Erik Halterman and guest Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus break down the Phillies’ hot start and discuss how to use new metrics to find fantasy gems.
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11:15 What is SEAGER?
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1:02:00 How good are the Phillies?
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how can the newest baseball metrics help you win your fantasy league well let’s ask Robert or who created one of them more on that on the Roa wire Fantasy Baseball [Music] podcast welcome everybody to the Sunday edition of The roota Wire Fantasy Baseball podcast brought to You by so rare Eric hman here with my guest today Robert or of baseball prospectus and ftn vantasy and the creator of my favorite new baseball metric Seager more on that for the bulk of today’s show also we’ll be getting to some Phillies because Robert in addition to being very smart in his uh creation of baseball metrics is very smart in his choice of his favorite team he picked the one that is the best team in baseball this year so uh Robert how’s it going it’s going pretty good um thanks for having me on yeah let’s uh start with the headlines as we always do and we are going to start with a Phillies headline so we’re going to book end the show with some Phillies talk hopefully this one doesn’t turn out to be too much of a headline but Ranger Suarez was hit by a comebacker early in his start last night and had to leave the game so far the news is not so bad bad the x-rays came back negative and there’s some swelling so maybe he’ll miss a start but man this got to feel like a bullet Dodge for Philly fans and anyone with Rangers Horrors on their team because what a season he’s been having yeah definitely I think that was generally the theme of all the quotes yesterday and he seemed to be in good spirits I read that he uh hit underneath of a table in the locker room and surprised the reporters after the game so that seems like a good sign as far as how he’s feeling yeah well normally hiding the table and feeling good may not be linked but I think in this case yes I think that’s a good point so would lean towards Suarez being fine I guess if you are someone who has Spencer Turnbull on a roster and haven’t dropped him yet maybe hold him through this weekend just in case I mean we assume he’s gonna come back and play a role at some point but we also hope that it’s going to be for Taiwan Walker and not for Rangers forz yeah they’re GNA keep going with this Taiwan Walker thing as long as they have to seems like it’s elsewhere in pitcher news yesterday uh Reed depur was optioned and this is probably much more significant news than the ranger Suarez news which again hopefully is going to be at most one miss start but Reed Detmer optioned after a bad start and if you look at his surface stats seems pretty darn reasonable 12 starts for Reed demmer’s a 614 ER and a 148 whip but I would imagine you don’t have to dig too far under that to be a little bit confused by this move so what do you think is going on here do you think this is a sensible move and de Mur does need some time to go sort things out or do you think this is very strange and maybe surface time manipulation and I don’t know what’s going on here I don’t think it’s anything nefarious like that I think it’s maybe that organization’s a little reactionary um I know he’s he’s got off to a really great start this year and it just seems like he’s been shelled every start since then so maybe it’s like a little reset uh because yeah I mean his his numbers everything that tells us a pitcher is good pretty much says hey this guy should be should be pretty good but who knows yeah but man looking at his game log and his earned runs which is you know not something that we look at right away when we analyze pitches but it does actually matter just a little bit when it comes to who’s going to win the game uh demmer’s is first four starts one one01 in earn runs but since then four or five 5 seven6 4 635 so if you do that for that many starts in a row this is going to happen but I think I’m with you on I’m I’m sensing no long-term reason to be worried about de Mur but I guess it does leave people in a tough decision if you have him in a deeper fantasy league would you be holding on to him and assuming we’re gonna see him soon and you’ll get the guy you drafted or is this time to cut bait yeah I would uh I would hang on to him for a little bit um just because like the we’ve seen the up side it’s it’s pretty good um and like you look at his game logs again something not everyone looks at all the time is left on base percentage and if you look at like the first four starts it’s you know 80% 75% 100% 75% and like League average I think is around 70 71% and then everyone after that is like below 50% so every Runner that’s getting on is scoring and some of that is is a little bit of scale but a lot of that is bad luck I think and relievers coming in and allowing inherited Runners to score and that of kind of thing so that tends to usually work itself out yeah maybe they’ll send him down and then when he comes back up the bull Bend will be better and he will have a better left on base rate and we’ll count him as a better pitcher I speaking of Angel’s Bullpen they did recall Ben Joyce the very exciting F fireballer I just got the