Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1934: How to Bring Back Bellinger’s Bat

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Ben Lindbergh convenes a roundtable of hitting analysts—Robert Orr from Baseball Prospectus, Esteban Rivera from FanGraphs, and Ryan Parker, formerly of Baseball Prospectus and the Los Angeles Angels—to diagnose the problems with free agent Cody Bellinger’s much-diminished bat and recommend how to revive it. They also discuss their approaches to analyzing hitting, coachability, the differences […]

There's something moving over me. I want to remember everything. I cannot figure out what I meant by living all those ways I did Hello and welcome to episode 1934 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Meg Rowley is off today, which is a reasonable thing to be. This is a holiday week. But I'm still trucking here and I figured that while Meg was away, I would take on a simple task and figure out how to fix Cody Bellinger. And by figure out how to fix Cody Bellinger, I mean talk to some other people who might be able to figure out how to fix Cody Bellinger because I certainly don't know. three of the fine minds of hitting Twitter and of the baseball blogosphere in general, people whose work I have admired and whose hitting analysis I have admired. And I have invited them on to try to diagnose what ails Cody Ballinger

and how it could possibly be corrected. So first, I have Rob Orr, who covers not just hitting, also pitching, also other aspects of baseball for Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Rob. Hey, Ben. How you doing? Doing well. And we also have with us Esteban Rivera, a fairly recent addition to Fangraphs, whose work I have been enjoying, Fangraphs contributor. So, hello, Esteban. Hey, Ben. And we are also joined by Ryan Parker, formerly of Baseball Perspectives and more recently of the Los Angeles Angels,

for whom he was the coordinator of hitting analysis from 2019 to 2021, taught Mike Trout and Shohei Otani everything they know. I guess he came in a little after that, and also they weren't in the minor leagues. But other than that, so Ryan, welcome to the podcast as well. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me on, and I apologize in advance for the background noise of a two-year-old and a dog upstairs. Yeah, that's okay. I appreciate all of you being here shortly before Thanksgiving with travel and family

and who knows what else. So we will make the best of that situation. family and who knows what else. So we will make the best of that situation. So Cody Ballinger is a riddle, is a cipher, is an enigma, and everyone wants to crack this puzzle, it seems. So he was recently non-tendered by the Los Angeles Dodgers, which is historic, unprecedented, I think. I don't think there's ever been an MVP who has been non-tendered during his arbitration years. And that's partly a testament to the fact that Cody Bellinger was so good so early that he is still in his arbitration years. Right. He came up in 2017. He hit 39 homers right out of the gate. He was something of a sensation. That was his age 21 season. And then, of course, his age 23 season, he was something like an eight-win player, according to Fangrass War. He was the National League MVP. He had a 161 WRC+, 47 homers. Sky was the limit.

Incredible career ahead of him. And then there was a decline in 2020. And then there was a steeper decline in 2021, and there was a slight bounce back in 2022 that still left him a significantly below average bat. So put it all together, and he has hit, since his MVP year in the three seasons since, this is, 272, 376. That is a 78 WRC plus. And according to Dan Zimborski, that is just the biggest decline really of this kind for anyone who ever had such a great offensive season so young over their subsequent three seasons. So everyone's kind of confused about Cody Bellinger and the Dodgers have decided

that they didn't want to pay him what he was in line to make an arbitration for 2023, something like $18 million. So he is now a free agent and the offers have flown in, unsurprisingly, because he is still young, because he was good not that long ago that teams are talking themselves into. Maybe we can make this guy the Bellinger he used to be. He's only 27 years old. And, of course, he's still a good defender and a good base runner, so he brings some value even if he doesn't hit. But, of course, everyone is hoping that he will hit, and I'm sure he's hoping he will hit. And even though lots of teams called and some teams reportedly offered multi-year contracts right out of the gate, his agent, Scott Boris, without using any puns as far as I'm aware, said that he will only be entertaining one-year offers. So he wants a make-good pillow contract type deal here where he can restore his value and then be in position to cash in long term.

And the question is, will that happen? And can any team help, will that happen? And can any team help him make that happen? So my idea here after that long preamble was that I would invite each of you on and we could kind of have you role play a little bit as, let's say, an analyst for a team that is interested in signing Cody Bellinger. Maybe you're making a recommendation to the GM about what you would do to help him be better. Or maybe you're even making a presentation to Scott Boris and trying to convince him that your team is the one that is best equipped to help get Cody Ballinger back to where he was. And I'm sure there will be some overlap in what each of you says, so we don't

have to stick to this religiously. But I figured that would kind of be the conceit of this, and we'll see where it goes. And maybe each of you can provide some diagnosis about what has gone wrong, which I guess is a necessary preface to fixing what has gone wrong. So I've just randomly selected who could go first here. And I've come up with Rob. So Rob, if you don't mind leading off and I guess going into whatever level of detail you're comfortable with here, I can diagnose Cody Bounder. He has had a 78 WRC plus over the past three years.

That's not so good. But as to why that has happened, it's a little tougher to say. So what have you come up with? Okay. So since his MVP season, he's obviously been a lot worse, but as you said there, but I think it's important that you can bring it down into smaller periods and it kind of starts to make sense, at least to me, what might be happening. So in 2020 was not that bad. And that was such an abbreviated season that he actually probably if he had more time, I think he his final season numbers probably would have looked a little bit better than they were. And a lot everything else was kind of in line for that season like his his exit velocities and the way he was hitting the ball they all looked like his seasons before that but then the really really

sharp decline when he fell off a cliff was in 2021 yeah which what did he he had a 47 wrc plus and 350 plate appearances which that's again, not that good. I'm with you so far. And then this year it, you know, it almost doubled, but that still only gets you to 83. I think what happened was everyone knows about like the injuries he's had. There's been a lot of attention that has been paid towards the shoulder injury he had. There was a lot of words written about that.

I don't actually think that's the one that caused him the most problems. He fractured his tibula in his left leg, which is his plant leg in his stance in April 2021. And I think that got his mechanics out of whack and led to a significant power decrease that year. And I think it's been off ever since. So I think if I was a team looking at acquiring Cody Bellinger and trying to maximize the most out of him, I would try to fix his mechanics to get back to where they were in 2019 by getting him more into his plant leg. He is lot less athletic now it's kind of hard to show it

visually for a podcast yes but he uh essentially like he's he's not getting back into his back leg during his load and it's breaking up the sequencing for the beginning of a swing which causes a lot drop in power which is why you know over last two years, his max exit velocity has been 107 miles an hour, where the years before that it was always 110 plus. So he's losing a lot of the pop that's available to him. So I would try to fix that. And the second part of that would be trying to keep him healthy so that these things don't keep happening because he also had a strained hip adductor during that period which could have been caused by like the compensation for the other injury so yeah i would uh for him i think they're the easy solution there

would be a regular platoon where he's not playing every day trying to keep him fresh he might look a lot better in 450 500 plate appearances than he would in 600 as a everyday player and yeah that would that would be where i'd try to start with what i would try to convince him and scott boris that uh we had a plan for getting back on track okay yeah would you see him as a platoon player long term or do you mean let's rebuild his value? Let's just get him back into gear and then maybe you could let him loose again? Because he has a significant split long term, but it's not as if he has been totally helpless against lefties. I mean, he's certainly been worse, like 743 career OPS versus 855 career OPS versus righties. Obviously, a lot of that coming earlier in his career where he had higher OPSs. But he's not like Kyle Schwarber, I guess, who isn't a platoon player, but kind of hits like one where he just doesn't really hit lefties so much. So are you seeing that as like a short-term fix or maybe even long-term that might be a better role for him? Yeah, he definitely is. When he's right, he looks better against lefties than a lot of

lefty hitters out there. But for me, it's not so much, you know, he can't hit lefties as like a load management solution. And it's kind of just like natural way to do that that kind of helps all parties, I think. Yeah, that's interesting because I think it's really hard to come up with any comp for Cody Bellinger, offensively at least, just in terms of the heights he reached at a young age and then how precipitously he declined immediately after that. I think the only one you could kind of come up with is Zolo Varzaez, who won the 1965 MVP for the Twins. And he was, I think, maybe 25 or so at the time. And he wasn't a great hitter, as Bellinger was in his MVP year. He was a good hitter and also a gold glove shortstop who made a lot of errors but had good range. And he just was laid low by injuries, seemingly. He hurt himself in multiple ways the year after his MVP year. He hurt his back, and that became kind

of a chronic career-long issue. And so he never really hit well again. So I guess the back specifically has not been Bellinger's issue, but that's what you worry about. I mean, that's, if you see a steep decline like that for someone so young and someone so good, of course, you think injuries and Bellinger certainly had injuries. But as you're saying, you know, maybe he just got into bad habits because I think he said by like a year after he hurt the shoulder or even less than a year that he was feeling at full strength again. So at least according to him publicly, he said it wasn't hampering him anymore and he still wasn't hitting like he used to. And in 2020, I think some of the blame was placed on him maybe tinkering and changing his stance and changing his swing and everything, which I guess surprised some people because he had been so successful as he was.

