Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1882: Back-Tracking and Bat-Tracking

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Mike Trout’s rare back injury, Zac Veen and vaccines, the Rangers’ one-run record, interesting team trade rumors, and teams with tough deadline decisions, plus a Past Blast from 1882. Then (42:40) they talk to MLB.com’s Mike Petriello about Statcast’s newly public bat speed and swing path data, touching […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1882 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of FanGraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Well, I'm contemplating living in the darkest Mike Trout timeline, which seems like where we are or where we might be heading. timeline, which seems like where we are, where we might be heading. This is the worst. I mean, it could be worse, I guess, but it's not good. It sounds dire, the latest details about Trout's diagnosis here. I feel semi-responsible because I joked the other day in Ringer Slack, like, to recap,

Mike Trout initially was removed from a game with what was said to be back spasms and he wasn't playing for a few days, but it sounded like he would be back imminently. In fact, I believe he was penciled into a starting lineup one of those days and was a late scratch. And then he went on the injured list with what was termed rib inflammation, right? Right. And that sounded- that flamed ribs yeah inflamed ribs that sounded worse than back spasms potentially but we were also wondering wait is this like the same injury right the back is this the ribs is it two different things no it's the same thing but seemingly it's a more serious thing than anyone knew. And when he went on the IEL, I put some like gallows humor kind of joke in ringer slack about like, well, he's definitely done for the year just because like I'm so scarred by the calf injury from last year where it was like, oh, it's just a calf strain and he'll be back fairly soonish. And then he was done for the year somehow.

He aggravated it, it seems like. Well, now there appear to be very big error bars around when or if he will be back. So I hope I didn't speak that into existence. I was trying to like laugh at a time of tragedy, just find some comedy in the darkness, but it turns out to be darker than we thought. So he has muscle spasms, yes, around the inflammation. The inflammation, I guess, caused the spasms. But technically, this is an injury called, and I just watched like three YouTube videos to try to figure out how to pronounce this. And it said it three different ways. Great. It didn't really help at all, actually. But I'll just go with costoverterable. I'll just. Leave it. You think you're doing better on take two?

Costoverterable. That was better. I take it back. It wasn't good. Costoverterable dysfunction. Very good. Third time's the charm. Maybe, unless that was completely wrong, too.

But I'll read some quotes here from the Angels head athletic trainer. This is a pretty rare condition that he has right now in his back. Dr. Robert Watkins, one of the most well-known spine surgeons in the country, if not the world, doesn't see a lot of these. Great. Great. It's always a good sign. And as a lot of people have pointed out, that was the Dr. David Wright saw for his career ending back issue. Not that we're saying this is career ending, but, you know, sort of scary just to see the same name mentioned. For it to happen in a baseball player, the quote continues, we just have to take into

consideration what he puts himself through with hitting, swinging on a daily basis just to get prepared, and then also playing in the outfield, diving for balls, jumping into the wall, things like that. And there's so many things that can aggravate it, but this doctor hasn't seen a lot of it, and he's one of the best in the country. So Trout had a cortisone injection, and now it sounds like it's going to be at least another week to allow that to take full effect and see how he's feeling. But now there's a question even going beyond that. So the trainer was asked if he could miss the rest of the season. And he said, we hope not. It's not encouraging either.

I don't think we're at a point where we're going to make that decision. He's going to have a follow-up here once we get back. And we'll just kind of see what the doctor thinks at that point but that really hasn't been a discussion that we've had and then maybe the most dismaying quote of all and i know they've we've already covered some dismaying ones long term we do have to look at this as something that he has to manage not just through the rest of the season but also through the rest of his career, probably. So this is evidently just a chronic injury that he might never be free of, potentially. So this is pretty devastating. I mean, I'm not a doctor and I'm not a back specialist.

And apparently even back specialists are like, never seen this one before. Never seen this one before. So I have no special insight to offer here other than the fact that, man, we just wanted Mike Trout to stay healthy. Yeah. And this seems like an issue that might prevent him from ever being fully healthy again or ever being free of the concern that at any point he might stop being healthy. And that's the kind of thing where you just have to wonder, like, are we ever going to see the real Mike Trout again? How often will we see him? What does this mean for the back half of his career? I mean, this is scary stuff. Yeah. Like, I don't want to overreact to stuff like this because I'm not a doctor.

And, you know, I think that there is like a – it's useful for us to bear in mind that as much as we know about the health and well-being of baseball players, at least in terms of the stuff that affects their ability to play baseball or occurs while playing baseball, there's probably a bunch of guys who are dinged up with a this and a that, and we're not aware of it. And so we don't feel the need to stress about it because we don't know, but we know this. And it sounds not good. And it sounds like the kind of thing where at the very least, like the kind of thing where at the very least, I think our baseline expectation for his availability absent other, either absent dramatic improvement in this instance, a change of diagnosis,

you know, on our, uh, a well-articulated sort of plan for how they're going to keep him on the field. Like, I think we're probably just at the point where our baseline expectation for how many games a season mike trout is gonna play just has to be lower going in every year now that sucks ben it really sucks yeah you know like that's um that's that's like a pretty monumental bummer really like i'm i'm not happy with it i would like to speak to a manager, not a baseball manager. I don't know that they'd be. Which one of the Angels managers would you like to speak to? I think I've seen people bring up, like, Ken Griffey Jr., right?

Yeah, I was about to say. Like, the specter of that kind of decline. And I don't think we're there yet. But I mean, the difference, I guess, is that like we don't know. Maybe he was feeling the effects already. But like starting out this season, he was off to a troutian start to the year. Yeah. And even last year before he hurt the calf, he was playing great. So it's been a case of like, well, when he's healthy, he's still very much trout. It might be a different trout than we saw earlier in his career in some ways, but not an inferior trout necessarily. And so that's makes it sound like the way that the trainer is talking about it, it makes you wonder whether

even when he's out there, will he be back to full strength? Will we ever see that guy again? Like, I certainly don't want to close the book on seeing peak prime trout. It's been one of the great joys of my life as a baseball follower and as a podcaster, certainly. So I don't know. Like, on the one hand, we got just about the greatest decade of baseball anyone's ever seen from Mike Trout. So, I mean, even if we don't get a second decade of that, I guess we can count our blessings. But it's such a bummer because he got off to the best start anyone ever has. And so naturally, everyone started extrapolating and thinking, well, if he just keeps up this pace or anything close to this pace, then he's going to end up as an inner circle guy.

He's going to be at the top or close to the top of every leaderboard. And people were projecting, you know, how many hits and how many homers and how many this and how many that. And he's already lost a lot of time to injuries and to the pandemic, etc. And so he's already fallen off some of those paces. And now the prospect of missing even more time or being hampered by this injury, you have to lower those odds even further, I guess. not sure how far but man this was not the news i wanted to see today right and it's like again i am not a doctor but you're like how is this gonna impact like his ability to rotate how is this gonna you know there's just like so this bit about like he's a baseball player it's like yeah yeah and like you need to be able to cleanly rotate to hit like this is and you know mike trout full-time we thought that our sort of progression with him was that sometime probably soon we would be looking at mike trout corner outfielder. And like,

you're going to automatically adjust your expectations from a war production perspective down as you tumble down the defensive spectrum. But like, there's going from being a center fielder to a corner guy. And then there's going from being like a center fielder to a DH. And it's like, is that what we're entertaining here? And I,

again, I don't want to like overreact because i don't know i don't know how to say these words i mean i know how to say dysfunction yeah but i don't know i'm so yeah i'm really it was such a small bit of kindness on your part to not make me try to say the first word like that was so generous of you ben so like what the hell do i know i don't know anything except that i want to see Mike Trout play baseball to his like full capability as often as I possibly can. Like that's what I know. But it seems it seems not great. And you know, it's just really, it's really a shame. It's funny,

like, I don't want to step on the conversation that we will have with Ben Clemens later in the week about the trade value series. But like, as you might imagine, all of the big contract guys who are still really, really, really good cause a fair amount of consternation for us when we're trying to put together the trade value rankings. Because it's like, on the one hand, Mike Trout makes like a gajillion dollars, but also he's Mike Trout.