call uh just today just before the show I’m not sure if we’re anticipating him moving to the back of the bull immediately in picking up saves but maybe for the deeper leagues worth throwing that name out there yeah definitely I mean he he got a lot of hype in college because I think he was he was at Tennessee if I remember right he was touching like 104 105 miles an hour sometimes um and it’s not like the guys at the back end of that pen have been lighting the world on fire um Carlos Estes is like in a permanent state of shakiness so yeah I mean maybe if Joyce comes up and has a good good few weeks he starts getting those higher leverage opportunities eventually yeah when ex Philly Luis Garcia is getting the occasional save chance and not necessarily looking all that different than he did when he was a Philly back in the darkest days of Philly’s baseball H you know things aren’t going great elsewhere in the headlines yesterday we got a couple injuries to some not exactly Superstar hitters Von Grom hit the injured list with a hamstring strain uh what do you think this does for the Boston infield is there any fantasy goodness we should be looking at I mean mostly I’m seeing less competition for David Hamilton and and Manuel Valdez do I need to get excited there and Manuel Valdez has looked o okay and in brief sance before uh but that’s like really just super deep League I think because you know he’s got a platoon and he’s not we’re not really sure if he’s that good I think he had a two home run game uh recently didn’t he um but yeah other than that I don’t I don’t think there’s a lot a lot to get excited about here yeah and not a lot to get excited about is probably the takeaway for the other injury here uh Andrew Ben and tendi he is now on the injured list with ailles tendonitis which seems like the kind of thing which could potentially keep him out for a while uh Although our note does indicate the fact that it’s listed as tendonitis rather than a strain is a positive so maybe it’s not that long at this point I’m not not sure how many listeners would have Andrew Ben and tendi on any of their teams although I think I picked him up at one point and quickly dropped him in one league so the the playing time mattered for Ben endi and he doesn’t have that anymore so there’s now some playing time in the White Soxs outfield for uh Corey julks Dominic Fletcher Oscar Kos you taken any shots at any white sock this weekend um it have to be in a pretty bad way to want to but um I don’t Oscar Kus has been interesting at times before and it looks like he actually cut his strikeout rate a little bit in Triple A this year it’s under 20% Which is that that’s pretty big deal for him we know he can hit the ball very hard um jokes looked pretty competent at times last year in Houston um but it’s hard to figure out which one of them is gonna get most of that run um it’s kind of like take your take your best guess I guess yeah jokes seems already may be viable as a deep League compiler types if he’s going to play a lot looks like he can do some of everything and not hurt you colas that’s an interesting shout about his uh decreased strikeout rate coming down a few points and it’s worth remembering with guys like kasas when there are players who we were somewhat excited about a year and a half ago we shouldn’t forget those guys because the reasons we liked them a year and a half ago most of them still apply I we’ve learned some of them may have been overstated but in general outdated scouting reports are still mostly right and so if it just took a year and a half for him to sort things out now should also mention his overall slash line in triaa only equates to a 97 WRC plus so I don’t want to be getting ahead of myself here but you’re right to mention that he’s he’s somebody and he’s doing something in the right direction and maybe there’s some playing time yeah that Talent the talent’s there somewhere you know we we liked him for the power speed before so that presumably that’s not gone away entirely at age 25 so maybe just a just a little Improvement somewhere maybe becomes relevant yeah so keep him in mind for your deeper leagues also speaking of talent wanted to mention Royce Lewis he is expected back Tuesday so if you have him in any of your lineups can presumably plan on him returning then I don’t think he’s likely to suffer a setback before Tuesday you never know uh there was the interesting story where he attempted a steal on rehab and the team freaked out about it I don’t know if that bodess well for my confidence in him going forward obviously if you have him somewhere the news that he’s coming back is very exciting and you’re plugging him right back into the lineup but if we’re at a place where the team’s not even trusting him to run I don’t know how I feel about his overall health right now yeah or his his fantasy value if he’s just like being forbidden from running on the bases I mean the the bats potentially special we’ve seen so still could be like an extremely good like I don’t know yordon light type of thing if he ever put together a run of games but um yeah I mean just not not sure what we’re getting on the bases or like how often he’s even going to play I could see him sitting you know one or two games a week you know trying to trying to keep him on his feet I don’t know I don’t have him anywhere but I did have