But maybe he is just kind of a tinkerer. And then I guess once you start struggling, then you're even more likely to tinker so you can get yourself out of your hole there. But all right. That is our first diagnosis and recommended course here. And I'm sure that there's some thunder being stolen and apologies to the people who are not going first here, because I'm sure a lot of you have great minds that thought somewhat alike. But Esteban, do you want to take a turn here? Yeah, I'll go ahead and start off by saying I agree with pretty much everything Rob said and I was going to mention a few of those things myself. So trying to stay in line with what Rob was saying along the injuries, I'll start off by acknowledging the fact that Bellinger is a really stretchy hitter. If you

could think of athletes in terms of like muscles versus stretch, like he is on in my opinion on one side of the spectrum of stretchiness so what he's doing is relying on efficient sequencing between all the parts of his body to produce his power so if if he is suffering through injuries whether it be in the shoulder rib cage etc he can create some compensations that change his mechanics. And that is definitely something that I saw, especially in 2022. Specifically, when he gets into his plant leg, like Rob was saying, he's just in a completely different position. His hands are more close to or further away from the center point of his body than they were in, say, 2019, 2020. And a lot of this can be due to the fact that he is creating different levels of stretch

and just doesn't have as much space as he once did to rely on the stretch that he made and get into more athletic positions. And like Rob said, he's just experienced like a fall off and max exit velocity pretty drastically. I mean, I think he was in the, around the 90th percentile in 2019 and has fallen well below average in the last two seasons. So he's just incredibly less athletic.

So that would be the first thing is trying to make sure one that he's healthy and if he is healthy to get his body back to the point that it was in 2019 whether that be recommending some sort of difference in training and strength and conditioning. I know he said that he's healthy but it's very possible that he got healthy in terms of where his strength is at, but his body's just functioning differently because of some compensations. So getting, again, just getting him back on track with his body will be the most important thing. And then in terms of actually recommending what to do with his swing, I think that he has just been rushing his

load. A lot of people, Bobby Tewksbury and others, will say that you have to be on time in two different points, like at pitch release and then when the ball is actually about to make impact with your bat. So if you're not on time with a pitcher's mechanics at their release point, then it's going to be pretty difficult to get on time when the pitch is actually in the hitting zone. And there's a swing in particular that I was looking at against Joe Musgrove, which is like a 92 mile per hour sinker in the upper third of the plate. And Bellinger, it just looks like he gets on top of him so, so quickly. It's 92. Musgrove doesn't have great shape on his fastballs anyway, so it's not like a pitch that has really good ride that is tough to recognize at the top of the zone, and Bellinger,

he just looks surprised that the pitch got on him, and I think it's because he's just rushing his load and when he's getting into that load his his hands are in a different position he's not getting as much stretch in both his back and front hip and everything is just going really really quickly so he needs to just give himself more time and that could be directly related to giving himself more space in his swing. So yeah, those are the main things that I would tell him or advise him, I guess. And I guess, you know, when it comes to maximizing performance these days, it's often kind of a conversation that goes on between maybe analysts in the front office and then coaches at the field level and even trainers and people who are trying to help players do things in the gym and train in ways that can help them execute what they are trying to do or what the team is recommending that they do.

You know, if you have a coach or an analyst who says, well, you should be making this kind of move and the player just is not physically able to make that kind of move. Yeah, exactly. Then that's not going to work, right? And so Bellinger, I mean, like he's always been sort of a willowy guy, right? Like even when he was hitting for a ton of power, it was almost surprising because he's not, you know, by baseball player standards that big, that built. I don't want to be like the, do you even lift guy? But you look at him and he's sort of skinny compared to baseball players who are big generally. So this was working for him fine, obviously, like the build was not holding him back initially. So

I don't know if that means that now he's got to go and bulk up or add muscle or add strength or anything. But based on what you're recommending or what you're saying he should do, and anyone can weigh in here if you want to, but would you sort of prescribe a certain workout plan or say here have some protein shakes or like whatever? Does he need to change his his body in any way or is this more of the body's fine but the mechanics could change i'm just imagining force feeding cody billinger now scott boris with a bottle of whey protein just cradling him in his lap yeah i mean it's tough to say because you don't want to to compromise what makes him special and right what makes him special is that he is this really stretchy elastic player but at the same time it doesn't hurt to have muscle as long as it's not compromising like the mobile part of your body which I'm pretty sure that whatever team was to pick him up would make sure that his plan isn't getting rid of his mobility and flexibility. So, yeah, I mean, it doesn't hurt to have more muscle.

And I feel like when you see more wiry players earlier in their career who are just like super stretchy, amazing athletes, that sometimes they do tend to add more muscle as their career goes on and as their body changes, because it's inevitable that you're going to lose twitch. And so when you lose twitch, and you still want to have the same level of power output, you want to add on muscle to make sure that you have something to make up for what you're losing in one other part. So we're not going back to the pre-weightlifting days where it was, no, don't touch weights or you will be unable to move or you will pull all of your muscles or whatever.

Sometimes you used to hear that, although players do still pull a lot of muscles. So who knows? But Ryan, I apologize that you're bringing up the rear here and you can obviously echo anything that Robert Esteban has has said but interested in your take on bellinger tomb yeah so i had uh two main points that rob and esteban just snatched out of the air to start us off so on the one hand appreciate it guys on the other you know it's

good to see that i wasn't crazy and you know seeing the things i did specifically with the lower body stuff there's actually even like a handful of articles about that. One by, I believe his name was like Tyrion Alexander. And it has like a whole breakdown of it. But the big thing with that leg literally hitting with a broken leg, you know, he's doing the Greg Jennings out there. Is when Cody would stride when he's good, you know, he's a guy guy his foot basically stay his back foot stays in one place like it stays pretty anchored to the ground until he goes to swing after that uh fracture what you see is as he would stride his toes almost starts like open up towards the catcher as he went

forward now that's not like a inherently bad thing guys like carlos gonzalez and handley ramirez you know made tons of money and had awesome careers doing that. But it's an element of instability that Cody never had in his swing before. So it's addressing like, can that issue issue quote unquote be fixed or do we need to learn how to manage a swing with that move? The other issue, you know, with that shoulder being a little out of whack is everyone talks about how Cody like tinkers with his swing and stuff.

Well, like, is he consciously doing that or is that just to make his shoulder feel better? So I literally went and found a, you know, dug a bat out of my closet. And when he was, you know, early in his career in his stance, you can visualize that his elbow, his front elbow is basically as high as his front shoulder right it's like 90 degree angle after 2020 it started kind of his elbows are drifting lower and lower and lower which again it's just set up doesn't really you know in a vacuum matter but that's i can tell you that's way easier on your shoulder holding a bat like that so maybe that was like a little compensation he was making that he didn't even know about i think the big thing with cody is said, he's a guy who's tinkered. I think the first thing would be just straight up talk with him.