And so this year, people probably noticed that like he's the lowest he's ever been. And I think that a time will come probably fairly soon where he's just not in the top 50 anymore because the intersection of his contract size with the injury stuff is getting concerning and then like this news hits and i was like oh boy like what if this had happened you know i i will just ask ben so you don't have to answer this question but i was thinking to myself i'm, where would my trout have ranked in this exercise if this piece of information were available to us two weeks ago as opposed to today? And I don't know what the answer to that is. We're going to ask

Ben. You help me remember to ask Ben that. But sometimes there's been people like, he's too low, he's too high. And I was like, well, this piece of news satisfies half of that constituency, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. I just got an email from some PR company that says, good afternoon. With Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout out indefinitely with a back injury. Whoa.

By the way, not a good afternoon if that's happening. Yeah. You are not Mike Trout's doctor. Yeah. Start with bad afternoon. Yeah. So with Trout out doctor. Yeah, start with bad afternoon. Yeah. So with Trout out indefinitely with a back injury, parentheses, costoverterable dysfunction at T5. Yeah.

Mangled that slightly. That time, I wanted to touch base and see if you were interested in speaking with a physician from this hospital who can provide general comments on the injury. general comments on the injury. I love this genre of PR email I get where like some baseball player gets hurt with maybe an atypical injury and suddenly I get emails like, hey, you want to talk to a doctor? Because we just heard you were saying on a podcast that you were not a doctor and your podcast co-host was saying the same thing. We don't even play doctors on a podcast. And so if we want to have a doctor on to talk about Mike Trout's back, I guess that option is available to us. Although that would probably be a bummer of a conversation, too. So anyway, I guess more bad news for the Angels.

Don't know what the implications are for them in terms of exploring Otani trades or whatever. It's probably still unlikely, but it's just another blow to that franchise and to fans of Mike Trout because we all just got high on Mike Trout just climbing the leaderboards faster than everyone has ever climbed them. And he has already had a Hall of Fame career. As we've noted many times, he has Hall of Fame career war totals. He's passed many Hall of Famers in career war. He's played the requisite length of time. He could retire today and be a Hall of Famer, but it would not be the kind of Hall of Fame career that we wanted or envisioned for him after the way he started. So I don't know. Let's hope that cortisone shot works and that his T5 feels just fine one of these days that we all can forget about costoverterble

and never have to attempt to pronounce costoverterbrle it's just like it's too chewy in the middle as a word it's too big a bite

it's very verger verger well I hope not It's too big a bite. Ver-der-brul. It's a very ver-der-ger kind of word. Yeah, ver-der-ger. Well, I hope not to need to learn how to pronounce that better because we'll just never have to think about this again. And Mike Trout will be fine and everyone will be happy. Yeah, yeah. Hey, this is Ben interjecting from the future, or I suppose not from the future.

From the future relative to the Ben you were just hearing, but still in your past, slightly less in your past. You understand how time works. I wanted to splice this in here just to note that Mike Trout did address his injury and diagnosis after we recorded, and he put a somewhat more positive spin on the situation. Sounds like he was not totally in accordance with how the Angels trainer portrayed this and does not seem to think that this is potentially season ending or career threatening. He was asked if he's going to play again this season. He said, of course, of course, that's my goal. The last two days, it's been a huge step. I'm excited with the way it's going. I got back and my phone was blowing up. It said my career is over. That's news to me. I've got to stay on top of it. It's just rare for a baseball player. I'm just going to have to stay on top of it. He also said,

I've got to stay on top of the routine I do on a daily basis to prevent it from coming back. I feel good where it's at right now. Every day it's improving. I don't even know how I got it. I can't pinpoint exactly what happened. It just started aching and it got to a point where it was bothering my swing. But the last two or three days, the progress has been great. He was asked when he's going to swing a bat again. He said, I couldn't give you a timeline. He's going to see the doctor Sunday, see what he says and hopefully start swinging. He was also asked if he has any long term concerns. And according to the transcript, he said no four times. So he said he thinks it's a

little exaggeration. Appreciate all the prayers, but my career isn't over. No, I'm not worried about it. It's just one of them things you play,, you swing a lot, and things pop up, and I've been playing through it for a little bit, and it just got to a point where it was just time to figure it out, and we figured it out, and it's going in the right direction. So I suppose my concerns are slightly allayed or assuaged, but only slightly until we see him out there swinging again and sustaining that swing for some time, because what is he going to say? I'm doomed? Probably not.

Athletes are often optimistic. I hope his optimism here is well-founded. I hope he is back soon. Still sort of anxiety-inducing for me, but obviously hoping for the best for him. All right, now you know. Let's return to the even deeper podcast past. even deeper podcast past. So I did want to note just as a kind of counterbalancing happy force to our repeated discussions of players who have not gotten vaccines, I just wanted to mention this brief thread from our

friends at Cespedes Family Barbecue the other day who tweeted, quick stupid thread. There's a really good Rockies prospect named Zach Veen. Yeah. Who I believe is ranked third on the Rockies prospect named Zach Veen. Yeah. Who I believe is ranked third on the Rockies list on the board at Fangraphs. And the tweet continues, ever since I first heard his name, I've wondered whether or not Zach Veen had gotten the vaccine. The number of times that I heard about this while in LA, Ben, can't even tell you how many times.

So many times I heard this while I was in LA. The tweet says, I annoyingly mentioned this to like 20 people at the Futures game. So I guess you were one of those people. But it has truly kept me up at night. And then the next tweet in the thread says, then somebody pointed out that Veen's high A team in Spokane is in the same league as the Vancouver Canadiens. So to cross the border, Veen would have needed his shot and he did play against them.

So they say, pleased to report that Zach Veen does indeed have the vaccine. I'm so glad that this mystery has been solved. Yeah. Mostly so that I don't have to hear about it at winter meetings. Yeah.

Jake and Jordan can sleep again. They can rest easy in the knowledge. Yeah, be at peace. Zach has the vaccine. I love it. Lord. So we are going to talk trades next time later in the week with Ben Clemens so we can get into trade candidates and trade value and everything more than

just maybe a couple quick things about trading teams and whether they will be the tradies or the traders or both possibly. So just like looking at MLB trade rumors right now, some of the headlines are interesting because you have Rizzo saying nationals won't dilute trade returns by attaching bad contracts to Juan Soto. That was mentioned that they might do that. They might want to include Patrick Corbin, let's say, in order to get some salary relief there and not get prospects back that they could have gotten without that. Then you have Astros willing to listen to offers on controllable starting pitching. You also have the Guardians who are seemingly willing to trade controllable pitching. Controllable pitching is the big buzzword or watchword right now.

Guardians open to dealing controllable starters. So those teams are at least nominally in the race. I mean, the Astros are going to win the AL West. The Guardians are in the wildcard race. And I don't know, they're in the running. There are a lot of good teams, potentially better teams that are in that wild card race and i don't know they're in the running there are a lot of good teams potentially better teams that are in that mix too they're also only like two and a half back in their division yeah there's that too right you know like they could just win the central if they really were like hey let's go win the central maybe that option is is open to them also so

yeah i'm always interested in the team that is in contention, but is still willing to trade away players to get back other players. Maybe also in that category, you have the Marlins. Now, maybe the Marlins are out of it at this point. I don't know. They're on the periphery of the race. You don't have to be good to make the playoffs anymore, but it's Marlins open to trade offers on Pablo Lopez looking to upgrade offense. So again, maybe trading from a strength to improve a weakness. And that seems like something that they've had to do for a while now. They have all this good young starting pitching and just not much of a lineup. So something's got to give there. So

those are interesting, but I think one of the more interesting ones maybe is the Tigers trade rumor that is going around. So Ken Rosenthal reported that the Tigers are open to dealing Tarek Skubal, who has been the bright spot on that disappointing Tigers team and the one of their young starting pitchers who has been healthy and as good as advertised. And then there's a quote in the second paragraph of this piece at The Athletic. The Tigers, quote, gave us a blanket that just about everyone is available, one official said. Another speculated the Tigers are trying to be opportunistic and extract a big return for Scooble, et cetera, et cetera. So this has caused some conversation about like the rare double rebuild, like embarking on a rebuild in the midst of your rebuild. Rebuild to electric blue. Yeah.