some fomo at the start of the Year about missing out on him but I don’t know we’ll see what he looks like when he comes back yeah that fomo lasted less than a full game before he got hurt for the first time so hopefully he can make it at least two games this time around hopefully a whole lot more than that uh that’s going to do it for our headline portion of today’s show so I want to move us on to the main topic which is Robert’s new invention uh what’s the right word what do you do with a stat design create I don’t know but you’re award wining your award-winning stumbling into Seager there you go won you what what was the award from saber for best contemporary something or other um very high honor that I should have remembered the exact details of before launching into the sentence but the point is what you’ve done here is created I think one of the more significant metrics that I’ve seen in recent years and seems like saber agrees saber award for contemporary baseball analysis there you go to give you your proper title um and Seager is to give the one one sentence description of it before I turn it over to you for a one minute description it’s a stat which tracks how good a player swing decisions are basically do you swing at strikes and take balls but there’s more to it than that so why don’t you tell me a little bit more about what goes into Seager and how useful you think it is and why you decided to create it and that sort of thing um yeah so I guess to start off with just what it is is a swing decisions metric and it’s not just tracking you know Chase percentage or you know how much you’re chasing out of the zone and that kind of thing because um that doesn’t actually track too well with quality of contact which is something that we’re after as you know analysts and fantasy players um we want those guys that like we want to figure out which guys are going to be able to impact the ball and get consistent playing time that way and give us our home runs and everything um and like owing doesn’t actually correlate too well with it so I was trying to figure out a way to measure that and last year um there’s a lot of articles about Cory Seager coming out um how he has like this unique approach where you know he doesn’t let anything go by him in the zone at all but he also doesn’t Chase too much so it’s like he’s balancing both of them very well and seagar attempts to put a number on how well a hitter does that how well are they balancing hitting the pitches they can and also not getting themselves out or turning down opportunities to get on base if a pitcher not giving them anything to hit basically so it’s it’s selective aggression is kind of what the um the moniker stands for a little bit I didn’t come up with the name um Cy Seager was the inspiration but uh I I was not I had no name for this and the people at baseball perspectives kind of retrofitted an acronym for it yeah so best baseball tradition of course all all great baseball stats are retrofitted acronyms to some player or other and at least this one gets to be retrofitted after a star player unlike some of the other acronyms we’ve seen out there but this year if you were to create Seager this year who would they have had to name it after edmundo Sosa or something yeah possibly and he’s he’s quite a story because he was actually like one of the very very worst players at it last year so you know obviously I watch him a lot this year like the quality of his at bat is completely different really interesting I might I might have to write about it soon if if uh one of the Phillies beats doesn’t beat me to it yeah I’ll be looking forward to that so we’re going to be taking a look at some leaderboards of players who are doing well in Seager or doing poorly in Seager and doing well or poorly in terms of their results to try to see if we can find maybe some potential future risers or future fallers or maybe we can learn a little bit more about Seager and discover that hey you know as useful as it is it’s not everything there are other stats that explain a good player so try to get a sense on just how explanatory it is how powerful it is but also Robert where can people find Seager um so if you go to my Twitter which this is a really bad way to tell people how to find it um then I have it in my uh I think it’s either in my bio or or my pin tweet but I have a shiny app that update every day that tracks that you can find it and also they it should be coming to baseball perspectives leaderboards sometime this year oh exciting is that is that breaking news or is that already known I don’t know are we breaking news here on this podcast uh people have been asking for a while we’re working on it right now getting it up there that that’s a little bit of breaking news I guess fa until that point listeners can go to your Twitter it’s notthe bobor which is a good Twitter handle and you in your PIN tweet or you can go to your shiny app which is called the realist Muto which is also a good name as well so we’re going to get into some of these leaderboards or who is showing great swing decisions and how much should we care uh right after this message from our sponsor so rare have you ever dreamed of stepping into the shoes of a general manager welcome to so rare MLB a groundbreaking fantasy baseball game where you call the shots take charge and make your managerial Mark