been healthy and he was clearly trying to pitch

through a shoulder issue for a couple of starts that I think, you know, again, has skewed his line. I think, you know, you've got a core of some pieces that you go, well, this is a competitive team. Are they as good as the Dodgers? Probably not in terms of overall talent and depth, but I think that it's not like you're walking into 2022 without talent where you're going, well, this is a team that's just going to be mired at the bottom of the second division necessarily. Even with a little bit of luck, they would be significantly better than this year. Yeah. This Diamondbacks regime has done a pretty good job of finding talent or developing talent, undervalued guys who have panned out. And so you'd have some confidence in them getting the right chips back in any trade that they make, but they really have

to make that Cattell Marte trade count if they make one just because of where they are. They're not going to make one. I mean, No, I think it is highly, highly unlikely. I would say that anybody who's putting Marte out there as a trade candidate, and teams are inquiring, I'm sure, but there hasn't been anything substantive to this point from what I can gather, and I don't anticipate there being anything substantive. That's what makes this losing streak tough, I guess, is that, you know, as you said, it's not hopeless looking past the season, but it's also not going to be an easy path back to the top of this division because you have the Dodgers and the Padres who were seemingly set up to compete forever. And then you also have the Giants who are competing right now a little earlier than expected.

And then their youth movement is going to come along and maybe set them up pretty well long-term. So the Rockies may be a mess, but other than that, every other team is set up pretty well. And so it's sort of a scary spot to be in. Yeah. And the Diamondbacks have garnered some pretty good praise from what they've had in their minor leagues, at least in terms of the depth of their farm system. But their top prospect, Corbin Carroll, tore his shoulder capsule on a home run and had to have surgery.

Christian Robinson, who is probably their highest ceiling prospect, has not been able to get a visa to leave the Bahamas because of an arrest last year. What he said and what the club said is he was dealing with some mental health issues during the pandemic, which I think we can all appreciate, and that helped to lead to an arrest last year when what he said and what the club said is he was dealing with some mental health issues during the pandemic which i think we can all appreciate and that helped to lead to an arrest but it's meant he can't come back into the country and then for the most part the offensive players that they do have outside of like alec thomas and i would i would keep an eye on on aj vukovic who was a high school draftee last year's having uh after a slow start a really nice year at visalia you. I don't know that the offense has really come along in the minor leagues. And they have some really

intriguing arms, but the results haven't necessarily been there so far. And I do think that a good chunk of that is because most of these guys didn't play at all in 2020. I'll be really curious to see what happens in the second half. But it does feel a little bit like when you see this and you see Dalton Varshow come up a couple of times and not really get going, who was supposed to be a good prospect. It can add to, I think, the consternation that some D-backs fans are having, even though if you really are to take a 10,000-foot view from it, it's not as bad as it seems, even though it is bad right now. It's pretty bad. I mean, it's not fun for anyone. Well, last thing about that then, you mentioned rolling the boulder back to the top of the hill, and that's what you do every day because you host the Diamondbacks pre- and post-game shows. So how do you approach that during a 5-and-40 stretch?

I mean, is it just a group therapy, venting, counseling session? Are you looking ahead to how they might actually snap this streak? What are the keys to the game at this point? Just make the pain stop. It's a lot of laughs and a lot of love, Ben. We have a couple of different things that we do. Our pregame show is pretty newsy, right? It's generally interview heavy. It's a lot of asking Tori Lovello, how the hell are you going

to get out of this? Tori going, trying everything I can, damn it, Mike. So I think that part is, I guess, relatively easy from a formatting standpoint. For our home games, we actually have kind of a coffee clutch. It's me's Steve Berthiaume for the most part. And on Saturdays, Rodrigo Lopez, who's our Spanish radio analyst, actually does the post game with me. And Rodrigo's just a terrific baseball mind. Great, great, great dude, too. Not that Bert's not a great dude, but Rodrigo's a really great analyst. And so we break it down, but we also try and, I mean, all you can do is laugh a little bit, right?

Like we're trying to have fun. We're just trying to keep people engaged in what's going on i mean i i do view the job of a broadcaster as being you know our job is to entertain you on a nightly basis and and sometimes the baseball isn't going to help you with that but people are listening to baseball games as an escape even if it's a bad team. They're listening to it to escape from reality. And so you want to give them hope in the game and hope that things are turning while also being realistic about where things stand. But you also need to have a little bit of fun. I mean, this is baseball. It's supposed to be fun, damn it. So we might as well try and have as good a time as we can. Yeah. I mean, the 17 in a row, that's bad enough.

But the 40 out of 45, that's about as bad a sustained stretch of losing as I can recall. 1936, the last time that's happened. I mean, it's only happened twice in the modern era. And listen, I've become, with these losing streaks, the 23-game road losing streak, and now the 17 overall, I've become an expert on the really bad Connie Mack teams. So Stephen Goldman, eat your heart out. Right. Those were the results of fire sales again.

And this one is not. But it's happening anyway. And so you've got the Brewers coming in. Then you've got the Padres, the Cardinals, the Giants. It doesn't get easier, really, until you get the Rockies on July 6th? You got good to great teams until then. So I hope for the

team's sake and for your sake doing the pre- and post-game that something changes soon that you get to talk about a win sometime soon. But you know how this goes, right? Like, none of this is predictive of what's going to happen the next day. I mean, that's the beauty of it. Right.

Right. You can't predict baseball, Susan. So like, you're going to go into the series, you know, maybe it's this one, or maybe it's the one in San Diego, or maybe it's the one in St. Louis and go, gosh, this is a mismatch on paper. And the Diamondbacks will sweep a series, you know, like that's, what's going to happen because that's baseball, you know? I mean, it's, it's, you don't know.

And that's part of the, I think that's part of what even during a bad stretch, at least keeps me going is like, well, tonight really could be the night, you know, like, even if you feel like that, that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, you know, sometimes somebody crashes through the top of the tunnel in baseball. Well, I haven't watched a whole lot of Diamondbacks baseball recently for obvious reasons when Shohei Otani is not playing against them, But there was one small moment I enjoyed this past Saturday when Matt Peacock was at the plate. Matt Peacock, not to be confused with Brad Peacock. He is a Diamondbacks pitcher and he was facing Walker Buehler. And we've talked on the show this year about the rate of totally non-competitive plate appearances where pitchers have been batting and just haven't even taken the bat off their shoulders and sometimes haven't even

feigned that they might take the bat off their shoulders. And Matt Peacock in his one plate appearance looked like he was going to have one of those. So for the first few pitches of that plate appearance, he just backed out of the batter's box, essentially. He just was entirely out of the batter's box for one pitch and then was at the back of the batter's box for a few pitches. And even if he had swung, I don't think his bat would have been in the strike zone. So it was impossible that he might've made contact. But then just when I thought he was going to take his lumps and sit down, he actually went close to the plate and took a swing. And he whiffed, he came up empty empty but it was an ambush where he tried to yeah i

guess uh you know lure walker bueller into a false sense of security and then he actually took a swing he struck out so it didn't help in the end but i enjoyed the uh attempt it was a little bit of a it was a rope-a-dope i mean it really did rope-a-dope him yeah it was it was it was very funny and yeah peacock is peacock actually has handled the bat pretty well, too. He's actually one of the faster guys on the team. And so I thought it was a riot. I don't know if you've heard his backstory at all, but he actually got hurt, I think it was his junior year,

at South Alabama and went to go work at a sawmill. And after working at a sawmill, he was like, I'm going back to baseball. And he's made it to the big leagues on the strength of a pretty good sinker. He's kind of a fun guy. I don't know that he's necessarily a rotation guy going forward. He's been pressed into that service, but I can see him being a pretty valuable reliever. Again, speaking to some of these guys that have come up that you're like, yeah, these could be good pieces or important pieces on a competitive team.

Well, hopefully they win sometime soon so he doesn't go back to the sawmill because that would be a better work environment. Have you noticed last thing, I guess, like has this taken a toll on team morale? I mean, it must have, but, you know, you're talking to guys to some extent or having them on the show, like are they sick of answering the questions? Are they down in the dumps or are their spirits still somewhat up, all things considered? I mean, I think it's all things considered. They're actually, they're handling it pretty well. And I think that that, you know, what's really funny is that that rankles some people because I think that they expect them to be just, you know, like breaking

bats and crashing into things and doing, you know, like being angry about every about every single moment, which is probably wouldn't help. No, it wouldn't. I don't know that it ever has, you know, I hear that from, from, you know, retired players a lot. Well, it doesn't, you know, they should do this. They should do this. And I always kind of wonder like, okay, so you did that during a losing streak and you weren't on a great team. What happened next? You know, like, like I think, I think what's, what's been impressive about it is that, you know, as we spoke to with how close the game was, and certainly, you know, Sunday,

they come back from a 9-1 deficit to, you know, at least push the Dodgers. Like, Kenley Jansen had to finish that game, right? Victor Gonzalez and Kenley Jansen were the two pitchers the Dodgers had to bring in. Those are part of their A bullpen. And so the fact that they keep competing every night and keep trying, I think is impressive, especially when you consider that there's a number of veteran players on the team. To me, the effort level is summed up in the eighth inning yesterday, there were a couple of men on and Steven Vogt as a pinch hitter hit a chopper to first and Albert Pujols was back on the cut of

the grass and dirt behind the bag where he fielded the ball and Gonzalez just was a bystander, right? He didn't cover first like he was supposed to. Vogt is sprinting down the line and beats Pujols to the bag and it ends up leading to a couple runs that kept the rally going. And so here you've got this, you know, this veteran, a two-time All-Star, who's now a backup catcher, right? Who is still bringing the energy and the effort every night and into every play and trying to use that to win games. I think the players deserve to be lauded for that if you can pick apart their performance. And certainly you can from an execution standpoint, offensively, defensively on the mound. Yeah. I saw actually Jessica Brand,

who is a fun fact, or in this case, unfun fact machine in our Facebook group and on Twitter, she tweeted on Sunday that I think it's the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics who had a 3-42 stretch or five separate 3-42 stretches. And I think they were the last team to have 40 or more losses in any 45 game span. So it's been a really long time. So at least you're witnessing history. And I guess I'll stop torturing you by making you talk about the Diamondbacks until your other job starts and you have to talk about the Diamondbacks again a few hours from now. So we talked about the 17 game losing streak. Let's hope it goes no further than that. I'll have an update at the end of the episode. For now, let's talk about a happier number 17 for a moment,

Shohei Otani, who you got a chance to see up close recently and Meg did too. She was at the game that he pitched against the Diamondbacks. So we talked about that. But he has been on an absolute tear. He just won the AL Player of the Week award. Of course, he is my AL Player of the Week every week. And as much as I talk about him here, I feel like I might not talk about him enough. Every listener is thinking you talk about him more than enough, Ben. But it's hard not to because he has hit six home runs in the past six days. The only day that he did not homer

was the day that he started as a pitcher and pitched six solid innings and also reached base a couple of times. He is now confirmed to be participating in the Home Run Derby, the first player from Japan to do that. And really, there are not enough superlatives that you can say at this point. He is just overshadowing every other incredible, great, riveting, watchable player in baseball, and there are a lot of them right now. So I don't know whether you have any observations from seeing him up close recently, or whether you have been marveling at him as much as I have, or just talking to players who have marveled at him as much as I have, which was one of the best aspects of all of this is just how impressed players are by this,

let alone people like us sitting on the sidelines. Yeah, I mean, I don't see how you can't be. I mean, so we saw him for three days. He pinch hit twice and started, you know, a game and pitched well as a starter, pitched out of trouble. Like there was this kind of Shohei learned how to pitch moment where he was 93 94 i think this was his first start since his velocity had been down right and everybody was very worried and he came out and he was like 93 94 and then when there'd be men in scoring position he was throwing 100 miles an hour right

so like all of a sudden he turned into justin Verlander in the way that he would ratchet it back until he needed it. Right. So that was impressive. The fact that he hit, I think in that series, three balls over 108 miles an hour was incredibly impressive. One that actually struck Merrill Kelly, which fortunately Kelly was okay, but he, you know, he crushed balls. I think the thing that's, that doesn't get talked about enough is that he is really stinking fast like he can really move and i have no doubts that if you were to say hey we need you to play the outfield regularly that he would what he might lose in route efficiency he would more than make up for in athleticism to be able to run down balls. It's just remarkable. Like I never thought we would see Babe Ruth and somehow we've seen like

almost a better version of him because once Ruth became a slugger, he stopped pitching. And now we have somebody who seems to be getting as better as a pitcher as he's getting better as a hitter. And it's, I mean, anybody you talk to, you just kind of look at it and it's like, is this guy for real? It's, I think what's cool about it to me,

not just as the performance, but that hopefully this opens up the possibility for other players who maybe aren't Shohei Otani, but have enough skills to be able to do both, to get a chance to do it more frequently professionally to not have somebody say you have to pick you know i've i've talked to when when otani debuted or was about to debut we did a big special for mlb network radio and i talked to a bunch of guys who had been two ways so it was like micah owings and michael lorenzen and you know a lot of guys

who were good hitting pitchers but guys who could who could play two ways, Brooks Kieschnick. And there were many of them that were like, listen, I wish we'd had the chance to do both because I wanted to be able to do both. Mike Lorenzen wants to play center field as often as possible. He wants to hit. He wanted that opportunity coming out of college and was told that he had to focus on pitching.

