Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 683: The Almost Inexplicable Stephen Strasburg

Episode Date: May 26, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Dan Jennings, then attempt to explain Stephen Strasburg’s perplexing season.

🎵 What's it gonna take? 🎵 🎵 Wish you'd help me find the key 🎵 🎵 It's happening again 🎵 🎵 Tell me your secrets 🎵 🎵 Before I try to give it to you straight now 🎵 🎵 What's happening inside? 🎵 🎵 We need a little help now 🎵 🎵 Tell me why you think you gotta find the key now 🎵 Good morning and welcome to episode 683 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com.

I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi, Ben. Hi. How are you? You know very well how I am. It just sort of feels like we're leading a double life. It does. Now that we're recording the podcast, because it used to be the case that we would talk only when we did the podcast, and then we would go about our separate lives. and then we would go about our separate lives.

But now we have lives together away from the podcast and now we are recording as podcast us after spending the day as Stompers us. And it feels like we're hiding things from the listeners. I mean, it also feels like you're living a double life specifically because you are nothing like the person on this podcast. It's like that laugh, laugh for instance that everybody just heard no no never never laugh ben is in a ben is in a complete zombie haze all the time the first episode of this podcast episode one it was 10 times the energy he brings to life and this is

like a very odd thing to go from from real life Ben who just grunts at you sometimes if he's extremely impressed to this podcast Ben who's like really bringing it. Like you're a normal, engaged human being laughing at the right parts. Yeah. Talking about things. I can't do this all day. I would run out of steam very quickly. It's true. I guess it must take a lot out of you.

It does. Yeah, no. I feel like I have two bends. Like you are – it's like the – it's the exact opposite of the prestige, I think. I'm not sure if it is or not, but I think it is. I saved my best self for the podcast. But it also feels weird today because you and i spent an entire day watching baseball that mattered and now we have to talk about this fake mlb nonsense that nobody cares about

certainly we don't care about it we don't care about it as much as we care about a unofficial spring opening scrimmage yeah we won't we won't bore people by teasing little bits of our book that will be out a year from now. But there is this whole other baseball that we are sinking ourselves into. And then there is real baseball, which is almost secondary, even though I'm still writing about it and we're still talking about it and following it throughout the day, it definitely feels like the less important baseball, even though to everyone else, it is the more important baseball. All right. Let's do a couple of quick banters about things we've talked about previously. Yeah. I have put a stop to some conversations in person for fear that we would use up banter that could be used on the show. Yeah, that's true. And because he hates talking.

Yeah, I have to do a lot of talking these days. All right, so Dan Jennings we talked about. And right after we talked about Dan Jennings, this feels like a long time ago because this is a three-day weekend, but right after we talked about Dan Jennings, the Marlins first had that embarrassing thing where none of their players showed up to a publicity event. Fans could pay $100 to hang out with members of the team at a fish and chips event, by the way.

I should say hashtag fish and chips event, which I guess probably means it must have been a poker night. That must be a pun if there's a hashtag then then i'm assuming there's a pun here that makes sense so then because fish would be the marlins and then chips is has got to be poker or some sort of casino right i'm guessing this is a casino night with the marlins and jennings and his coaching staff showed up but no players did yeah no players did And so then you have to, first you wonder, oh, whoa, is that a thing? Was that a protest of some sort? And then you wonder, if not a protest, was it poor organization?

Because it does seem weird. Doesn't it seem weird to you that the coaching staff of a major league team could possibly be responsible for telling millionaires what time the charity casino night is? Yeah, well, it was not mandatory that Marlins players attend. I don't know whether it's whether you can make that mandatory, whether that whether that's a collectively bargained issue, whether you want your players to show up at Fish and Chips night. But they were not required to attend. And maybe there was just an assumption that someone would attend, that out of 25 players, someone would show up. And no one did. And there were comments. There was a comment by a Marlin saying that it wasn't a protest about Jennings or anything.