Find out. Because I guarantee you there's going to be a lot of people who come to him saying just out of the blue, hey, do this. I guarantee you there are some coaches who are down bad and have tried to slide into his social media DMs. Being like, hey, you need to do xyz he's gonna hear all that stuff so for me it'd be important to hear from him you know what has he tried what's worked what hasn't worked after you get that i would then run a highlight tape of adrian beltre's time in boston being hey this guy did a one-year deal he did well and he you know he got paid afterwards right if he can do it you can do it just try to build up his confidence in ways like that right scott boris client i believe so yeah and then going into the numbers a little bit you know i just i looked at kind of two basic One, what damage did he do on pitches that he was supposed to damage,

like on pitches down the middle? And those numbers, they fell way down post-2019. The other thing I looked at was what did he do beyond hitting pitches down the middle that made him really good? And he used to have the ability to take not down the middle breaking balls, but breaking balls that were on the outer third but still strikes and do damage on those pitches so you know pitcher trying to steal an early strike with a breaking ball he could hammer a pull side home run off and he

essentially lost that ability after 2020 so yeah he lost the ability to you know damage what he's supposed to and then lost the ability you ability to create extra damage outside of that. So it's looking at what can you recapture? What can you build with a maybe newer Cody Bellinger model of a swing and go on from there. But a lot of it to me is going to be having a conversation with him

and making sure his body can cash the checks that we're trying to write for him. Right. And let me ask you this and anyone can weigh in on this. I've seen sometimes people will say, oh, well, the league just figured him out. They figured out what his vulnerability was, and then they exploited it, and he hasn't been able to make the counter adjustment. It sounds like mostly you're all pinning the blame more on on bellinger being unable to do what he used to be able to do than just he always had a weakness and the league zeroed in on it and he just hasn't been able to

come up with a solution i guess it could be a combination of both where if he's unable to make some move that he used to make then pitchers scouts. can pick up on that and start to do whatever it is that he is least able to accomplish now, right? And pitch him in whatever spot it is that he's least able to reach. So what do you all think? Like, is this purely just things went wrong with Bellinger? He got hurt. Maybe his mechanics changed. He picked up some bad habits, etc. Or is it the league figuring out some flaw in bellinger that always existed or some combination of both i just want to say even if the league did pick up some flaw in him i glanced over you know pitch usage against him

very very briefly and nothing crazy jumped out but also he had three years you know 17 18 19 right where he did damage in the league so hypothetically even if the league did make some adjustment to him after that as a coach analyst whatever you sell that back to cody as hey when you came in with this it took the league three years to adjust to you all right you know again so if we can you know if there is an adjustment that needs to be made we make it you're gonna have three more awesome years there's ways to help kind of craft the narrative to cody All right. You know, again, so if we can, you know, if there is an adjustment that needs to be made, we make it, you're going to have three more awesome years. There's ways to help kind of craft the narrative to Cody that,

you know, if the league changes, they don't adapt as fast as, you know, you had three years of being awesome. All right. We can recapture that. So that'd be kind of how I would lead into that with him. Anyone else have thoughts on that?

Something Ryan said, uh uh stuck out to me that kind of applies here is uh over the last three years bellinger's strikeout percentage and swing percentage and other swing percentage where he's chasing outside the zone has increased and i think what might be going on there is not the league adjusting to Cody, but Cody adjusting to his new normal, essentially. Because if he can't do damage on pitches on the edge of the zone like he used to, then he kind of has to out that way, which would maybe some of you know. This is at Swing Graphs on Twitter and swinggraphs.com and the author of the book Quantitative Hitting, Swing Graphs being the site that offers a vertical bat angle measurement, which you have used in at least one recent article, as I recall, Esteban. And I asked DK for his diagnosis.

as I recall, Esteban. And I asked DK for his diagnosis. And to his credit, I think he regretfully declined to come on because he didn't really have a great recommended fix. He was somewhat flummoxed by Bellinger. He said, out of the entire league, the fix for Cody Bellinger is the biggest mystery to me. His swing path is a little changed from 2019, was a little better then, but it's not the reason for the huge decline. While everything looks a little worse, most of the data in my view says he should at least be average, and he's a long way from that. EVs better than average, although huge fall off in max exit velocity. What's interesting, he noted, and he sent me some data, which I will share on the show page, but he noted what's interesting is the under balls. They have really spiked and so has his swing and miss, guessing he's missing under on most balls.

Anyway, I really appreciate the invitation, but I like to have a reasonable basis for making a recommendation and I really can't find one. It seems like he's either aiming more under or he's having some kind of cognitive issues or mentally projecting pitch path, and I have no real knowledge or expertise in that area. So I always respect someone who says, you know what? I don't know. I don't have a fix here. But the data is interesting. I guess I should explain the term under balls because that could mean a lot of things.

But he basically sent me his rates of, like, hitting the ball weakly, topping the ball, so, you know, being over the ball, swinging too high and then swinging under and, you know, maybe being more likely to pop it up or miss or just hit a weak fly ball. And that does seem to have spiked according to this data pretty significantly since 2021, especially his rates of under have gone up from like 27% to 36, 37%, something like that. And he's toward the top or I guess the bottom in that category. I don't know whether that sparks any thoughts in any of you, this observation that he has been under a lot of pitches. Does that square with anything that

you have all been talking about or seeing, or is that surprising in any way? Yeah, I think that plays in really well with what Brian mentioned about how different hand positions make it easier on his shoulder. So one thing that I noticed is that in 2019, when he was getting into his foot plant, his bat was pointing, say, more horizontally or it was starting on a more horizontal plane. And now if you just take a snapshot of him at foot plant, more often than not, his hands are sort of the bat is pointing almost straight up. bat is pointing almost straight up and so you can think about it as when you're trying to make a movement to get into the zone it's followed by a reciprocal movement which is pretty much the opposite of where you start so I think that his barrel as it's entering the zone is just much more steep and that could explain him clipping the bottom of the ball a little more often I've been looking at Ronald Acuna swing the past few days and trying to explain like why he's hitting so why he hit so

many more ground balls this year opposed to pre-ACL tear and he is sort of doing the opposite that Bellinger was doing where he's really really good at entering the zone very steeply and still getting his barrel under the ball, getting his barrel under the baseball, where it seems like Bellinger is the opposite. When he makes that steep entry, he's clipping the bottom of the baseball more often than hitting it flush. That's interesting because you mentioned Acuna. I was looking at Dan Szymborski's post from August,

where he was talking about how unprecedented the falloff Bellinger has had is, and he ran a retroactive long-term zips projection for Cody Bellinger generated pre-2020 or on his pre-2020 performance. And at that point in rest of career war, Bellinger ranked third among position players behind Juan Soto and Ronald Acuna. So Soto still trucking along pretty much. I guess he had a slight down year by Juan Soto's lofty standards. And then Acuna has fallen on slightly harder times, but obviously nowhere near Cody Bellinger. And he is not as far removed from his injury. So we'll see if he can

get back to that point. But Zips had no concerns about Bellinger at that point. There were no red flags in the data as far as it could see before the actual decline came. So let me ask you this. I guess I'll direct this to Ryan first. It sounds like you're all in some degree of accordance. You're picking up on similar things here. You're all noticing different details and wrinkles, but no one is loudly shouting down the others and saying, what are you talking about? You're out of your mind. That's not happening at all. Probably be good podcasting if you were to do that, if this turned into a first take style

exchange about Cody Ballinger. But you've all been very polite and respectful of each other. Is that normal? I mean, you've worked with a lot of hitters, Ryan, with the Angels or just as a private instructor. Is it common for coaches generally to agree and reach similar diagnoses when it comes to players? Or is it more common for coaches to sort of each one sees a different thing and then if they make different recommendations to the player then that can screw them up royally yeah so before i answer that i want to just make one kind of lay out one thing that i don't think it's mentioned enough when you have to talk about these kind of swing rebuilds for lack of a better term, is that

Cody Bellinger has an amazing swing, all this stuff. He's also a person. There's no way, like, if we know things are going bad, it's going to be worse inside his own head. There's no way he's not pressing through all this. So a lot of times like, yeah, there's some mechanical stuff that needs to be

changed or could be changed, excuse me, and all this, but like end of the day especially being around these guys they are human beings as much as they look you know like you know video game avatars they are going to be going through it you know mentally physically whatever else so that's just something that i think it's lost in a lot of this especially because you can't put like you know you can't make a gif of belliger being frustrated with himself sitting you know sitting in a hotel you can in a lot of this, especially because you can't make a gif of Bellinger being frustrated with himself sitting in a hotel. You can make a lot of gifs of Cody Bellinger, and people have, but

largely about his expressions more so than... You can't make a gif of him sitting in a hotel room eating leftover room service being frustrated. I just want to lay that out there. Going back to you know will coaches agree disagree on this kind of stuff usually you'll get you know some measure of

agreement it's also tough when dealing with a hitter of bellinger's caliber that you sometimes you don't want to be the guy who sticks out um you know if this was just like a random a ball hitter you know some of us would come in here have you know no qualms to saying oh this guy needs to add you know i know it sounds crazy but he needs to add a gary sheffield style bat waggle or he needs the donaldson leg kick right like if this were jimmy ball player trying to get to the midwest league none of us would have problems saying that with a you know guy like bellinger who's got a literal a literal MVP and whose contract is going to be worth tens of millions of dollars, that's when it gets a little harder. That's when, for me, running a hitting room, if there are differences, those are the things we need to key on and be like, hey, why do you say that?

