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We dig into pitch release angles as a way to possibly quantify deception. So big topic that we'll try to break down, make it more digestible for people like me, especially what you know, and Trevor are here to do. We're going to talk about some of the Orioles' secret sauce and scouting for curiosity. The nature of being inquisitive, different things that make players more adaptable. It might be part of that secret sauce. We'll dig into that. Great story that you know, wrote with Brit drooly that went up on the athletic earlier today. We've got a new game called Name That Dude that we'll squeeze in at the very end of the show. Back to day with some news, it's a report from ESPN's Jesse Rogers that they may, in majorly baseball, be kicking around the idea of a six inning minimum for starting pitchers. Because yeah, you know, let's just add more stuff that could break pitchers. There would be some guardrails throwing 100 pitches before you get through six. You could leave the game for that. You can leave with an injury, which would require an I.L. stint, so you can't just game the system there. Or if you give up four or more earned runs, that might be another way to leave a game early. Trevor, why? Why are we doing this? Why are we so adamant that we need a requirement like this? It's done under this guise that people only show up to watch starting pitchers and that anyone and everyone could do this, but simply choose not to in the pursuit of, well, nastiness mostly. Honestly, it's under the assumption that people only show up to watch hitters. So the funny thing is people go, why do we want to increase offense? And at the end of the day, it's they want pitchers to do worse more often. And a good way to do that is to restrict their freedom to make to do strategic things. And that would be another way to do it. Now, the interesting thing is now where, you know, we've had a long conversation about injuries and things and for years now, it's been associated with pitch count and all kinds of different things. And now they're suddenly like, Hey, what if we increased all of those things, even though, you know, injuries are up and that's been a conversation all year, let's do things that are actively working to increase injuries more to pitchers. It's a little bit of a head scratcher, but in the day the offense is still down. It has not bounced up the way that they want it to. And they're trying to create, you know, environments for that to happen. So, yeah, that's interesting and a little bit annoying from my side, just from a route the outset, like not knowing a lot of where this came from and why they're saying these things. But there are a lot of guys haven't thrown that deep into games. I understand the, you know, the concern when you're looking in the fifth and everyone has someone warming up, but it seems a little bit weird to me as a way, because you mentioned two before we kind of in the show about like the way that the game will get longer and all this other stuff will happen if a guy's out there laboring the third time through the order. All right. So maybe you're shooting yourself on the foot there. It's just a little bit of a head scratcher, especially now, why now? But you know, the rules change to where you can put a rule in in 50 days. So I think that's why we hear things like this so quickly. Yeah. And I think tactically, the clear understanding of the third time to the order penalty has been realized over time as well. It's not just that you can't push pitchers through. It's that you shouldn't because the alternatives we talked about this on the show so many times the relievers you're going to bring in sometimes in the fifth inning are much more effective than the starter would be facing the same hitter a third time. So that's part of the calculation as well. So yeah, you could take that away, but I do think you're adding a lot of base runners. If you're making backhand starters in particular, pitch deeper into games because those are the guys that are probably more susceptible to getting just demolished the third time through. So now you've got 17 combined run scored on a regular basis because in the fourth and fifth and sixth innings, guys are just getting clobbered. And those are those are longer games for sure, guaranteed you're going to add time. Things like a nostalgia for like when we the starting pitchers went further into games. We were talking off air like what what is the goal? What do you want? What does baseball want? What is the ideal game? What are they looking for? And and so if we have this nostalgia for when the starting pitcher went deeper into games, I get it that that I like starting pitchers to sorry Trevor and and it's cool. But if you say let's go back to when starting pitchers went deep into games six, so do you had a chart about like how many six start six inning starts we've lost over the years? Yeah. Yes. I made a simple search on staff. I just look back to 2000 and if you go back to 2000, there were almost three thousand six inning starts per year across the entire league. If you go back to last season, 2022, we were just under 2000, it's a pretty big cut. That's a big difference. But so what you're saying is let's go back to 2000. Let's go back to 2000 in terms of pitching, but we're going to leave hitting in this year. And so you are you just going to assume that hitters learn nothing over the last 25 years. And I'm going to assume no, the hitters developed over the last 25 years and the hitters are a nastier than they were in 2000. I don't know why people think, Oh, hitters have been the same and pitchers have been the same. I think there's evolution. We're all getting better at this. Like this is a game that has existed for, you know, a hundred plus years, like of course we've gotten better at it, you know, like, you know, we've learned how to play it, you know, we've learned the rules, the intricacies, the rules we've learned player development, we learned how to coach better. I think we're always getting better. So if you're just going to take hitters from now and face pitchers from pitchers from 2000 and make them go six innings, it's going to be. I think it's going to be disastrous. Here is the list of pitchers that don't, that don't go far into games. This is, this is who we're going to fate. We're going to force to go six innings, but we really want Yariel Rodriguez to go six. We need slave to Coney to go six. James Paxton, please, I know you can barely make five, but we need you to go six. Randy Vasquez has like a six year right. Do you really want more Randy Vasquez? That's who's on this list. Kenta, my Ada has been turned into a middle inning guy because he couldn't go six. So, and if you say, okay, you guys aren't good enough, you need to, someone else needs to pitch instead. They can go six. Who are you going to? I mean, if the, if the nationals aren't pitching DJ Hertz, then they're pitching somebody else that you think they have somebody else that they could go, they could go six that they're just, it's just waiting to go or you're just going to force DJ Hertz to go six and he's going to walk eight guys. So I don't know, like, I think this is, this is ill-fated. And then on the other side, just the number of pitchers, number of pitchers with 50 innings and who have averaged more than six innings per start, 15. We have 15 guys who do this now, like 15 guys who averages. So I just, that's such a big, there's so many innings that you're forcing onto the table and you're not really, you're not even giving them, like, maybe if you were going to do it, do it in AAA, you're still going to have teams like sort of avoid it. You'd have to do it for a while out so that teams like develop it. You might have to tell them we're going to do this in five years because teams have to develop it. They have to have the guys ready to do it. If you did it right now, it would be disastrous, I think. Yeah, you could not make this change quickly, at least if you did, you would absolutely get the worst possible outcome on it, but if you put, put it four or five years down the road, that changes the way people train. It changes the way you scout. It changes the way you game plan. I think the other way to flip this is, okay, let's say you had the six inning minimum. You'd use three relievers for the last three innings, most cases, right? So you've got it down to four pitchers per game. We've talked about this before. Why not just allow four pitchers per nine innings and then allow more pitchers if the game goes extras and still let teams manipulate those innings across those different ways. Because then at least you're, you're shouldering the workload in a way that's more balanced. You're not just saying, all right, you got, you have to take two thirds of the innings and then we'll just chop up the rest in the smaller pieces. That's a very bizarre way to codify this. And why not take, why not try some small stuff