I think the fact that this could open the door to allow guys to really display their athleticism in a way that we haven't seen in a century and really very much at all, I think is really exciting. Yeah, I think so too. I think that teams will be more likely to give guys a chance. I don't think we're going to get another Otani sometime soon necessarily, but yes, someone who can at least provide a passable impression of a two-way player for a while. I think the door is cracked a little wider for that type of player. And now he's up to a 168 WRC plus, a 169 ERA plus. He is leading the major leagues in baseball reference war. He is, I think, third in fan graphs war behind DeGrom and Vlad Jr. And really, you're setting up for an exciting AL MVP race now where Vlad Jr. is threatening to win a triple crown. But Otani might still be the leader in the clubhouse in the AL MVP race now. I mean, there's so, so long to go that it's premature to talk about really. And of course,

an Angels player who probably will not make the playoffs is going to be at some disadvantage in awards voting, but I think everyone is appropriately impressed. And I've kind of flipped from early in the season when we were looking ahead to Home Run Derby, an all-star game. And for one thing, I was wondering whether the Angels would even let him participate or want him to participate or whether he would want to, because so much of this incredible high wire act that he is pulling off here is about the load management and giving him enough rest and that all-star break could be crucial. And so early in the season when he was still dealing with blister issues and he still seemed fragile and precious. I was sort of in the camp of, let's just prioritize his health and his energy and set him up for the second half. And

I don't particularly care if he participates, but now that we've seen him sustain this for close to half a season, and now that he is going to be participating in the Home Run Derby and he's leading DHs in all-star voting. I kind of just want that week to be the Shohei Otani show. I just want him to do it all, especially because we probably won't see him in the playoffs this year and maybe not anytime soon. And we don't know whether this sort of season will happen again. You know, pandemics occur and injuries occur and work stoppages occur. And it's so hard to do what he's doing that who knows whether we will see him do this again. I certainly hope so. But

while this is happening, let's have the signature moment for him and for the sport. Have him go into the Home Run Derby. And of course, it's hard to predict how anyone will do in the derby. We've seen plenty of great sluggers just strike out in the derby, but I have a feeling that he is going to put on a show there. I can't escape the suspicion that he's going to have a Josh Hamilton or Vlad Jr. type performance. Everyone has circulated the videos of his semi-legendary BP session in Coors Field in 2018. I could see that being absolute fireworks, but then get him in the game, have him pitch and have him hit. I don't care what machinations you have to do with the roster to make that happen, but it's not the West Coast game with probably no playoff implications, might as well make the most of it and have him showcase every skill he has, which is all of them. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. And I would even go further to say that, you know,

we don't know that, you know, he needs his workload managed. You know, we don't have enough information on really on load management. I management. I think we've got a pretty good idea that the medical teams are wanting to be conservative to make sure that guys are performing at their peak, but we're also dealing with a pretty spectacular athlete. Who's to say that this is participating in a home run derby Monday and then having two plate appearances and throwing an inning in the All-star game would derail where he's at. He could still get two days of rest Wednesday, Thursday. He's going to get

off days over the course of the rest of the season. And there are certainly a ton of ways to do that. So I think we kind of have to run full steam into knowing that there's a lot of unknown with Otani too, in that just because we haven't seen someone do it before doesn't mean someone can't do it. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited about the prospects of him, you know, changing the way that we think about the game because he absolutely is doing that.

Now, again, like he's just such a supreme talent that I don't know that we'll see anything quite like that again in this or any other lifetime, just from a pure talent standpoint. But, you know, it's always the guys that push the envelope that open up opportunities for other guys. The swing revolution, right? Justin Turner and J.D. Martinez making themselves stars opened it for other guys, right? Otani performing at a star level to me opens up the possibility for so much more. Yeah. And he is now starting on Wednesday this week, which lines him up to pitch in New York next week. And I will be there come hell

or high water. There's nothing that could prevent me from attending that game. So last thing, while we're talking about players and getting hyped about young talents, let's talk about another one. Back in 2017, MLB Pipeline ranked Otani the top international prospect. Second on that list was Wander Franco. And Franco is here now. So Wanderwatch, Wandervision, whatever you want to call it, it's over. He is coming up the consensus top prospect in baseball probably for the past two years since Vlad Jr. debuted for the Blue Jays in 2019. He is arriving finally, and the Rays have lost six in a row. I guess they fell out of first. They lost Tyler Glass now.

They're about to play the first place Red Sox on Tuesday, and Wander Franco will presumably be in the lineup. Sox on Tuesday and Wander Franco will presumably be in the lineup. So you have been watching him and talking to scouts about him for a long time. I'm sure. What are you looking forward to with Wander? And I will just say that the stats with him, maybe they don't pop off the page quite as much as with Otani, let's say, but they are incredibly impressive, especially when you account for his age, which if you want to feel old, Wander Franco was born on March 1st, 2001. Yeah. So he will be the youngest player in Major League Baseball. I believe he was also the youngest in AAA.

I mean, he is just he's always the youngest wherever he goes, or at least the youngest regular. And he batted 315, 367, 586 in 39 AAA games. And really, he has just done that pretty consistently while being young for his level. Career 933 OPS in the minors with more walks than strikeouts as a shortstop, who this season has also played some second and third. So I'm excited to see him get an opportunity, but I also am a little bit cautious about what we're going to see right away. And this is not to, you know, Jared Kelnick obviously is a very different player than what Wander is, but I do think that there is some that is instructive in what we saw with Kelnick. And I think it was Robert Murray that first mentioned this a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, and I've kind of been checking around with it, and it certainly sounds like it's the case. The gap between AAA and the big leagues right now is bigger than it's ever been before. You have to remember that, much like when we started this conversation talking about the Diamondbacks farm system, that there are a huge swath of players that didn't play any real competitive games last year that are pitching professional baseball. And because of that and the injuries at both the major and the minor league

level, which have been significant in the minor leagues as well, the competition is a little bit different than what we've seen in the past. And so while Franco was walking, what, 7% of the time and striking out 12% of the time in AAA, I don't necessarily expect that to be the case when he first breaks in. And I wouldn't be surprised if those first 150 or so plate appearances aren't particularly good. Or maybe he gets off to a really fast start and then the next 150 aren't particularly good

and that there are some fits and starts and some struggles but that's part of what we are in now with player development or at least that portion of player development being finished at the major league level Franco and granted he was the youngest in these lower levels it's swinging and missing about twice as much as he did uh in 2019 you know he on the on the card it looks like he skipped two levels even though last year you know lower levels. He's swinging and missing about twice as much as he did in 2019. On the card, it looks like he skipped two levels, even though last year he was at the alternate site and was a roster option for the postseason. Right. He'd never

played in the Dominican Winter League since 2019 in competitive games. And so, yeah, that makes it more impressive that he hit the ground running. But you're right, a little more swing and miss than he had showed in the past. Yeah. Not that it's crazy. Like, I mean, it's a swing and miss than he had showed in the past yeah not that it's crazy like i mean no it's still swing and miss like you'll take that in minor leagues that projects pretty well and and he has shown you know more power in triple a which you know is probably a combination of him being 20 in the

triple a baseball and all of those things and so like i think you're gonna see the what you will see is you're gonna see the flashes of what makes him spectacular but it may take a little while for him to end up being that guy i mean hell it took vladi 900 plate appearances 800 plate appearances before we started talking about vladito in the way that we are now and what we anticipated and i don't know that that franco is necessarily immune to that i hope he's not i hope he comes in hits the ground running and he's a superstar from day one because that would be awesome. But this is where I have to put on my Dougie Downer pants a little bit and say, hey, let's be a little bit patient with what we see from him

because it's going to be a big jump for him. And he's never been game-planned against, and they are going to have – the Red Sox are a pretty smart team. They may not have the best pitching staff, but they have a good idea of how to game plan. And it's not like he's going to go up there and being able to sit on the first, you know, bell high fastball or thigh high fastball and just jump on it because they're going to want to see what the kid has. They're going to pitch to him right from the jump. Yeah. And I guess, you know, as great a prospect as he is, and Eric Langenhagen famously ranked him as the minor league's lone 80 future value prospect. So there's a little doubt that he's going to be good or great eventually. But I guess it might be in a slightly less flashy way than it is with some of the other recent top prospects who have been hyped and who have made good on that hype. Like he's not a huge guy. He's listed at 5'10".

And so he doesn't have like Vlad's power. He doesn't have the speed that Tatis or Acuna do. Certainly doesn't have the base stealing ability. Like he'll go, but he'll get caught a lot too. So he's doing this as a shortstop and generally a competent defensive shortstop. It sounds like he is not Andrelton Simmons out there. You know, he's maybe not going to be making daily web gem style plays.

So between the fact that he is not going to be, you know, top of the charts defender at short and the fact that he is a really well-rounded hitter without any weaknesses, but also maybe without the light tower power. I mean, he'll hit for high averages. He'll put the ball in play. He'll take his walks, but it might be more of a holistic, you know, cumulative add up all the contributions and he's a superstar, but maybe the back of the baseball card stats don't leap out at you the way they do with some of the other great young 20-something players. So maybe that's something to keep in mind as we're all super excited about him. He's great, but might not be great in the same kind of eye-catching way, at least initially. So we've been spoiled a bit by Tatis and Soto and Acuna and Vlad and all the rest.

Well, I think it's a great point. I think it's a great point because I think he probably doesn't lend himself to the highlight reel as much as he lends himself to just being a great all-around baseball player. And isn't that what we – this is what everybody's been pounding the table about, right? We want guys that put the ball in play. We want guys that do all these things. We want the things – it's always the middle-aged guys like me that want to go back to baseball

the way we had it in the 80s or whatever. And so maybe in that sense he's a throwback or he's a more complete player a la Jeter. Maybe it's more like that, but that doesn't mean that we can't appreciate what it ends up. I would argue that what it is is that we won't see those singular highlights maybe as much but when we look at the baseball the baseball card and look at the back of it you're gonna be like oh this guy hit 290 with 25 homers and he knocked in you know 100 and i get that that's you know i should never mention rbi on a fangrass podcast but but you know

you know what i mean like it's just everything is going to stand out in the fact that everything is going to be really, really good. And that overall is going to make him one of the top players in the game. Yeah. And it's kind of been unusual for the Rays to have superstars. Like, even as they've been a great team, generally they've kind of mixed and matched and they've platooned and they've brought in players who no one knew who found higher levels with the Rays. And so they've had a lot of good players and not a lot of bad players, but also not a lot of great players, which is, you know, because they tend not to shop at the top of the market. And when they do have a great homegrown player, has the potential to be one of the best players in baseball, that's kind of a departure for them too, I suppose. And he has to be good to break into this lineup, right? Because the Rays have hit pretty well this year. Again, not with a lot of stars, but not with a lot of empty spots in the lineup either.

And this infield, Taylor Walls, a very good prospect in his own right. He came up first. He's had an above average bat so far and is, I think, generally regarded as the better defensive shortstop. And then you've got Wendell and you've got Brandon Lau. And, you know, I mean, these are core parts of that he is stepping into. And I'm sure that they will want him to play every day just for development purposes. But it's not as if he is just replacing a replacement player, essentially. There's some pretty good players here that he's going to have to fight for playing time. You know, we were joking this morning on the radio about, well, he's coming up to save their season because they've lost six in a row, right? You were crazy about that. But I do think- The Diamondbacks.