Because it's hard to speak up or even an email change or Slack channels, whatever. It's hard to be the guy who sticks out when you're talking about swing changes for, you know, an athlete of this measure, you know, with a guy like Bellinger, there's going to be agreement. And then there's usually not going to be any major disagreement, but with, there is points of difference. Those are the things I think you need to kind of hone in on and kind of bring those to light because it's a harder, you know, the situation is harder to bring up differences because no one wants to be the guy who completely, you know, quote unquote, tanks his career by making an off the wall recommendation. Right. Yeah. Although I guess when you are down bad, as you said, as a player, you're maybe more receptive to changing things, which I guess could be good or bad, depending on whether you're getting good recommendations, right?

If you're getting the wrong recommendations, then you'll be implementing the wrong changes. But if you've had a few bad years, then you're maybe more likely to change things. And if you're someone who obviously has talent and athleticism and stretchiness, right, then you are maybe more encouraged that that player could make those changes, I guess, right? Because like when people talk about swing changes and, you know, you list the Justin Turners and the JD Martinez's and all these guys who've really reinvented themselves, they are often pretty talented to begin with. Like there was some sign maybe that, you know that they could get the bat to the ball, let's say. They could make contact and they just weren't unlocking the power potential

that they had. Not everyone can do every kind of reinvention. So maybe when you have someone like Bellinger, the last few years notwithstanding, you are more inclined to think, well, he could get back to that level. I mean, I guess that's so self-evident that I you are more inclined to think, well, he could get back to that level. I mean, I guess that's so self-evident that I don't even need to say, like, if someone has been at that level before, that obviously you're more confident that they could get back to that level than with someone who has never been at that level getting to that level for the first time, right? So it's not shocking, I suppose, that lots of teams are talking themselves into, we should go get Bellinger.

Maybe we will be the ones to fix him or maybe he will fix himself or whatever, some combination of those things. A lot of teams want to be in the Cody Bellinger business despite the past few years. So one quick thing I do want to add that I think a lot of people won't recognize with this is this let's say you know random team gets cody how do you then implement the logistics of whatever you want to do with him can you convince him to come to your complex or to your big league field for six weeks do you have to then communicate with his like private trainer about that so there's there's so much more to this than just implementing two or three things with a guy like Cody.

And I think whatever team does get him, there's going to be so many behind-the-scenes logistics of how you try and optimize him that I think the public, us, will never see. But it's not like it's not as easy as you need to do this, be in a cage, but it's not like, it's not as easy as that. You need to

do this, be in a cage five days a week. Okay. Where's the cage. Okay. Who am I in the cage with? Okay. That coach who's with me, is he like foregoing working with other hitters on the big league roster or giving them attention? It's a whole, yeah, it's a whole dynamic that needs to almost be in place before you put pen to paper with Belanger. We might be able to figure out what went on if he actually is successful and has a great bounce back year. Then we'll get a bunch of stories about how it happened and how he did it. But if not, then maybe not. And another thing I wonder about is the fact that he's with the Dodgers all this time, right?

So if he were with another team that did not have a reputation for improving players, if he had been with the Rockies, let's say, sorry to pick on the Rockies always, you know, insert team here that is not the Dodgers, a team that has a reputation for helping players maximize their abilities and specifically hitters even, right? Like there have been so many hitters who the Dodgers have rehabilitated or have rehabilitated themselves under the Dodgers watch. And so I guess that might make you more pessimistic about his prospects just because all the things you guys are looking at and saying here, in theory, the Dodgers have looked at those things too. Like they certainly have all the things you guys are looking at and saying here, in theory, sometimes you just really do need the quote unquote change of scenery, right? Like you need new voices. You need a new context. Maybe it's hard if you're in the place where you were a superstar.

You can convince yourself that you can get back to that. Whereas if you actually have to go somewhere else, and of course you could end up with the Dodgers again. if you actually have to go somewhere else. And of course he could end up with the Dodgers again, but maybe it's tougher to just reinvent yourself if you're sort of in the same uniform and the same setting where you were doing something else and it was working so well. So any of you have thoughts on that aspect of things

that he's been with the organization that if you were just to pick out of a hat or out of all of the 30, you would say, oh, they'd probably be the best equipped or most likely to be able to help a player? Yeah, that's a really good point. And I've definitely thought about it. But then I think it's important to also consider how much pressure that he's under, especially with the Dodgers. They're constantly competing to win a World Series. I mean, they're usually the favorite, at least since he's been in the big leagues and on their roster. They've pretty much been the best team in the National League, maybe also in all of baseball. remake themselves or try and bounce back to what they were in environments that may be a little

easier than I was the MVP for this team. This team won a World Series in 2020. This team is loaded with superstars and I'm constantly needing to compare my performance to theirs. I, of course, I'm not speaking from experience here. I don't really know what's going on in his head, but just thinking about the human aspect of it and the pressure that's on him to be successful and to be an MVP for the best team in the league just seems like a lot. Right. And I'm sure that the teams that are reaching out to express interest in Bellinger are also trying to pick his brain a bit or Boris's brain, not just on what kind of contract they're looking for, but on just what their mindset is when it comes to making changes. can make available to players, right? I mean, they have in-house analysts and coaches and people who can help players. And you never know, maybe Cody Bellinger is convinced that he knows exactly what is wrong and he can fix himself and he's been an MVP and he doesn't need anyone's help. Or for all I know, it's the opposite end of the spectrum and he's listening to too many people

and he's too receptive or too coachable. So probably teams are trying to get a sense of maybe they have each come to the conclusions that you have come to today and have done that kind of research and have figured out, well, if we were to get Cody Bellinger, here's what we would recommend or what we would try to help him do. But then they probably also have to try to figure out, is he willing to listen to that or is he not ready? Is he not at that stage? And Ryan, I don't know if you have any perspective on that from having worked with a team.

I guess you were working with mostly minor league hitters. But how does a team try to gain some insight into a player's coachability or receptiveness to changes? Like if it's someone in your organization, then you just talk to them. But if you're thinking of drafting someone or acquiring someone, do you have a feel for how teams will try to get a sense of, well, if we were going to go get this guy, would he even be willing to listen to what we say or be willing to put the time in to practice and implement those changes yeah the baseball world is small enough kind of once you get into you know that realm of it where the good chance

somebody's going to know somebody who can give you details on a guy you know sometimes this is it's as simple as you know digging up a bunch of film on a hitter and seeing okay they've made obvious changes xyz did they do that on their own? You can even go back like as amateurs, were they making a lot of changes? Are they just a guy who's liable to do stuff like this? Or has there been kind of a, you know, intervening factor that's led to them making these changes? Once you do that, it's again, just trying to collect as much info from, you know, coaches, you know, who have worked with him. as much info from you know coaches you know who have worked with him sometimes it's you know his off-season workout group happens to be with one

of your players so you kind of try to build relationships that way just try to and trying to learn more about him and sometimes it's you know not even is the guy coachable not coachable end of the day they, they're pro athletes. There's some level of coachability there that's allowed them to cash paychecks playing a kid's game. So it's finding, okay, is he coachable in the way that we want to assign this coach to him? Or does he need another different voice within our organization? You know, let's say like you have the kind of younger, more analytically based guy who has all the, all this info that's technically correct. Is that the voice Cody needs to hear? Or is it, we have this more kind of old school coach who

played in the league for years, who can bring a lot of experience to the table is that the voice he needs to hear so it's not only crafting you know what the information that you think cody needs to help optimize himself but it's how is that gonna is that message going to be delivered who is going to be delivering that message is this a guy who's going to sit down and watch a presentation about swing changes you want to make or is this a guy you just going to sit down and watch a presentation about swing changes you want to make or is this a guy you just need to get in the cage with for a week and let him do his own thing and then start to kind of chip away at changes

there's just so much of it that goes into the front end of working with a hitter I wish I had a concrete answer of oh good teams just do this but I do not and this is a pivotal year for him because if he has another down year offensively then well he will have probably been a bad hitter for longer than he was a really good hitter and then perhaps teams would not be quite as interested or quite as optimistic about a bounce back and obviously he's hoping to parlay a one-year contract into a long-term deal and fully restore his value here. So I'm sure that he and Boris and