It was just a long day, and there was a game, and they were tired, and it was bad timing. But, yeah, you kind of wonder whether it's something else. I saw Latroy Hawkins enter in Vernon Wells' bowling. Uh-huh. At a charity event. That's my claim to fame okay uh so i and then uh more dan jennings did you see that opposing managers have been taking like not particularly veiled shots at his managing which is very unusual i saw chip hales comment yeah

how it's frustrating that a guy can get hired without going through the grind and earning it okay which is i guess is fine although because chip hale did go through the grind you know he was a bench coach for a long time but i mean if you're going to complain about that wouldn't you complain about all the millionaire baseball players who get to do it without any grind before you did the gm who's been working in front offices anyway whatever so not only that but Chip Hale I'm going to read from a Miami Herald piece Hale pointed to what he perceived to be a managing oversight by Jennings last week when believing the Marlins didn't have a right hand already in the bullpen sent in right-handed pinch hitter

AJ Pollock to face lefty Mike Dunn last week. Pollock's two-run homer proved the difference in the outcome, never mind the fact that right-handed reliever Brian Morris had warmed up one inning early and was ready to go if summoned. So, Hale is insulting Jennings' managing while himself actually being unaware of the situation, it appears. And then on Sunday, after Jennings' bullpen moves figured prominently in a win over the Orioles, Buck Showalter sounded unimpressed. Quote, they used, what, three guys, three days in a row out of the bullpen to get it done? We'll see how that works down the road.

So that's kind of interesting, right? You don't ever really hear managers insulting managers. I didn't really, I guess this isn't the Marlins concern, but of all the things that I thought, of all the tension that I thought that this might create, manager on manager tension was not what I expected, but apparently managers feel insulted by this. Yeah, it feels a little like an unwritten rules violation to publicly chastise another manager's managing because managers hate being second-guessed by anyone,

and you'd think that they wouldn't want to do it to each other, and yeah, they must not regard Jennings as a member of the manager fraternity. Yeah, so I guess I would say that managers, there's a professional courtesy to not criticizing your own. But I guess maybe this is the manifestation of professional courtesy by sort of saying that an outsider is not welcome in your profession and that the 29 are sticking together against him or something. It is odd. I guess it's somewhat foreseeable. He's the boss. They all have a boss who's just like him.

They all probably, to some degree, resent their boss, as most people do. And so the idea that their boss could come in and take their job is probably insulting to them, I guess. I don't know. It seems silly. Yeah, kind of undercuts them. If they have some kind of power struggle going on with their GM and they're saying that they know something that the GM doesn't know

because they're the manager. And now in this other team, there's a GM just becoming the manager. And if it works, then it's sort of showing that their boss could do the job. So we'll see if it works. Did you watch The Roosevelts on PBS? There's this great quote in there about FDR from somebody at the time who said, FDR is, quote,

is the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch. Great quote. I've thought about that quote a lot because I am in charge of some people now and I feel like I am kind of obnoxious. And I feel bad about that. I want to do better.

All right, second banter. Tim Lincecum allowed three home runs. That's pretty much my banter. He allowed three home runs. He allowed, I think, four runs in five innings, struck out four, walked three. Really, frankly, to be totally honest, if you strike out four, walk three, and allow three home runs,

you should allow a lot more than four runs. So still getting it, still getting whatever Lincecum's dad luck there is to be gotten from being born of Lincecum's dad, I guess, because that's not a good start at all. But yeah, five innings, five hits, three walks, three homers. So eight base runners, three homers, and only four runs in five innings. Kind of magical in itself, but I guess you'd say that that's a little regression. Yeah, well last year I picked the perfect time to write about Tim Lincecum right before everything fell apart. I wrote about him like exactly when his

season was at its high point, which I guess is what happens a lot of the time because we write about the player who's doing well or doing something unexpected and then he stops doing so well or doing something so unexpected. And so, yeah, we talked about Lincecum when he had a 2.08 ERA, and clearly this was coming at some point. Was that your – that was your Grantland debut, wasn't it? That was a bad debut. Yeah, and I liked that the headline was,

don't call it a Lincecum back because it was not. No, it turned out to be. It was not a Lincecum back. Don't call it a Lince comeback because it was not. It was not a Lince comeback. Don't call it one ever regardless. If it is, don't call it that. It's kind of good in retrospect because it makes it sound like I was saying that it wasn't a comeback. If you don't read the article, if you just look at the headline, it seems a lot less dumb. Yeah, the next day he allowed six in four innings. The next day, so 24 hours later, that article lasted 24 hours.