I don't know if that's what this is or whether this will actually pan out into anything. But you got to say the Tigers are one of the more disappointing teams. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think everyone expected that they would be coming out of the rebuild. I think they expected that they would be coming out of the rebuild and they spent on some free agents and they have not gotten what they envisioned

getting out of those free agents. Eduardo Rodriguez has been largely absent from the team for undisclosed reasons. Javier Baez has been absent in another sense. He's been there, physically present, but not playing like the Javier Baez of old. So they expected to turn the corner this season, bring back an old Effectively Wild reference, and now they have not. They have plunged back into being bad and haven't really made a lot of progress. They're 39 and 59. And this was ason got demoted and now we're just going to get what we can out of Scooble and start over. Probably not.

That seems too drastic, I would think. But man, things have not gone the way that they wanted and that some saw them going for them. Yeah. Well, and it's just like, you know, when this kind of thing happens, I think that it's always important for the organization to be like really clear eyed about where their process failures were. Because like some of this stuff is, some things are not going to be within their control, right? Like injury is not a thing that they can necessarily control totally, right? And, you know, young prospects are going to sometimes like disappoint or at least be slow to start like i don't know that my long-term perception of torkelson is like that different but clearly he needs more time like he's not he wasn't able to do what he needed to at the big

league level so like some of that stuff you're like look this is just the variability of baseball but i don't think things go this wrong without some process failure and so there needs to be some assessment of that internally and then it's like if you're really thinking about yourself in the position as being in a position where you're like i'm gonna i'm really gonna reboot to electric boogaloo because i like to say the word boogaloo i got to say a much more fun word that i know how to say versus the one you had. Cost of vertebral. It's just too chewy a word.

I think that that's a good description. But if you're really thinking about it as like, oh, we're delaying our postseason aspirations for more than a year, right? It's different if you're like, look, we got beat this year, but next year we're going to make a run at it. If that's what you're saying, you don't also say everything is open for business, including our best young player. And then at that point, it's like, is this the, I don't want to call for anybody's job, but like, is this the group that you want orchestrating the next rebuild, right? Like is this, if you've decided as a group that really the best thing for you is to trade a guy who I think we probably thought would be an important part

of the next good Tigers team, like is this the group to engineer that return? Like how are you going to deal with the pieces of the roster who are signed to much longer term deals? Like, what do you do now? So I don't know. It's a very it seems like if I were ownership, I would maybe say, hey, don't trade him, please. And then maybe start looking for someone else to run the team. Yeah, because you don't usually have one regime that gets a second bite at the rebuild Apple,

at least without some success in between, right? I mean, like, maybe if you're dating more, right, and it takes you a really long time to put together a good team, but then you win a World Series and you win a couple of pennants and then you get bad again. And perhaps he's had a longer leash than he should have. I don't know. But he at least had some success in between where it was like, OK, he bought himself more time and now we will give him a chance to build it up again. The Tigers haven't had that.

Like it's been some time now since they were good. They've had time to build up again. And so I don't know if they don't pull themselves out of that morass, then you wouldn't say, oh, well, the people who failed the first time to make us good again, that's who, okay, we'll trade some relievers. We'll trade Gregory Soto. You can have him if you want, you know, and it's not like the long-term foundations of the team that they hope that they're building there. But it's just tough because like Manning has shoulder issues and Mize and Turnbull had Tommy John and other guys had other issues. And so suddenly it's like, well, who are you actually building around that you can completely count on? Now I know, you know, like Riley Green is up and doing okay. I mean, there are bright spots. There are some things to be happy about, but it would be a rare rebuild if it was like we were at the precipice of getting good again or so we thought. And now we're just going to go back to square one. So I don't think it's quite that necessarily. And probably if they were going to trade Scoopople, like they'd have to get something good. And maybe it's just like

a miscommunication where it's like, well, we'll listen to offers on anyone, right? Which like probably everyone should say about every team and every player at any time. So maybe it's more that than it is like everyone must go, you know? But that's something to watch, you know, if they were to really be open to dealing anyone, then that might change the complexion of the deadline a bit. Right. As opposed to the Marlins who apparently really everyone but Sandy is up for grabs. Yeah. And so then you have the Red Sox, right, who are a 500 team as we speak on Wednesday. So the AL East is still top to bottom, 500 or better, but the Red Sox are bottom now. They are trailing the Orioles by half a game.

So I think excluding 2020, I saw this is the first time that a non-Orioles team has been in last place in the AL East since 2017 when the Blue Jays were. So it's been a while since someone leapfrogged the Orioles in a normal season at least. And it's just been a steep descent for the Red Sox. Yeah. Looked like a very likely wildcard team and now do not. recently where they just got blown out repeatedly and had like the worst run differential over a three game span and a four game span and maybe a five game span. I forget exactly what the stat was, but they were setting the kind of history that you don't want to set and make. And so now they find themselves 500 with Chris Sale hurt again, a lot of other players injured. They've been very

shorthanded. And of course they have some players who are in their walk years or can opt out after this year. And so suddenly it's like, oh, J.D. Martinez, could he be available for trade? And bigger names than that, your Xander Bogarts is, right? And I think for now at least they're saying that they're not going to trade someone like that. But who knows? Or are they close enough and you know rich enough that they should just stay in it regardless because it's not like they're completely out of it i think they have about a one in four chance right now according to the playoff odds a little bit better than that

even so maybe if you're the red sox then it, eh, we owe it to our fans. Like we already traded away bets and we did that whole thing. And now maybe we should just stay in it just to see what happens and hope things break right. But it's been a swift fall from likely contender status. Well, and it's like, look, it's never good to have the run that they've had recently. run that they've had recently but when it's punctuated by the sight of jaron duran and center field looking to the heavens of where is the ball and then the ball rolls to the wall and then he does not go after it sometimes you're like well things are really not going right for this team yeah yeah and i don't say that to pick on him because he's been picked on enough but it was it was one of the been one of the wildest baseball things I've ever seen.

It was, although Red Sox fans have seen a lot of that lately because I know that was something like the fourth or fifth ball that was very catchable that they just didn't see or allowed to drop. Yeah, did they change the lights at Fenway? Are there new bulbs? Yeah, it seems like that. But yeah, I mean, he got piled on because he just sort of stood there after not seeing the ball. And I think everyone wanted to see like at least a token effort, right? I mean, like, look, there were people backing him up. And if he had sprinted after it immediately, he probably wouldn't have been the first to the ball anyway. So maybe it's like eyewash.

Like once you miss that badly and you're that far away, like it doesn't even matter. he probably wouldn't have been the first to the ball anyway so maybe it's like eyewash like once you miss that badly and you're that far away like it doesn't even matter but i think also when you miss that badly like people appreciate some eyewash you know they just like they want to see you make a little effort even if it's largely for show yeah i think you know you gotta there's it's called eyewash for a reason we find silly, but sometimes like it's an important analgesic. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you gotta, I was about to say you gotta give people their cream, but like that has a specific baseball context.

I don't mean to. It's like a chemical shower in the lab when you get some substance on you. That is so much like, I was was like it's like an analgesic and you're like it's like silkwood i guess it's not quite like that because that's not i watch you actually should get in the chemical shower to get the chemicals off you it's not just for show but that's the big question now it's like oh are the red socks suddenly teams that are going to trade away pieces rather than add pieces so again like that might be a deadline decision just like based on what they do between now and then but there's not

a lot of time left yeah sometimes it really comes down to like what happened in the weekend before which is you know i think like obviously you have to react to to baseball as it's played on the field. It would be ridiculous for that stuff to not matter. But if I were a front office person, I would find that very humbling because it's like you have these big plans and you have these big models. You have all this math and all these spreadsheets and thousands and thousands of hours of work across hundreds of people in an organization. And sometimes it's like, I don't know, how did we do in the last five? I'm just like, okay. Yep.