Wish. Thanks. Thanks, Ben. Yeah. Do you have anything else you can run under my fingernails real quick? I appreciate it. But I think that the other part of that is that it gives him, I don't want to necessarily say cover, but one, he doesn't need to be counted on to do everything right away.

And two, if he doesn't and he does struggle, you know, I think we need to change the narrative a little bit on guys in that that, you know, going back to the minor leagues after a first chance isn't necessarily a bad thing. I mean, Trump did a couple of times. Right. So like like let's say he comes up and he struggles a little bit. Let's say he's hidden in the 150s and he's got 60 or 70 plate appearances and the strikeout rate's really high. Like, him learning and going back to Durham isn't the worst thing in the world. You know, would he learn more by playing every day?

Yeah, but they have other options and they need to be productive because they're in a race. And I don't think that that's necessarily bad. So I don't know that we know whether or not Wander is going to be here to stay. His production will certainly say that. But, you know, I do wonder if there might be some other opportunities for others along the way. Sorry, Meg's not here. I had to drop her.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah. The puns are probably the only potential downside of this call-up. It's going to be nonstop puns for a while. So last thing I wanted to mention, just following up on something that Meg and I spoke about last Friday, actually on our most recent episode, we answered a listener email about whether the wave could be a distraction for players and whether teams should try to do the wave, whether fans should try to do the wave to distract opposing players. And we talked about

how it seems sort of far-fetched. How could you analytically figure out whether there was really distraction going on? And also, I think Meg made the point that who's to say this would distract opposing players and not your own team's players. And in just another example of weird hypotheticals that we talk about in this podcast coming true almost immediately. I don't know. It's probably just like the Badr-Meinhof phenomenon or something that I noticed these things happening after we talk about them on the pod. But the same day, Friday, that we talked about this on the podcast, it happened in the Padres-Reds game at San Diego. The fans did the wave and noted speedster Joey Votto, who had not stolen a base since 2019, he stole a base

on Manny Machado because Manny Machado was doing the wave along with the fans in San Diego. He was not paying attention to Votto at second and Votto just basically strolled to third because Machado literally raised his arms up as the crowd was doing it and the wave was passing third base so just an incredible coincidence it is an absolutely hilarious moment it makes me wonder if Manny was listening to yeah to Effectively Wild and he was like oh hey I'll do the wave here you know I'm gonna get jumped in I mean it's I think the first reaction from a lot of people is like Manny what you doing yeah and then like you watch it unfold and it's just, it's just damned funny. And I can understand, I think in that

moment, why, you know, like you said, Votto doesn't run. Right. So in that sense, you're not expecting him to go, you know, maybe you're expecting the pitcher to look back a second time or something. He's not the one holding him on. He's the one that's supposed to be covering the base. And so then all of a sudden, you you know he takes off and your hands are in the air doing the wave because you're like well there's no chance he's gonna run here and all of a sudden there's vato and also i think it's probably you know like that was what friday night right it was a thursday or friday night friday yeah so like they had sellout crowds in san diego all weekend and i can only imagine what that atmosphere was like.

And I wouldn't be surprised if you were to talk to some guys candidly about it, if they got lost in that a little bit because it had been so long since. I mean, that's a first time for a lot of those Padres players to play to a non-opening day house like that at home. Yeah. Actually, for all of them. I mean, they've been bad for a long time and last year when they were good nobody actually got to see them in fact nobody got to

see them even in the division series because they weren't even allowing fans in in texas until the league championship series so to be able to have their home fans actually be there and be at capacity that had to be a moment where i would think just by human nature, you're going to get lost in that a little bit because it just, I mean, it's so unique. It's so unusual. It's so cool. You know, like that, that to me, I think is that, but it led to a really funny moment. And it's going to lead to a lot of people criticizing Manny because everybody loves to criticize Manny. Probably. Yeah. But Padre swept the four game series, so no harm done. We got a fun little blooper moment and weird, try to time his pitches to coincide with the wave.

When the wave was happening, he would wait until it was like going around the outfield corners, depending on whether you have a righty or a lefty up. So wait for it to be in the batter's sight line and then deliver the pitch. So it would be hard to figure out whether that worked, whether it was effective, but you could imagine. I mean, the batter's eye and those sight lines, they matter. You don't want to be distracted by movement out there. So in theory, that could work. So apparently it's a real thing. Anything to gain an advantage.

Right. All right. Well, I will let you go prep for another pregame show. All right. Well, I will let you go prep for another pregame show, and hopefully the game will be better than the last 17 or most of the last 45 have been. You can find Mike on Twitter at Mike underscore Farron. Hear him all the time on Power Alley on MLB Network Radio and Sirius XM. And if you are a Diamondbacks fan, hopefully he has helped you through A rough month and a half Or so So thank you very much Mike And I wish you better times ahead Thank you and it's a pleasure to be with you Now who will stop and frisk me on my way off the field today

Alright I came here for the frisking Yes well I will be back in just a moment To talk about the frisking and the farm substances With Jimmy Buffett. It's a long time to be gone. Time just rolls on and on. When you need a shoulder to cry on. When you get so sick of trying. Just hold on tight Okay, I am joined now by biomechanics expert Dr. Jimmy Buffy, a former Effectively Wild guest, but more notably, a former biomechanics consultant for DriveLine Baseball and senior analyst for the Dodgers. He left the Dodgers in 2019 to co-found Reboot Motion,

a sports science company devoted to helping athletes maximize their performance and avoid injuries. Jimmy, welcome back. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Ben. There's a lot going on. There sure is. So I want to ask you about injuries, but before we get to that, I want to ask you about sticky stuff. Although as it turns out, those things may be related. So I wonder what your level of expertise or experience is when it comes to Sticky Stuff, you know, without ratting out any former or current clients. I wonder whether this is something that has entered into your work because I guess for some instances is maybe more directly related to pitch design and pitch movement and pitch physics than biomechanics. But I guess there's some interplay between those things. So is this something that you have studied or devoted any thought to or consulted on in the past? Yeah, well, generally speaking, my undergraduate degree was actually mechanical and aerospace

engineering. And before I got a PhD in biomechanics, I thought I was going to work on airplanes and airplane engines. So I spent a lot of time studying aerodynamics and actually, you know, the flight of objects through the air, which turned out to be super useful in baseball. And then actually the first two years of my PhD, you were studying these exact muscles of the forearm that we're talking about for the purpose of building better prosthetic hands. So it actually wasn't until two years into my PhD that I switched to much more biomechanics of pitching. But actually, I was studying the biomechanics of pitching and these forearm muscles. So I have a lot of background in aerodynamics, biomechanics, these forearm muscles. And then, you know, at the Dodgers,

because of my background in aerodynamics, spent a lot of time studying ball flight pitch characteristics in general. And then I think, you know, over the past five to 10 years, as spin rate has become much more prevalent of a topic. It's just become, I mean, I don't know, maybe not as mainstream, but at least like among baseball circles, it began to become more and more known that as spin rate has become more important, you can use grip enhancers to improve spin rate. So I don't think it's been any secret throughout the baseball world. Right. Although it was a total surprise to Rob Manfred and the commissioner's office, it seems. Just kidding.

Yeah. So, right. I guess your time with the Dodgers, you know, 2015 to late 2019, that coincided with the advent of StatCast. Of course, teams had access to TrackMan data prior to that, but that was really the time when the general awareness exploded. And I'm sure the Dodgers were among the teams on the cutting edge of whatever pitchers have been doing over that period. So I do want to ask about the physical ramifications of this and the possible injury concerns, but what's your general understanding of the performance enhancing effects when it comes to enhancing spin. And I don't know whether you've studied various substances and quantified the differences between them, but just in general, you know,

what have you found along those lines? And do you have any expectations about what we might see happen to offense in the coming weeks? Yeah, well, first of all, you know, I think to give some context on how spin rate affects pitcher performance. So, you know, when the ball leaves the pitcher's hand, because of the way it leaves the pitcher's fingers, it starts to spin. And depending on the direction of that spin, the efficiency of that spin, that spin can actually cause the ball to deviate from a straight line path, along with a few other things like gravity. And I know people, you know, more recently have gotten into the seam shifted wake, but really like what the spin tends to do is basically amplify the, the pitch break. So you have the direction of the spin. And then as the

ball spins faster, the ball just breaks faster, you know, in the way that the, in the direction that the ball is spinning. And, but i also want to say that you know people are giving spin rate a ton of credit for how pitcher performance has changed over the past you know few years but actually the other thing that's changed over the past few years is just the prevalence of things like slow motion edutronic cameras and rapsodo computer vision and diamond kinetics pitch tracker balls and, you know, people like me who understand aerodynamics. So, you know, like even without like the use of a grip enhancer that can increase spin

rate and amplify pitch break, you can spend a lot of effort and time very much optimizing exactly how the ball leaves a pitcher's fingers to have, you know, the perfectly spin efficient pitch that's moving in the perfect right direction to compliment the slider. So I think, you know, while this reducing the spin rate should reduce a little bit of that, the fact that we can still use these slow motion cameras and pitch measurement devices to optimize, you know, the spin direction and spin efficiency, you know, I don't know if changing spin rate will affect performance as much as people think. Right. And of course, the recent, it's not even all that recent, but the increase in strikeout rate, which is now up to, I guess, 16 seasons or will be if it actually ends up higher by the end of the season. pitch design concepts. So things like increasing velocity and less of a stigma surrounding strikeouts. A lot of these things are contributing to these effects and were even before some of the

recent innovations. And this has maybe just supercharged it. But I do wonder how this interacts with all the pitch design stuff you're talking about. If you're designing the optimal slider or something, and well, now maybe that slider is not quite as effective or maybe you weigh your pitch mix a little bit differently. If you know that you're not going to be getting this unnatural movement on a certain pitch, does that lead you to go back to throwing something different or emphasizing a different pitch mix? We've seen some of these trends and maybe the sticky stuff and the other pitch design innovations have kind of gone hand in hand or finger in finger. And so I wonder how those will interact now if you're kind of cutting pitchers off when

it comes to the sticky stuff. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a couple of things, too. I mean, I do think, you know, if you just like scour the baseball, you know, the underground baseball, not even underground, you know, turning into like mainstream baseball research. you know, the underground baseball may not even underground, you know, turning into like mainstream baseball research. I specifically, I think saw some, some work from, you know, Mike Saan and the baseball development group where they, they, they were able to show that removing sticky stuff changed spin rate. I think it was a couple hundred RPM, which can equate to, you know, an inch or two of movement. So it's not insignificant. That's, that's, that's for sure.

of movement. So it's not insignificant. That's for sure. So last week, Tyler Glasnow got hurt, and he came out and blamed a large part of the injury on having stopped using sunscreen and rosin in anticipation of this crackdown on foreign substances. And there was a lot of debate and discussion. Well, is this just a guy who's had some injury problems in the past and throws a hundred and he's in a high risk category to begin with? Or is it actually his explanation, which is that taking himself off of the sticky stuff all of a sudden caused him to grip the ball harder and maybe stress some parts of his arm that normally would not be so stressed. And all of a sudden he has a torn UCL and strained flexor tendon and maybe headed for Tommy John surgery. So you had some tweets on that topic, which I read out on an episode last week, but I figured it would be better to hear from you directly rather than reading some tweets. So what did you think of Glasnow's take on this and what the possible injury ramifications could be from taking away the foreign substances.