by collecting officially licensed digital player cards of your favorite MLB Stars these aren’t just any cards they’re your ticket to compete 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MLB today transform your passion for baseball into a quest for Glory and get rewarded for your baseball Savvy sign up today with a link in the description and get 50% off your first pro cards up to $50 it’s your passion rewarded welcome back everybody to the Sunday edition of the Roo Fantasy Baseball podcast brought to you by so rare Eric Halterman with my guest Robert or today and we are talking about his new metric created last year called Seager which measures a player’s swing decisions and if I am able to pull up my slides here or my uh Google sheet there we go uh for everybody following Along on YouTube I have just posted a list of the players who are doing great in both seagar and in their offensive results this season uh this list of players I believe has a WRC plus of at least 130 and they’re in at least the top 15 percentile in SE uh should I’ll just read off the lists for anybody not able to catch on YouTube this is an example of the hitters that make excellent swing decisions and have excellent results and there’s some really good names in here mixed in with some interesting pop-up names Marcel Ozuna Davis Schneider Christian Walker William conteras Kyle Tucker edmundo Sosa Aaron judge Vladimir Guerrero Dylan Moore David fry Bobby Whit Joey Ortiz Juan SoDo Reese Hoskins show he Otani gunar Henderson Bryce Harper and Mookie Betts so man if you were to give me a list of the best hitters in baseball and also David fry Dylan Moore and David Schneider that would look a lot like that yeah it excuse me sorry um yeah these are these are mostly when you think of the guys who are consistently doing the best of the play this is this is a lot of the a lot of the names that come to mind um and then also like you said uh the uh incredible season of David fry is popping up here and kind of last season’s David fry might have been David Schneider he is also here yeah these are these are guys who are they’re doing what you want they’re making the best decisions at the plate they’re being rewarded for it and so something I’m curious here is how much can we read into a third of a season worth of seekers so when I see that most of these players are the types of hitters that I would expect to be having great seasons and showing good plate discipline I mean Juan stto for example probably epitomizes that I guess he’s only 91st percentile in Seager but hey Aaron judge he epitomizes that too Kyle Tucker 998th percentile Seager having the best season of his career so when we see that those guys make this number make sense in a lot of ways if we also see the David Fri the David schneiders making that level of Swing decision for two months what does that tell us about the type of Swing decisions they’re to make the next two months so yeah it’s it is uh something a guy can be streaky at um like they can they can run hot be seeing the ball very well um I’ve done a little bit of like the stability or reliability testing um still still working on that it’s one of the reasons it’s not quite on baseball perspectives yet but it it does take a little bit longer to stabilize than other metrics because there’s a lot going into it um there’s two different parts it’s selective aggression and then hitable pitches is taken and those are two different like behaviors that a hitter exhibits you have to wait for both of them to stabilize so I found that like around 80 to 100 plate appearances you can start to assume that a Play What a player is doing is more them than the rest of the league um so you can if they’re doing considerably better than the league average you can think okay they’re they’re just doing the right things uh they might still regress towards the league average but they are display an improved skill there um so I don’t know if I would uh bet on edmundo Sosa to lead the league in swing decisions for the rest of the season but I would say that he has definitely made a significant jump forward I think uh David fry also I think he was okay at this last year but like this is an entirely new level so again I don’t know if you would expect him to make you know Juan sooes decisions at the plate all year but I think that you can bet on that skill at being one of his standout attributes the rest of the year yeah for me I think that the power Seager has here is that when we see these guys who have had a pop up two months you want to see I at least one underlying number that goes with it and ideally many and so if we see with some of these guys having these exciting Seasons out of nowhere that oh they’re hitting the ball hard and they’re making more contact those are good things to see and this is another one in that realm where it doesn’t necessarily guarantee right if if we see a player having his best average exit velocity in these first two months of his career that’s really good right if he’s had a hot two months we really want to know that he is also hitting the ball harder similarly we really want to know that he’s also making better swing decisions so I think it definitely matters although like you said that’s not a guarantee that he’s going to stay like that but man if you had told me that David fry he’s having this outstanding season