first? The double hook, I would try the double hook and the active roster. The active roster is in a NHL, it's an NBA NFL. Every other sport has an active roster. So declare an active roster tonight. You're allowed to have five pitchers on it, you know, then you can have a nice long guy. Then you are incentivized to take your starting pitchers six, but like, you know, it's not like a rule. It's more like, Oh, well, I have these five guys when we're going to do. Yeah. And since I think incentivizing things works, I mean, I think we've seen this in every walk of life, but incentivizing things always works a little bit better than rule, like making it a, you have mandatory rule because everyone tries to work around the mandatory rules because they usually in order to promote some sort of outcome that goes against some other part of the game, like the pitchers that goes against the pitchers. So like the people who are in charge of pitching part of their job, then becomes how do we circumnavigate this? How do we get? How do we, you know, finagle our system to work the best within this in this way? And then that just causes a whole bunch of other things that then they react to. It's just very reactionary. It's reactionary. That's the word, not, that's just not how to, that this is not very effective. And it's been proven that the way if you make decisions like that all the time, it's just not that effective. I like the, I like the active, um, the active roster. The interesting thing for me though, on that is, um, I'm thinking back to all the time sitting in the bullpen and being like looking around like, all right, who's like, who's up today? That, and that's that we'd be emphasizing that it'd be sort of codified. They'd be an up and a down list to suck to look around and be like, I know three of you guys aren't up every day, like, on days that you were out there and you had five guys available and three of them are the horses, you're like, well, you know, I'm in more situations now. Like I have to like, I have, you know, and there's, there's a little bit of a, sometimes you got to dodge a game from here to like where you're available, but you don't pitch and that really helpful for your career. Um, I understand the weeds now, but like there are times where I'm like, Oh, like I know I'm available. And I know there's a couple situations better if I didn't, but it'd be there 80% of situations I'm gonna pitch because we're, we're, we're, you know, a short handed, but that 20% happens. I will be very, very thankful. And like the starting picture goes eight randomly that day, either Jordan Wild, right? And you're like, yes, it would be weird to qualify where you're like, I am, I am literally the guy who only is going to be active if they used one of the other inactive guys yesterday. Yeah. Then the roles are getting weird and then like now there's active versus inactive and then there's going to be a bunch of like, who do we send down, who we bring up and then there's to be options. It's just going to, that's going to be a chain reaction. It could, there could be second, second level stuff. You're right. But there could be, you know, for anything in this, in this, it's less drastic, at least than the six. So then the forcing the six. So I agree. I agree. There's ever, every solution is going to have some issues probably or some ways it doesn't work well, but that is much better than making everyone throw six for sure. And if you made everyone throw five, you know, at least that lines up with getting a win. Yeah. You know, and like, you know, it's still deeper than some guys are going and, but it's not, it's not as drastic. I think a foolish baseball had a number that like over a third of the starts this year didn't follow this six inning rule, which doesn't actually make sense for me because there's only 15 guys doing it. He has 33% because there's, there's supposedly this rule that like, oh, if you went to a hundred pitches, you could be taken out to or the runs, the four earned runs to that, that ticks the box. That gets you out of there too. But this is also kind of rough on the score and the umpires are like, okay, dude, dude, and then they have to go out there and be like, are you actually, oh, you're going on the IL after this? So you're actually injured. So that's why you're coming out. So, you know, is it going to lead to like more phantom I L stints? Yeah. Because then you can come out there and be like, man, I just gave up and this is a big game. You know, why don't I just say, you know, I'm fatigued and they take me out for two turns and, you know, and then somebody else comes in, you know, something, something's not right. You know, my hamstring hurts a little. You know, we're going to need, we're going to need someone like Hugo from Bob's Burgers to be the inspector for legitimacy of IL stints. We need someone like that. But I did not think we're going to bring up Hugo from Bob's Burgers. He comes by and he's like, oh, does that hamster and y'all see a limp? Yeah. I think you're going to do the voice for Hugo. That would have been something. I can't. I can't get to that level. I'm not going to do it, especially on a live one. Bob, do you know what the term meat fraud means? I don't want to create scenarios like that where we're create more phantom I L stints. That's not, it's not good. Oh, but just to finish the thought, foolish baseball said that five innings would be nine percent. And that would be closer to where when they had the three inning rule with the relievers, there was it was like sort of like five to nine percent is in that level were, were, you know, out of bounds that, you know, so basically if you take a third of starts in baseball this year and saying, Nope, that wasn't good enough. That's a lot. Yeah, that's too much of a change at once. If your goal eventually is to have a six inning minimum, you should start with five and see how five goes and make sure that nothing else breaks. And then you might want to do it like two or three years too. So you didn't like be like, Oh God, and your two injuries really went up to the roof. That was the story I didn't see coming this morning that it's been sort of taking over a baseball Twitter. You know, we love talking stats here at the athletic. Here's one that's super simple to remember discover automatically doubles the cashback you've earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cashback match. That means with discover, you could turn $150 cashback to $300. That's right. You could put it towards some memorabilia you've had dry on or treat yourself to a premium sports network. You earn and discover doubles. See terms at discover.com/creditcard. You know, we love talking stats here on the athletic baseball podcast. Here's one that's super simple to remember discover automatically doubles the cashback you've earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cashback match. That means with discover, you could turn $150 cashback to $300. That's right. 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That's code TA2024 at checkout for 15% off your first order. Air beer, exclusions and conditions apply, athletic brewing company fit for all times. And now to our previously scheduled show. Yeah, our previously scheduled main topic. There was a great story, a great piece written by Michael Rosen at Fangrafts earlier this week. Very detailed looking at pitch release angles and it focused a lot on Shota, Imanaga and Christian Javier and their fastballs and how they are such unique pitches. This is very high level granular stuff that I think is hard to understand for a lot of people. It's hard for me to wrap my head around when we're talking about pitch release angles. What exactly are we talking about? You can use visual people on YouTube, but we got a lot of people listening to the podcast version. So what are we referring to in this instance that we haven't previously dug into on this show? I think the easiest way to think about is hand positioning. So you're talking about this angle sort of vertically and up and down, that's an angle and then you're talking about sort of sideways angles. So it's like the way the ball is coming out in terms of angles this way and this way. So it is the way the ball is coming out of the hand. Another way of saying it would be hand position, I think, because it is independent of your release point. So you take that release point and the release point gives you some angles as well, but we're not talking about angles to the body. We're talking about hand angles. So we're talking about release point angles in this space and this space coming out of the hand. And that's independent from release points. So what was really interesting in this piece from Michael Rosen, I think this is the big line here. So when the pitch is released from a steeper angle, so when the pitch is aimed more downward, it generates more carry. So that's sort of, think of someone sort of ripping the seams sort of like