whoever's directly representing him are listening to these kind of presentations from teams because you could say a make or break year. I mean, he'd get another chance if he had another below average offensive year, he would still be only 28. So it's not really the end of the road, like it has to happen now, but obviously he's hoping that it will happen now and that he can change the story here and the trajectory. So I'll give you the projection for him. Dan Szymborski just gave me his updated Zips projection for 2023. And maybe you can tell me whether you're taking the over or the under here or what your level of confidence is. So first of all, his top near-age offensive comps, according to Zips, not really a murderer's row. Gary Geiger, Rupert Jones, Jim Nettles, Odobee McDowell, Tuffy Rhodes, Bob Speak. So yeah, that's a different

group of comps than it would have been a few years ago. His projection, his baseline is 226, 303, 412. That's a 93 OPS plus. So closer to average, but still below. the good news though is that he is projected to be worth two war which he came close to last year because again he does offer a lot of ancillary value one thing we probably don't talk about enough with Cody Pinscher is how he has transitioned on defense from coming up as a first baseman and mostly a corner guy to a plus defensive center fielder that's a pretty impressive thing that has happened maybe as the bat has declined. And that has kept him a viable even almost everyday player because he can be kind of

close to average with his speed, with his defense. So that's the positive. There are a lot of teams that would have a use for a player with those stats, even if his bat does not return to its former level. So his 80th percentile war projection, 3.3, his 20th percentile, 0.8. So he's projected to offer some value, but zips at least, and understandably given the past few years is saying it's a long shot that he will get back to being a significantly above average hitter. The system does give him a 77% chance of ever having a WRC plus above 100 again.

So that's something. But I don't know, Robert, you want to go first? I guess maybe each of you could offer your level of confidence whether you'd take the over on those numbers and and what odds you would give of him ever getting back to being let's say an all-star level player again let alone an mvp player uh so you said is a 93 ops plus yep that's probably in the in the range yeah that's a pretty good number. Yeah, I'm an optimist. I'll say he'll have like a one-on-one OPS plus or something.

But yeah, I mean, if he can get back to even league average, then he's such a good center fielder that that's an incredibly valuable player. And he's probably going to get picked up by a contending team i would imagine i would think he'd want to go to a winner so if you can get a league average hitting very plus glove in center field that's a that's a very very good player for any team i am interested to see if uh his his plate discipline like his his swing decisions improve at all as he as he gets a year you know another year removed from uh from the series of injuries that he had because i think he was pressing and if he starts to feel more comfortable at the plate after some mechanical

tweaks then uh he could make a big jump because the strikeout rate is really, that's like kind of glare. That's a standout change on his profile because he went from like 16% his MVP year to 27% the last two years. It's just enormous. And I don't think he's that bad as far as discipline goes. I wonder how much he would prioritize being with a winner. I'm sure he would prefer that all

else being equal, but he has had a lot of winning in his career already. He's been with the Dodgers. He won a World Series. And if he's signing only a one-year deal, maybe it wouldn't be at the top of the list. He'd probably prioritize just getting good again. Although I'm sure that there's probably a correlation between contending teams and teams that he would think are more likely to make him good again. So maybe it's sort of the same calculus either way. Esteban, how are you feeling about the prospects for Cody here? Yeah, I'm typically an optimist myself as well. So I'm happy to take the over. And in fact, I think this is all about different perspective and how you look at hitters,

but I think the fact that he has struggled in the heart of the plate is maybe a good thing, which it's funny to say, but like Rob said, if he can even rebound just halfway to what he was in the heart of the plate like that's a pretty significant jump from where he was in 2021 and 2022 and I think that he I've always really really liked his his swing and the way he uses his body and I'm just so hesitant to bet against that and to bet against him hitting fastballs in the heart of the plate again. I just think that he's special enough to overcome whatever he's dealt with and bounce back to being an above average hitter. And Ryan, how are you feeling short and long term?

Yo, usually I like being the guy who has a different opinion. But on this one, one, I'm not in the business of kind of dunking on hitters. You know, Pitching Ninja has enough views on his page. He doesn't need more of Bellinger and whomever else. But yeah, I'll take, you know, the over, I think. Getting with, you know, a new organization, getting, you know, just being able to clear his head a little bit. I think that will help him out. And at the end of the day, he's, you know, going into his late 20s.

He's got an MVP under his belt. The athleticism is through the roof. Like you said, coming up as a first baseman, then, nah, go be an elite level center fielder. This is a special athlete. Right. Yeah. 93 OPS plus. you know go be a elite level center fielder this is a special athlete so right yeah 93 ops plus like if he's able to fix the things that you're all recommending that that he fix or or the flaws that you're identifying then you can easily talk yourself into well he'll just be back to being the player he was again and then whoever gets him it will just be a windfall, which is why I think teams were interested in offering him multi-year contracts while his value is low now, hoping

that they could get him locked in at some low rate and then he would get back to a high level and then they would have a below market value Cody Bellinger. And that's why Bellinger and Boris are not interested in making that kind of deal. But it will be fascinating to see. And Dan told me that his 50-50 final career home run total is now 301. So Zips is saying that's kind of the baseline expectation that he will get to 301 home runs. He is at 152 now, so essentially halfway there, even though he's young. So it's projecting that he will stick around for a while, but not that he will return to his old level. And of course, a projection system is not going to project a full bounce back after a few years of not playing at that level generally. So

it's not surprising. But if he were to end up at 301, well, for most players, that's a heck of a career. You'd be quite happy to have hit 300 homers. But when you hit 39 as a 21-year-old rookie and then 47 as a 23-year-old MVP, then you have even loftier expectations. So maybe as we wind down here, could you each give me a window into your process here, how you came to these conclusions. You could talk about what you went through to analyze Bellinger specifically, or you could talk more generally about what you tend to do when you have this question of what has gone wrong here, or what can this hitter do well, or when you're just trying to evaluate a hitter. Because we talk so much about pitching data and everything that's available there, and there's such a wealth of it.

And there's a little less, at least in the public sphere, when it comes to hitting analysis and pitchers, always ahead of the hitters when it comes to the latest technology and the availability of data and everything. So if you could each just kind of give me a little window into your process, like how do you break down hitters? And if you have any thoughts on how you would do that differently, if you were with a team or when you were with a team in Ryan's case, in terms of what information is available to you there that is not available to you outside here from afar, that would be interesting too. So I guess we could go in the same order that we went initially, if you want to lead off, Rob. Yeah. So with a player like Cody, where there's like a very definite split in his career, I want to see what was going on when he was hitting well and see what it looks like now.

So I pull up video a lot of times to start with. I am a numbers guy traditionally, but with hitting analysis, I found that I really need to just like grind and watch a bunch of video to really pick up on the smaller details. So yeah, with him, I just pulled up video from 2017 to 2019 and then was comparing that to what I've seen the last couple years that I do go through and I see how he's done versus various pitch types and try to bring it all together in a way that makes sense. So with him, I think the loss of power became evident when looking at like his exit exit velocities but he hasn't whiffed more on any particular pitch type now compared to what he was during the first three

years of his career so it really was like a problem going on with the quality of contact and that's you know going back analyzing the video again and, you just kind of see where the kinetic chain breaks down. So that was just my way of doing things. It's kind of iterative, but it works for me. So do you start with the data? I guess it varies by player, but will you look for little tells in the numbers and then try to look at the video to analyze how that's happening or the other way around or some combination of both? It does depend on the player. With Bellinger, I started with the video, but with a lot of new players,

when I wrote about Julio Rodriguez and Bobby Witt Jr. earlier this year, I started with the numbers to get a feel for what exactly was going on. But yeah, with Bellinger, there was a feel for what exactly was going on. But yeah, with Bellinger, there was a lot of prior video to look at. So I began there. Esteban? Yeah, I'm a video first person. When it comes to conducting the research, I'm pretty much always video first.