Yeah, I mean, it's quite the cascade of events. So as I mentioned earlier, my PhD was specifically studying the muscles of the forearm, the ones that, you know, help with grip flexion. And also the unique thing about these muscles, which is why I was so interested in studying them, was that they also cross the elbow. So, you know, in particular, you know, we can go into the specifics of which muscles they are if you care to. Sure, yeah. But, you know, there's one in particular called flexor digitorum superficialis that I'm thinking of, but there's a few. But that one in particular, you know, it goes all the way into the fingers. It helps you, it helps you grip, but it also crosses all the way down the forearm, crosses your elbow and actually attaches on the upper arm. And it attaches basically right next to the ulnar collateral ligament, like right there on the

inside of the elbow. And, you know, maybe if your listeners care to, you know, they can, if you form a fist, if you really like clench your fist and you feel down on the inside of your elbow, you can actually feel some tension there. And that's these forearm muscles down by the elbow because they cross the elbow. And what my PhD, what I was studying was how the forces in these muscles can actually theoretically protect the ulnar collateral ligament when you pitch. And what I found was, I mean, it was a proof of concept study, but what I found was that these muscles can have a significant impact, at least in simulation, in protecting the ulnar collateral ligament. So this cascade of effects, I mean, it's definitely, at least from my research and simulation studies, it's definitely plausible what Glasnow is saying

in that, you know, if you remove this grip enhancing substance that pitchers have gotten used to, now all of a sudden their finger muscles probably have to do a bit more work. And I think the fact that Glasnow was mentioning how much he had to choke the ball and how he was mentioning how sore his forearms were, I think this, you know, this is evident. I have no inside knowledge. I'll just throw that out there. I don't know anything about... So this is just a little bit of speculation, some, some educated speculation, I think, but it's certainly possible that these finger muscles were getting a little

bit more tired, a little bit more sore. And then because these muscles also cross the elbow right near the omic lateral ligament, it means that while the pitcher is pitching, it's also very possible that the force these muscles were able to generate goes down. And when the force in these muscles goes down, it just stands to reason that the force experienced by the UCL could be going up. So that's this whole cascade of events that could lead to more stress on the UCL and possible injury. Now, again, I have no inside knowledge of the situation. This is just some educated speculation. My point with those tweets was just to say that this isn't something to be dismissed.

And my possibly flawed layman's understanding of this, and please correct me if this is wrong or exaggerated, is that the UCL itself, if left to its own devices, would just not be up to the strain that it is subjected to during a high-level pitching motion and that you really need this support structure, these muscles that can absorb some of that strain and kind of cushion the UCL to some extent. Is that right? I mean, if the UCL were left to bear the brunt of this on its own, it would snap, I mean, pretty regularly. And you kind of need this larger trellis of body parts that help it sustain itself, at least in many pitchers' cases. And so if you weaken that support structure because pitchers are gripping the ball hard

and they're getting fatigued, then that increases the risk. Have I just completely massacred that or is there some semblance of accuracy there? No, there's a good semblance of accuracy there. I mean, I like to think there's a few things that provide some level of like a safety factor for a pitcher as they're pitching. You know, one is just simply the way their delivery works. for your arm path, for a pitcher's arm path, to stress the UCL less than other pitchers' arm paths, depending on how you're transferring torque and force across that elbow. But definitely, at least from all the research I've done and seen, the muscles also provide some level of a safety factor. And the UCL itself even has a certain level of strength and a safety factor.

So there's, you know, there's a lot of things that go into ulnar collateral ligament injury risk, but one of them is certainly how well these muscles can actually protect the UCL. So what would you recommend then if there is this increased risk, if pitchers are trying to compensate for the lack of foreign substances by gripping the ball harder. Is the solution as simple as, well, don't grip the ball harder? I mean, how hard is that? Like if you just take a little off, if you throw less hard, because like if the point of this is in part, well, to ensure a level playing field and that the rules are enforced, of course,

but to try to increase offense a little bit and make pitchers a little bit less effective, then in theory, if they do have to back offense a little bit and make pitchers a little bit less effective, then in theory, if they do have to back off a little bit and maybe throw the ball a little less hard or throw it with less movement, less spin, that's kind of the goal. But you also don't want a bunch of pitchers to hurt themselves in achieving that goal. So I don't know if you were consulting with pitchers, maybe you are consulting with pitchers if you were still working with an organization and you were trying to with pitchers if you were still working with an organization and you were trying to advise pitchers on how to survive this transition.

What would you say? Yeah, I mean, always in situations where we're changing, you know, how a pitcher, like the whatever, like the stimulus for a pitcher, whether we're increasing the number of innings we need a pitcher to throw. I think we talked maybe a little bit about this last time, but workload management or changing a role or changing the delivery, I always, always advise changing as slow as you can. I mean, obviously sometimes or a lot of times the constraints of the situation don't enable you to change as slowly as you would like, but some type of adaptation period. Yeah. I mean,

unfortunately it would be something along the lines of like, yeah, maybe like not gripping the ball as hard and learning how to release the ball with the lighter grip, but you know, doing so at a much more gradual pace, you know, maybe, maybe you have to reduce the workload to allow, you know, the pitchers time to adapt. I mean's it's really really hard obviously right now because like we're in the middle of competition to do things to do things gradually but generally it's like yeah always when you're when you're doing something to the body it's best to give it time to adapt just because muscles you know they can take a few weeks to adapt to a new stimulus so it's just whatever you can do to to ease that change. And even like furthermore,

as you're making that change, you also, it's also really important to monitor things like what Klasnow was mentioning, like soreness, just subjective things, soreness. You could even actually like monitor grip strength as a method of assessing a person's level of fatigue and sort of like modulating workload and intensity based on those measurements. So you're actually using something objective to help the pitchers adapt. So I guess part of this, though, might just be that pitchers have to resign themselves to some extent to pitching less well, right? I mean, if they've been unnaturally enhanced by these foreign substances, especially some

of the more exotic ones that concur in greater advantages in spin rate, you can't just grip the ball harder and achieve the same effect. I mean, it's just physically impossible, right? So part of it might just be a mental, a psychological adjustment of just, hey, I've been relying on this tool, on this crutch, in essence, that gives me greater abilities. And now I just have to accept that my stuff is not going to be as good. And other pitchers probably won't be either. But if I tried to replicate naturally what I was achieving unnaturally, then that just might be a recipe for hurting myself.

Yeah, I guess so. Which is tough because pitchers have a lot at stake and a lot riding on every pitch and they've been taught to throw max effort, right? So now you're asking them not to do that. So, and to change, you know, quickly, which is tough to do too. Yeah. I mean, another thing that I'm wondering though, too, and you know, I was, I did actually tweet about this a little bit the other day is I think it's possible that removing, you know, a grip enhancer could help some pitchers. Because not every pitch you're trying to maximize spin rate and maximize break. For example, a sinker, a lot of times a sinker has, you know, spin that resembles that of a four-seam fastball, but you actually don't want it to rise as much.

So I'm actually curious if this will, you know, sort of bring back the sinker a little bit. I mean, I do feel like it's been a, we've been in a little bit of a, an era recently of like bringing back the sinker, but I wonder if this would even like bring the sinker back in even more. Right. Huh. So in the short term then, because pitchers have to adjust quickly, I mean, I guess they could have anticipated that this was going to happen and and wean themselves off the stuff earlier but tough to tell them to do that when the rules aren't really actually being enforced yet so there are maybe certain

exercises forearm strengthening things that maybe they're already doing but maybe could ramp up to kind of compensate for this or maybe it's just instructing them to hey don't do what glasnow did because look what happened to him oh man yeah it's it's so tough i mean these teams all have awesome medical staff members and it's just the thing is it's it's i you know i i understand it's really hard to like especially especially with the pitching arm, when the pitching arm is obviously taxed all the time in a season to do any type of like specific strengthening work, like, you know, during competition, a lot of times during the season, it's much more about maintenance than it is about really trying to increase strength. But yeah, I mean, extra special attention to now potentially a more vulnerable body part definitely seems like something people have to think about.

And a more general injury question for you. The first time we had you on was last October and last season was a particularly rough one for pitchers and injuries. And it sure seems like that was likely related to the start and stop structure of the season and spring training being suspended and then summer camp being brief and guys not really ramping up the way that they would normally. So that was a tough challenge and a unique challenge, but it seems like this year still pretty bad for injuries and that it's not just baseball either. The NBA has had a lot of injury issues this year, but in baseball, based on the data I've seen, Derek Rhodes at Baseball Prospectus has shared some. It seems like IL placements are still up compared to certainly pre-2020 and maybe even for hitters compared to last year. It seems like hitters have been particularly hard hit,

so to speak, this year. And we've seen a lot of Tommy John surgeries. And it seems like a lot of people, you included, are trying to figure out how to prevent injuries. And we're not there yet. So why have you not solved this problem? I guess you're taking away the stinky stuff on top of all the other injuries that we're seeing. And I wonder if the worst could be ahead. Generally, at least certain types of injuries become less common as the season wears on and guys are already ramped up but you wonder having come off a short workload last season and guys maybe not being conditioned as well as they would be normally whether you'll start to see some fatigue creep in later this season so there are all sorts of effects going on here but the upshot is that there's still really

a lot of injuries so is it the weird post-pandemic hangover still? Is it just velocities higher and higher? What are some of the contributing causes and challenges that we're seeing now even independent from going cold turkey on the spider tech? Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to say. And we are all working very hard to prevent these injuries, even though it may not seem like it. But yeah, I mean, I think such a big part of it is workload management. And, you know, in my experience, pitchers are huge creatures of habit and they have very specific off-season routines, in-season routines, ramp-up routines. And I do think like, you know, having a full season potentially helps conditioning to be ready for the next season. So I just think like, you know, obviously it's been, it was a

terrible pandemic for so many reasons that go beyond baseball, but you know, within baseball, I think it completely disrupted pitcher routines and ramp up periods leading into last season, completely disrupted, you know, just like having a full season to condition for the next season. And even, you know, I think at least in certain parts of the country, the pandemic got truly, you know, really bad over, you know, last winter, December, January, especially where I am in Southern California, which potentially impacted off-season training for pitchers again. And yeah, I just think it's really, really hard when you're not, when you don't have access to the same coaches and the same

facilities and things like that, just to get yourself ready. Because pitching, as we all know, is really, really hard, especially doing it over, you know, a super long season. Yeah. So I just think it's been just, especially something like pitching where it's just such a routine oriented thing. Having this global pandemic interrupt routines for a year and a half just makes it really, really hard on pitchers and their trainers. So we're speaking as Jacob deGrom is about to take the mound in the first game of a doubleheader against Atlanta. So hopefully by the end of this episode, I'll be able to report that he pitched great and his ERA is even more minuscule and he had no health issues and some of my concerns will be assuaged. But I've been worrying can't comment or speculate about DeGrom specifically, but I wonder in a more general sense, you know, someone like him who has avoided serious injuries

this season, of course, he had Tommy John surgery long ago, but this season it's been a bunch of minor nagging things that have cost him no time or a little time, or have just caused him to be pulled from starts a little early. And it's various body it's a side it's a back it's an elbow and it's a shoulder and of course you know it seems like he thinks or the Mets think that these things aren't really related or all that concerning or he wouldn't be pitching at all but I wonder whether you see patterns like this in other pitchers whether you can have kind of a cascade effect where one little minor nagging injury helps cause another, and then maybe that forces some almost subconscious mechanical change and that causes you to do something that maybe increases your injury

risk in a little other way. I just wonder whether when you see this sort of pattern, it's better obviously than having some single catastrophic injury, but when you see this sort of pattern, it's better, obviously, than having some single catastrophic injury. But when you have a series of smaller ones, how do you determine whether those are related, whether that means you need to take some extended break or whether it's causing some other change that could lead to a more serious issue down the road? Yeah, well, like you mentioned, I certainly can't and don't want to talk about DeGrom specifically. But generally speaking, yeah, I mean, I think when you start to see different nagging things pop up, I mean, I think you're right on in that sometimes, I mean, honestly, it's very much related to what we were talking about with the grip enhancer thing is like you take away one minor thing you change one minor

thing and a pitcher has to compensate in a slightly different way and pitching is just such a precise thing that you have to do over and over and over again especially for a starting pitcher throwing you know the ball 100 times or including warm-ups 150 times or whatever in a day certainly if you're even just compensating for something a little bit, it can make your body have to do something it's not used to. In the same way, changing a grip enhancer could make your forearm muscles a little bit more tired. So certainly, different minor things can have cascading effects as you possibly compensate. So just in general, I just think it's important to monitor that. Even if they have something that's somewhat minor, can they throw the ball in a way that's not necessarily like changing something else and possibly having, you know, unforeseen consequences in another part of the body.