and he’s making the worst swing decisions of his career I think that would be a very different story so even if this is no guarantee that David fry in June and July is amazing it really does back up the idea that David fry is earning a lot of what he’s done so far yeah it’s it’s telling you he’s got good processes going into what he’s doing it’s not like just fluking it basically he’s he’s consistently doing the right things and I think that’s the big takeaway there do you have any thoughts on these guys who are truly at the elite elite elite end of this scale like say Davis Schneider who’s all the way up at the 99th percentile versus the guys who are merely quite good I mean the guys in the upper 80s does it tell you something extra if you’re way at the top in Seager or does it tell you okay that was two months you’ll probably fall down to the 90th percentile um yeah I wouldn’t say there’s like a a huge um you could you can take anything away from there being like big outliers like last year year over the full season I think Cory Seager was number one and he had a Seager of like 25 something if I remember right and then like second and third place was like 23 22 there’s there’s not a huge spread um so I don’t think it there’s a really big difference at the top end I think it’s more moving away from around the league average that tells you something that that would make sense to me also before we move on to the next list you mentioned Seager was up around 20 in Seager what does that 25 mean it’s not 25 runs added or anything like that it’s just a score because that’s why I’ve chosen to display it alongside the percentile here for added context right I’ve I’ve wrestled with this because it’s it’s kind of a bad math in the way that Ops is where you have different denominators going into one number so um technically it’s a comparison of um the number of uh the amount of your correct decisions that are takes um and then you subtract away the amount of pable pitches that you are taking and it’s kind of like approximating you see people doing like Zone swing minus Chase rate um it’s kind of like approximating that structure a little bit but yeah you’re subtracting those two numbers in coming away with a score and it’s kind of like a rate basis kind of thing but it’s also different denominators for those two things so you can’t Technic Tech Al call it that got it so it works even though there are some interesting bits when you get down there got it uh so let’s move to the next list here which is bad Seager bad results and I don’t think we need to linger too long here because this is mostly just showing the other side of the coin and showing that hey a lot of the worst hitters in baseball make bad swing decisions and those two things are related uh the list here is quite long and I don’t want to read every single one of them but at very bottom you’ll see names like Nick Amed and Martin Maldonado and Dominic Smith I think nobody’s surprised there are some interesting names on here though uh there was a question somebody in chat wants to know Alex wants to know what do you guys think of enion strand well Christian inario and strand was really struggling and only 12th percentile in Seager so that’s not great obviously there were other things going on with his season but when you see a talented highly hyped young player showing up this bad in Seager am I right to be worried yeah and the interesting thing with him is that last year I’m pulling it up right now um he was quite good he was in the 77th percentile in his limited uh sample last year so interesting and and he’s always had a reputation as a free swinger uh in the miners that was the big the big knock on him as a as a prospect uh but somebody with a ton of power so he was able to mat ask that a little bit but you know if you’re chasing a lot and you kind of like take and and nudge those decisions just a little bit more in the wrong in the wrong direction then that can have considerably uh that could really hurt your your overall production in a way that we’ve seen with him this year I just think that’s kind of being reflected in the numbers here yeah I think that makes a lot of sense there’s some other names on here that are potentially worrisome uh or potentially just explaining why a GU having such a bad year bone Naylor in the ninth percentile in Seager that’s not good if you were hoping he would take a step forward Brett B also ninth percentile so some young guys who are struggling and this certainly seems to be a real part of the reason why yeah I I definitely think there’s like some approach issues going on with uh with Brett B there there’s been a lot of different stuff I’ve read about whether he should be uh like trying to pull the ball in the air or hitting it the other way and those influence the pitches you swing at and what you’re looking for and that kind of thing so like if his approach is if he’s getting told different things and getting tugged at different um in different directions by his organization and coaches then that’s going to show up in in something like this which is telling you what basically his thought process is at the plate and I think that’s shows a pretty good chunk of why he’s had he was sent down and having such a bad season is this something you’ve noticed are there team-wide shifts in Seager have you noticed from year to