I pull up a savant query and just filter on swings and group it by year and then just spend a lot of time in front of my computer watching video from each year just to see if I can pick up on anything before I look into the data. It's mostly because I will pick to write about someone or just to do research about someone when I'm watching the games so it feels like a natural next step to pull up the rest of their video to see what's going on. And then, depending on that, I will go to the plate discipline or the bad at ball profile. That part definitely depends. It just depends on what I see, what I've been hearing from the internet and other people. And then from there, it's funny that I'm saying I'm a video first person when I'm doing the research, because when I write, it's almost always data or other parts of information first. And then I like to go into

the video to link it all together. But yeah, I love watching hitters swing. So as much video as I can watch when I'm doing the research or just informing the other data that I've looked into, the more video, the better. how this differs now versus when you were with a team. Because I know this was years and years ago, but even when I was interning with a team, when I left that team and no longer had access to the information in the database that I had when I was there, it felt like a phantom limb. It was like, I want to have this information and all these great video angles and all these clips and all the wealth of information that that team made available that I was just deprived of when I left that team. I know there's maybe a little less data available at the minor league level than at the major league level, but I imagine there's still a lot that you just kind of have to approximate from afar. Yeah. So the program, everyone who moves

from ProBall out of it misses is a program called true media allows you to pull up anything on command the other thing i miss is having a crazy awesome video guy so what i would do when i would get kind of these kind of requests from the front office or whoever reach out to our video guy ryan dundee who was amazing and i'd get a couple playlists sent to me where it's like hard contact on fastballs hard contact on breaking balls and then like whiffs slash soft contact and the same thing so like four different playlists then I would just throw those all on the same folder randomize the order and just kind of watch them through and for me I think the first time I watch a video I almost try

to watch it like passively. Because if I go in saying, oh, something's wrong with, you know, this guy's rear elbow, I'm going to find something wrong with his rear elbow. Even if it, you know, it's totally fine. So, you know, almost like I'm going to make some dinner and have this running in the background and see if anything is like so obvious that it catches my eye. Then, you know, then obviously go back and watch it with more detail and try to really scope it out then. But just for me, it's like, how much of a clean plate can I go into this with?

And then going from there. So then once you kind of get an idea of what you're looking at, then going into the numbers. For me, the two things I always do is look at, I mentioned this earlier, is what are they doing it's pitches they should damage like it's you know pitches middle middle and then do they have any ancillary skills that allow them to be exceptional you know like with bellinger his his ability to hammer breaking balls on the outer third used to have and hopefully he can reclaim the final piece that i would like to do and just

because the time wasn't able to do this time is to see is there a template or is there you know a path where a progression like this has worked before it's a lot easier to walk through a forest if you have a trail so you know just kind of what i had if I had another day or two. And it's not a perfect comp, but, you know, I grew up a Rangers fan and, you know, got to watch Josh Hamilton do his thing. And he had one year, I think it was 2009, where he, you know, wasn't Superman that year. So just looking at it on BRAF real quick. Yeah, you know, he had his first two years in the big leagues, you know, OPS at 900. Then it dropped to 740, and then he won MVP the next year, you know, ops over 1,000. So that's not quite the, you know, the drop-off that Bellinger had, but, you know, similar age, similar thing, like, okay, Hamilton had, was amazing, had a year where he fell off a bit, and then captured it back, and then some.

where he fell off of it and then captured it back and then some. Is there like market change in that that you can obviously see and say like, oh, this has worked in the past. There is some kind of baseline for a late 20s hitter, you know, recapturing some of the productivity he used to have. And I know it can be tough because certain hitters do things that you wouldn't teach them to do if they were starting out and that might not work for other hitters do things that you wouldn't teach them to do if they were starting out, and that might not work for other hitters. But if they work for them, then you don't necessarily want to mess with success unless that success goes away.

So you have to be conscious of, well, this just isn't optimal maybe, or it wouldn't be for most people, or this looks strange, but it works for him. So let's just keep letting that happen. Just a couple of last things to close here. One question I wanted to throw out, because Ryan, you had a recent tweet that was kind of about hitting mistakes. You quote tweeted a Craig Hyatt tweet where he tweeted out just the display of where all of the pitches were that Aaron Judge hit for home runs this year. And you noted that in MLB, out of 5,400 homers, 3,200 were in the heart zone, middle-middle. That's 65%. For Judge, out of 62 homers, 44 were in the heart zone, 71%.

71 is bigger than 65. Get good at hitting mistakes, y'all. And that reminded me of a really interesting article that you wrote, Rob, for BP in late September, crushing bad pitches is a skill. So I wonder if you could walk us through that because I, in the past, have sometimes defended pitchers based on the idea that, hey, you know, not every home run is a mistake. It wasn't always a mistake pitch. The hitters are really good. Sometimes they take a good pitch and they hit it out or they do some damage on it. So could you walk us through that research and the idea that specifically hitting bad pitches is a skill? Yeah, sure. So I guess Aaron Judge drove a lot of conversation about hitting pitches over the heart of the plate this year, because that is

also what drove me to write that article. But yeah, for that, I did put some of the data skills I have to use because I kind of took different pitch types and found out how well each one did away from the middle of the plate. And like there was like a drop off point or no, it was league average. It was where I made the cut off. And then everything that was closer to the heart of the plate than league average for that pitch type was called a bad pitch. And I think it was something like 80 percent of home runs came on those. But the whole premise was basically that like hitters get one pitch to crush in every at bat.

And being able to do that consistently is what sets apart the great hitters from just the good or okay ones aaron judge this year was like historically good at it but even then he had a little above league average for home runs in the heart of the plate but uh it wasn't like everything um i think one guy who had every single home run he hit was on a quote-unquote mistake pitch or i called him cookies in that article right yeah cookies was uh i think brandon nima a hundred percent of his were were cookies i think andrew mccutcheon also but uh but yeah these are guys who at this point in their career they aren't like huge sluggers or anything but being able to do damage on those really, really made them valuable players for their team.

So, yeah, that was the gist of the article. It's just like, you shouldn't denigrate guys for punishing bad pitches because that's very important to be a good hitter. Yeah. As I guess Cody Bellinger has shown us, he has not crushed enough cookies lately. So, all right. And lastly, I don't want to put you on the spot here, put you in an uncomfortable position at all, Ryan, but we talk about the Angels a lot on this podcast just because of Trout and Otani. And like everyone else, we have lamented that those guys have not been on better teams and have not made the playoffs together.

And now in the last week or so, there's been some renewed enthusiasm about the Angels. What are the Angels doing? The Angels are going and getting some guys. They're filling in their holes in the roster with some average players at least, whether it's Tyler Anderson or Gio Urshela or lately Mike Trout lookalike Hunter Renfro. And I'm only asking you this because I've seen some of your tweets on occasion since you left the Angels not being entirely complimentary of ownership, let's say, or that organization. And ownership is changing, right? And Artie Moreno is selling the team in the process. So everyone's trying to figure out what are the Angels doing? They're going for it again. Is this just one last run with Otani? Is this related to the

sale? Is this just the angels being their usual confusing selves and taking a couple steps forward and then taking a few steps back? So whatever you're comfortable saying here, your perspective on the state of things there or Moreno or just, you know, why the Angels have not been able to get out of their own way more often. So I don't know, whatever you want to share your thoughts on just how the Angels have not managed to put things together with the incredible head start that they have with Trout and Otani on that roster? Well, I would like to work in pro baseball again. So I'll bite my tongue so hard it's going to bleed here. But I will say it's a lot of what you see

kind of in the public-facing element of ownership issues. It just becomes a domino effect. And that looks like it's changing. And while I have said a lot of things about my time with the Angels, there are still a lot of really awesome people who work there. There are still coaches who I still talk with who are with them. So can the organization be fixed? Like any large organization with a lot of moving parts,

it'll take time, but having that new ownership, maybe some better clarity at the top of how this organization wants to be viewed, how it wants to move forward. I think that's going to help everybody out. And yeah, I'll shut up before I say something I shouldn't. Yeah. Yeah. Not trying to get you in trouble here. Very diplomatic very diplomatic. I mean, you know, you were there, I guess, in 2020, right? When, I mean, there were things publicly reported, right? About the Angels, like what, not paying minor leaguers or cutting minor leaguers or whatever it was, Marino kind of being one of the owners who was least willing to support players, support the

organization in ways that other organizations sort of distinguish themselves on the opposite side of the spectrum, like the Royals, for instance. So that's public record. That's out there, I guess. So you can extrapolate from that probably, I guess, would be safe to say. But I'm interested in, because you were kind of part of a crop of internet hitting analysts, right? Or people who had some internet footprint who joined the Angels roughly around the same time, right? And maybe some are still there. Some have moved on. I wonder just kind of how that went from your perspective, what worked or what was a challenge?