So I think that's a really important thing when you start to see, you know, minor injuries, especially if they begin to pile up a little bit. Yeah. And the other thing that I wonder about with DeGrom, it's almost miraculous that he throws as hard as he does. I mean, harder than any other starting pitcher does consistently where he's been basically sitting at 100 in his recent starts. And that amazes me and also scares me. He just turned 33. We don't generally see pitchers add velocity five consecutive seasons. Generally, things go in the other direction. And obviously, it's led to incredible results, and he's been fun to watch. And so part of me is like egging him on, like, yes, how hard can he throw? How high can this go? I want to see him be even more dominant and unhittable. And then the other part of me is looking at the track record of hard throwers and guys like Glasnow and seeing how often they break and then worrying about deGrom and wondering, is this too much? Because this is a guy who won Cy Young Awards when he was throwing 96-97. Clearly, that was getting the job done.

He may be even better if he's throwing 99-100-101, but is there some increased risk there as a tradeoff? So again, I know you can't really weigh in on deGrom specifically, but I wonder what we know or what you know about, A, the risk factors for hard throwers versus less hard throwers, and then looking at individual pitchers, you know, if a certain pitcher dials it up more or takes a little off, how does that affect his individual injury risk? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And like you said, again, definitely can't talk about or speak on DeGrom specifically, but in general, yeah, I mean, velocity. So all things being equal and, you know, a pitcher just increases velocity with added effort, right? You know, the delivery looks almost the same. It's just like things just start to move a little bit faster. I think in a scenario like that, it's likely that that type of scenario would actually increase injury risk because you just expect like if the UCL is experiencing some level of force and rate of force acceptance, as you just scale up the velocity without changing anything, that just

goes up a little bit and which could put it a little bit more at risk, or even not just the UCL, like other potentially vulnerable body parts. But that is all things being equal, the delivery looking the same, basically. But then it's very possible to change your delivery to make it more efficient. So let's see if we can give a tangible example. I mean, if we, you know, if we stick on like sort of the, the UCL as something that people probably, you know, can, can think about a little bit, if we can imagine the arm accelerating, you know, as the, as the, as the arm is, the foot, it's the ground, the arm is accelerating. And now, you know, that forearm is starting to unwind. You know, there's a way in which it unwinds where essentially you're like pulling the

forearm through with the UCL or, you know, where the UCL is heavily involved in like pulling the forearm through. But then if you're changing the way your arm moves such that rather than like, you know, rotating the arm very forcefully over the inside of the elbow if you if you're able to change that arm path where the arm actually accelerates across the elbow extension degree of freedom as opposed to across the inside of the elbow now it's possible to get a little bit more ball velocity without actually strengthening the or uh stressing the ucl more because you're essentially like you're changing the direction in which that torque is operating and there's you

know there's other things like that of just you know lining up different planes of motion even sometimes you know it's possible if you maybe increase like a waist range of motion or a shoulder range of motion or something like that. You know, now you don't necessarily need to have as high of a peak force. You can actually sort of like add that force over a longer period of time. So maybe like the steepness of that force production isn't so high or, you know, so there's just like, there's things like that, that you can change about a delivery to get more velocity out of it while maybe not, not necessarily increasing injury risk, maybe even reducing injury risk, you know, in certain circumstances. So I don't know, did that answer your question?

Did that make sense? So, so DeGrom, when he has been asked sometimes about how he manages to keep adding velocity, he hasn't really had a simple explanation like, oh, I went to driveline or I did this specific shoulder strengthening program or something. Maybe he has done those things and just hasn't said so, but he has tended to say, oh, I just cleaned some things up and made my mechanics more efficient and that sort of thing. And so if that's the case with him or to keep it on specific with pitcher X pitcher x or joe slobotnik or whoever like just because a guy is throwing harder doesn't necessarily mean that he is subjecting his arm to

more stress it could just be that he cleaned up his mechanics in some way that reduced stress or at least kept stress constant while also enhancing his velocity. So those things are not mutually exclusive, it sounds like. Yeah, no, you can definitely increase velocity without increasing injury risk. But, you know, I think a fair amount of time, because of what I said, if you're just like maybe putting in more effort, if you're just like getting stronger per se, more powerful, you know, generating more force with your legs, like there're just like getting stronger per se, more powerful, you know, generating more force with your legs, like there, there are a lot of ways in which, you know, that,

that correlation does hold up as like a causal type effect. So it's just, you know, it's, it's a very like picture specifics, uh, situation specific thing. Is there anything to the idea of velocity looking easy? You know, like when people watch DeGrom, it's like, oh, he doesn't even look like he's throwing hard, you know, or it doesn't look like it's max effort or it doesn't look super intense. It seems like it's free and easy. And that's something that scouts

have always tried to pay attention to. You know, does it look like a max effort delivery? Does he look like he's going to hurt himself or does it look easy? And the correlation there, I don't know how high it is. People would say that Mark Pryor had perfect mechanics and then Mark Pryor broke. And I wonder whether having studied these things more scientifically, you found that there is any correlation to the visual component. I mean, can we look at someone and assess injury risk or is that totally false that we could pick up on this at all or that the appearance of stress

might actually correlate to actual stress? Yeah. Well, I think that the correlation between like a delivery looking like it has effort and injury risk is probably a little tenuous. But I do think there is something to the fact of something to the idea of, you know, effortless velocity. And in fact, I think that that's a really important concept, because if anyone is trained pitchers or anyone's tried to throw hard it often seems like if you try to throw hard you'd end up throwing less hard and i think a reason for that is so much of throwing really hard is allowing your body to use large ranges of motion and allowing your body to sequence the transfer of velocity

in a very specific way where one body part accelerates, then the next body part accelerates, then the next body part. So I think when, you know, someone is like trying really hard and tensing really hard, I think at times what can happen is you do, you know, you create what, what's called like co-contraction of muscles. So, you know, maybe like you clench up, you know, your, your arm really hard. And now the muscles on the front of your shoulder and the back of your shoulder are turned on. And now all of a sudden your upper arm is just rotating as a unit with your torso. And now you're not able to separate the torso from the upper arm as effectively. And now you're not able to separate the torso from the upper arm as effectively. And therefore you're not able to transfer velocity from the torso to the upper arm

as effectively. Whereas if you, if you put in a little, a little less effort and maybe there's a little less co-contraction, as they say, now maybe you allow the body parts to accelerate in a sequence, which allows you to transfer momentum much more easily. So I think in that way, you know, I think when a pitcher is throwing really hard, really efficiently, it probably feels easier because it means they're sequencing properly and using all of their ranges of motion. I see. Well, I guess it's good for you that this is all a little bit more complicated than just looking at someone and diagnosing them from afar. This way you have a job. Yep, for sure.

And whatever the opposite of a hex is, I will be placing on Jacob deGrom. I'll be casting some kind of mental protective spell over him and over all pitchers. And overall pitchers, and I hope that Tower Glassnow doesn't turn out to be the canary in the coal mine here and that we don't see an epidemic of arm injuries in the coming days or weeks. But if we do, we will have to have you back on to break it all down. Oh, boy. Yeah. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Yeah, I hope so, too.

But thank you for lending us some of your insights and expertise here. I recommend that everyone follow along with Jimmy on Twitter at James H. Buffy. And you can also follow Reboot Motion on Twitter at Reboot Motion. It's also at rebootmotion.com. Always a pleasure, even though we're talking about guys getting hurt for the most part, but hopefully also about preventing guys from getting hurt. So good luck with your mission. Yeah. Thank you so much, Ben. It's always a lot of fun. I appreciate you having me. All right. And we will take another quick break and then I will be back with Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Graham Stinson to continue our talk about foreign substances and whether the

sinker will make a comeback as well as some experimental rules in 8-Ball and his new company, StatStack. Rub it in, rub it in Rub it in, rub it in I feel the tingle begin You're getting under my skin Rub it in, rub it in All right, I am back now and joined by left-handed pitcher Graham Stinson, the Rays' fourth-round pick out of Duke in 2019, and now a pitcher for the Charleston Riverdogs, the Rays' fourth round pick out of Duke in 2019, and now a pitcher for the Charleston Riverdogs, the Rays' low A East affiliate. He is not the Tampa Bay Rays prospect

making the most headlines during the week of Wander Franco's debut, but hopefully his day will come. And he is also an entrepreneur, having co-founded a performance tracking company called StatStack last year. Graham, welcome to Effectively Wild. Thank you so much for having me. So we connected a little while back, and I've been planning to have you on to talk about your company, which I think is really interesting. But you have the fortune or misfortune of being the first professional pitcher we have had on the pod since the foreign substance crackdown took shape.

So we're speaking on Monday, which is an off day for you and kind of the calm since the farm substance crackdown took shape. So we're speaking on Monday, which is an off day for you and kind of the calm before the sticky stuff storm. So the next time you take the mound, you like every other pitcher in the majors and the minors will be subject to mandatory inspections. So I wonder what you think of all of this, both about the effectiveness of foreign substances in general or the prevalence of it or how the leagues are cracking down and what you think will happen. So first, I want to preface like foreign substances have been around baseball for mostly forever. The guys have been trying to cheat in some way, shape or form for the past 100 years, whether that be the spitballs that got outlawed, I want to say 90, 100 years ago. Yep, D20, yeah. Yep, the guys using pine tar or sunscreen and rosin up until the past few years where we've seen such a huge spike in the spin

rates and the pitch effects areas and stack cast error hasn't been around that long, but the types of substances you were, we're talking about now and which I think are kind of the problem are the ones that are essentially being made up in a lab or they're artificially created. They don't already exist on a baseball field, whether that's guys mixing up, using a Bunsen burner to mix up pine tar, rosin, and you know, several other, or the spider tech that is used for professional powerlifting and strongman competitions. And so it's really interesting because everything short of these artificial substances has been widely accepted and the blind eye has been turned for 100 years, as we were saying. And I do think that the things that have been around for a hundred years, as we were saying. And I do think that,

you know, the things that have been around for a while are helpful as a pitcher, you know, using, you know, sunscreen and rosin, that's something that would help me get a grip. You know, I've never used spider tack. I think I tried in a bullpen one time and I was like, I can't control baseball with this. It just, it moves too much, but the, I'm a sweaty guy. And so I go out there and if I don't have some sort of tack on my fingers, then it's extremely difficult to grip a baseball that, you know, it just becomes a health concern for any hitter that's in the box. You know, in college, I was up to, you know, 96, 97, 98. And if I didn't know where that was going, that would be pretty unsafe for a hitter in the box. So I think that the real problem is when it started being shifted from just ease of

use and being able to control the baseball versus adding 250 RPMs to your slider to add three inches of break or having the later break or adding the same amount of RPMs to your fastball to get six, eight inches of horizontal break on your sinker or getting an extra four inches of carry on your four-seam fastball. And so the performance enhancement side of things, I think is essentially, it's the same as using steroids in a sense. But I think that there should be a distinction made. And I think that the way that these rules are being enforced is there's not really a distinction made because they had to do something. I see why it had to be done. I think it's a combination of multiple

factors along with the changing approach from hitters over the past five, 10 years to try and hit more home runs and it's okay to strike out more. And so you've got these multiple factors just confounding together to combining themselves together to kind of reach to where we are right now, which is a huge lack of offensive support. And it's a big problem. And I think that the league's probably reaching outside of their bounds just a little bit. But part of that is because it's so difficult to enforce. You know, are you really going to send baseballs out to a lab at the minor league level? It's kind of expensive to do that.

So now we're left with, all right, you know, so many guys couldn't play fair. So now everybody kind of gets a short end of the stick. So can you explain just as a non-pitcher, it's harder to understand this. I guess the difference between, say, rosin and a pearl that you get that is maybe rubbed with mud, but nothing else. And you use the only thing that is legally allowed now, the rosin bag, and that gives you some grip, presumably. But what's the difference between that and, say, sunscreen and rosin, which is now banned, but a lot of people think should be acceptable? Because we've but a lot of people think should be acceptable because we've heard a lot of major league pitchers say, you know, I just can't throw a breaking ball now without this. And I think maybe some non-pitchers, you know, myself included are

wondering, well, isn't rosin sufficient? I mean, that stuff is pretty sticky. Doesn't that give you at least enough grip to throw the ball? Maybe it won't be as effective at breaking ball. Maybe it won't move as much, but that's kind of the point of the crackdown to some extent. So I guess, how do you draw the line between this is unsafe or it's impossible to throw this way? And this is just not going to be as good. It's going to be maybe more hittable, but that is what actually baseball wants to accomplish. Yeah. So with just the rosin, say I get a ball that comes out of the ball bag during a game, it's rubbed up with mud, I believe from right off of the Delaware River, it's very consistent. But the balls that are rubbed up are not necessarily consistent in the manner that they're rubbed up or the amount of

mud that goes on them. And so Pearl right out of its little plastic sleeve when it comes out of the box almost has like a waxy coating on it. And there's no way to grip that to be honest. And then once the mud's rubbed on it, it essentially gives you a little bit of tack on the ball to be able to grip it. The rosin itself gives you a little bit extra tack.