I also feel bad for the Rangers, who we're not even mentioning in this context, but like the Rangers have a better run differential than the Orioles, than the Red Sox, than the Marlins, almost as good as the Guardians and some other pretty good teams. And no one has noticed really that they're 43 and 53, but they have underplayed their performance in some ways because they have a 5 and 23 record in one run games. 5 and 23, that is a 179 winning percentage, which would be the worst ever, or at least the worst since the 19th century, if that were to continue. And maybe it won't be quite that extreme by the

time the season is over. But this is like, we talked about last year's Diamondbacks, and they were 10-31, and everything went wrong for them. That's still way better than five and 23. And by the way, the Rangers have a 38-30 record. So they've been a winning team in non-one-run games, which again are much more subject to randomness than others. So it's really kind of wild because the AOS, Pesnitsky had this too, that the Astros are 18-8 in one-run games. The Mariners are 23-12. Still a little

Mariners magic. Then the Rangers 5-23, Angels 6-17, A's 8-16. So a couple of teams in that division have been beating up on their division mates and often in one-run games. So like the Rangers, I think a lot of people wondered coming into the year, like, wait, why are they signing all these guys to big contracts now? Do they think they're good? Do they think they're ready right now? And, you know, Corey Seager has been great of late and Martin Perez has still persisted as one of the big surprises of the season. And if they even had just like average outcomes in one run games, you would definitely be looking at them as very much in the thick of the wildcard race too. So that is perhaps largely just bad luck that has taken them out of the race pretty entirely. weren't going to really be in it this year. And then they were kind of in it. And we had kind of heard that maybe they want to keep him because they are clear-eyed about where they're going to

be this year, but they want to keep him around for next year. But will that end up being true? Is that the best move? Stay tuned. The Rangers. I mean, look, Ben, I got to tell you, yesterday when the Rangers lost, I felt happy. And not because of the Rangers losing, because of the Mariners winning. Because, you know, it was nice to have Julio Rodriguez playing baseball again. And when you hit a home run in your first at-bat-back from being dinged up a little bit, at-bat-back, at-bat-back is hard to say also. We're playing on hard mode today.

You know, you want that to result result in a W and they won. And I was like, yeah, good for them. And then I was like, oh, poor Rangers. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of interesting team level decisions to make. I think about are we in or are we out or how much are we in or how much are we out? Land of contrast. Yeah.

I mean, just scanning down the playoff odds page some other teams in that range of like coin flip are like white socks 59 percent ray is 56 percent twins 53 percent phillies 48 and a half percent cardinals 44 percent then guardians at 32 percent giants at 29 percent and then red socks at 27%. And then there's a steep drop-off to the Marlins at 3% and the Orioles at almost 3% too. Kudos to them. But a bunch of teams just in that no-man's land where it's like, eh, we could go either way. Some of those teams are clearly going for it and should go for it, but there are at least a couple in that mix that are like, eh, well, we'll see. It's going to come down to the wire.

And maybe it depends on what kind of offers they get. So we can talk more about the deadline next time. And some players who probably won't get traded because they're too valuable to get traded. Like Julio Rodriguez. Exactly. So I'll just give you a past blast here. And then we've got a guest. We're talking to our pal Mike Petriello in just a moment.

But here is a past blast, as usual, from Richard Hershberger, historian, saber researcher, author of Strike Forward, The Evolution of Baseball. This is episode 1882. This past blast is from 1882, to be more precise, the New York Clipper of April 15th, 1882. So here's the quote. Baseball under difficulties is the headline. From the account published in the New York Herald of April 7th of the wreck and rescue of the crew of the Bark Trinity of New London, Connecticut, lost off Heard's Island in the South Indian Ocean, where the men suffered much hardship for many months on a cold, bleak, and rocky island, we clipped the following, which shows how they relieved the tedium of weary hours and at the same time engaged in healthy exercise.

And that item said, finally, to cap the climax, a baseball club was organized. And on one sunny day, the first of a series of the national game was inaugurated. There was some little difficulty at first because one of the Portuguese sailors was appointed referee and was not posted on the rules of the league, but it was finally arranged by putting the colored man, it says, in the field and appointing the cook to the responsible judicial post, which he filled to the satisfaction of all, notwithstanding the dinner was somewhat late in consequence. It was a queer sight when the wooden ball prepared by the carpenter, after a vast amount of consultation, flew from the bat

and was chased by a number of bearded and hairy-coated fielders. The game was a success and was followed by others. You mean like they, what? I don't think they were like wearing hair coats. I think they were just very hairy because they were stranded on a desert island. Pursuit as it were. Yeah. Sorry I interrupted you. Not even a

important point of clarification there but not even a desert island I guess. It's a bleak and rocky island. So this sounds like a pretty good sensational story. Crew of a shipwreck stranded on this rocky island starts playing baseball with a wooden ball created by the carpenter. shipwreck of a whaling ship on a very desolate island of the ice and penguins variety, not the tropical paradise sort. Eventually, the ship's owners noticed it was late and asked the Navy to take a look. The Navy Corvette Marion found the crew on the island a year after the shipwreck. They had survived on seals, penguins, penguin eggs, and a wild cabbage that was one of the few things that grew there.

When the crew got back to America, the story received a lot of attention, including the Herald's tale of baseball. Sadly, this part is almost certainly a flight of imagination. Yeah. The Navy released a detailed report the following year, including how the crew passed their time. They inexplicably seem not to have included baseball among their recreational activities. The story does, however, tell us something about how baseball was regarded in American culture in 1882, that it would occur to the reportorial imagination to invent such a tale. So sadly, not true, I guess.

Fact check, not true. Right. ball, which probably would travel great, I guess. But, you know, just like dine on some penguin eggs and seals and wild cabbage and play some baseball. Sure. Why not? But then they also dined on penguins. Yeah, I know. I guess they only had cute creatures available to them. And cabbage.

And cabbage. But I don't know that that would have filled all of their nutritional needs. So they had to eat some cute creatures. Poor penguins. Yep. Anyway, if there are any authentic stories of crews shipwrecked that actually did play baseball, please let us know because I'd be interested in that story. Boy, as long as it doesn't involve killing penguins.

Yeah. All right. So let's take a quick break and we'll be back with Mike from MLB.com. And we're talking today about bat speed and swing speed and swing path and a new brand of baseball data that is becoming available to the public. Some of you may have seen some trickle of StatCast information about bat tracking. So not just what happens after you swing and hopefully make contact, but before, as you swing, the trajectory of your swing, the speed of your swing. We're going to talk to Mike about where that information is coming from and where it's going and what the possible applications are, both from a broadcast perspective and a team perspective and a public analysis perspective. So we'll be right back. I'm not going back

You're not coming back When you were the one and I wasn't okay And if you're not the one and I'm still not okay then There's no going back Well, those of you who were watching the StatCast-powered broadcast of last week's Home Run Derby on ESPN2 may have heard and seen some mentions and citations of bat speed or swing speed. You may also have heard and seen Mike Petriello, who is one of the hosts of that broadcast,

along with Jessica Mendoza and our buddy Jason Benetti. You, of course, have read Mike on MLB.com and heard him on the Ballpark Dimensions podcast. And now, once again, on Effectively Wild. Hello, Mike. Welcome back. Hello, heard him on the Ballpark Dimensions podcast. And now once again on Effectively Wild. Hello, Mike. Welcome back. Hello, friends. Always happy to be here. So I'm excited to see Batspeed be a part of baseball broadcasts and baseball discourse again. And I guess the question is, what is Batspeed or Swingspeed? And that turns out to be a pretty complicated question, or at least how you define it or how you track and calculate it. So can you talk a little bit about just the various decisions that had to be made just to determine how bat speed would even be measured and presented to the public?