year where this is a way we could tell hey it looks like the rays are telling their hitters to chase less or whatever it might be do you notice things like that in the team wide data here um yeah I I haven’t checked this year but um I know the Royals rate it really well for a long time yeah they are two three four five six they’re eighth they were like third best for a little bit there and um I think they they rate quite well in barrel barrel rate if I remember right last time I was looking at the Savant leaderboard so I think uh I think they are there’s a concentrated effort by them to attack pitches in the zone a little bit more this year um I would guess that like their Swig rate on on pitches has gone up like uh good pitches in the zone has has gone up a little bit this year interesting so I wonder if there’s going to be some future applications of Seager where we think about a player who’s switching teams if we can measurably say hey The Royals are really good at teaching aggression within the Zone hey look at this player he’s okay but he’s not aggressive enough in the zone I’m just spitballing here I don’t know any actual examples of this but I can imagine in some transaction analysis next offseason just in the same way we’re talking about hey this team’s pitching coaches are really good at getting their guys to add a sweeper oh this pitcher looks like he needs a sweeper oh I’m pretty excited that he just went there I mean is this the kind of thing that you think we could do with Seager and say look this is the team’s approach and he needs that approach so get excited um yeah I I think you know that’s it’s not gonna it’s not going to hit 100% of the time because it’s such a complicated process going into to teaching a hitter how to hit basically right or just changing their identity and their ability to recognize pitches and that sort of thing but I mean we’ve seen like teams like Atlanta have success just like picking guys off with scrap Heap and suddenly they’re you know Orlando Orlando rcia starting an All-Star game last year that kind of thing um so yeah I think there definitely is potential for to be speaking Yeah speaking of Atlanta one more name on this bad Seager bad results leaderboard before I want to move on to the potential uh potential uh improvers or potential fallers we’ll see uh Michael Harris shows up on here having quite bad Seager down in the sixth percentile and he’s having poor results this season uh does this stand out as as checking out with Michael Harris’s profile based on everything else we think that he’s a talented player but makes bad swing decisions is that where we sit on Harris yeah he is definitely one of the Streaker free swinging types and you’ll you’ll see those at the bottom of the lead leader boards it tends to be the guys on either end of the extreme that uh Seager doesn’t like uh either they’re like extremely passive Jack swinsky type of hitter or extremely aggressive like Michael Harris um so yeah he he does he swings at everything and that’s pretty much the issue is uh if I look at the selectivity part of this he is actually in the first percentile of the leag he is very very bad at at deciding what to not swing at basically and that’s that’s really interesting because you could sort of see that in a guys strike out and walk numbers but you can’t see it quite as well as you can with Seager for example with with Michael Harris for his career he’s a 21% strikeout rate a 4.8% walk rate so if you show me those numbers I would say Okay based on that walk rate he’s probably pretty swing happy but I don’t know if I would have been able to tell just how much so that first percentile what was that first percentile in swinging at pitches he shouldn’t swing at was it uh yeah the selectivity is like the takes portion of this so he’s like League worst in takes basically got it got it I should mention that I’m only displaying Seager one of your many stats that’s available over in your shiny app the realist mucho selectivity is one of those as well as a few other of the component parts so highly recommend people checking that out let’s move on to the good Seager bad results list and this one is I think the most fun one because there might be some potential buy lows here or we might discover that Seager isn’t everything so I am going to read off the list of the players here it’s about 15 the these are all guys who had a WRC plus below 90 and who were in at least the top quartile in Seager so Chaz McCormack Jorge palano Austin Riley George Springer Brendan Rogers Curtis me glaber Torres Emanuel Rivera Andrew vaugh Kevin kermier Joey Gallow Santiago espanol Lawrence Butler Mitch Garver and Alejandro Kirk so a whole bunch of names there who are not having good Seasons but who are at least choosing good pitches to swing at so when I see say Chaz McCormack’s name at the top of the list and I think about the fact that I was pretty in on him heading into this year and it’s not going well should I say oh well he’s a 96 percentile and Seager I think he’s going to be totally fine and hold on are we at that point with a stat like Seager or do we think all right well he’s got to have some other flaws yeah that’s a that’s a good question one I’m wrestling with myself because I think CH McCormack was my most owned player uh this year so I’ve been a little perplexed by this too I know there