Like I said earlier, I'm a really sweaty guy. With the rosin, the big issue is when it's either really dry or really sweaty. So With the rosin, the big issue is when it's either really dry or really sweaty. So when the rosin is very dry, it's essentially just like chalk. It's not really helpful. It doesn't help grip. But when you add a little bit of sweat to it, it gives you a little bit more tack, allows you to grip the ball better, and it combines really well with the leather and stitches. And it's perfect. But when it's 95 degrees out in the middle of June, July, and it gets really sweaty, there's really no other way to explain it. It

just gets hot. It's humid, especially down here in the low A East. You know, we're playing in Charleston. It's still 85, 90 degrees at six, seven o'clock at night with, you know, 80, 85% humidity. And so I'm just myself, I just sweat buckets. There's no way to keep the sweat off of me. My Jersey sweaty. I can't wipe my hands. My hat gets sweaty. And so it becomes like, all right, how am I supposed to grip this ball? If the methods that have been offered to me, aren't sufficient to be able to grip this ball in a way that's conducive to throwing strike. And so I think that there's a huge disparity between adding a little bit of sunscreen, which is already going to be on your body. You play a night game

even, which they told us in the latest memo to completely avoid wearing sunscreen during night games. Well, we're in the South. Night games start at 7, maybe 6, maybe 5. The sun doesn't go down until 8 o'clock at night. So you're still playing the first hour of the game under the sun. I just think it's kind of hilarious that they're telling us with already such a huge skin cancer problem and former players and guys who have been around the game for a while to just avoid that don't wear sunscreen and you know if i'm out during bp three hours before a game i'm wearing sunscreen i'm what happens if you know that sunscreen just continues to stay on my body up until i go into the game and now i'm considered a you know breaking the rules yeah so that part of everything just gets extremely hard to enforce. But you look at the kind of the real foreign substances like spider attack. Let's use that one as an example.

It is such a huge difference between getting a little bit extra tack with some sunscreen compared to putting on a little bit of spider attack all over your hand. You can literally hear the ball come out of your hand. I can be sitting in the dugout, listening, watching the game, and I can hear a baseball leave the pitcher's hand that's on the mound in the game. Seems like it would be a giveaway. It really is. It's quite obvious when you're sitting there watching these games and you just hear a thump

straight out of the hand. Like, okay, yeah, this guy's obviously using something. But at the same time, you know that somebody on your team might be using it, so you're not going to call them out. But yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how they choose to enforce it because there's really no appeals process. And if the conditions are right with rosin, you can get a fair amount of tack to your hands.

I still have rosin stuck to my hands from yesterday. And I've been trying to make it a point over the past two outings to really make sure that I don't have any sunscreen on my hands, keep it on my arms. Yeah. I was going to ask, knowing that this is coming, whether you've adjusted just to try to get used to the new normal. Yeah, a hundred percent. And if it's going to be done, if it's going to be enforced, then I need to get used to it. And so that's what I've done the last few outings, which I mean, I'm not going to blame having two home runs it off me in my last few outings, three in my last three outings, but it doesn't add the same amount. Like when the conditions are right, it works works but trying to control for conditions that are

changing every day it might you might just have a rain delay come in and it's 95 humidity at 80 degrees it's just impossible to get the tack on the ball that you need to especially if you're you know a sweaty guy or say it's super dry and no humidity out in arizona it's equally as hard to grip a baseball with only rosin. There's no way to make the sweat into a natural performance enhancer. I mean, if you mix the sweat with sunscreen or rosin or whatever you were using, does that help in any way or is it purely detrimental? A little bit of sweat goes a long way with the rosin. It adds the tack, but there's a law of diminishing return with everything. And you have just a little bit

too much sweat and it just becomes slick. One of the things that I, with myself, is mixing the rosin and then touching my face, the oils on my face create tack on my fingers. And so is that now considered a foreign substance? Am I not allowed to touch my face to add a little tack to my fingers and make sure I can grip the ball? Yeah, that's a tough one. I guess if you're naturally secreting it, it seems like it should be legal, but I guess that'll be a judgment call. That is one thing I'm curious about actually, and I don't know how much of the trade craft you want to give away here, but when you were using sunscreen and rosin or when other pitchers are, how exactly are you mixing and applying those things? Because now you're sometimes, depending on the game, allowed to use rosin. I mean,

you're always allowed to use rosin. And sometimes if it's a day game, you're allowed to use sunscreen, but you're not allowed to mix those things intentionally. And I wonder in practice how enforceable that is, whether you can distinguish between intentionally mixed sunscreen and rosin and unintentionally mixed. So how would you actually blend those things or use those things? And will that be impossible now? The way I used to do it was just putting on sunscreen like a normal person and you're going to have sunscreen left on your hands. And then I would, I always keep my own rosin bag in my bag and just take the rosin and just rub up both my hands with it. And that would usually create the amount of tact that I needed to go out and confidently grip a baseball.

You know, nothing special, literally just putting on my sunscreen, rubbing it in, and then throwing rosin right on top of it. And I wonder whether the sense that you've gotten from talking to your teammates or opponents or anyone else is that they are scared enough of these new rules to stop doing whatever they were doing. If they were doing something that would be banned by this, do you get the sense that pitchers are going to try to test this, see what they can get away with, or do you think it's going to be pretty much across the board cold turkey right away. From the organizational level, in the past it was, here are some tools, don't get caught. And now it's moved into, okay, we can't do anything for you guys. Whatever you choose to do is on your own.

And that does not have anything to do with us as an organization whatsoever. If you get caught, that's on you. We can't help you out with a 10 game suspension. We don't want you to get suspended. So don't get caught and we can't help you and we're not going to encourage it. And like our team in Charleston, I don't think we had a single guy that was using anything artificial, but now I mean, there's nobody for sure. But I've talked to guys in other organizations where, you know, it's an entire pitching staff that's relying on foreign substances to make their pitches better. And over the past couple of weeks, you'll see a few teams just get kind of hit around a lot with, you know, some pitchers going out there and don't have the same carry that they had, you know, two weeks prior and start to get hit around more. I think we'll see a few more balls leave the yard in the next few weeks. But I think as everything kind of cools down after, I'd say give it a month, and then we'll see if guys kind of start

getting a little bit more brave with it. And I mean, nobody wants a 10-game suspension. It kind of ruins the roster. I don't think that you can bring another guy up. I think that roster spot maintains like stays closed. And so it really puts a damper on, you know, the rest of the pitching staff. If one guy goes down or if three guys go down for 10 games that can start creating issues late in a series. Yeah. That's one thing I've wondered about. Can they keep up the pace of these inspections and will they continue to be as thorough in the long term? Because for one thing, if they're not really catching guys sticky handed, then maybe you tend to grow lax over time, or you just assume that you're not going to catch anyone. There isn't a problem. So you sort of let

things slide. Or maybe just because of the relationship between players and umpires or time of game or whatever. It's awkward or a hassle to keep inspecting people. So if those things do start to slip after a while, I guess, you know, one thing they could do instead of keeping up these checks, then you could sort of suspend it or scale it back at least. And then you'd have that baseline to compare to. So then if you see that someone has a significant increase in spin rate, whether in game or between games or whatever, maybe that could trigger some greater scrutiny going forward. So I guess that's one way that they could handle it, just sort of have everyone reset to their natural spin rate baseline and then see what happens from there. But for now, I guess it's going to be full court press. So that'll be interesting. And I wonder also just whether if you felt some degree of peer pressure when it comes to, I mean, you know that organizations value having high spin rates, all else being equal, and whether they're actively encouraging you or other pitchers to use stuff or just kind of, you know, you know that guys will get rewarded for having those stats.

one of the pitchers who is not using at least the more exotic substances and you know that either guys you are competing with within your organization or guys you're competing with in other organizations are using those things, I wonder whether there is any sense of relief, even if you have some misgivings about the specifics and the extent of this, whether it's nice to know that you're not falling behind because there are certain things that you can't or won't use. For me personally, it's never been, I've never felt like I've been pressured into it whatsoever. And especially with the raise, they don't put pressure on you to do anything that you're not comfortable with a hundred percent. For me as a more of a sinker slider guy, especially coming out of college, the only value that it created really was on the slider where I was able to get a little bit more RPMs on the slider.

But as a sinker guy, you're not really looking for the higher spin as long as the movement profilers are there. It's great being in the Rays organization because they value every type of pitcher. So, you know, you go, say, the Astros, where everything is extremely analytics heavy, and they're looking for guys with a ton of carry, a ton of induced vertical break. You know, you might see more kind of fallback after, you know, these rules are put in place compared to, you know, our organization where you've got guys with elite carry, and then you've got guys with elite horizontal break. And with the sinker ball guys, the spin rate doesn't matter as much. Guys that throw a lot of change-ups, the change-up spin rate is usually, you want it to be lower. And so it's definitely

more of a mixed bag with us, and I've never felt pressured here. And I've never felt like I've been kind of looked over or looked differently upon because I haven't gotten into spider tack or pelican grip dip. The development side is really just figure out what your strengths are and play to them. Play your strengths. Take the two or three things that you're elite at and try and make them better. Yeah. In theory, it could benefit a guy like you. I mean, the sinker has kind of fallen out of fashion at the major league level over the past few years as guys have gone with high four seamers

and breaking balls. And I do wonder whether that will swing a little bit back in the sinker direction, because as you said, you know, maybe those high spin pitches will not work quite as well anymore. So maybe your stuff will be back in fashion. I guess, you know, it might affect your slider. But for the sinker, at least, it might be good for you. Hopefully. I mean, even these last couple outings, my no sunscreen and I had better movement profile on my slider. So I guess we'll see with everything.

But maybe the whole thing will help me out. Yeah. Well, we should mention also that the ball that is used in a ball is a little bit different from the AAA and major league ball. It seems like the seams are maybe a little bit higher there, which in theory, I guess it's a little easier to grip. So the lack of the sunscreen and rosin mix or, or the fancier stuff at the higher levels may be even more notable if it's tougher to grip those pitches. But the offensive trends that up. So all of those trends are really happening at every level of the game. So to the extent that this is intended to be kind of a corrective to that, we'll be able to see in the minors as well as in the majors pretty soon whether there will be a big impact. Would you guess just as a pitcher knowing what you know and having experienced some of this stuff that we will see really demonstrable differences. I mean, accounting for the change in weather and

weather warming up and that sort of juicing offensive stats generally, but even over and above that, would you expect to see like a really significant difference between before and after sticky stuff? To be honest, I'm not totally sold on it yet, but I think that there will be kind of resurgence of some of the offense, especially at the big league level. The weird part about the big league balls is that they made them a hair lighter this year and they wanted to increase doubles and triples and keep the fans more engaged rather than just home runs and strikeouts. And so that was an interesting thing going into the season knowing. And now we know that it allowed the pitchers to create even more

break on their balls and it just cut down on the number of home runs. And I think that I mentioned this earlier, but the hitting approach has drastically changed in the last five to 10 years in that home runs are valued, strikeouts aren't as big of a deal and taking away a little bit of juice on the ball seems to have just exacerbated that issue. And, and even if you take away the sticky stuff, it was obvious a few years ago when the balls were, you know, maybe a little bit juiced, but guys were just launching balls out of the park every night. But without that, you don't see the rest of the offense becoming that much better in the short term until the approaches kind of shift back to almost fundamental baseball where you get guys on, get them over, get them in.