Yeah, absolutely. For sure. It's funny. You'd think something as simple as how fast did this thing go would not take a lot of effort to think about it. And, you know, it turns out it really did because the different parts of the bat move at different speeds, obviously. And so it's like, what are you really trying to track? Are you trying to track the head of the bat where nobody's really trying to make contact anyway? Are you trying to track where the ball makes impact, which is not going to be consistent. And eventually we settled on, you know, about six inches from the top of the

bat or the sweet spot, which is A, where guys are trying to hit it, and B, sort of the industry standard if you look at some of the other technologies that are out there. We figured why upset the apple cart and go with the thing that makes sense. And so that's kind of where that question got answered. And for folks who haven't had a chance to read your very helpful, what you need to know about StatCast bat tracking blog post. So I think, you know, there are a lot of options for tracking bat speed and sort of measuring how a hitter is interacting with that in like casual settings, right?

I won't call them laboratory conditions because that feels like an overly fancy way to describe batting cage. But, you know, we have a bunch of different sensors that you can put on a bat and then get data off of that. But that is not what StatCast is doing. What is StatCast doing, Mike? That is a good question for all times, really, I think. So in two parks, I actually think it's more than two parks, but this is what I have access to at the moment in Houston and at Dodger Stadium. There are these extremely high frame rate cameras, like 300 frames a second, which are many times what the other cameras are. And that helps you actually track the bat. You know how fast the bat is moving, what angle it's moving, all sorts of stuff with the bat, which has really been one of the missing pieces.

Like you think about, you know, how much do we know about the way a baseball moves? And it's a lot, right? How much do we know about where the players are lining up and how fast they move? And it's a lot. How much do we know about how the bat is moving in the midst of a major league baseball game? And it's very little. And as you sort of alluded to, like certainly StatCast, you know, we're not the first ones to ever come up with the idea of, hey, let's track a bat. People have been doing it, you know, in laboratory settings and experiments and stuff for like 100 years. When I wrote the article, I was very pleased to find an example. Dr. Alan Nathan actually sent this to me. In 1920, some physicists strapped Babe Ruth into a series of tubes and stuff to try to come up with these measurements

for him. And he said that Ruth had a 44 horsepower swing, which shoots the ball skyward at six miles a minute. And I basically spent the last month trying to get us to use horsepower on baseball. But I'm not sure we're going to get there. Yeah, I did want to ask about the difference between what's available to the public and what's available to teams, because there's been some confusion about this. And I don't know how much you know or how much you can confirm, but just from talking to people in front offices. So first of all, there are some alternative systems out there, right, non-Hawkeye, non-Statcast, that have presented this information to teams that have signed up for it. So, for instance, Kinetrax or Simimotion, right?

So, for instance, Kinetrax or Simimotion, right? These are a couple of companies, data providers that do biomechanical tracking and have done some swing and bat tracking, at least going back a few years, maybe even several years in some cases. So some teams subscribe to those services and they have those setups in their stadiums. in their stadiums. Now, I've heard from some people in front offices that they have also had access to some Hawkeye data on bat tracking, maybe at least going back to 2020, I've heard. And that's sort of a special package that teams have had to sign up for. And so initially only a few had that. And now maybe as many as half or so have that. But it's basically like you have your standard Hawkeye install with the lower frame rate cameras, and then maybe you have some extra cameras with extra high frame rate tracking that can do pose tracking and also swing tracking. And so some but not all teams have had access to that. Is that your understanding or can you confirm or refute that? Because I think people are curious,

just like have teams had access to this for a while? Have they been using this for a while? And if so, what can they do with it potentially? Yeah, I think everything you said is at least directionally correct as far as I understand. I mean, I should clarify, I'm not the one talking to the teams. I almost never talk to the teams. So a lot of what I have is a little bit, you know, even secondhand over here. I found it entertaining. So there was two months ago, maybe, an article that was written. I can't remember his first name, unfortunately, but his last name was Moore. Yeah, Ethan Moore. Yeah. Ethan Moore, exactly. And it was a really good article, right? And it was about a lot of the stuff that we ended up

talking about. And I think he updated it later, but at first it was written in the sense that teams weren't necessarily doing this. Right. And he, I believe, had worked for the Rockies. Yes. Kind of made me think more questions about the Rockies, to be honest. Yes, that's what I meant too. Right.

So anyway, that was not really an answer to your question. I think most of what you said is pretty much correct so the the main stack has tracking system right the one that tracks the ball and spin rate and exit velocity the players all that right uh that is owned by the league like the league installs it in all 30 parks and maintains it and everything like that teams are as far as i understand certainly welcome to install their own kind of stuff to do whatever they want, like privately. So I would guess, I'm almost certain that some teams are probably ahead of other teams in that regard. And what this is, at least the way it was presented to me when it came across my desk, which was like, well, we know that this kind of upgraded hardware exists. We'd like to kind of make a value proposition out of it,

see if there's anything useful before we try to like go forth with the investment to, you know, hopefully put it in all parks, right? Okay. That's where things are right now. I could not tell you today, it's going to be in 30 parks next year. I honestly don't know. I am not part of those conversations, but that's the idea. And so like my kind of task here was, you know, take this information that we've gotten in these two parks, see if it's going to be useful for the public, for broadcast. And I think we did that. I mean, I think when you come up with a list that's got, you know, Julio Rodriguez swings

real fast and Leary Garcia doesn't, I think there's some signal there, even in just like limited data. So now I just feel like I'm borrowing subheaders from this post, but like, I think one of the things that always slows adoption or becomes a task of adoption when we have new metrics is to help people understand like, what is good, right? Because I think we have an intuitive sense of like, what a good batting average is. And if you're a fan graphs reader, you probably have a good idea of like, what a good WOBA is, but what is a good output for this? Like, what is the, what is the average speed

you're looking at to, to say this is, you know, of this very limited sample that we have, here's what averages here's below average, here's Julio Rodriguez. Like what is the range of speeds that we're looking at? Yeah, that's totally the right question. And in some sense, we're at the point with this that we probably were with like spin rate in July of 2015, where now we look back and go, oh, we should have maybe approached that differently or with different metrics. And that's probably what we'll say about this conversation. Should we actually make it to 2027? The answer I found is the average is about 80 miles an hour at the swing spot. And I should also caveat the data set I had.

It's just contacted padded balls, not misses, which is also very important in another way. It's just for various reasons, not what I had available. And the range is from about 69 to 95, give or take. But most guys are within, I'd say like 72 to 87, I guess would be the range there. Gotcha. And do those particular speeds tend to correlate to particular batted ball events? I wouldn't say batted ball events, but certainly there is some relation between swing hard and ball leave hard, like swing speed and exit velocity. It's obviously not one-to-one because you want to square up the ball, want to hit it,

not at the end of the bat or on the handle. I don't have the article in front of me, but I think at the time I had written that I sorted every batted ball from the top of the bat down to the handle. And in order to get to the first hard hit ball, 95 miles an hour of exit velocity, like this 75 batted balls near the end, you couldn't do it. And like 100 from the handle, you couldn't do it. That has nothing to do with swing speed. You know, it's entirely where are you making contact? So my guess is where this is going to end up is sort of like pitch velocity in the sense that it's great to throw hard. Like you absolutely want to throw hard, but we can think of guys who throw a hundred who aren't very good because they don't have

control or their pitch shape stinks. Like there's still room in the world for Kyle Hendricks because he's so good at other things too. So there's going to be a relationship between swinging hard and being a good hitter, but it's like? Because I wondered about that just because there's some correlation between pitch speed and exit speed of a batted ball. It's maybe not as great as some might think. Mostly it's the hitter that's supplying the exit speed, but there is some contribution from the pitch too. So the faster it comes in, the harder it goes out, all else being equal. But I wonder whether that is true as well with swing speed, where if

someone's throwing really hard, then you have to swing extra hard to catch up with it, or whether people are just generally sort of swinging as hard as they can most of the time regardless. Yeah, that is a great question. I didn't do this. I saw an internal presentation that suggested, no, that there is not really much of an impact there, which I think was, yeah, it's fascinating. Like, when I looked at this i'm like i have so many different ways i would like to break this down but i'm starting with sort of a limited data set in the first place and then if i'm doing like splits on splits like now now am i really finding anything like meaningful and interesting that's sort of the hard part here

but i was i was pleased to find like even if i just put the minimum at three swings there was signal coming through. Like, Joey Gallo is now in our top 10, which is great because, like, that's exactly where I'd expect him to be. And again, you don't have whiffs in your data set. So you might be in your top 10 for that too. Sorry, Joey Gallo. I did want to ask what extra value you think this information brings to what we already knew from batted ball data, right?