Because we've seen other teams kind of commit to maybe remaking themselves, you know, like the Reds bringing in a bunch of driveline people and then deciding to go in a different direction after a couple of years. So sometimes these things stick and sometimes they don't and sometimes they seem to produce results and yet not really lasting changes. So what were your thoughts on that way of doing things or overhauling the coaching, the instruction that was happening at that time? And I guess, you know, just what's different about the reality of coaching professional players on that level as opposed to breaking them down on a podcast? them down on on a podcast so you know don't don't ask me loaded questions or anything i mean there it would be a whole podcast to go into the differences of the private world versus the uh professional setting yeah i would say kind of like i mentioned with you know arty and like the dominoes falling in the professional world you can't knock over just one domino so like let's say you go to make a swing change with

the player but like you haven't looked at his like player history he's tried that change before it didn't work so now he's going to try it because you're a coach telling him but you know he's not going to put his heart into it so now you're going to go backwards there and then his minor league coach had a good relationship with him now you've blown up their swing plan and now that you know there's just so many dominoes that go into you know every change needs to happen and then there's the documentation of everything there's very little on the fly stuff if it does happen it's going to get marked down it's going to get recorded you shouldn't really be surprised when you go to work with a player so i think that was the biggest change for me was learning to do a lot of work before I

got in the cage or before I got in the field to have, you know, a roadmap laid out, have contingencies ready if things went sideways. So I think that was the biggest change for me was learning that the work wasn't so much in the cage or on the field. It was everything I did beforehand to make things look like they were running smoothly in those settings as far as a lot of us being brought in at the same time 2019 was a huge learning curve for a lot of us in in that setting and what's not not frustrating but you know time machine type thing is 2019 like i I said, it was a big learning curve, a lot of chaos. And then rolling into 2020, a lot of us felt like we had, you know,

had our feet under us, we had good plans going forward. Yeah. And then the world had other things. Yeah. Then I get a message from my farm director, Michael Acosta asking if I had shaken hands with Charles Barkley when he was in camp that day, because he had tested positive for COVID. So the world ended and then 2021, we had brand new leadership and GM and all that. So it was a complete philosophy change. So there's just a lot that

goes into the pro world and to the coaches and analysts who are in the pro world, hats off to them. The time and effort these guys put into it, these guys and these girls put into working with players is unbelievable. I want to make that clear that you don't get the credit you deserve, and you should because y'all are the ones behind the scenes helping make these players tens of millions of dollars and these owners hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, this was all really fascinating. I appreciate you all coming on and tackling a big challenge here with Bellinger. Glad I could get this Bellinger brain trust together. And I would encourage everyone to find all of the guests that we've had today. You can find Ryan on Twitter at RA underscore Parker. And I guess he is a free agent like Cody Bellinger.

So maybe they can be a package deal. You can go sign Cody, go sign Ryan to help implement the changes that he recommends that Bellinger could make today. And you can also find Rob Orr at NotTheBobbyOrr on Twitter and also writing regularly at Baseball Prospectus. And then Esteban is at Fangraphs, and he just posted his Acuna article that we were discussing. I will link to that on the show page. But he is also on Twitter at ESTEE Rivera 42.

So thanks, guys. This was really great. And I guess we'll see whether any of these fixes happen and whether Bellinger can put any of this into practice and restore his career. But this was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. And happy holidays. Yeah, thanks a lot, Ben. Pleasure talking with all y'all. And happy holidays to everyone out there.

Well, we've done it. Mystery solved. Let the Cody Bellinger bidding begin. You're welcome, Cody. You're welcome, Scott Boris. We, we've done it. Mystery solved. Let the Cody Bellinger bidding begin. You're welcome, Cody. You're welcome, Scott Boris. We've solved all your problems. Boris can direct a cut of his commission from the forthcoming long-term deal that Bellinger will sign next winter to Rob, Ryan, and Esteban.

Of course, my favorite Bellinger will always be Clay Bellinger, Cody's dad, our guest on Effectively Wild episode 1611. But I wish Cody well too. And not just because his success would make Clay happy. And I guess this is kind of Cody Bellinger day at Fangraphs because unbeknownst to me, Chris Gilligan also wrote about him and he noted something that

is also pretty important and a good reason to take the over on that projection. I will just quote him here. Another reason to take a flyer on Bellinger? Well, it's not easy to say exactly what kind of league-wide effect banning the shift will have. He has been one of the most shifted hitters in the majors for years now. In 2022, he faced an overloaded infield in 90.5% of his plate appearances, and his.302 WOBA in 52 plate appearances with the shift off was nearly 20 points higher than his WOBA with it on. Nearly everything Bellinger hits on the ground goes to the pull side, and next season teams will only be allowed two fielders to knock those down instead of three. Is this going to turn him back into the 47 homer MVP of 2019?

No, but it could help a good base runner get on base more often, and that's added value. Excellent point. Bellinger does have an abysmal BABIP over the past three years, 2.35 that is tied with Anthony Rizzo for third lowest in baseball over that span, minimum 1,000 plate appearances behind the quite slow Carlos Santana and Gary Sanchez. Maybe we can have one or more of these hitting analysts back at some point before opening day to talk about how they expect batters to adapt their approach, if at all, because of the dead and ball and the banning of the shift. I've got to give you a pass blast from 1934 and

from Jacob Pomeranke, Sabres Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. Jacob writes, 1934, the value of scoring first. Before the 1934 season began, the Sporting News commissioned a series of early sabermetric articles from Edward Beale, B-I-E-L-E, who was identified only as, quote, expert accountant, unquote. Beale conducted a study of 1,000 major league games played over the previous two years and used his analysis to explain trends in pitcher usage, scoring by inning, and late inning comebacks. Here's a brief example of Beale's analysis from the February 1st, 1934 edition of the Sporting News. Quote, does the team which scores the first run generally win the game?

This is a question that has intrigued students of the past time. It was John McGraw who said there is a substantial psychological advantage to the first run, and he added the other team must then score at least two in order to win. In 588 of 1,000 games studied, the team which scored the first run won the game, an indication that in almost 59% of all games, this system meets with success. When it is remembered that the first run of the game is almost invariably scored in one of the early innings, the significance of these figures will be fully appreciated. In more than one half of the games, the first run is scored in the initial inning, and in

88.5% of all games, the first run has been chalked up before the end of the third inning, end quote. Jacob concludes, Beal's article continued with a few more statistical nuggets on high-scoring innings, extra innings, and rainouts. After these five stories were published in 1933 and 34, Edward Beal's name never appeared in the sporting news again. Little is known about his background or how and why he came to conduct his study and write these articles. Little is known about his background or how and why he came to conduct his study and write these articles. Now that we have more data instantly available, we know that his answer to the question about team scoring first still holds up well today. Score early, score often, win a lot of games. A formula that was as true in 1934 as it is today.

And yes, it is still true. If anything, he underestimated. It may have been different back in the early 30s than it is now. Different run environment, etc. High scoring era. These days, I think it's more like 65 to 70 percent of the time the team that scores first wins. There have been a lot of changes since Edward Beal's time, bullpen usage, etc. But of course, it makes sense that the team that scores first in the game would win most of the time, not just for the reason that John McGraw cited, that that means that the other team has to score at least twice to win. But of course, there are some shutouts.

There are games where the other team doesn't score at all. Plus, the better team is just going to score more often in general and thus will score first more often. So if you're the team that scores first, you're probably also likely to be the team that has a better chance of scoring the most just because it's a better team. Of course, these rates vary based on how many runs you score when you score first, but there aren't that many runs scored on average in a big league game, what, eight to nine runs. So if you score first, you have to score fewer times over the rest of the game to win. And of course, you've already

used up an inning in which you scored, but teams don't score in most innings on average. So you're ahead of the game if you did score in an inning. Anyway, I'm probably over explaining this. This is probably pretty intuitive, but it's always good to run numbers and check and make sure these truisms are actually true. And Edward Beale did that. So it's intriguing that he showed up and ran these numbers and did these studies and then disappeared, rode off into the sunset. Someone should look into what happened to Edward Beale. Not the first person with a sabermetric mindset. F.C. Lane and others predated him, but still, it probably took a lot of labor to look up that information that Ryan Nelson, our frequent StatBlast consultant, could probably query in a minute or two. This reminds me of our past blasts from 1890 about Ella Black,

the first woman baseball reporter, who had a similarly short career, covered the game for a season, and then sort of disappeared. It was, I suppose, a little tougher to keep track of people in those days. A bit of baseball news we had alluded to recently. Bryce Harper had his Tommy John surgery. It sounds like he had the full procedure, not the internal brace. So he will miss some of next season. Maybe he could be back by, oh, June-ish, let's say, perhaps, as a hitter at least, and then maybe in the field after that, perhaps at some point next season. So good to get him back on the road to full health, but it's a blow to the Phillies not to have his bat in the lineup for a couple months at least.