The start after that, five runs in three innings. And so his ERA was a full run within four starts. Good memories. So let's talk about Steven Strasburg. So Steven Strasasburg as everybody knows is having a hard time of it he's allowing seven runs per nine of which six and a half are earned he is i think i saw this jeff pass and i think said the highest or second highest era among qualified pitchers he of course of course, I will just get this

out of the way so that we don't have to waste a level of conversation noting this. His FIP is pretty good, although not great, but it's three runs lower. If he had an ERA of 3.67, which is what his FIP is, nobody would be complaining about him, but he doesn't. He has an ERA of 6.50. be complaining about him, but he doesn't. He has an ERA of 6.50. And of course, Steven Strasburg, probably more than any other pitcher in the world, this gets attention because Strasburg is the most hyped pitcher in history and was not only the most hyped pitcher in history, but was an extremely good pitcher in his first five years who always seemed like he was on the cusp of something incredibly great, which is what we all expected of him. And yet in those five years, he never did get there. He never did manage to be that ace.

He was widely perceived to be an ace without ever actually having been one. He got, I think, one fifth place Cy Young vote in his first five years. He made one all-star team. He missed one postseason for kid glove-related reasons. And now he's terrible. So I guess the first question is, how much accuracy is there in the sentence, so now he's terrible? Well, much of my research for this podcast involves reading a Jeff Sullivan post from a couple weeks ago where he dove deep into Steven Strasberg and he looked at all the stuff that was going wrong and he found that there were actual reasons to worry that it wasn't as simple as just pointing to the high BABIP and he does have an extremely high BABIP. It's now at 390. But there seemed to be

a reason why he had a high BABIP, and there was an explanation from Steve McAddy about the Nationals pitching coach about how Strasburg had altered his delivery to pitch through a minor injury, and then bad habits developed during that time had stuck. And it seems telling, perhaps, that he has pitched much worse with runners on base, that he's been fine, more or less fine with the bases empty, but has been much worse with runners on. And you can kind of see that in his his strand rate his left on base rate is right now 57.8 percent so when a guy gets on against him he scores almost half the time he's just been bad at at preventing guys from scoring once they get on and he's allowing a higher contact rate and i think much of the difference i want to go back because okay so explain what jeff's point really

was why did jeff explain that the contact that he has been allowing is not necessarily just flukish bad babbit block well because it has happened there's been a pattern to it where it's happened with runners on more so than let me rephrase steve mccaddy's explanation for it tell me steve mccaddy's explanation for why strasburg is allowing bad contact okay steve mccaddy's explanation i can just read from an article that jeff cited when strasburg's left ankle was taped up it made it hard for him to land properly on his front foot, which led to him throwing across his body, leaving pitches up and off-speed pitches, losing their bite.

But in between starts, McAddy worked with Strasburg on fixing his alignment on the mound. They simply didn't translate to the game, and McAddy says he's been fine in the bullpen. His stuff has been great in the bullpen, but then he gets out there and he falls back into these bad habits that were developed while he was trying to pitch through a minor injury. Okay, so let's focus on this for a minute. Does this explanation that McCaddy has offered, A, seem reasonable to you? B, does it say that this article ran three weeks or two weeks or

whatever ago, and that in fact the problems have have gotten worse and that whatever fix he has in the bullpen has not only not translated to the mound, but also, why would that be? mechanical problem. Sometimes it seems to really be the case. Other times, I don't know, maybe it seems like the player is trying to justify a poor performance somehow or a coach is. Maybe the coach is trying to make the player more confident by saying it's just a simple mechanical tweak and he's close to fixing it. So I can believe that if a player has some sort of injury, Strasburg had a minor left ankle injury in the spring, and maybe he could have altered his mechanics to compensate for that somehow, and the bad habits could have stuck. But yeah, it's not very obvious.

Jeff couldn't find a clear tell looking at pictures and video from this year and last year so it's not something that stands out incredibly obviously and you would think that if maddie knew exactly what the issue was weeks ago and strasburg knew exactly what the issue was weeks ago that it would have been fixed by now assuming strasburg is coachable and mccaddy can go he is coachable because he got fixed in the bullpen right we're we're led to believe that this was fixed already in the bullpen and he just needed to bring it i look i will say that steve mccaddy has spent i don't know 60 hours on this and i've spent 18 minutes on this so he is to be deferred to but i don't buy that i i i just don't i like to me if he's if it is the ankle injury that hurt him and he's and he is continuing to throw poorly and it

to me that says oh my gosh well the ankle injury is still hurting him once the ankle injury stops hurting him i have a very hard time believing that a bad habit that he picked up from three weeks of pitching with a sore ankle is going to overwhelm the 20 years of muscle memory or even the three years of muscle memory that he's got. I just don't really buy that. I don't buy that he has, in that short period of time, developed a bad habit that he just can't kick. And I don't. I don't think so. So I'm going to say I don't believe that.