So I don't really know what's going to happen. It'll be interesting to see, you know, if the sinker ballers become a little bit higher valued now because of this shift, then I think we'll see a little bit more of a shift into more fundamental old school type hitting. And to be fair, the approach changed because the pitching approach changed. You're throwing balls up in the zone more. You're going to have to try and hit those balls out or else you're either going to swing through it or it's going to be a pop-up. It's really hard to hit balls on the ground or line drives when it's above the belt. And so if pitch selection and pitch execution drops farther down in the zone again, then it's definitely possible to see that more fundamental, spray it around the field, hit the gaps, hit doubles.

I think it's more probable that we see that resurgence in the next couple of years. I'm hoping that's the case because that's a better game to watch. It's really fun to play. And it makes it harder as a pitcher too, having to deal with guys on base, not bases clearing every five or six batters and striking everybody out, which is fun. But having to compete and get yourself out of tough situations is always the hardest and most fulfilling part of the game, especially as a reliever. You come in tough situations, you get roll over ground ball, double play. You know, that's a great situation.

Well, that was really interesting. And I am also really interested to see what happens next. And, next. And no one knows for sure, even the pitchers themselves. So last thing I want to ask you before we get to stat stack is about one of the experimental rules that was put in place this season in the minors that you've been dealing with. So there are different experimental rules at different levels and different leagues. So you are not in the low A West where they have the 15 second pitch clock this year. You are not in the low A Southeast where they have the robo zones this year. And I want to talk to someone in that league because the stats in that league are just wild. If you look at it, it's like strikeout rates are way up.

Walk rates are way up. I think it's more than 40% of plate appearances are ending with a walk or strikeout. And the batting average is 230 right now. So everything is at its most extreme in the low A southeast where they've had the robo zone, which is pretty interesting, given that we might see a robo zone sometime soon in the majors. But what you have been dealing with, as have all low A pitchers, is the new step-off or pick-off attempt rule. So there are now only two step-offs or pick-off attempts per plate appearances permitted. And if you try a third one, it's a balk unless you get the guy out. So the stakes are pretty high when you're throwing over now. And the intent of this is to boost the running game. And it has succeeded on that level. So I have some stats here.

The low A East League is made up of teams from the former South Atlantic League and the Carolina League. And there's a pretty big difference in both the attempt rate and the success rate of base dealers this year. So in 2019, there were 1.18 stolen base attempts per team game in the Carolina league in 2019 and 67.6% in the Sally league. So more attempts and more successes. So it's worked on that level, but I wonder how this has been for you and other pitchers to deal with and what you think about the brand of baseball that is being played there now. You know, it's definitely very different having to keep track of how many pickoff attempts that you've made in your head and is a new guy in the box? Do I have two more? Or the biggest issue that I've had with it is that the step-offs,

when you're only just trying to communicate with your catcher or a step-off without a pick attempt, they're both counted as pick-off attempts. And so early on in the season, we saw more box than normal, at least just from anecdotal evidence on my part, just watching the games. You'd never see that many box in a six-game series. And it seemed like there was a couple each series. That's just like the big weird thing.

You know, it's cool. I'm glad that the game's getting a little bit harder. You know, that's great. We're making it more competitive. It just seems a little bit overkill to have those step-offs with no throw counted as a pick attempt. And I don't think that that's going to speed up the game or help the running game. It just kind of makes you have to stand there, wait till you come set, and then you just yell time, which is just going to

slow the game down. And that's essentially what guys have started doing. If we can't step off or run sure of the sign that the catcher gave us, Come set, can't just step off, ask for the sign again. You stand there until the batter calls time, or you stand there and you look like an idiot by calling time yourself while set yelling at the catcher. And so I don't love the rule because it makes my job a little bit harder, but if it's going to make the game better, that's cool. The only issue that I've really had with it so far is just the step off without a throw. And that just seems a little

egregious to me. Yeah. And I wonder how you approach that. Like if you've thrown over once, then to do it a second time, I mean, you must be really reluctant because once you do it a second time, you're pretty much out. I mean, you can do it again if there's like a ridiculous lead where the guy's halfway to second base and you know you're going to get him. But otherwise, if you pull the trigger on that second throw over, then you're kind of at the mercy of the runner a little bit. He can get a great jump. So how do you think about that?

How do you gauge the game theory of it, I guess, whether it makes sense for you to burn one of those pickoff attempts. For me, most of the time when I'm picking over, it's coming from the dugout and it's just a mix one in my kind of my development process so far has just been a focus on, you know, after taking pretty much two years off, both with injury and COVID, just getting comfortable back on the mound again and focus on throwing strikes, not to be too worried about the running game. But as kind of I develop and the season goes on, it's going to be imperative that I begin, you know, really being good at having either a slide step or a better

pickoff move or mixing both of them in, but also keeping tabs on, you know, how many have I thrown? You know, in college, I would pick off two, three, four times in a row. I'm pretty slow to the plate. I'm a one, four, five to one, five time to the plate between leg lift and the ball hitting the catcher's glove and kind of to prevent steals, you need one, three or below. And so at some point, I'm going to have to figure out how to prevent that from happening. It hasn't been a huge problem for me, but that's just something that we're going to have to adapt to. And I'm interested to see if they continue to

enforce that rule the second half of the season. I believe that they were going to go back and evaluate the first half of the season to see how it went and kind of make a decision for the second half of the season after doing that. So it'll be interesting. Yeah. And the other complication, I guess, is that if you climb the ladder during a season, if you were to get promoted to high A, there they have the step-off rule. So you have to fully step off the rubber before attempting a pick-off. then in AA, none of this is in effect, right? So as you climb, you might have to deal with different variations of this rule or no rule at all. So have you practiced those things or how did you practice for the new conditions that you found yourself in unexpectedly this spring? It was really interesting. In spring training,

they had just come out of these rules with all with all the rules and so as groups of pitchers they would send us out and we would learn everything so it would be like first 15 minutes of a you know a pitcher's group session we were working on low a rules and you know limiting the pickoff attempts or working on your holds how long you're holding the ball before you release to go to the catcher, just to mess up the runner's timing. And then you would switch to high A rules and we got to work on pickoffs where you have to step off. So no, as a left-handed pitcher, I can't lift my leg and throw to first, which has been my only pickoff move since I was in high school. I don't particularly like the step off move. It's difficult. And that throws just harder. And the same thing goes

for second base. You can't do an inside move to second base. And then on a spin move, you have to disengage and then spin. Whereas in the past, it's been, you can just spin to the backside and you don't really have to worry about stepping off as long as you gain ground towards second base. And so that I think is going to be the biggest issue with all the different rule changes and kind of experiments that are going on in the minor leagues. I think that one's going to see the one with the most criticism. You know, like you said, with the low A-East stats, you know, they're going to like seeing that stolen base attempts and successful attempts are going up. And I think that they'll stick with that. going up and I think that they'll stick with that. But I'm not really sold on having to step off to challenge a runner. I'm not really sold on that being a very good change to baseball to make it

a better game. Yeah, I'm sure if I were to ask a big base dealer, maybe I'd get a different answer and he'd say, oh yeah, this is great. Although not necessarily. I think I've seen some comments from guys who think it's almost like too easy or it's cheap or something, or you don't have to read the picture as much because, you know, one hand is tied behind his back or it is if he's already thrown over once or twice. So in that sense, you know, maybe it makes it feel a little less earned if you're going to go or if you're going to get that bag and maybe it's overkill. I don't know if there's a happy medium between no one stealing bases

because analytically, you know, maybe it's frowned upon more than it used to be and just everyone going all the time where maybe it's not super exciting at either extreme. So I don't know if this is the happy medium or not or whether they still need to find that. But it'd be great if more guys were getting on base and putting balls in play. That would create more base runners and more base stealing opportunities without changing the running rule, which I think would be nice as well. So they're trying to throw things at the wall and see what works, I guess. And you're the guinea pig for now. Yeah. I feel like the minor leaguers always end up being the guinea pigs. There's

poor guys in the Atlantic League and the Frontier League who have partnerships with the MLB. The Atlantic League was the first one to try the robo umpire. That's just the short end of the stick for us. It's more of a reason to get to the big leagues. Yeah. Have the conditions been okay for you? The stated rationale for downsizing the minor leagues was, well, we'll get better pay and better conditions. And I know you were So in terms of housing, nutrition, et cetera, have things been okay on your end so far? Yeah, they've been pretty good. The only qualms I've heard from guys who have been at affiliates in the past compared to now is the fact that you could in the past get an apartment or rent a house and pack as many guys in there as possible and get the rent down as low as possible. But with the COVID restrictions at the beginning of the season and going into the past couple months, it was really not much of an option for us to find a place where we could stick six guys in there and get rent down to a couple hundred bucks a month. And so that's just kind of the short end of the stick as far as the situation

goes with COVID. And I think that that's just kind of been a problem that is really tough to solve. And I feel like the Rays have done a great job with us. They've treated us well this whole time and they've been helpful at helping us find housing and feeding us well this whole time. And, you know, they've been helpful at getting us, helping us find housing and, you know, feeding us well. But at the same time, you know, you're always at the mercy of when you're on the road, you're at the mercy of whoever's ordering the catering. And if you've never catered in, you know, that area before and with the Rays, you know, we hadn't been in Loewe East or the Sally League in like 10 years. Our low A used to be in Bowling Green. High A used to be Florida State League. So, you know, our nutritionists are making relationships with these caterers

and it's kind of a hit or miss, you know, the first couple times you work with them. And credit to our guys, they've done a great job of feeding us well. You know, here and there, you know, you might get a meal that's not up to, you know, even the nutritionist standards and they're kind of like, I'm sorry, I did my best. These guys kind of screwed us. But for the most part, it's been great. We've been treated really well. Clubhouse managers have been great.

It's really nice to have 85% of our club vaccinated now. So a lot of those restrictions are taken away. But yeah. Yeah, that's good. now. So a lot of those restrictions are taken away, but yeah. Yeah, that's good. And hopefully more organizations will follow the lead of, I guess, the Astros and maybe the Orioles have provided housing so that you're not longing for the days of stuffing six guys into an apartment, which might be cheaper, but comes with its own costs, I'm sure. So yeah, hopefully providing housing to everyone at least at a

certain level on down will become the norm. That would be nice. So I want to ask you about stat stack, which you started last year. And, you know, a lot of guys who were in the minors, the season was canceled. They just tried to train while they couldn't play, or they did the Rogers Hornsby, you know, stare out the window and wait for spring and just, you know, kill time until they could come back to baseball again. And you started a company, which is a nice pivot. So tell us a little bit about StatStack, which you co-founded with a friend and former teammate of yours from Duke and what it does and what led you to found it. Yeah. So go back in time to spring training 2020. I was geared up for my first full season, ready to go out there and

compete after missing the majority of 2019 with thoracic outlet syndrome. And so spring training ends up getting canceled 10 days in, and I'm sitting there in Port Charlotte about to pack up all my stuff. My little brother, who is at Duke, and my former teammate, Eli Herrick, those guys had just had their season canceled. I reached out to Eli, who had been thinking up a storm about another startup that he wanted to get going. That was more on the the weight room side of things as far as analytics go and I hit him up and I was like hey man like do you have any idea what the deal is with the season or how are you planning on getting drafted because he was a senior looking to get picked up play pro ball and he was pretty much like I got

no idea man and I was like we should figure out how to put together a digital database of players so that they can essentially build a digital resume with their track mandate or their video and be able to send that out to teams and represent themselves. And so I convinced Eli to come live in my basement. And then we actually spent a few months up at my parents' mountain house in Western North Carolina out in the middle of nowhere. And it allowed us a lot of time to really put together our thoughts and really look at the problems within data that exist, both on the scouting side and on the player development side. Because I was coming back from injury.

