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Smart Baseball With Eno Sarris!
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As we welcome Eno in, my guess would be that a lot of pod race fans haven't necessarily noticed the drop in offense simply because the pod race are actually on pace to score more runs than they did last year. I think that's mostly explained through a much higher batting average with runners in scoring position than last year's absurdly low numbers that they put together. But around the league that that's definitely not been the case and we welcome Eno Sarris in from the athletic for the weekly Smart Baseball. Eno it is very interesting because they've made a lot of rule changes to try to help the offense and yet offense continues to continue to trickle away. Yeah, I think that the general trend in baseball and you can actually point this back to like 1892 or whatever. They started playing affiliated baseball. The general trend has been towards run prevention. So the very beginning of baseball, they were like, you know, hey, I would like the ball here and they just sort of tossed it in and the point was to put the ball in play and see what happened once the ball was in play, you know. But that's not what people do anymore. Now you've got multiple fast balls and that was a part of our piece where, you know, now there's a huge rise in cutters and thinkers and not just normal cutters and thinkers, but now they're all averaging 93 and 94. So you've got guys with three fast balls that makes it hard to kind of figure out which fast ball it also means you never have to throw the wrong fast ball to the wrong hand. And then you've got pitch design. So no guy, no pitcher is really throwing a really terrible pitch. They're kind of all their pitches are designed up to their max. You've got outfield shifts. Outfield shifts were more effective than infield shifts at removing hits and short of, you know, spray paying some circles out there. It's kind of hard to do anything about that. So, and believe me, I'm sure they're considering the spray pan circle. Yeah, you have to stay right there. You have to stay on the DraftKings logo. Yes, yes, until the ball is actually in the air, you know, man, that's so interesting. And, you know, I think we're talking about offense being down, you know, for the San Diego Padres is who we mostly cover. They have been a, they've been a more pleasurable bunch lately, slugging a little bit more, hitting some more home runs. You know, Luis Arise, I know he's been hurt. He's really, really kind of struggle. It's weird, man. It's weird to see a guy like Luis Arise came. Then he kind of jammed his shoulder. And I think that's, that's affected his swing a little bit. But I like how the offense is everybody's kind of coming out of it a little bit, a little bit more, and they're starting to hit with a little more pop, which I think makes it feel certainly like the offense is better. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a pretty good offense. I was looking at some of the numbers before the show. And I think it's by, you know, sort of league and park adjusted numbers. I think it's like fourth or fifth. Yeah. You know, so, and what I also like about it is, it's kind of, it's a balanced offense where you've got your guys and make contact. You know, Donovan Solano is not a big deal, but he's just a guy who makes contact and is better than a lot of people's other bench pieces. You know what I mean? No, he's like, you know, and you've got, you've got, you've got, you've got your guys to make contact. Once the teeth is back in the lineup, Machado looks like he's, you know, getting back to what he used to be, you know, they're your power threats. Then you've got your, you're, you're kind of your two-way threats and ChronoWare and Profar. So, I mean, it's really a nice balanced lineup. And I have nothing but good, good things to say about it, especially with Merrill kind of coming into his power to use right now. Well, you've talked about that. We've talked about that with you for many, many years now about the Padres needing different looks per se in their offense, different, different shape, swing paths, you know, and it was really easy for pitchers to game plan against the Padres, even last year with an elite hitter like Juan Soto in the lineup, because it just was all the same essentially. And now it does feel a little bit different and it certainly looks different. And the brand of baseball certainly feels a little bit better right now. Yeah. I think it's also interesting that you brought up about running scoring position. You know, you have these traditional luck metrics that you look at when you look at a team quality. And the Padres in the last couple of years have really just been on the wrong side. Yeah, just a lot of these luck metrics. Like remember the one run thing we talked about for a whole year and the one run game thing, you know, they're on the there on the better side of that now. And then yeah, the other thing that's like losing one run games and actually related, of course, to losing one run games is batting average in scoring position, which is just totally flooky year to year. And so, you know, I guess the one thing that's not flooky about it is, if you do add some contacts, maybe you help yourself, you know, put some balls in play at runners in scoring position, you know, you know, there's a quote in your piece. And what's just mentioned, Louisa rise. And I would imagine he'd be the ball player who was least happy to see this quote that was in your piece with Jason Stark. And it was from George Springer who said, quote, don't put batting average up on the scoreboard anymore. It doesn't mean anything. If batting average simply went away. I'm not sure that anyone would care about Louisa rise at all. Unless you watched him. Unless you