was an injury component there and now he’s basically fighting for his job with Jake Myers going completely ballistic um and also John Singleton being relevant in 2024 um yeah so I would take it generally as a positive um and that you would expect better like we wouldn’t expect him to have a 57 WRC plus all year even if you don’t think he’s going to be 2023 Chaz MC cormick but um for a lot of these players it’s like okay there’s good process happening here um they’re doing the right things I would expect them to improve but also it’s important to remember that for a lot of these you know it’s not just the decisions they make for hitters that determines their success like um George Springer you uh you’re seeing his EVS his exit velocities have declined quite a bit this year so um there might be some age related decline happening physically so maybe he’s making the same good decisions he always has but you know the rest of his game is starting to lag behind and then a guy like Emanuel Rivera he actually R it really well if you dropped the um qualifications for it last year he like top five he was insane yeah yeah but for that my takeaway was um that might be what’s keeping keeping him in the league because we know he can’t really hit the ball too hard but if he’s consistently having a great at bat every time he goes up that’s what is keeping him you know on a Major League bench uh managers love that kind of guy come in and just never Strike out usually put a ball in play and gives the picture a hell of a time basically yeah so yeah that so I was gonna ask you at some point today and I think we’ve already touched on it about Eman overa specifically because he was so Elite last year and do you think a guy with this outlier skill and nothing else do you think that pretends to Future not start him but you know did did it should I have seen that in a dynasty league and went and tried to go get Emanuel Rea because he’s such an outlier in swing decisions that he’s gonna come good eventually or do you think there’s a possibility of like you said you can actually be a one Tool Guy where your one tool is plate discipline but that’s not going to get you anything more than a bench fot yeah I uh it’ll keep him in the league but I don’t think that would make him relevant in anything except for you know 30 team Dynasty or something like that leag where it’s just a ridiculously deep League um because yeah it’s swing decision swing decisions are very important for a hitter but I think ultimately what would determine how good they can be probably at the high end is like their power potential and he just does not does not have that yeah I think that’s very fair but say looking at this for someone like maybe Curtis me who we’ve only seen in the big leagues for a little bit we don’t really have a full sense of how good he is he struggled is 94 plate appearances but I think it’s probably fair to say okay well he at least had 84th percentile Seager that’s something when he comes back if there’s more well-rounded game you know maybe he’s just Emanuel Rivera but I still definitely like to see it in a young hitter I would think I’m not sure if if these 94 plate appearances are enough to conclude Curtis me has the skill but if he was considered to have it according to scouting reports too that would be another thing where this is good to see just sort of builds a holistic picture of the player yeah exactly um and for him I mean he’s he’s displayed better uh high-end exit velocities than like Emanuel Rivera or another name here it’s Santiago espanol those are kind of roughly roughly similar guys but uh but me can hit the ball a little bit harder and a little bit better than them so this is more significant for him I would say that yeah he’s probably got a at least as good of an upside as what like the Prospect scouting reports had him down as which I think was like generally thought of as like a typical professional hitter kind of thing um right so so yeah he he should be able to do that I think he’s he’s probably going to come in and I would guess he’d be a pretty consistent offensive performer if he ever got an extended run um and he’s just working out the Kinks in his first first run through the league basically yeah unfortunately Seager can’t help us predict the future rais depth chart which will be an issue for Curtis me but other than that at least one good sign in his Direction let’s move to the bad Seager but good results list and by bad Seager I did have to go all the way up to below average here because there aren’t actually very many players who are straight up bad in Seager but have had good results this is guys with a WRC plus of at least 130 uh Tristan Casas and Jake Myers their Seager percentiles in the 40s so maybe they’re fine and Jose Ramirez actually 38th percentile Seager was a surprise rounding out this list Kevin polar Carrie Carpenter Connor Wong Mike Trout you might have heard of him Patrick Bailey jerks and profar Steven Quan Michael conforto and adley Rutman a couple interesting names on here and I wonder if the takeaway is that we just shouldn’t worry when we see an Elite hitter like Jose Ramirez or Mike Trout having bad Seager should we just say yeah but those guys have proven that their approach works for them ignore that number yeah I would I would definitely trust the uh the back of the baseball card when