I was trying to figure out how to throw, you know coming back from injury. I was trying to figure out how to throw, you know, 96, 97 again, still trying to figure that out. But we were really trying to get to the bottom of, you know, what the big problems were. And what we found was that data communication and centralization was the main issue for, you know, most college coaches and at the professional level, to be honest. It just becomes extremely difficult to pass along the amount of information. There's 40 plus points collected of data

in every pitch on a track man. I barely see any of that. I saw a raw file at Duke that didn't really make sense to me, had no idea to really like how to break it down or make adjustments off of that. And so the entire system just seemed antiquated. And so what we set out to do is create software that allowed coaches to upload different pieces of data and be able to do analytics on them. And at the same time, share that data with the individual athletes and allow them to have a copy of their data and

carry it around with them to add on at the different places they train, the different places they play. For example, I played up in the Cape in 2017. They've got trackmans there. I've never seen any of that data. I wouldn't even know who to go to for it, but it was collected on me. I would love to have it to have an idea of what I was doing. Thankfully, I had the data from when I was at Duke, but then in the off season, now I go to Baseball Performance Center in New Jersey, or I train with Sean McLaughlin from Matrix Diamond Analytics in Atlanta. I'm on the track band with both of those guys, but there's no centralized place for me to be able to carry around my data and be able to develop myself as a player. And so what StatStack is allowing us to do is allows a coach to upload

the data, tag their player, and the player essentially gets their portion of the data set. And so the individual player has a free account that they take and they plug into different coach accounts. Essentially, they join different teams. They can be on multiple teams at once collecting data from these different places. They're either playing or training. And so they're now collecting their own data, which they can now do analytics on. They can create reports. And what we're trying to do is create the most simple, easy to understand library of charts, analytics possible for all the players that are out there that are now essentially, Eli and I were probably the first generation of

players to really grow up with this stuff. And we're seeing it more at the younger levels now, the youth sports where they're starting to collect the bat tracking data as well. And so these kids have a decent understanding of it. The coaches are growing into it as well, but it's a huge learning curve and numbers analytics, you could go get a college degree to understand all that. Not everybody can write R scripts or work in Python, myself included. And so it's imperative that we offer a chance for these people, coaches and players alike to be able to analyze this data. And there's thousands of points collected on every player in college every single day, millions of points, data points.

And so what we want to do is just create the most simple, easy to understand analytics platform possible. Yeah. So, I mean, some schools now, high schools even earlier than that might have track band systems or RepSoto or bat tracking tech or what have you. And so a player who's coming up now between the ages of 15 and 40 or, you know, whatever he stops playing, he might play in 10 or more different levels and leagues. I mean, high school, college, you get drafted, you play for multiple organizations, you get traded. And so the idea is that you would be able to have this data from each stop along the way and analyze it and see how it changes and be

able to break that down in one place conveniently, which would be nice instead of having to beg and borrow it from a bunch of different people or not knowing how to access it or not knowing what to do with it when you get it, because it's not really in a format that you can easily break down. But I guess for that to happen, then you would need this to become sort of the standard or you would need people at every level to subscribe to this service. In essence, it can't be just player-centric where players control their own data necessarily from the start. It needs to be more program or organization-based where they're the ones who kind of have the pipeline and then would provide it to the player. Is that just the way it has to work?

For the most part, yes. Because this technology is so expensive, you have a Rapsoda machine or a TrackMan machine. That's thousands of dollars of investments. Blast sensors are hundreds of dollars plus subscriptions. All these different pieces are really difficult for the individual player to own at a countrywide level. But we've got these different organizations at the travel level, playing youth, the college level, who are able to afford some of

these pieces of technology. Trackman is in every minor league stadium. I think you'll see Trackman, Yakertek, or Flightscope in nearly every college stadium in the next five years. So this data is always going to be collected, but the problem is getting that data distributed to the athlete. And so the way the system is set up right now is essentially to cater to the coach. And so from that perspective, it becomes a little bit harder to get the athlete involved. And so we call ourselves athlete-centric, but what we had to do was create value for the coaches to make their jobs easier in analyzing this data and making the job extremely easy in getting that data to the athlete. And so that's kind of been the focus for us is making that

transition from keeping this data warehoused and siloed out and it's different cloud drives and wherever it exists and allowing it to get immediately tagged to that individual athlete. And now the coach is able to do just as much as he was before, if not more. But at the same time, without him even having to do anything extra, he's now able to pass that data along to his athlete. And have you had the most success with amateur programs so far? Is that where you're concentrating or have you gotten bites from pro teams too? Because I wonder whether they see the same value or whether they feel like, hey, we've built out our own system.

And maybe if we're an advanced team, we have some sort of iPad app that we've come up with that allows players to access this stuff. Some, I'm sure, better than others. But has this been broadly embraced or are you seeing more uptake at certain levels? So we focused this spring on doing a beta release with about a dozen college programs. And kind of as we built out the software, we've been able to get more of a read on who wants this the most. And we targeted, our beachhead market was the college programs. And then right behind that is going to be facilities, which are allowing us to touch as many people as possible.

You've got 40 guys on a roster in college. You've got a couple hundred kids in a facility. And that's allowing us to kind of get a feel of what do people want. We want that user feedback right now. And so I couldn't tell you exactly what the next move is as far as upstream or downstream pro or youth, because there's value to be added in both areas. And what we're trying to do is just get a feel for what makes the most sense business-wise right now to spend time and resources on, whether that's allowing a professional team to share this data with their athletes and make it easy to understand versus how are we going to create value and make it even easier to understand for the youth and potentially travel high school clients as well big thing at the pro level is that trackman's used throughout the minor

leagues problem is that at the big league level hawkeye is a hundred times the amount of data right compared to trackman so that that'll be an interesting thing to uh kind of brush up upon in the next couple years uh but right now we're really just focused on trying to create the best user experience possible and make it as easy and simple as possible to communicate that data between the coach and the athlete for player development. And how have you balanced starting a small business and helping to run it with your own pro career? So it was really fun last year as far as it really gave me something

to put my mind to engage myself, learn new things because you really are learning something new every single day. The problem solving was a ton of fun, extremely difficult at the beginning and it still is now. But my role has kind of shifted

kind of as the season got started to be more, a little bit more on the fringe, but during the off season, it'll be more of a focus, but it was really great during the pandemic to have something that I could work on and have tangible value created out of it. And to learn those new things and to really put the nose of the grindstone and problem solve, try and figure out the best way to go about solving this problem. And so it's been fun. Eli's the CEO and he kind of takes the reins on 99% of everything that goes on in the company. Our CTO, Bingxiu Ren, is a genius.

Came from Corten, which is a fintech startup up in Nashville. He's a genius. And so those two have been really running the ship from Nashville and have been making the big moves there. I was really blessed to be able to add value a lot last year, and I'm looking forward to adding a ton of value this off season. But it was tough, especially in the fall when I was in a full load of classes at Duke, and then this spring when I was in a half load and finally finished my degree. So it was difficult juggling all three, you know, working out, getting my training done, school and business. It's nice to only have to worry about business on the off days

now and setting up some meetings with coaches and doing what I can when I can. And then being able to focus on baseball the other six days of the week. But I do really just want to credit Eli and Bing Xu because they've done so much in such a short amount of time. Getting a startup off the ground is not easy. And going from idea to proof of concept to product in, I want to say, 14 months now. It's kind of ridiculous. As far as raising money and getting investment from outside parties and really just having everything come into creating a product and seeing the value and seeing the tangibility of everything has been really cool.

Yeah, and just looking at your site, it looks like you've assembled a sizable team here, including Bill Petty, who has done some writing for Fangraphs and the Heartbowl Times and is listed as an advisor for StatStack. So it's an interesting idea. I mean, there's just such a deluge of data wherever you go now, and it's hard to manage even for teams and front office people, let alone for players who have so many other things to worry about. And hopefully this is something that could also kind of democratize that data because it would be bad if this

technology and the analysis of the data that it produces would be a barrier to entry for players who can't afford to access that stuff or to have help in breaking it down. So maybe to present it in this way that hopefully anyone can understand would help a little bit with that and level the playing field a bit. So I wish you luck with continuing to develop it and to find clients. And I guess if people want to analyze

the pre and post sticky stuff performance, they can do it with StatsTack and break it down with a bunch of tools and charts on there definitely i think what i would love to look at is a report for you know the first half of the season and then you know with the exit velocities on the heat map and then you know looking at the spin rates and then having another report for you know post sticky stuff yeah uh being banned and seeing how that stuff changes. So I'll have to get my hands on some track man data

to see how everything is going to play out. Yep. All right. Well, we wish you luck with the company and with staying out of trouble once the umpires start patting you down. And you can find Graham on Twitter at his name, Graham Stinson.

You can find StatStack on Twitter as well. That's at StatStack, S-T-A-T-S-T-A-K. You can also find the website at StatStack.io. And we will link to that on the show page as usual. Graham, thank you very much for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Well, good news on multiple fronts after we recorded this episode. First and foremost, finally, the Diamondbacks won. They beat the Brewers 5-1. They snapped the losing streak at 17 games. I sent Mike a message to wish him a happy post-game show and tell him I'm taking credit for breaking the curse by having him on the podcast. He said, thanks, all credit to you. Although some of the credit should go to Diamondback starter Merrill Kelly,

who pitched a heck of a game, went seven innings, allowed only one run. And of course, the win was predicted. The MLB.com game story says, During their pregame meeting to go over the scouting report on the opposing team's hitters, D-backs pitching coach Matt Herges looked at starting pitcher Merrill Kelly. It stops tonight, Herges said. Yes, it does, Kelly replied. Of course, we don't know whether anyone said it stops tonight on any of the previous 15 days when the streak did not stop.

But given some of our recent banter about player predictions, the streak ended in fitting fashion. In other good news, it was no sticky stuff, no problem for Jacob deGrom. He threw five scoreless innings. He ran his streak of scoreless innings to 30. He lowered his ERA to 0.50. He broke Bob Gibson's record by making a 12th straight start with no more than one earned run allowed. Two walks, six strikeouts, one hit, which was more of a Mets misplay in the field than a mistake by DeGrom. His heater maxed out at 101. It averaged 99.6, and he lived to dominate another day. I

hope that can continue. No one in the majors was ejected for sticky stuff on the first day of the crackdown and there was no additional decline in the average four seam spin rate. The lowest daily average on record thus far was on Saturday. Sunday and Monday actually ticked up slightly so maybe that means that most pitchers cut themselves off before the inspection started. The average four seamseamer spin rate is still down about 60 RPM comparing pre and post June 8th, which is when we really saw the dip. I will link on the show page to a graph of the average four-seam spin rate by day each day this season based on some data

that Lucas Apostolaris of Baseball Perspectives sent me. And one thing we speculated about last week was whether the ball might carry farther without the stowaway sticky stuff on the cover. And Rob Arthur last week wrote a good piece looking at that possibility and seeming to find some early indications that that might be the case. Small sample, but intriguing. And I will link to that piece. I also wanted to mention that it was a real roller coaster ride to read this weekend the headline at MLB Trade Rumors, Twins Activate Byron Buxton, Option Williams-Estadillo. One thing that made me happy, one thing that made me sad. I can't claim that Williams-Estadillo didn't deserve to be optioned, he was playing at replacement level or below, and when you do that, you tend to get replaced.

But I was still sorry to see him go. However, his absence may not be a long one. For an unfortunate reason, Buxton, who'd been back for just a few games, was hit by a pitch and fractured his hand just like Carson Kelly. We've talked about the hit-by-pitch epidemic. Sometimes it does more than sting, and so no sooner has Buxton returned than he is out with yet another injury, which is really demoralizing. Just let the man have a healthy season. The slight silver lining is that maybe this means Estadio will be back sometime soon. At least the Twins won and Nelson Cruz hit a home run you can count on Cruz. He now has a 151 WRC+, which trails only David Ortiz, 2016, and Willie Mays, 1971, among qualified age 40 hitters.

And Nelson Cruz's birthday is July 1st. He turns 41 next week. So really, he was one day away from this being his age 41 season, which makes it even more some visible substance emanating from his behind. Meg wrote about it at BP at the time. Well, there was another instance this weekend involving Martin Maldonado of the Astros, and the suspicious cloud was gifed and circulated on Twitter, where Maldonado himself quote tweeted it and said, just baby powder, lol. Which was always the likeliest explanation. But here we have it straight from the source.

I'll link to that on the show page, and you can come to your own conclusions. I report, you decide. This was a long episode, but hopefully a fun one, and it'll have to tide you over for a few days. We'll be back when Mega's back later this week. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Thank you. Review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Thanks for listening. Talk to you later this week. Down town, hot spot I used to be on this street

I used to be on this street. I used to be 17. I used to be 17. Now you're high-shat. Hanging on my block. Show me coming up. Who is my shadow?