Okay. Yeah, go ahead. Second point. Matt Trueblood also wrote about Strasberg and his issues on May 8th, which was 17 days ago. And at the time, what interested Matt so much about this was that strasburg had become phil hughes i think the first headline that we had was something like how strasburg became phil hughes he had become an extreme strike zone pounder like he was up there with hughes which was not where he had normally been and indeed if you look at strasburg he has walked very few batters he has

walked 13 batters in 46 innings and three of those came in the first game he pitched walked one in his last start one the start before one the start before that two and then one these were all bad starts like these are five bad starts but without any walks and so if you i know that i i know command and control are different things. I know that when we say them, we mean different things. However, you would think there would be an extremely tight correlation between command and control. And if Strasburg is able to throw more strikes at a higher rate than he's ever thrown in his career, which he is. He's pounding the strike zone like he never has.

ever thrown in his career which he is he's pounding the strike zone like he never has it just doesn't really pass the smell test to me that he's got this incredible control that never misses the strike zone except always misses by exactly the wrong two inches because like he's broken like to me that is not the profile of a guy whose ability to control the baseball is broken. So I just don't think that's it. I don't think that, I think that he is, well, let's say that his, okay, now I'm going to back up. You could make the case that, in fact, Sam's an idiot and that he's wrong. And you could say, well, no, here's the explanation. He has a worse control than ever,

and he's compensating by focusing He has worse control than ever, and he's compensating by focusing on throwing strikes more than ever because that's kind of what command and control are. That's the distinction. Control is sort of are you trying to throw strikes? Are you avoiding walks because you are a strike zone pounder or whatever the case may be? Maybe you just have great command. And then command is are you able to put the pitch where you want it and so maybe he has adjusted to his poor command by becoming extremely intent on throwing the pitch

right down the middle and that's why i've had the hypothesis in the past that for pitchers on the downslope of their career fifth is a lagging indicator because they adjust to their loss of stuff by becoming Joe Blanton. And so they end up being around the strike zone, doing the things that make you a FIP god while not being very good pitchers. So that's conceivable. And so I will allow that that is an alternate explanation. But I don't see that. I think that that is not the most likely explanation, given what we know about Strasburg. And so I'm going to say no. Do you remember when there was a whole controversy about Strasburg pitching to contact?

I think that was in 2013, and it was maybe, I don't know, he wanted to be more efficient, and he either took it upon himself to pitch to contact more to try to get outs more quickly, or maybe that was a pitching coach-inspired move also, and he struck out fewer guys that year, and he was basically the same effectiveness as he had been the year before, but there was briefly some talk about how Strasburg was trying to pitch to contact after being one of the hardest pitchers to make contact against. The odd thing about that is that he had a career-worst walk weight.

Uh-huh. Yeah. So there's some precedent for that, for him just suddenly deciding that he wants to be a different type of pitcher. So maybe he had some other sort of epiphany, which may or may not have been counterproductive. I mean, he's throwing a little bit more slowly. He's lost velocity basically every year of his career, right? He came in throwing 98 or so, and he's lost a little but not really much this year. If you look at Brooks, it's basically the same as it was last year. So I don't know if that's any sort of explanation. Doesn't seem like it. He's throwing more fastballs this year, but that's not a dramatic change either. It's not like he's changed his pitching approach, at least in terms of the pitch types he throws, and I haven't dug into counts or handedness or anything like that. I'm just looking at the general overall stuff, but nothing really stands out there.

So I don't know. Your theory then is that he is still being bothered by the same injury that's the leading hypothesis no i don't i don't know that there is a leading hypothesis i don't know if you said this by the way but his movement is all the same his velocity is is fra you know for all intents and purposes is also the same i mean it's yeah yeah it's down you could make the case that it's down you could i guess you could make the purposes, it's also the same. I mean, yeah, it's down a little. You could make the case that it's down. I guess you could make the case that it's down and that that's an issue, but it's not way down.