being on top of the ball and ripping the seams and like staying on top of it and getting that carry. Think of like how you throw a beach ball when you want the beach ball to go straight up. You straight down, you sort of rip it, you know, hitting angle to you, when it comes down on the ball, you get the best backspin. Right. And then the second sentence is when a pitcher has a flatter aim, when a pitch has a flatter aim or a release angle closer to zero degrees, it generates less carry. So try to think of throwing that beach ball and you want it to go up, but you're throwing it straight and you're not getting that rip on it. You're not like sort of ripping down on it. You're just sort of throwing it straight. You might be able to get it to go up, but not the same way to be kind of ripped down on that beach ball. It goes straight up, you know. So it's about the, those angles and what's so interesting about Shota and Javier is that they release from a lower sort of release point, but also lower release angles and yet somehow get that same ride, that same, or that really plus carry. And what we may find out, Michael Rosen posits, what we may find out is in the future that there's something about their hands, their fingers, something even beyond just those angles, something biomechanically that they're doing, you know, maybe there's something they're being able to drop their elbow further. So they're like mimicking being on top of the ball, even though the angles say they're not. So he was saying that there's something there that we don't have, that we can't explain in the public sphere that they're probably trying to figure out in the private sphere where they have, you know, team team level, they have more biomechanical data than we do. Trackman, Hawkeye, those types of technologies are actually recording this information, but it's only modeled from other data on the public side, right? So we don't have the precise stuff that teams get to work with. So Trevor, what kind of, what kind of IVB did you get? You know, I don't have your release date in front of me. So like what, did you have a lower release, you were kind of lower release medium IVB. So making the most out of your lower release, or what was your IVB's? I was technically like lower release height. And but for my lower release height, I actually had high IVB. So were you like 16s or something, but lower release point? So like lower release, but like I think my average in like my average of 2022 was like 17, eight, last year, it was like 16, seven, and the highest ever was like 18 and a half was average, which was like 2021. So Shodra and Javier are getting like 20s, getting like 20s from of maybe a similar release point, a little bit lower release point, maybe even, yeah, maybe even a little bit of a lower release point, because they're smaller people than me, I have really long extension, which also put me closer to the plate, which also made my IVB play up. So it's, there's like combinations of all those things, a lot of different angles there. You're talking about an angle out there, you know, a great way to talk about this too is like, I always, whenever you're talking about a supinator versus a pronator, like that hand position is what causes those two things. So like that, those are connected. And being behind the ball, or like you hear, get on top of the ball. Everyone's heard that. That's an old school saying what you're talking about with the ride on top of the ball is, that effect, but unfortunately, like if you're too much on top of the ball, then you're throwing it, the angle to the plate, then is lower down angle, then you're killing your ride. So it's, it's a balanced type thing. It's like, do you have the right timing of the stuff? So what I would take what I used to do is I had trouble getting on top fully and where I would go is I would miss underneath. So I'd throw underneath the ball. That's when things would sail and that's when I would get more horizontal because the spin axis would catch a little bit like the air would affect the ball a little bit more because it's tilted back a little bit more and the seams are a little bit different place. And so I would get more run on an arm side fastball that way and that would also kill my IVB, but it'd also be a foot above the strike zone. But what was your cue, like to change hand position, what was your cue to get on top of the ball? Like, how did you, you just were like, I had to think on top of the ball, I had to get out in space. Like, what was it? I don't know what happened was switching my target. So like, if I tried to go up in a way to a ridey, that would you a lot of times fix it? It's because it'd make me just have to reach out a little bit farther on the ball a little bit longer, which, you know, if you, if you're gripping the ball really tightly too, like there's a feeling you get there. But the surefire way was throw a change up because you, I couldn't, I could feel what a ball, what I was waiting underneath to change up more than I did when I had a fast ball because when I play catch, you're doing long toss and stuff, you can get underneath the ball and it'd be okay. And so you've done that a lot more where that feel, think change ups though, you can't get away. If you're popping a chain, if you're throwing change, you think that's going to straight, go straight up. It's not even going to actually the plate. Parable. Right. So that would get me back on. That's why I went to my change up a lot in my career. And if that, if I was able to get that down the fast mode, follow it to the back, that's really interesting. But that was a big, that was a big key for me. A lot of guys have sliders that they're more on top of and they can't get on top of their fastball and they do it that way. So like, it's just, you're trying to like connect the feeling, but a great way to think about all this stuff, even hand position, I know we're talking about specifically, but even arm angle, even deception, all that kind of stuff. Think about it this way for the people at home and the people watching is like, a deception is what happens before you release the ball and then stuff is what happens after you release the ball. And they work together to give perceptions of what's going to happen and then also get a hitter to react in a certain way that you want them to work. So we're talking about like, deception and how hand position can affect that. It's so interesting. You said it to guys with low arm angles, but are able to stand on top of the ball. Actually, there was a guy who could do this as well. Like he had a ride that he should have based on where his arm was when he released it. This is a good segue. So I talked to Spencer Schwalenbach and he's got, so what you were talking about a little bit too with arm angles, what you sort of expect and deception, right? Deception is the difference between expectation and actuality, right? And so Spencer Schwalenbach has a very low release point, 5.4 feet. So what he is is when you see him, he's a former shortstop that didn't pitch until junior year or didn't pitch like sort of D1 level until junior year of college. And so as a shortstop, he was just used to kind of almost side arming where he's just sort of, it's not a sidearm thing, but he's out there, you know? And so it's not an over the top thing. It's more just sort of out there. And this is the same thing Michael Givens told me. Michael Givens used to be straight out from his body, but with kind of his hand up, right? So you know, you don't want to throw two seamers to your first baseman, right? You don't want to throw something with a tremendous amount of fade to the first baseman. You want to throw something that's true to the first baseman. So even if you're a shortstop with the arm out there, your brain is like, no, man, I want to throw this thing like a seed to first base. I want to throw a foreseamer to first base. And so what, you know, with this former shortstop out there, he throws like basically a true foreseem and he has to work on this. And he, the thing that he does sounds a lot like Max Scherzer. So he used to throw his foreseem with the finger like in a normal spot, like out here. And when he did that, he just threw a regular foreseem for his arm slot and it had 10 inches of arm side run. And that if you take his current, if you take his current fastball and add five, so now he's taken five inches off and the way he did it was by tucking his thumb like Max Scherzer. So Max Scherzer tucks his thumb. What that does is take, takes the thumb off of the side here and does different things to the way the ball comes off in terms of spin and it does, it changes your hand position in a way. It changes the release angles because when the ball, when the finger's out here, it's going to come out a different way. But if you take the thumb out of the way, you can come out straight, you know? So if you take Spencer Schwalenbach's, uh, foreseamer and you add the five inches that