Because we know that Julio Rodriguez and other great hitters hit the ball hard. And so we can kind of infer from that maybe that they swing hard too, right? There's even been some inferred bat speed metric that's been floating around out there. So I wonder whether you think we know something more just from looking at the swing speed? Is it like there are guys who will have high swing speeds, but not high exit speeds and vice versa? Or should there be a pretty one-to-one match there for the most part, at least if you're looking at contact events when you actually do hit the ball? Yeah, I think that, and we don't have enough information to answer this yet, but the number one thing that's going to be most interesting to me

is an aging curve, I think. Because you think about exit velocity, that's an outcome event, right? Like at swing speed, you have full control over how hard you swing it. And just eyeballing it, it's like, okay, well, Leo Rodriguez is very young and Luis Robert is young and Jesus Sanchez at the top is very young and Jess Chisholm and Bobby Witt. And then I noticed like Justin Turner's pretty far down the list and he's 38. He's actually been pretty good recently, but for most of the year he hadn't. And I don't have the last five, 10 years of his data to say if that's actually any different from the way he always was. But it would be pretty interesting to say, well, his swing is really slowing down. This

is going to give me, you know, some reason for concern. So that's, that's the one thing. The second thing is I find it really interesting that there are, you know, there's multiple ways to be a good hitter. So let me give you a Michael Brantley example, because he's an astro and therefore someone we have a lot of data on. He does not show up very well on this, right? He's a very good hitter, does not show up with particularly interesting swing speed data. Presumably that's because he's extremely good at squaring it up, right? Or he's always getting the ball at the sweet spot of the bat, even though he's not showing

elite bat speed. But one idea I had, and I know I was just saying don't do splits, but I did it anyway just because I wanted to see what would happen is I was curious, do guys have, let's say, a two-strike approach, right? Would guys maybe be a little more controlled with their bat on two strikes? And so I looked at that for the Astros. And, for example, Jordan Alvarez drops four miles an hour in swing speed from before two strikes to on two strikes. Like, okay, sure. Altuve down five miles an hour.

Sure. Michael Bradley has no change whatsoever. He appears to be using his two strike swing all the time, which I find fascinating. Like that can kind of go into, you know, what kind of hitting approach does this guy have? And if you can do that on counts, you know, you can do that on all sorts of things, pitch types,

you know, high velocity, low velocity, you name it. I think it opens up a lot of interesting things. So you already mentioned Julio and you mentioned Jordan, who I think we would not be surprised to see is ranking well here. Who are some of the other in your extremely limited sample that only looks at contact events and does not include swing and miss which we are only saying not to give you a hard time but just to remind people of where we are in this which is exciting nascent stages everyone relax who who's uh who's doing who's doing the best here mike well it is uh still who they are rodriguez i don't think he's actually played in either of these parks in the last two weeks so that hasn't changed you know i'm very excited right now because literally as we speak,

the Nationals are getting pounded in Dodger Stadium. But that does mean that Juan Soto is in front of these cameras. And when we did the home run derby show, he obviously won, but he had the highest, the three highest swing speed rounds, right? If you ordered all the players and all the rounds, he was number one, number two, and number three, which was very interesting to me. So I would be fascinated to see how he lines up. But if you were to look at the top 10 names, I think nine of them would probably make some amount of sense to you, right? Like the names I mentioned, and also Stanton's up there, Manny Machado, Josh Chisholm, super satisfying because everybody's seen him turning around 101 mile an hour fastballs, pull side. Great. I'm happy he's up there. Trace Thompson is on the list, which I got to say I didn't see coming. And it's like, he's a Dodger. So it's not like he was only there for one game. But also, we haven't seen him that much. Did he just happen to have like the three best games of his life in front of the camera i don't know um but it's interesting that one stood out and he's actually like pitting pretty well on a very good dodger team so i don't

know maybe he's just unable to make contact but he's got elite bat speed um i gotta say i enjoyed looking back on old scouting reports of some of these guys just to see how they matched up like joey bart is now high on the list even though he can't hit at all and the scouting reports on him were you know 20 hit tool but very good bat speed and it's like great wonderful perfect i'm happy that worked out right yeah i love that you mentioned in your piece too that mike trout at least pre-back injury he had a very high hard swing rate, essentially, even though maybe his individual swings don't stand out as extreme, much like I guess his hard hit rate is very high, even though he's not putting up Stantonian or Judgean individual exit speeds for the most part. So just incredible consistency, basically. Yeah, totally. And you're right. In the same way, I don't actually use average exit velocity that much anymore. My guess is we might not end up using average swing speed that much either because a percent of hard swings. And right now the five guys I have who are perfect 100% over 85 are still Julio, Elise Robert, Fernando Reyes, Machado, and Mike Trout. That's a pretty solid top five, I think. Yeah. So you got into swing path and swing

shape a little bit in your piece too. And again, I guess there's going to be some correlation here, probably with launch angle, but maybe not completely just because part of it is going to be the height of the hitter, I imagine as well. But you looked at swing flatness and uppercutness. So how much of a variation is there among hitters? And I guess I'd also be interested, I don't know whether it's possible to answer this yet, but it would be interesting to see the just variation from swing to swing within the same hitter, right? Like, do you use an uppercut swing when you're going down to get a ball or you're facing this pitcher and then you use more of a flat swing on other types of pitches.

Or maybe it depends on what pitch type you're predicting. That would be kind of cool to look into eventually. But what showed up as far as who's the flattest, who's the least flat, that kind of thing? Yeah, that was pretty fun to look at. I don't think I necessarily broke any barriers in the sense of if you swing up, you'll probably hit the ball harder and then more likely swing and miss more. You have a flat swing, you'll have a higher Babbitt, but less power. But I mean, these are the kinds of things that I think are intuitive to the eye test, but now you can actually put some numbers too, which is cool. So like you said, I broke it into four different groups, you know, of 25% of the swings and, you know, the guys who

have the uppercut swings, I mean, it's pretty clearly that the barrel rate is like through the roof and the guys who don't, you know, have good batting averages, but don't have any power. So I have the list updated through yesterday, actually. And, um, at the time, Steven Kwan had the flattest swing, which sure. Uh, at the moment, Connor Joe does, which I think still makes a certain amount of sense. My favorite at the top, it was Altuve, and now it is Matt Carpenter. And man, does that make a lot of sense because look what he's doing. This is another example. I wish we had historical data. I wish I knew what he was doing with the Cardinals because I bet it's not what he's doing now.