This is not Jared Weaver. So I guess, yeah, one hypothesis is that he's still bothered, although if he's still bothered, I mean, again, it goes back to he's throwing as hard as he ever did, more or less. He's throwing with throwing as hard as he ever did, more or less. He's throwing with as much movement as he ever did, more or less. He's throwing strikes as much as he ever did, more or less. I, I, if I had to guess, honestly, if I had to guess what a leading hypothesis is right now, I would just guess that he's made some bad pitches that like bad pitches have clustered.

I would just guess that he's made some bad pitches, that bad pitches have clustered, and that he's missing in the wrong direction, or batters haven't missed when he's missed. I mean, there's luck involved in whether the hitter is there to hit it. A lot of times, hitters miss hittable pitches. So if I had to guess, that would be my leading hypothesis, is just that he's been getting hit because he hasn't been pitching that well, and he could start pitching that well again tomorrow. I want to say the leading hypothesis is that he's hurt or that there's some lingering pain that is continuing to disrupt him

and that it won't be an easy fix. I just don't really see an indication, an obvious indication of injury in his performance. I don't know, though. It's hard. I mean, it's weird because we think about the risk on pitching prospects all the time or on pitchers in general as mainly being health related, that they can be great today and be out for 18 months tomorrow, or that they can be great this year, but lose a mile and a half every year for the next three and be Matt Morris by the time they're 26. And neither one of those things has happened to Strasburg. And yet he has

suddenly gone from being slightly disappointing, but probably unfairly disappointing to being this big disaster in the middle of the league. And there was just how much would you have had to, what would the odds have had to have been for you to bet on this like this was not an option there were ways that strasburg could hit his 10th percentile projection to be sure or that he could fail to give the nationals value but not like this this was not conceivable it was not possible and yet it is i mean he was a top five pitcher coming into the year based on his experience, based on his performance, based on what he did, you know, just as his profile as a pitcher. And that a top five pitcher could be this bad for no real reason, no clear convincing reason, no necessarily external factor. He's just bad. Just happened. It's weird.

It's an underrated aspect of the pitcher collapsing genre. Just the total mystery. Just the Malaysian flight of pitchers. Yeah, and I guess that I would say that there's no real precedent for this that I can think of off the top of my head. Every pitcher that right now I'm thinking of collapsing, you can say it's injury, age, or velocity, or yips. And I don't have a profile in mind of a guy who comps to Steven Strasburg right now. And therefore, I think the leading hypothesis is actually,

in fact, I'm going to say the leading hypothesis is actually i in fact i'm going to say the leading hypothesis is that in fact all the articles looking to show that it's not just luck and it's not just fit and it's not just you know fluke are looking too hard i'm sticking i'm sticking with fluke i know that i don't normally like that explanation but i'm in this case because I can't think of another guy who matches Strasburg in this trajectory, I think he turns it around. And I will say, bold take here, Ben. If I had a start, if I had a game tomorrow and I needed a pitcher, there aren't 10 guys I would take before Strasburg. That's quite a vote of confidence. That means it's easy to vote confidently.

That's quite a vote of confidence. That means it's easy to vote confidently. Last year of 88 qualified pitchers, he had the 12th lowest contact rate. And this year, out of 109 qualified pitchers, he has the 17th highest. So he is right around Patoa Colon, Jordan Zimmerman, James Paxton. right around partoa cologne jordan zimmerman james paxton roberto hernandez he has a a lower contact rate than steven strasburg so that's pretty interesting he's still struck out over a batter per inning but guys are not missing when they swing and and that is something that stabilizes pretty quickly and he's only had nine starts 44 innings it's not a huge sample but yeah man to have that drastic a decline would have to be just for no reason

at all just you know from facing better hitters or just facing hitters on good days or whatever i'm not saying that it's it's's bad. I'm he's pitched worse. I believe he's pitched worse. I believe he has made more mistakes, but I mean, if a look, a golfer is going to have a thousand mistakes over the course of, you know,

a thousand rounds. And it's not unreasonable that eight of those mistakes could cluster in a, you know, in a league golfer. I don't even know if those are made up nurse, but it's not, it's not unrealistic that those mistakes could cluster in a lead golfer. I don't even know if those are made up. But it's not unrealistic that those mistakes could cluster not only in the same round, but in the same hole. And I think that's probably my leading hypothesis,