watch. There's still a lot to what he does, which is, you know, just really great contact. And so, we might be talking about someone, you know, oh my god, he's striking out 7% of the time when the league is striking out 24%. You know what I mean? Like you could, you could adjust that for other league contacts. That's probably the same as somebody striking out 1% of the time, you know, 20 years ago. So, you know, it is, it is, he does have obvious skills outside of batting average. But, you know, I think that the reason that quote exists is because, you know, he's struggling. He doesn't want his batting average. Yeah. 195 for George Springer. I wouldn't want it up there either. Yeah. But also it just, it speaks to the kind of disconnect between front offices and fans, really, because front offices for the large part do not care about batting average. I bet I would bet you even that even if, you know, they acquired Louisa rise and they obviously value him, it's not necessarily because of batting average. It's like, hey, we got this great contact hitter, you know, that we can put in our lineup. So, they just speak a different language. Like the front offices speak a different language than fans. And so, Springer was like, if you're just going to put up, if you're just going to put up, you know, batting average, you're kind of speaking the old language when front offices don't value that. And that's part of why batting average is down around the league because teams are saying, well, I value contact, I value power, I value this, and I use different numbers to find those. So, you are more likely to see a starting player hit 230 and hit 35 homers and still have a decent OPS because of the slugging, you know, maybe get on base a bunch. That is more of the modern player. And the team itself won't care about his batting average if he's doing all those other things. We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature, whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to, or the succulents that adorn our homes. Nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it. But the outdoors is closer than we realize. With all trails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on-trail navigation. Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with all trails. What kind of programs does this school have? How are the test scores? How many kids do a classroom? Homes.com, those, these are all things you ask when you're home shopping as a parent. That's why each listing on Homes.com includes extensive reports on local schools, including photos, parent reviews, test scores, student teacher ratio, school rankings, and more. The information is from multiple trusted sources and curated by Homes.com's dedicated in-house research team. It's also you can make the right decision for your family. Homes.com. We've done your homework. This season Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow. Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first, call your parents to say, "I'm sorry." And then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order additional term supply. Well, I'll tell you who the modern player then is, because you also tweeted Kyle Higashiyoka yesterday. And if you look at the numbers, Kyle Higashiyoka has a better OPS, and a higher war than Louisa Rias, despite less than half the number of at bats this season. He passed him yesterday with his two home run six RBI game against the Washington Nationals. I know enough, at least from listening to you and baseball experts, Padres can't expect this to continue from Kyle Higashiyoka. This has been an insane month, Lin Sanity. Yeah, but, you know, I'd tell you that there's a bunch of Yankee fans who said that they always loved them. I don't know if that's revisionist history, but... Probably. I mean, he does have the kind of skill set that you want out of a catcher, which is, you know, patience and power. That's the sort of typical skill set out of a catcher. And the catchers are kind of ready to have that skill set, because they see so many pitches, you know, and they know the strike zone so intimately that, you know, they're kind of set up to have that kind of approach. So, yeah, I like his approach, and he likes the Western, you know, metal supply building. He sure does. He wore it out yesterday, talking to, you know, Sarah Smith, athletic. Let's stay on Padres catchers, because I was, I brought it up earlier in the show today, was reminded of one of the first interviews we did with you this season about Camp persona, who got off to a really good start defensively and offensively. And you had a conversation with him, you know, about, "Hey, man, like, you're hitting the ball, your exit wheel is about 70 miles an hour." And he had a comment back of like, "I don't care what I'm, how hard I'm hitting it, as long as they drop." Well, they stopped dropping as, as tends to do. And, and, you know, he's, I wouldn't say he's in danger of losing his gig, but I think you have to, you have to appreciate what Kyle Higashiyoka has done, and probably he's going to get more reps than he would have. But that was an interesting throwback of him looking at you and saying, "I don't, I don't care how hard I hit it." I mean, he stopped hitting it, he continued to not hit it hard, and didn't get hits. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that does happen with these outsides contact rate guys, and that's, Camp persona has pretty good contact rate. You know, I said this, I asked Marco Scootero this once, I said, you know, you lead the league in contact rate, and he goes, "Yeah, I probably lead the league in bad contact too." And so what, what will happen is that you will make contact on pitches that you shouldn't, you know, you'll make contact on pitches that are outside the zone that don't produce good outcome. And when you do that, you know, I go off to the lower and the outcomes are worse. So I know he's a free swinging guy that makes a lot of contact, and that's who he is at his core. But any, any sort of improvement in his flight discipline will improve what happens on the ball from play. You know, it's just, if you look at like a heat map of like, "Hey, where's power? It's in the zone." You know, where's, where are the good hits? Where's the good eggs of velocity? It's in the zone. So the more he can sort of focus on where his, his good parts of the zone, and in the zone in general, that's his way forward, I think. You know, Sarah, some of the athletic is with us. And you know, I know that even, even numbers can lie and be misleading. There's no perfect stat, there's no perfect data. War is a stat that they at least try to put everything together into one number. My eyes have told me that Hassan Kim, after having a great year last year, has just not played as well this year. Just my eyes, my gut tells me absolutely has not played as well. So I just looked at the war numbers. Do you know who leads the potteries in war this year? Hassan Kim. The 2.1. How is that even possible? I mean, what am I missing here? You know, he's hitting 223. He's got 10 homers, but you know, it doesn't leave the team in that, that category. I know he's a good defender, but he's committed a lot of errors this year way more than last year. What am I missing that that war stat is telling me about Hassan Kim? I guess a couple of things. You know, we started this interview at the top with how offense is down. So you'll probably, if you kind of scan across and see how good his offense is relative to the league, you'll probably be surprised. I don't have it in front of me, but I would guess that maybe he's like a top seven short stop offensively. I think something like that way surprising. Yeah. And he's probably only like 10% worse than league average with the bat, where you're like, what? That line? 10% worse than league average with that? So that's part of it is just like the league offensive solo that you could have a bad looking line and it's actually fine. And then the other part is that like, you know, errors actually don't factor in to defensive metrics the way that our eyes think they should. You know, we see an error and we go, oh my god, or then we remember the error. You know, defensive metrics see, oh, maybe he got to a ball that someone else wouldn't have, you know, or, you know, maybe that was a ball that was hit, you know, 125 miles an hour and he wasn't, you know, it's not necessarily his fault that he didn't get to it basically. And so, you know, the defensive metrics are kind of look at everything in a way that we can't with our eyes. That's why I like metrics is because they'll remember things that we won't remember. Yeah. And so I would, I would assume that his defense is rated as well as last year. Now, one last thing I will say about war is that the defensive metrics that are in fan graphs war are probably like not the best defensive metrics. So sometimes if you're looking at a fan graphs war and you're saying, I think this is actually B war though. That's, so which one does the espn.com use? That's a, I think that's the B war. Yeah, even B war, like both of those guys, I think that the best defensive metrics are the ones on baseball so long. I wouldn't be surprised though if Kim was good there too. So, you know, what? They are. They're good. Yeah. So, yeah. So, I mean, I think he's just a really good defender whose offense looks worse than it is. And so he's still, he's still a valuable player. I am interested to see what this offensive downturn does, you know, on the market for him next year and how, how much he can get it back going again. I do think he can get it back going offensively. And then I think about the final bit like people have been hot at different times. That's another part of chaos and luck. You know, sometimes your team is just everyone's bad at the same time and everyone's good at the same time. And this team so far has kind of had different people step up at different times. And so Kim, Kim's struggles haven't been as important, you know? Yeah, for sure. So, maybe, maybe they'll be like a three week stretch where you're like, ah, it's Kim time, you know? I wanted, that's, that's how I see it. We only have two minutes left. I wanted to ask you quickly about the Traject Machine, but I guess we'll wait until next week because it's going to be 30 seconds. Ben, I did want to, I teased it. Well, you, you had seen one of those earlier. It's basically a pitching machine that replicates the pitches and deliveries of pitchers. Yeah. You know, players can get that look, at least going into an at bat, but yeah, we'll save that for next week for another day. Yeah. Yeah. And I just dropped a trade deadline piece of what arms are available. Arms and bats are available. Need to read that one. Look at you. And I've got a big piece coming up tomorrow. So, next week, we'll have a couple of topics to talk about. Let's do an hour next week, you know. Thank you, Eno. Okay. Bye. Eno, Sarah from the Athletic or Weekly Smart Baseball segment brought to you by Seven Mile Casino. You don't just live in your home. You live in your neighborhood as well. So, when you're shopping for a home, you want to know as much about the area around it as possible. Luckily, homes.com has got you covered. Each listing features a comprehensive neighborhood guide from local experts. Everything you'd ever want to know about a neighborhood, including the number of homes for sale, transportation, local amenities, cultural attractions, unique qualities, and even things like median lot size and a noise score. Homes.com. We've done your homework. Oh, hey, we're invited to the Johnson Summer Pool party this Saturday. 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