But they went through that this year, and it worked out just fine for them. Two other quick follow-ups. On our last episode, I made a comment about how I wasn't sure a team Twitter account or team Twitter account tweets merited inclusion in our baseball Twitter draft. We didn't actually take any team Twitter accounts, and sometimes team Twitter accounts get sassy and it can be kind of entertaining, but I always wonder, is this sort of a work? But I was reminded by a listener in the Facebook group of one example that definitely deserves to be on there, and that is the Toronto Blue Jays account at Blue Jays back in 2019, a wonderful exchange where the Blue Jays account at Blue Jays back in 2019, a wonderful exchange where the Blue Jays posted a lineup on their official team Twitter account.

Justin Smoke wasn't in it. So someone replied and said, did you trade Smoke? And the Blue Jays replied and said, no, he has neck tightness and could be available to pinch hit if needed. And the original tweeter replied and said, source? I don't know whether they were serious or not, Twitter replied and said, source. I don't know whether they were serious or not, but the Blue Jays iconically responded, literally us, the Blue Jays, should have drafted that. Also in the tweet draft, it was mentioned that Jose Canseco had tweeted about time travel, but never returned later to explain how time travel is possible. Effectively wild wiki keeper Raymond Chen notes, not true. On the same day as the tweet, Vice ran a story by Canseco titled, Let's Talk About Time Travel. He also returned to the topic on Twitter in 2019.

In that Weiss story, which has a Jose Canseco byline, he says the only way to time travel is in your dreams subconsciously. So that's semi-disappointing. Also, I made an offhand comment in passing on the last episode about how I wasn't sure that catchers should get the sole credit on put outs on strikeouts. It seems like they get to run up their put out totals because of that. But Michael Mountain, listener in our Patreon group, was noting, and I had already thought of this after I recorded, that it is actually quite comparable to first baseman getting the put out on a ground ball to short and then just receive the throw. That is essentially what the catcher is doing. It's not a strikeout until the catcher catches the ball. So yeah,

they should get a put out. You could say that the bulk of the credit belongs to the person who delivered the throw or the pitch in each case, but the put out is recorded when it's caught. However, in the first baseman scenario, the ground ball to short, the shortstop gets an assist. The pitcher does not get an assist on the strikeout. So I think maybe pitchers should get defensive assists when they record strikeouts in addition to being credited with strikeouts. Maybe it's double counting. I don't know. This isn't particularly important. Listener Sir Parsifal disagreed about pitchers getting an assist because third strike rules all work under the basic unstated assumption that the third strike is a ball in play. Giving pitchers an assist would

mess up how elegant those rules are. Now Sir Parsifal is a fan of the drop third strike is a ball in play, giving pitchers an assist would mess up how elegant those rules are. Now, Sir Parsifal is a fan of the drop third strike rule because it just works exactly like any other ball in play, but he is in the minority there. As he noted, I may be the only person in the world other than A.J. Pruszynski to be a big fan of the drop third strike. We've discussed that before. This was the same Miller hobby horse. But Sir Parsifal, who runs the at old baseball news Twitter account, old timey baseball articles, he referred me to an old article headlined Another Freak Play. The story in Tuesday's post, which told of pitcher Crichton getting an assist on a strikeout, seemed to prove very interesting to readers.

Several letters telling of interesting plays have been received. One from an Ohio State University fan follows. I noticed in your current baseball extra on account of a unique play in the Portsmouth-Newark game at Portsmouth Monday in which Crichton, pitching for Portsmouth, had an assist on a strikeout. I believe I can go you one better on this. During one of the interclass baseball games at Ohio State University this spring, the batter had two strikes on him and the catcher signaled for a drop and stooped, extending his right knee somewhat. The batter struck at the ball, but the catcher missed the ball, which hit him on the kneecap

and bounded back to Finney, who threw the man out at first, thus giving him an assist on a strikeout. So hey, it's possible. That was from the Cincinnati Post in August 1908. But if we go back further, and why wouldn't we, then we find that this was actually a subject of some controversy in the 1880s and 1890s because originally pitchers were credited with assists on strikeouts. So I suppose I'm an originalist on this issue. According to Sir Parsifal's research, it looks like maybe the American Association

stopped crediting them with assists after the 1885 season. The NL got rid of it after the 1888 season. I asked former past blaster Richard Hirschberger, author of Strike 4, The Evolution of Baseball, about this, and he confirms the 1888 scoring rules include in the section defining assists, an assist shall be given the pitcher when the batsman fails to hit the ball on the third strike, and the same shall be entered in the summary under the head of struck out. This paragraph is removed in the 1889 rules. The why is trickier and speculative.

First off, strikeouts were already in the summary. The summary was made an official part of the scoring in 1887, but did not include strikeouts in it until 1888. At that point, strikeouts are being double counted. This is explained by a report of the Joint Rules Committee's meeting of March 2, 1888. The report of the 1888 meeting included Ks being removed from the main tabulation as assists and being added to the summary. This was a committee of both the National League and the American Association to coordinate the rules, but both leagues had to ratify any change for it to go into effect. Clearly, one of the leagues rejected this change while not cleaning up the summary rule.

All of this just pushes the question back, why make the move in the first place? We aren't told, but I can make an educated guess. This era saw a lot of discussion about battery errors, defined as bases on balls, wild pitches, and passed balls, distinguishing them from fielding errors and the assignment of credit and blame. The 1887 rule counting bases on balls like hits in batting average was part of this discussion. The older thinking was that a walk was an error, in the sense that it was blamed on the pitcher. But an error also assigns blame to the batter, which didn't seem right, so in 1877 it was moved into the battery error category and not counted in at bats. But this produced confusion about earned runs. If a walk was the result of an error, it followed that if that

runner scored, the run was unearned. This made sense initially, when the idea of earned versus unearned runs was about whether or not to credit the batting team for those runs. Gradually, the idea shifted, becoming more about whether or not to blame the pitcher for those runs. In this light, not including walks in earned runs made no sense, hence the 1887 rule. That lasted only one year, then they landed on the modern solution that walks don't count in at bats, but any runs that result are earned. Now how does this tie into assists for strikeouts and the general rethinking of how to assign credit or blame? Pitching achievements were more and more split out from fielding achievements. This is the era when we start to see talk of a pitcher

winning or losing a game, as if there weren't eight other guys involved in that win or loss. From this perspective, counting throwing a third strike the same as fielding a batted ball to first no longer made sense. Pitching and fielding were now seen as essentially different activities, hence the modern rule. Of course, originally, the pitcher wasn't really trying to keep the ball out of play. The expectation was that it would be put in play, and baseball was more about the batter versus the fielders than the batter versus the pitcher. That's Richard's best guess anyway. But I say bring back the defensive assist for pitchers on strikeouts. This is the platform I'm running on. So that will do it.

Hopefully these episodes have been helpful to you if you are traveling for the holiday, if you are sequestering yourself for the holiday, you've had something to listen to. And of course, maybe you were listening to this long after the holiday and you don't even know what holiday I'm talking about. It's Thanksgiving. So happy Thanksgiving to all of you who are celebrating it. We are certainly thankful for you. Speaking of which, thanks to everyone who has supported us on Patreon, which you can do at patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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. Brian Kelly, Doug Gale, Isaac Stevenson, Kyle Lewis, and Brian N. Parsons. Thanks to all of you. Our Patreon supporters get access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for Patreon supporters. They also get access to monthly bonus podcasts, plus discounts on merch, ad-free FanCrafts memberships, access to playoff livestream, plus discounts on merch, ad-free Fangrafts memberships, access to playoff livestreams, and

even more. Again, patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you're thankful for us, you can show it on Patreon. You can also contact us via email at podcast at fangrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can also show it by rating and reviewing us on iTunes or

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we keep on waiting for the miracle to come roll down the mountain to the sound of sad strings. We keep on waiting for the miracle. For the miracle. We keep on waiting for the miracle.