that just he's had a series of bad outings, that he's just kind of clustered his bad stuff in there. And it is only, look, it's 212 batters. I know that these things that you cited stabilize quickly but we're talking about 400 major league pitchers there's going to be there's going to be outliers and if it were you know if it were zimmerman or if it were another pretty good pitcher if it were grinky i don't know that we've been we'd be talking about him it just so happens that it's strasburg who gets talked about and the whole thing with stabilizing

stats as russell carlton always takes pains to point out when we say that something stabilizes in a certain number of batters or something that means that over that number of batters over that sample what his actual performance was is likely to be a real reflection of what his true talent was during that time. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that is going to continue to be his actual talent, his underlying performance going forward. It's generally a decent predictor. What a guy is right now is often what he is tomorrow, but not always. It could just be what he was during that time, and then he did something different, and now that sample no longer applies as well.

So it could just be a funk. That could be the official diagnosis. He's in a funk. All right, Ben, I got one for you. Okay. Steven Strasburg's 10th percentile projection going forward. I want to know, or for the year. Okay, so Steven Strasburg's ERA is 650.

His WIP is 1.69. Nice. What is Steven Strasburg's 10th percentile projection for ERA and WIP in 2015? Well, what was it preseason? no i'm giving i'm asking you pre-season all right so pre-season i'll say it was 4.66 and 1.18. Wow. So his ERA is three runs higher than his 10th percentile projection. And his whip is about a half a base runner per inning more than his 10th percentile projection. Now, of course, this isn't a full season.

I will bet anything in the world that both of those numbers, assuming he keeps pitching, will go down some. However, that is really bad. Okay, here's one. Would you bet on, which is bigger, the amount that Tim Lincecum's ERA will climb relative to where it was last week when we talked to him, or the amount that Steven Strasasburg's era over the rest of the season will fall relative to where it is today well lindsgum has already gone up i would say so lindsgum was about 205 and i would guess that lindsgum ends this year around 345

that's pretty optimistic well he's got a quarter of the season banked, and it's still a hitter's park, I mean a pitcher's park, and he might get injured. So that's a run and a half. Strasburg's at 6-5, and I'll put him at 4-4-5. So that's about two runs. So I will say Strasburg will drop more than Lincecum goes up. I agree, but I'll say it's closer than you think it will be. Because you think Lincecum will up. I agree, but I'll say it's closer than you think it will be. Because you think Lincecum will be worse?

Yes. Do you think Strasburg's ERA at the end of the season will be higher or lower than 4.45? I think it will be, I think, lower. Really? My bold take, looking pretty non-bold. Pretty tepid. Pretty plain text. What is non-bold?

What is the opposite of bold? Pretty italics? Unbolded. Pretty unbolded. Well, yeah, maybe they'll just meet in the middle somewhere. Maybe they'll end up at the same place. Okay. This is a fake bet, but I bet a dollar that Tim Linscombe will have an ERA higher than

Strasburg this year, how much would you put up to win that dollar? At any point this year, end of the year, Tim Lincecum has a higher ERA than Steven Strasburg. I'll say, yeah, I don't know, $2? So you think there's a 67% chance that Strasburg will have a better ERA than Lundskam at the end of the year? Wow!

Wow, he's four runs behind! ERAs can change pretty quickly. I think the Warriors are much better than the Rockets, but when they were down 25 in the first quarter, I kind of was like, okay, I would have quit betting on them. Four runs! That's a pretty big gap. That's a bad bet probably. That's a bet only Andy McCullough would make.

All right. Okay. So that is it for today. Send us emails. We'll answer them at some point. Podcast at baseballprospectus.com. Facebook group is at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild where sonoma stompers press releases are analyzed posted and analyzed before i am even

aware that they are on the internet and our sponsor is the play index at baseballreference.com go to baseballreference.com use the coupon code b BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Hey, can I make a quick thing? We've been talking about how A-Rod has needed to hit more home runs from age 39 onward than anybody in history in order to beat Barry Bonds' record. However, he now no longer does in the sense that if like we start today as counting as a 39, like he does still if you count the past as part of 39. But he's still 39 right now. And so like he's 39 right now. So from this point on, you know, he needs to hit fewer home runs in his career than Bonds did.

So doable. Yeah. To that logical tip. All right. We'll be back.