he's trying to take away with this work, if you add the five inches, you get annual Delos Santos, Chad Kool, Josiah Gray, Brian Bayo, and not Brian Bayo's two seen. That's so good. Brian Bayo's foreseen. And if you take all those, the average stuff plus of all those is like 79. And the average slugging on all those is over 600. That is not a good pitch. If you look at what Spencer Schwalenbach is now with the five inches taken away, uh, the movement he's got with this thumb, uh, out of the way, it's channel Perez. I don't actually say it. No, I have say it's first name. I think that's it. Even Collec Perez is the, is, is on the, on the Orioles, Stephen Collec is on the Padres. They both have over 100. Their, their stuff plus average is around, uh, they're, uh, slugging against average around 300. So you just, you just took, subtracted 300 points of slugging, you know, off the pitch by, by making it something that they don't expect. The hitter sees that arm slot and they say, Oh, and you know, Delos Santos got it. You know, it's out there. It's going to go sideways. It's going to have 10 inch is it's, you don't, the hitter won't even tell you that that, you know, but they'll, they'll have seen Delos Santos. They'll seem cool. They have seen. And, and another thing is there's fewer people like him, you know, when you take those five inches off, when you add those five inches in, there's a whole bunch of guys. I've seen this guy before. He's out there. It's got 10 inches. I know what to do, you know, but, uh, so, you know, something as simple as moving your thumb on the ball can change the release angles and change the movement. And I just think this is also really fascinating because, you know, as we were able to quantify this, we can start to answer questions like what is changeable and what isn't, what is coachable, what isn't. And once you have that, you can say instead of saying, you know, I think sort of 2.0 with pitch FX was, Oh, you know, this guy's curveball has a lot of spin and he doesn't throw it enough. Let's go get him and make him throw it more. That kind of, let's go get Ryan Presley and tell him to throw his curveball like twice as much. Bam. You know, uh, this version, today's version is, Hey, let's go get Alex Vessia before he tucked his thumb and then tell him to tuck his thumb and change his release angles because everything else looks great. But if we were able to change these, these hand release angles, just a little bit, we could get a lot more out of them. And in fact, you know, there's been some talk that the Dodgers don't know, you know, what they're doing development wise. And I would say that some of their reliever acquisitions proved that they have been ahead of this curve and a lot of ways because they did get Alex Vessia and tuck his thumb. They did get Evan Phillips off of waivers and, uh, yeah, and they, and they did things with these pitchers to make them better. And like they also identified, Oh, you know, Evan Phillips sweeper is a, is a really good bitch. They were really early on the sweepers. So, uh, I think that they are, they're pretty good at what they do, you know, yes, they've had some injuries and yes, sometimes you can be like, well, who would they develop? You can play a game with everybody, you know, I, yeah, I mean, you can make the case if you don't know how to develop guys to stay healthy. Yeah, but not being successful in the big leagues. That's not right. Yeah. I was trying to tackle when you know, said that I'm like, some people say like the, the what are you talking about, who's critical of them right now and like in a fair sort of way, you know, River Ryan has heard and I think Bob Miller's hurt. The injury thing is completely real, but Trevor, how compared to learning a new pitch, an adjustment like this, how much easier, relatively speaking, is it to make a change like this and to get a feel for something that's different that makes an impact in this way with release angle. So the interesting thing is, and you know, is just alluding to it like the, the, the, if you were talking about trying to get your hand like in a different position within your arms. So changing your arm slots hard. That's really hard. And then changing how your wrist is pivoting or positioning or forward or backward. If that's what you're trying to do, that's also very hard because there's different muscles, you start recruiting the most now we're getting into like, we don't know about the implications of the stuff till it happens type stuff. Like if you're a muscle group that you haven't used before, I actually have a prime example of this. And so this is something that I found, uh, I was trying to explain. So when I throw my splitter coming back from my stress reaction to my humerus, I was throwing the splitter still and I was like, I know it's probably from the splitter, but I've learned how to throw it a little bit better. So maybe, um, maybe I can work through it and keep, keep throwing pitch. Because I was throwing it, I noticed that all of my ride was disappearing, my horizontal was increasing, all this stuff, like on my fastball, like everything else was getting worse. The slider was breaking less and spinning slower. So I'm like, okay. And there wasn't pain related. It was armpat. So I'm like, what am I doing for my splitter that is causing everything else to be messed up. And when I got back into layback or like cock position behind here, my hand was more rigid than it's neutral. It's always been neutral like here. And then I would come in. But there's the, there's what I was like, why am I doing that? What it was, what I was trying to do is I was trying to like, that got me into position to get on to split the splitter right down the middle because I'm such a supinator. So like I was trying to be more in a pronated position subconsciously because that's how I do the flitter would work the best and throwing it in a supinated way wasn't going to be as good. So I tried. So I was getting a different release point, which was then recruiting all kinds of muscles in my arm, like flexors working harder, everything was working harder that wasn't used to doing that and messed everything else up. And then that become comfortable. So now I got to get everything back. Getting rid of the splitter was the best thing I did, but that was an example of that type of thing. But what they're doing now and which I love and we talked about this a lot last year just sitting down the bullpen was figuring out where guys natural point was and then figuring out which pitch grip changes and ways you can work within what they naturally do to get to see what pitches they can they can learn to throw. So like guys who are natural supinators, which there are a lot of everyone thought there was way more like pronators because pronating has been something that because you have to have a change of you have to pronate. You have to pronate pronating is what we do naturally and you pronate. It's not like you're not pronating. You're just pronating later in the you're releasing the ball and then pronating as opposed to releasing the ball in the middle of your pronation. That's the difference. It's just when you're releasing it so which affects your hand position. So what we were doing as supinators, we figured out supinators like we're picking up sweepers really easily because you had to stay inside the ball the whole time. You didn't have to you just got around it. It was like a net turning your hand this way and releasing the ball on your way to turning your hand that way was more natural. And so guys were like, let me try it and then they could throw one, you're like, see, like you naturally are positioned to do this. Some guys naturally can throw splitters better because they're more behind the ball. Like I always I played catch with him and played with him and I can never remember his name. But mega splitter from the Rays straight over the top went to Navy. He's from New England. Gosh. Do says I cannot remember his name. All of a Drake. All of a Drake. Oh, really? He's totally over the top. Yeah. Iron Mike straight over the top, but his his release point because he was he wasn't supinated or pronated at all. Literally almost 12 like when it was 12, that's unique, but a lot of it's hard to do that. So he was perfectly positioned to a splitter and they saw that he threw one already. He didn't throw enough and in Minnesota, they were like, throw that because you're you're you're naturally you were built to throw a splitter and then he had one of the nasty splitters. I would. Yeah. I would really love if I was working with the team to look at two things with release angles. First of all, there's been in the public sector and from Michael Rose and other people already some advancements in understanding the relationship between release angles and command that just turns out that some players have just sort of tighter release angles and that's command. You know, they're just better at sort of just