I think that we should just take a moment because it's never a bad idea to appreciate what Matt Carpenter's season line is you know because it's never it's never a bad idea to like appreciate what matt carpenter's season line is right now because it remains hilarious 309 427 794 he's a 235 wrc plus like this guy this guy's has 30 hits and 14 of them are home runs this is my favorite this was just my favorite thing sorry it's not the point, but it is a point that we could make here. And he was just out there pretty much. Anyone probably could have had him for the right deal. Yeah, of course. He's a Yankee. broadcast tool you think this will be? Because some people might remember back in like 1999, 2000, ESPN had a proto-bat speed metric on some broadcasts. I think it was called BatTrack. And I believe it was an early pre-pitch FX sport vision product. And I've emailed back and forth

a bit with Phil Orleans, the producer at ESPN about this. And I think I've shared some of that info on the show before. So I wonder, we went like 20 plus years between having Batspeed on broadcast and not having Batspeed on broadcast. Do you think that this will be a staple now? Do you think it'll be like, we'll see it on every swing the way that we see pitch velocity on every pitch? Or will it be more useful in a more selective uh judicious usage yes i also emailed phil about that because i was fascinated about how they pulled that off i think it was just for the derby is what i remember him saying so it was like yeah it was like a radar system they had yeah yeah you know right now the answer to that is is not very much just because again like it's not in every park. So, you know,

playing a Yankee game in Fenway, there's not super much to offer other than like seasonal leaderboard. So it's just like a hypothetical future where this is, you know, ubiquitous and everywhere. I would guess it's probably not going to show on every swing necessarily, but if you can come up with leaderboards, that's always like red meat for broadcasts. And if you can say, hey, no, this guy looks like he's got a fast swing, we can actually show a number that proves that, especially like the former hitters who are broadcasters. You know, like they will, I think they would eat something up that is geared towards them because everything is so pitching focused. Like, I don't want to say it's easy to be a former pitcher on the air, but there are so many numbers you can go to to point to this guy's slider moves like this and his spin is like that and his releases like this. And you just don't have that for hitters necessarily. So if you can go as a hitter, as a former hitter, who's a broadcaster and say, yeah, well, you know, his swing is uppercut or when he swings it more flat, this happens. And then we can show that with like a cool side angle, or we can show a leaderboard of who scores up the ball, like out in front of the plate, like show the top down angle. I think,

I think there'll be something there. I don't think it's going to be on every broadcast every night, just because there's such a wide disparity in the tolerance of the 30 different broadcast booths. As you can probably guess, there are some who are extremely into it and, you know, text me on a regular basis. And there are some who would probably walk the other way if they saw me out the street. So I think that's probably going to be part of it. But yeah, I mean, if this thing flies, I do think you'll see some of it on the air. That makes me think I'd like you to talk a little bit about the potential you see in the piece of this that we're not able to analyze yet,

which is what happens when the hitter doesn't make contact and what we might learn about particular hitters based on where they're missing and by how much. Yeah, that was one of the things I was most interested in. And like it exists and we just, we weren't kind of happy with the, with where it was at the moment, or at least in time for this. But I think it'd be, it'd be cool actually a little bit from the pitcher's point of view, who misses above the bat the most often, where it was at the moment, at least in time for this. But I think it'd be cool, actually, a little bit from the pitcher's point of view. Who misses above the bat the most often, I think, is really interesting, you know? Or who is fooling batters so badly that they miss by the most distance? You know, maybe like, I miss bats by one inch, but you're corkscrewing guys into the

ground and they miss by 10 inches. Like, that's really interesting and cool to me. And obviously the same thing from the batter's point of view. And that's not the kind of information, you know, anyone's ever had before. I also think in addition to like our analytical value or entertainment value, I mean, I heard from some team hitting coaches who were like stoked by this and mostly like, you know, minor league player developmental guys. This is, I won't say who, but this is a direct message from one of them and he's like man most of our brain trust is going to be floored that this info is even attainable or useful to coaches and players it's like that's surprising to me like this is new and cool and interesting but i don't you could probably find written scouting reports from 1912 saying this guy has a fast bat or a slow bat.

It's putting numbers to that. Yeah, I was going to ask whether you think this will be more valuable as a scouting tool or as a developmental tool or just as a like explaining baseball to the public tool. Because on the one hand, yeah, I mean, scouts can see bat speed, right? I mean, for the most part, maybe they can't always perfectly assess it. But I think it is something that you can kind of tell with the eye test with some level of accuracy, just like you can tell if someone throws hard or doesn't throw hard. Whereas there are things like, you know, spin rate, which would have been maybe tough to pick up on prior to TrackMan and Rapsodo and all these new tools or like edgertronic and high speed video showing how the ball is coming out of a pitcher's hand and you just literally cannot see that with the naked eye, whereas this you kind of can.

So maybe that detracts from the utility a little bit. But on the other hand, you could get all of this information, not just like, are you missing? Are you swinging and missing a lot? But how and why are you swinging and missing? And maybe that's something you can tell too. Like you could see if someone's late on a pitch, probably, right? Or probably if you're swinging under it or above it, maybe. But going back to the Ethan Moore post you mentioned, he wrote, imagine a section on fangraphs player pages with columns

for early width percentage on time with percentage and late width percentage or how about columns for swung under width percentage swung over with percentage or even average width distance in inches for each hitter in the x y and z directions now imagine a sortable leaderboard for any of these stats so you might think that like if you have that data available for a minor league hitter, and I know that there are some teams that have had this kind of info available for minor leaguers, whether it's via bat trackers that you put on the bat or some of the motion tracking systems that we talked about earlier. And if you could say, hey, you're a little late, you're a little early, you're a little high, you're a little low. I guess it's one thing to say that and another to be able to fix it. But it usually does help

to know where you're going wrong if you want to go right. Yeah, I would agree with that. I was actually thinking about this in regards to Joey Gallo, right? Who we kind of all agree is having a pretty miserable year. And I think the first thing people would think of if you say, what's wrong with Joey Gallo is they'd say the strikeouts. And I'd be like, well, I mean, he always struck out a lot. He's not actually striking out that much more than he did when he was having really good seasons. It's the quality of his contact is much worse. And we can always go back to the way the ball is flying. But if anybody is going to be immune to that, I would think it would be a guy who crushes the ball more than anybody else at baseball. So why is his quality of contact worse? I don't know the

answer to that, right? But if you could use information like this to say, well, it's because he's making contact out in front or more off the end of the bat or whatever he's doing with the bat to the ball that's different. That is why he's just not as successful and it's not actually the strikeouts. I'm not sure that there's actually anything there, just kind of speculating. This would be a cool way to get to trying to evaluate what's wrong with him in a way I don't have a good answer for right now. But I could see an application like that kind of being pretty far-reaching, I think. Analysis, TV, teams, you name it. One thing that I think it might be helpful for is pointing out just how impressive it is to make any kind of contact or good contacts.

Which, again, is like not news and the old cliche about the hardest thing to do in sports, hit a round ball with a round bat, et cetera, et cetera. But like the data that you've shown and that your colleague Tom Tango has shown on his site, and we'll link to that series of posts too, but like the margin for error here is so, so small. I mean, just like seemingly a couple of milliseconds can make the difference between hitting it and not hitting it or hitting it weakly and hitting it hard. And you also have to hit it at exactly the right spot. So you've been able to detect like where exactly on the barrel the sweet spot is, and it's not a big spot. And to get that spot in the perfect

position at the perfect time is so hard to do, which again, we're not breaking news here, but just like to be able to quantify it, I think makes it even more impressive. So what have you all been able to determine about just like the timing and the location and just like how much each of those things matters? Cause like, there's just not a big buffer in either direction if you want to hit the ball hard. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned Tom's name. Cause I would be remiss if I didn't point out that, you know, Tom and Graham Goldbeck and Brandon Nickel and a whole bunch of other people to put a ton of work into all of this before it even got to me. So my name is on this

thing, but it's, you know, the tip of the iceberg here of a whole bunch of people who are putting work into it. And I mean, I think that's the right question. And I don't know that we are far enough along to have a full answer beyond all of those things are going to matter in some sense. Like what I said before, that in a lot of ways, this is putting numbers to ideas that have existed for a very long time. And, you know, I made the joke about Babe Ruth and the Columbia torture tubes or whatever from a hundred years ago, everybody has seen, I've embedded this in the article, the famous bat path illustration that Ted Williams drew in 1970, right? Like everybody has seen it, the slight upswing and you've got the impact zone. That's what hitters are trying to get to.

zone. That's what hitters are trying to get to. And we don't have like right this second, a metric or a way to quantify like who's doing that the best, but we certainly could. And I expect that we will be able to get to that at some point. And I think that would be super cool. Who's hitting like Ted Williams? No, okay. Only Juan Soto hits like Ted Williams, but you know, who has the bat path that Ted Williams is trying to get to? I think that might be more important than any of it. I can tell you in order right now what's most important, the swing speed or squared up percentage or where on the bat you're hitting it. It's all important. And the guys who can do all of that, like let's say Julio Rodriguez, are going to be the most successful. Yeah. Tango had a post about just a bunch of Giancarlo Stanton swings from

one game, I think it was. And if you line them up, it's like, you know, he hit one 116 miles per hour, and then he hit one a lot slower, like 81. And it seems like the difference, he wrote, how much do we shift each of these attack angles? Would you believe just three milliseconds here or six milliseconds there or for the biggest mishit, 15 milliseconds? So that's like that's it. You know, I mean, there might be other factors there that come into play, too. But like maybe the difference between 81 mile per hour exit speed and 110 plus is just like, you know, it's not even the blink of an eye. Maybe it's faster than that. So these guys are good. Basically, that's what even the blink of an eye, maybe. It's faster than that. So these guys are good, basically.