keeping those release angles the same. Yeah. And that might be a better way for us to study command than to sort of look at the this sort of blobs or be like, do you hit the corner all the time? You know, so, you know, that's one thing. The other thing I would do is study the interaction between grips and release, release angles. So like grips, release angles, and like other biomechanical features, arm angles, layback, you know, you can compensate for your release angle with the grip. Right. Exactly. What if we like, if we move the finger, do we, if we change certain grips, what happens to certain release angles, you know, because I agree with you that some part of it, some part of it's got to be immutable, right? Like some of those things are just like, I'm not, I've thrown thousands of pitches with my hand like this out here, like, you know, I don't think you're going to change me right now. Yeah. You want to, you want to get the smallest changes to get the most effect and most netting grip. And, and you want to work with them, people's naturally what they've done 100,000 times in their life and work within those parameters, your chances, they pick up that pitch quickly and it's effective are much higher than trying to teach them for me. I think that's what we've been, we've been missing with a long time for pitching and now we're getting to the point where it's, that's why it's happening so quickly. And it seems like that reduces the chances of picking up an injury compared to doing something that's less natural or less intuitive to your mechanics. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's the ball. The, just a trip down memory lane real quick, we're talking about deception as the difference between sort of expected movement and actual movement. And that was something I tried to do all the way back in 2016, where I tried to just take arms slot and predict movement and then look at who was very different from that. I found that the people who were very different from that got more swinging strikes and got more pop ups and stuff like that. And the names on the list are really fun looking backwards. Josh Colemanter is on the list. He is your Iron Mike Oliver Drake type where he's way, way over the top. Another couple of fun names on the list, Mike Bolsinger, David Robertson, still in the league, was a leader in, in deception off of his sort of weirdish, cutish, forcing thing that he throws. I think it probably has less sideways movement than you'd expect. It's like, it has zero sideways movement almost and yet pretty good ride. And so that's the David Robertson and then a couple of really interesting names at the very, right there with David Robertson, Mike Messina and Tom Glavin. So this could be something about stuff that those guys were doing that was just deception rather than stuff. Because I watched a lot of Tom Glavin growing up and I never thought he had any stuff. I mean, the change up was good. The change up was good. But in terms of stuff, I would have put him third behind Maddox and Smoltz back in the day. So maybe we check in on this next week. A guy that I would love you to go look at and see if you can figure out if there's deception there. He's a woo on like his movement and stuff. I think he is higher. I thought he is high ride. He doesn't. There's a lot of stuff that he gets results that you would think is how his pitches move in and they don't. They don't move like that. So there's something he has like a Robertson, like hyper mobile, like very, you know what I'm talking about, like very smooth and athletic. They look really athletic. He's got that too. And I think people see, think something's going to happen and then it doesn't with him and he's been, by the way, he's just been ridiculous this year. He's also unique, I think, in terms of like the quality of his four seam and two seam shows up as both above average, which is pretty rare. So but yeah, he's got something there's something going on there and I actually wasn't able to find anything. Oh, Nick Pollock has a, has a, has a little thing. There's the, the flat of tang and all he's good at that. Flat attack. 99th percentile. Interesting. I want to move on to this collaboration that, you know, did with Brit and it kind of tries to break down what's in the Oreo secret sauce as an organization. What do other people around the game think the Oreos are doing? There's one note in here that jumped off the page to me just that they, they hired 65 new people within like 18 months of Mike Elias taking over. I mean, they're okay. So you've completely overhauled an entire organization, a large organization with lots of people that get in the ears of players. That seems good in the sense of trying to get everyone to row in the same direction where somebody organizations have some new hires, but they've got life first. They've got people that have been there for decades. That would have been pain. It was a painful, painful day. You know, can imagine and it's not something to sort of brag and broast about because it's a terrible day, but it is also how they were able to change things so quickly. I mean, the A's, I, when I studied, had the longest tenure of any organization. They're coaches at the longest tenure. They're just around forever. They don't change coaches ever. And I just found out from Grant Holmes that he'd never learned a slider when he was with the A's and yet you have the, the, the Orioles here. Now everyone's trying to copy Orioles hitting. And so I basically went around and asked, because when you ask an organization themselves, they're like, oh, we value the growth mindset and, you know, we're just, we're all about challenging our hitters and, you know, you know, they say things. They don't want to tell you the real stuff. They just, they have some prepared stuff they tell you. And, um, and then so, uh, I asked rivals. I asked other teams, what do you think the A's the Orioles are doing? And they're all talking about it. Like, it was literally the funniest things. Like they will interview an Orioles coach and even if they don't hire him, they're just asking, what do you guys do? They, they traded for one of the organizations I talked to, they traded for an Orioles hitter and just sat them down and says, well, so what do you guys do? So, you know, we tried to follow those breadcrumbs. And I think there's, um, you know, one executive in the piece, um, really nailed it. And um, he said that, uh, oh, here it is, the, it was a, an AGM of a rival team. And so we go through the different things like vertical bad angle and I explain what vertical bad angle is and, you know, there's some truth to that. The Orioles are really good at slugging high in zone and lone zone, almost better than any other team are doing both things, uh, the twins are right there with them. And, and so we go through these different things and this is what they say and this is relevant for, for our listeners too, cause we've been recently debating, uh, Derek and I have been starting a debate about the value of max maximum exit velocity as a stat. And so this speaks to, I think the best use of max max velocity, which may not actually be for fantasy people, it may be more for running a team. He says, they draft guys with present power and improve their launch angle and swing decisions. So that speaks to what we've been talking about. What is coachable and what's not, you know, and so they're saying, okay, they have some present power. We improve their ability to lift it and we improve their swing decisions. That present power is their in form of top end exit velocities, not necessarily slugging percentage. They teach vertical bad, better vertical bad angle to reduce ground ball rates. And the swing decisions plus that better VBA equals power production when you already had the top end max EVs. So you take a guy, it's almost like taking a pitcher who is sat, he has touched 97, you know, sits 93, you get him, you just sit 94, 95, and then you, and you figure out based on his arm slot how to improve his pitches. So these hitters, they're taking them and they're saying, okay, you've, you've hit the ball 112. We love you. Let's see if we can get you to lift that 112. Let's see if we can help you make better swing decisions. And the way they do that is a lot of it's with these young coaches showing throwing short box and short boxes, you know, I'm like, I don't know, 15, 20 feet away from you. And I'm throwing as hard as I can. And I'm a young coach and apparently these coaches started looking at their stuff metrics and improving their, their vertical, their angles and stuff to try and outdo each other. So they're just, they're, they're challenging these hitters with these young coaches that all have the same kind of mindset. They're doing it, you know, just all the way through the levels. They're using all the best data and take the use force plate analysis. Like, you know, pitchers have been using for a while. They use weighted bats, pitchers are using weighted balls. There's a lot of like correlation to what pitchers development has been like and taking it over to the hitting side. Yeah, going back to the top end velocities thing, I think it's looking for hard hit rate, looking for guys that have good, hard hit rates that don't necessarily lift the ball. It's more than just the max. It's hitting the ball hard frequently, but not always lifting it. That would be the, the trait I'd be looking for, because I think that's something the rays have done for a long time too. We're also looking at those guys in the big leagues. Right. Right. Looking at it from the amateur side is a little bit different. I think what I would say for our fancy listeners is like, I, I value max as a velocity at the very beginning the most. And then I value at least less over time. I may talk about it some and maybe I need to maybe reduce that much to talk about it. But for a prospect that's first come up, it can describe their power potential. But by the time they're in their, you know, fourth or fifth year, they may not, they may not lift it. And they may, that may have something to do with their organization's coaching abilities or just their innate characteristics of their swing. You know, that's where the, the correlation to pitching kind of falls away. Some guys can hit that top end max CV hitting, but just can't reach it in the right way. They can't hit balls in the air like that. There's just something about their swing playing that doesn't, doesn't lift it, doesn't do that. So it becomes less meaningful over time. But if you were talking about raw clay, you know, most of the best power hitters that we have have really good exit losses, maximum exit losses, judges, Stanton's, you know, sodas, they're all at the top. There's a quote in here from Matt Blood, he's the VP of player development and scouting now for the Orioles and he says, and this is just in his words, I think they're just all good at adjustability and being able to compete against what the game is throwing at them. And then Adley Rushman credits the organization, finding guys with good makeup, but adjustability is problem solving and problem solving, I think requires an ability to be curious, like to go ask questions when it's not working because at some point it seems like in every single player's career, different levels, different times, you hit a wall and stuff that used to work doesn't work anymore. So how do you find people who are curious and inquisitive Trevor? How would you scout for a trait like that, especially on the amateur side? It's easier to get a feel for what people are like once they're inside the game. But before you even draft somebody, it's really hard to know, especially for a 17 year old high school kid, how inquisitive and how curious they are from the outside looking in. This might be a little bit, the scope might be a little bit wide and maybe a little bit outside the box, but I currently right now have been like talking to trying to figure out a curiosity level for another reason, just working on making some like movie type stuff. And I've talked to people and the first questions I've asked them is like, what are you really into? And then like, how do you learn more about these things? So I had an idea like what their process is for the thing that they're most passionate about. And it might not be baseball. And that's it. So you might be able to ask a question like, what are your like, what do you do in your free time when you're not playing, like so guys, for example, if a guy goes and plays golf all the time and he genuinely wants to be way better at golf, and he like practices, playing golf and like researching golf and reading about golf, there is a good chance that you might be able to create or figure out parallels between that and baseball. There's a good chance that if if the interest is sparked, that they might that they would spend that same amount of time on their profession, right? So that that you can assume that that level of interest is also there for that. And then there's some guys who like show up to the field and they're they, if you tried to ask them like, Oh, what do you what do you see about that guy? You just ask questions like, Oh, that you like watching him play. Why? Like you can there's these type of questions where you can just allow them to kind of follow that thread and you can see where the thread kind of ends. And that would be kind of just a conversational, like getting to know a guy. And I think that we go to baseball a little bit too fast. Like, I remember talking to scouts and they were just like, you know, do you want to play professionally? Do you like it was like, is your intention there? Yeah, of course. There's some obvious questions there. Right. And as a player, you're probably ready to just sort of you can fend those off pretty easily. I go, yes, you want to engage somebody and get them get them excited about something. And if you see that spark go, I would say that's something that not everyone has. You would assume they would, but they don't. And while we were, I was interviewing West Johnson, one of my ex pitching coaches a few weeks ago on the radio and he mentioned we were talking to him about skins who we had for a year talking to him about Charlie common, like why why why is he so good? And he basically said they're two of the most curious guys I've ever met. Like they came and I would say, Hey, like, what are you trying to do with this? And how are you? What do you think is going to make you better? And they had those very clear, they're like, I think that I can do these things well. I'm not sure though. I would like them that maybe there's data and stuff because they knew what he was specialized in. And he's like, Oh, now I have something I go look, and then they had this rapport immediately, like, I know what you're interested in. Now, if I bring you something, you asked for it kind of. And that now we have this curiosity loop going, which is going to make you a better player long term if we keep going. And he said that he, he it's a skill that he maybe didn't notice that he was he was developing as a coach. But over time, the number of guys he's now had, he's realizing how quickly he he can like, he can, he can gauge, he can like track while that's guys curious. I like what you're saying too about not going to baseball so quickly because, you know, there's sort of cultural biases, I think that are at place when you talk about curiosity and you sort of expect them to ask questions almost in a college educated manner where it's like, Oh, I really want to know about ride IVB. So I'm going to learn it this way and I'm going to look it up this way and I'm going to Google it, but you could get somebody, a high school kid who still just love video games, but you get them talking about the video games and you realize, Oh, they go on YouTube and watch run throughs, you know, yeah, oh, they, yeah, or they, or they have a Twitch person they follow that like shows them this or this and they're like, Oh, they actually have some like really old school video games and it's, you know, like you start to like, Oh, okay. So this isn't just, he just pops in front of the video game and plays whatever he actually like has some process here. And you might be able to glean some of that from a, from a kid who's younger who just hasn't been exposed to the same learning styles as a college educated kid, or you might be able to gather, maybe they love soccer and they're from Latin America and you might be able to gather something where it's like a, you know, you are kind of going past some cultural biases because they're, that exists very pretty hardcore still in baseball. And so you don't, you don't want to fall into this thing that like all the college educated white kids are curious and everybody else is in curious. I mean, that's just not how human population works and it would work against you. But I like this idea of sort of engaging them on things other than baseball to sort of get that idea of how do you learn more about the things you love. I actually would think it would also maybe reveal some, some coping skills in some ways. I think having interests outside of baseball would generally be a positive. I mean, because again, when you hit that failure wall, what are you going to do? Just grind yourself through it. Or do you have a way to reset and center and come back with, you know, fresh mind the next day because you're able to go enjoy something else in your life and not internalize every ounce of it. Coffee. Coffee. So he was like, he's like, my new thing is just like, when I get to a new team, I need to find the best coffee in town. I was like, okay, I mean, that's, that shows inquisitiveness. That's just curiosity. That's awesome. I, honestly, I wouldn't have, I would not have clocked him for someone who'd get in the coffee. I live, you know, I live with John Singleton for a year. Yeah. Cause he's really, really