That's what I'm saying. Hot take. Yeah. And I also just, again, going back to the Ethan Moore post, and again, I'm sure that many teams have already been thinking about these things and breaking these things down and taking advantage of them. You know, the cutting edge tier of MLB that probably the usual suspects have been on the frontier of all this information and have been paying extra to avail themselves of these insights. But Ethan mentioned that like a few things that could come into play here, like pitch

sequencing, for instance, which is a tough thing to break down. Like maybe, you know, if we're able to quantify these just slight differences in swing timing and you can see the impact of pitch sequencing on swing timing and swing path and everything, that could be another valuable way to figure out, well, if you throw this type of pitch after that type of pitch or this location after that location, what's the impact of that? So this could be another way to get some insight into that, for instance, or even just like individual matchup data, right?

Like, you know, this pitcher versus that hitter. Like there's been a lot of talk about how a team like the Giants perhaps has been taking advantage of like looking at how this hitter's swing path matches up with this pitcher's stuff. And I'm sure a lot of teams do things like that. But it's like, you know, you can figure out not just like what has this guy done against this pitcher before or even pitchers like him in some way, but also like, well, he swings in this way that makes him like a perfect candidate to hit this pitcher or to be helpless against this pitcher.

So you won't have to be helpless against this pitcher. So you won't have to be a prisoner to small sample anymore necessarily because you could extrapolate a lot from small sample just the same way that you only need like one pitch for a pitcher to be like, that guy throws hard, right? Ben, I love how we are talking about metrics that are meant to demonstrate just how good hitters are. And you're like, let's use it to make it harder for them to do their jobs. Because famously, the balance right now heavily in hitters' favor. I know. Well, that actually, I'm glad you said that because that was a question I was going to ask Mike.

Whether you think this will be more valuable to the defensive end or the offensive end. to the defensive end or the offensive end, because it seems like every time there's a leap in technology, pitchers or defenses are able to take advantage of it first or most. And here you might think, well, it's about swings, like that has to help hitters, right? But maybe not. Well, yeah, both. I mean, I think that there's a lot of validity to that. I mean, I do think this will help hitters, right? I think you'll be able to see like, hey, here is where your maximum speed

or here's where you best square things up if you use this kind of bat path, right? So I think that could help. But I was thinking about a famous baseball chestnut that you always hear on TV. And I actually think a lot of the metrics and advanced stats that have come out over the last 15 years

have tended to prove most of those correct, not actually invalidate those. And one of them is in terms of sequencing, well, you speed up his bat and then you come off with something slow and then his bat will be too fast or vice versa. Right. And that's really interesting to me because we've never been able to tell how fast the bat was, but could we find some sequences like that and see, was there anything to it? Did they speed up his bat and that made the next pitch more effective because they had him on a different swing plane or swing speed? I don't know. But I think something like that going to be like a huge breakthrough when it comes to baseball analysis or whether it's going to be about like before and after bat speed and bat path data or whether this will just be like, yeah, this is kind of a cool thing. Another nice thing in our arsenal as baseball explainers and analysts. Like, do you know yet? Is it too soon to say whether this is going to be some big paradigm shift or just kind of oh this is cool yeah i mean again again assuming that it ends up everywhere and that metrics are

public and all that kind of stuff i think it's going to help us just explain batters a little better because everything we do about batters right now is really a like plate discipline stuff you know chase rate all that kind of stuff and b what happens to the ball you know ground ball rate pull rate exit exit velocity. And I don't think this is going to invalidate any of that stuff, obviously, but it would certainly add a lot more context to why a guy is great or not great. You know, you can certainly say, hey, this guy doesn't square up the ball that well, but man, he swings it hard. So he's given himself more margin for error or someone's like Michael Brantley doesn't swing that hard, but

squares it up perfectly. And then, you know you know like i said maybe this adds more context to aging curves maybe this helps us with um i mean i hate i hate using the word luck when it comes to these things but you know if we can say hey this guy's swing speed has been declining and all of a sudden he added like 40 points of slugging maybe we can kind of get a little deeper into why that might be. So is it going to like change everything you thought you knew? Probably not. But it would be something new we've never had before to add more context to all the conversations we have. Cool. Well, good luck with the rest of the rollout. I hope it does end up getting to every park and to all of our eyeballs because I think generally we're all in favor of more information about baseball and we can use it heavily or sparingly as the case may be. And I know it's information overload for some folks, but I think that you are adept at

figuring out when and how to use it so that it enhances a broadcast or an article instead of just overloading people and too much information. And also, like we talk a lot about the gap between public and private, right? And how teams have a lot of access to information that we don't and how, if anything, that gap seems to be growing. And again, I think that a lot of teams or at least some teams have had access to information like this for some time now, and who knows how it's been impacting the results that we've seen on the field. So anything we can do to close that gap a little bit and get at least a little window and insight into what teams have on hand, I think that's always a good thing. So I hope that there's more of this, basically. Me too. I was pleased

when this came across my desk and it was, hey, can we go put this on TV and get this out there for people to consume? And I was like, yes, yes, we can. podcast feed where he co-hosts a show with Matt Myers. And there's also a new show on that feed hosted by Sarah Langs and Mandy Bell. And both of those come out weekly. So always a pleasure reading and listening and watching. Happy to have you on the show. Thanks, Meg. Thanks, Ben. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. I have two quick notes here at the end. First is that we have a follow-up on one of the dozen stat blasts that I shared in the last episode of last week. This is from Sir Parsifal, listener and Patreon supporter, and he expanded on the stat blast about which teams had had stat blast about players being the first to debut from their country and expanded it to cover all major leagues from 1871 to present, including defunct franchises, as well as including players who were born in the U.S. but had parents or grandparents from the country of interest. and players like him are included.

Because I had mentioned in that stat blast that we couldn't account for players being of a particular descent. It was only where they were born. So Sir Percival took it a step further here. He says it's likely not 100% accurate since genealogy is tough, but it's interesting. And he notes that he took the result closest to being born in the country. So a player being born there would take precedence over a player's parent being born there, which would in turn take precedence over a player's grandparent being born there, and then the most recent one of those.

So for some of these guys, there's an older player who could claim to be from there, but the claim isn't as strong. For example, Duffy Lewis, who played in 1910, had a father from Peru, but Jesus Luzardo was born in Peru, so it overrules Lewis despite Lewis being earlier. Interesting research. I will link to his spreadsheet on the show page. And also, I have a new Tyler Taylor mix-up to report, courtesy of Raze fan and Twitter user at Slim Scroppy, Shroppy, Scroppy, Shroppy.

There's no pronunciation guide on the Twitter handle, but the point is that he alerted me to a case of briefly mistaken identity on the Rays broadcast on Wednesday. Tyler Wells was pitching for the Orioles against the Rays, whose lineup featured Taylor Walls. So yes, Tyler Wells, Taylor Walls. Fortunately for broadcasters everywhere, they are not teammates, and so this doesn't occur all that often. But when it does, watch out. And the victim here, I believe, is Ray's color commentator, Doug Wechter. So two up and two down. You're starting to see Tyler Walls or Tyler Wells get into a little bit of a groove here.

Could have been worse. He caught his mistake and corrected himself. And really, that was almost unavoidable. I love our listeners, especially the ones who support us on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up the ones who support us on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks, and help us stay ad-free. Sam Dinning, Tom Hawk, Zach West, Jesse R., and Zach Wenkos, thanks to all of you.

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