mellow, really mellow. And I don't ever find drink coffee, but you know, that was, that was 2011. I think from talking to him, some part of it is not even just the coffee itself. It's, it's, he wants to buy the best cafe. Like he wants to find the best place to hang out and see people and drink coffee. Like he just, it's more about the whole thing and getting out of baseball. And that was really important for him because he, he was grinding in baseball and he needed to find a way to sort of reset. Suddenly he's in the big leagues and he's staying and it's like, maybe this is a reflection of some changes he's made and what we don't talk about singing all day, but like, I love what you said. What do you do? Just grind through it? Yeah. Yes. The common way that most, that's the generic baseline default way that, that, that, you know, old school baseball has always said, just grind through it. You'll get through it. You'll get through your slump. Just keep sticking with it. That's not actionable. It's, I think curious people want actionable steps that are clear. And that's something that you got to find your way to do that. And it's funny. I think I talked about on this show. I loved that. I became, I became got a relationship to where when that something was wrong, became this big, awesome problem that all these cool things, maybe I could find out about myself. And so I, that's why I discovered all the things that I discovered because I was having an issue. The problem was when the game became easier and like you were dialed in and things were going well, there wasn't any big thing to work on every single day, bored. I got bored and quick towards the end of the year, last year was like, I just go out and do the same thing every day now. Like, yeah, it's great for your career, but like, I kind of bored. It's boring. And that can be, it's a weird, that's a weird thing to realize, it's when you're a professional athlete, but yeah, and, and, but when there's not anything like no injury or you feel good or there's, everything's moving kind of pretty good and it's just maintenance at that point, you got to find other things that interest you, which is probably why I have so many spreadsheets. Now, let's track what's going on so that I can share this for somebody else later. That was my project when things were going well. And you had to, I had to find those things, but I think that, I think that this is something, this whole concept of like, curiosity and stuff. When I spoke to people, I remember talking to David Forest before I signed and he, it's something he looked for. It's very clear. He saw a YouTube video. I made, and he was like, it seems like you, this is the way your process will work. Like I feel like you're going to be successful if you have, if you struggle and, and, and, and that's a big, huge credit to him for also looking for those things. We had that connection. And it was interesting. It was the first time I've had a conversation like that with an GM too. So, there are, there are people out there looking for that stuff and it is developing and it is interesting. I wonder if there's a core layer here too to, to over, over coaching with kids. If you, over coaching with kids, that means somebody else always has the answer. You know. Yeah. And someone else is always telling you what the answer is and you don't spend as much time just figuring out yourself and, and, and looking in different directions and, and learning yourself. So that's something I struggle with because I want to tell my child, you know, this is, this is what you do. This is what you do. But I also wanted to figure it out. I think one of the answers is just play because when you're actually out in the field is when you have to figure things out for yourself. Coming from coaching youth soccer and high school soccer, they, they referred to it as joy sticking. And as, as a coach, they tell you, don't yell directions to your players during the game. It's too late. Let them problem solve. I mean, if you need to talk to them on the sideline about something, sure, that's, that's coaching. But if you are actively giving an eight year old or a 10 year old directions on what to do in every moment, they will never learn. Then he's also listening to you and not paying attention to the ball in the game. Yeah. But there are a lot of coaches that do it. A ton of coaches that grew up on FIFA and places literally joy sticking. A lot of coaches that went through that uncle Ted wants to know do players on bad teams get bored? I would expand the question. I think players on every team probably get bored. Don't they Trevor? Around now too. They do. That's, that's actually the very interesting thing. I actually did a just talked about the white Sox right now when you, that team is so bad that everyone's like, they're, Oh, you got, you have to avoid the losing 120 games. You don't. Cause it doesn't really matter. What you need to do is just be better now or at the end of the season than you are right now. The next year you might have a job because no one's going to give a crap. If you're 500 next, like it just, it does not matter in the scope of things. And having constantly thinking about that stuff, you're only hurting your ability, your career. If you're not doing, if you're like, Oh, just want the season to be over. That is the one thing that you have to fight against harder than anything when you're on a team like that. I've been on 200 loss teams. You have to, you have to be like, I need to be better in a month than I am right now. And everyone in here needs to be better. We need to look at things in the process and not by the results. And that's why Pedro Grafault probably ended up being like, Oh, it's because I think he lost that threat a little bit. He was caught up like they were in the results and they saw that happen. In my opinion, just based on what he was saying and what I've heard people say. So like that is, that is the hardest thing though. It's so hard. We got to, I need to be as clear as possible. Like it's so hard to walk into a clubhouse and be like, I'm not being selfish, but I am trying to get myself better and put myself in a position to what I do out there to contribute to wins as opposed to losses in the future. And you have to stay there. And that's the big problem you got to solve. And if you're on a team like that, there's probably a lot of these big problems there is to work through, which for me, at least at the end of my career, I can't say I was like, this is the beginning. I won't act like I had all the, I didn't learn this halfway through. But towards the end, I would have been like, this, I got all kinds of problems to solve. I've got tons of, I got tons of stuff to focus on. I'm not bored at all. But like it definitely can get like, you can get apathetic really fast. And it's one of the hardest things to do that when the major leagues kind of loses it shine a little bit for you. And you're not like, oh, all the time, because it's business as usual, you got to find a way to make it into something else about the calendar. I've, I'm feeling a little bit differently coming into the clubhouse. Maybe it's myself because, you know, I'm, I'm playing along with this in terms of I have to write on the similar schedule. I have to, you know, I feel I live on the similar schedule, but I feel like definitely the dog days of August is like a, is like a saying. And it's like, I kind of get it because, you know, you don't get any of that like watching, you can't even like watch others races yet. You know, there's nothing really, it's not like end of September, we're like, Oh, I, what is going on over there? Who's going to win the West? You know, it's more just like, you know, ah, man, I don't even know where we going tomorrow, where we bit where we were yesterday, you know, it's no one at the end of the tunnel. If you've been on the team all year, your stats are kind of hard to make them better. Yeah. It's having a tough year. It's probably going to generally be a tough year matter like turn this into a new season. Everyone's tired and there's no races and there's no line at the end of the tunnel. So you're like not quite where anything's exciting and everyone's just looking around like it's a pivot point. It's like one of those things where you got to like get your second wind or your third wind for a lot of fancy football teams being drafted right now. And then, yeah, and then now football, majorly clubhouses, those guys are like, like, because half of players in the league were in the SEC. So I was like, yeah, and the tennis draft and it's just becomes insufferable if you don't play as much. Yeah. All that stuff's happening at the same time. Had a few questions, at least somewhat related to deception, one from Fugacious in our discord. Was there any hitter in his career that told Trevor they had trouble seeing his pitches or a hitter he thought had trouble seeing his pitches? There's a couple guys. Eugenio Suarez and Mike Napoli really struggled. They never told me that they struggled to see what I was throwing, but like, just based on I think they combined for one hit in 28 B's and like 15 strikeouts. So it's like, there's something, there's something about how I throw that is tough. And everyone's got these guys and then there's guys who saw everything I threw them. But one guy, Trevor Plouffe actually threw me, told me like at 2014, I think in the live VP, he's like, there's something about like, he was, I look up and I see that's 93 one or whatever, because I was still a star at the time. And he goes, and it feels like it's 96. So he goes, there's something about, I just can't get the barrel there. And he told me like, like, he's like, dude, it's like bowling balls, like you're not throwing sinkers, but I don't know, there's something about it that's, that's weird. And you just don't look like Alex Meyer was also on our team and he goes, and he's funky in a different way. But his is easier to see more than yours is. And he's throwing five miles in our heart than you. I was like, I don't know, I have, and then we, at that time we're like invisible. I throw a little more of him as a ball, he doesn't, he just overpowers you. And we didn't have any idea, but like, that's the one thing I really remember is because he was on the big league team too. So I was like, Oh, the big league here told me that I was, I had a weird fastball. There's also a decent amount of timing deception that people can have because hitters will either maybe time off your handbrake or time off your back, hand swing, like they'll figure out. And I think some hitters want to use the same thing for every pitcher, you know? And so you may, you may also have done something different between handbrake and, and, and getting the ball up, you know, where that timing was different, you know, a little longer probably because my, my extension was longer stuff like that. Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting, but like we were just, it's so funny to think about how we were babies. We had no idea what was going on. Less information too, though, at the time, you know, yeah, I had a question for you in terms of this, in terms of curious teammates. Do you, do you have any people that you thought that people might not know or, or as curious as they were? I mean, my answer might be Jared Hughes, who maybe it was obvious, but he would, he was super curious. That seems to have a way extended his career by two or three years by being that curious about it. And then now works for the angels, you know, like he's, he's a good example, I think. I mean, it's hard to tell what, who, what curious guys people know about, but some of the most curious people I've ever played with, like, Seth Lugo is extremely curious about pitch. Specifically pitching. There's things that he does not care about at all. He loves pitching and he's, he's very, very curious about it. And he loves to discover his own stuff, honestly, to the point where he doesn't like to listen to anybody because he liked it so much, which I don't think it's a different thing. I, I came around and was like, I think he just really likes coming up with this stuff on his own. But like Adam Adavino is me and him were two P's like we were just bouncing stuff constantly. But another guy who has actually shown up quite a bit and who was actually actively asking myself and Adam Adavino direct questions was actually Otto wasn't there when he was there. Anthony Banda was, was Bonda, I think it's pronounced. It's changed a bunch of times. He was like, so when this happens, what, what are you thinking? What this happens? What are you looking for? Because he was trying to figure out a way to stay. He's been told he had, he had certain ways his pitches move, but he didn't really know how to use it. And I think we've seen that he goes to Dodgers now they're like, Hey, do this. And he's like, okay. And he's been very, very good for them. He was a guy who I didn't anticipate because he was kind of a journeyman. We picked him up off waivers. He'd been on teams and he was like, I'm tired of this. I want to stick. And that was the thing, maybe guys that guys who might not surprise you like Greg Breslow, who knew he was going to be a GM like those kind of guys, a couple other, like one guy now he's with the Royals and he's, he's up and coming. I think he's going to be very, very, very good. At some point is Erse, another guy who asked tons and tons of questions. He actually asked me to sit down with him once because he was like struggling during day games. So we could not figure out why. And we figured out some stuff and he picks some stuff up. But he's again, he's an older guy who's like, I, I have a shorter window than other people and I need to figure out this stuff out quickly. And he hasn't been a pitcher and some of them are not analytical. So like Max Scherzer was like super curious, but not, not, not like didn't have always loved the numbers. I think, but yeah, numbers on their face, he was, he was like, it was, it was a little bit of a thing that he was like actively pushing against was like, I just don't want to, I don't want to be the one who's ushering this in so quickly. But you know, he did have like five different reports and all kinds of numbers on them that he designed. Exactly. That's a good thing. He's like, yeah, I'm open to it as long as I'm the one who sees it. He wanted to be in full control of the decisions he made. I think it's pretty good going on all thing. I got a game in mind. We'll try this. We'll try this with one player. So it's going to be whoever gets this right wins. If no one gets it right, then I win for stumping you both. The game for now is called name that dude. I'm going to give you a series of clues about a player. There's no actual limit on the number of guesses. You can be wrong as many times as you want. Here's the simple thing. After I give a clue, if Trevor jumps in with an answer, Eno gets a chance to submit another answer before Trevor goes again. That's it. That's simple. So I see you can't just reel off two or three in a row if the person gets a shot. All right. First clue and name that dude. I debuted on September 10th, 1987. He's probably not going to do it for either one of you. It'd be amazing. Someone just named right there. That'd be great. Okay. I made two AL All-Star teams and finished second in the Cy Young Award voting in 1995. Brad Radke. Not Brad Radke. Little too early. That's too early. Want to throw a guess out there yet, Trevor? All right. Next clue. I also finished fourth in the MVP vote in 1995. Is this a reliever? This is largely a reliever. For my career, I finished with 321 saves. Oh, Lee Smith? Not Lee Smith. Would you like to guess Trevor? He's got two All-Star teams. Two All-Star teams. Both in the AL. Still stumped. All right. I topped 40 saves in a season four times, including in my age 38 season with the Pirates. Ah, I got the stunk faces going here. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, Pirates. Ah. I don't know any Pirates will win. I've already made a bunch of guests. I don't even know if I'm allowed them to guess again. Alejandro Peña? Like, was it, you don't hear like a reliever in the 80s? Not Alejandro Peña. You may also know me as Senior Smoke or Joe Table. Oh, Mesa. I'll, I'll, something Mesa. Joe Table. Jose Mesa. Joe Mesa. Trevor sneaks in for the win. Jose Mesa. Yeah. The rest of the clues. I pitched for Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Colorado, and Detroit. Eight different teams. He got back to Philly to end this career in Pittsburgh. I remember Philly at the end. You had MVP votes? Yeah. He had won an incredible year. No, I didn't know it was '95 though. It just, Jose Mesa seems like he was in the 2000. Like, I remember him, I don't know, like 20, 2003, four, but I guess he was around. Fourth in the MVP voting blew my mind. The only reason he came up. I had a meeting yesterday. Just a random meeting. It wasn't just baseball people. And someone said, Joe Table. And I said, that can't possibly be his nickname. I looked up right there on his B-rep page and I'm like, all right, I got an idea for a segment for the show. Much, much better career than, than I remembered for Jose Mesa. Not quite big Christmas, but it's a beautiful nickname in that baseball reference database. So if you enjoyed name that dude, let us know. If you get a better name for name that dude, I'm happy to change the name of the game too. We're going to head out on our way out the door. Reminder, you can find Trevor on Twitter @imtrevormay, find Eno @enoceris, find me @derekrenriper. You can join our Discord with the link in the show description. That's one of the best ways to send questions for the show. So if you've got a question for a future episode, go with that route or drop us an email. Ratesandbarrels@gmail.com. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening and watching. [Music] (upbeat music)