it comes to guys like that with a with a run um I think you’ll uh one thing you could take away from this list and I kind of mentioned it earlier a lot of these guys are on the more patient Side Of The Ledger of hitters um and that is something that it tends uh that Seager tends to underrate those kind of players um as you know as a as a Phillies fan I watch this a lot and a guy who undoubtedly makes better swing decisions than he has in the past is uh Brandon Marsh but actually Seager thinks he’s you know making poor decisions but what is what’s happening is he’s he’s shrinking The Hitting Zone that he’s looking for so’s he’s watching a lot of strikes go by but when he does get the pitches in those zones he’s he’s doing something with them and that that’s a better approach for some hitters uh you know this Seeker doesn’t explain everything uh it’s going to miss on some of those guys a little bit I you know I’m playing around seeing if I can try to capture that a little bit better but for now it’s it’s just going to miss on that like a guy like adley Rutman he takes very good patient at bats we know he can his bats at ball is extremely good and he has good quality of contact I wouldn’t I would not Val take much away from Seeker not liking him but we know he’s adley retman yes and adley retman I wanted to mention specifically I’m just pulling up his past Seager numbers here because he has changed dramatically season to season and I don’t have any idea what to do about that um adley wrond in terms of percentile as a rookie he was in the 93rd and then in his second year he was in the 61st and now this year he’s in the eighth percentile in Seager now we also saw with the Orioles gunar Henderson I haven’t checked his Seager I guess I could pull that up but we saw that he went from a high walk guy to a very low walk guy very aggressive swinger and that totally worked for him is that maybe evidence of some team-wide shift here although I should not gunar Henderson this year in Seager he’s at 86 percentile actually showed up on our list earlier so I could have already known that so he is becoming I guess more aggressive in a way that Seager likes whereas adley rxman is becoming more aggressive in a way that Seager doesn’t like but he’s still having good results and any idea what’s going on there in Baltimore uh yeah for for well you you mentioned Gunner and I I wanted to um bring up that I I had posted at some point it might have been when he won the a rookie of the year last year um a rolling plot of uh the hitable pitches Taken part of Seager which is basically you know that’s what they’re they’re swinging at in the zone um and his improved dramatically as the year went on to the point where at the end of the year his like overall Seager if you just looked from uh like after April or something on it would have been like extremely good number probably in line with what he’s doing this year um with adley yeah he’s uh it looks like he’s just the decisions in general kind of look look worse this year because he’s not just uh not just watching or or being more selective he’s also like allowing a lot more pitch uh called strikes in the zone um so I’d have to I’d have to dig into that a little bit more to see what’s going on there um but yeah I wouldn’t base my opinion of edley Rutman on that right it is interesting and it’s something I’d like to look at a little bit more right and that’s what I’m trying to get at a little bit with today’s episode is when we see an outlier Mark like that and everything else is fine should we is that time to at least worry a little bit you think that’s accurate of like H we should make sure everything’s okay here or do we just write off the stat well not not the stat in general of course I I wouldn’t you on here if we write up this stat entirely but you know what I mean yeah I um I think I would um cons uh that would be like a sign for me to dig into him more to see what’s going on and also something I noticed that his his Chase percentage has also gone up a fair amount this year and I know I kind of uh poo pooed on on Chase percentage when I was explaining why I went about making Seager but I do like to see when when they align in either direction uh the guy has a bad Seager bad Chase percentage that’s usually like okay there’s there’s really something going on there um yeah and he his has gone up this year so making worse decisions in general um I guess that hasn’t affected him too much in the triple slash obviously but it’s the weirdest thing his walk rate over the three seasons 13.8 13.4 and now 5.4 but his Ops is identical 806 809 806 so the new version of adley wrond is the same version despite being kind of different under the hood I don’t totally know what to do with it either but it’s worth a deeper dive I think in some in wherever it goes he being more oh sorry sorry no go ahead he’s uh he’s just he’s being more aggressive in general um the swing rate is gone from you know 40.5 to 41 to just under 47% this year which is a pretty sizable jump for a header so yeah I wonder if he’s hunting fast ball specifically or or Breakers specifically and as a result is taking a lot more in the zone when it’s not what he wants I would Hazard to Guess that that’s kind of what might be happening there but I would definitely have to look into that a lot more yeah and we’re seeing a an increase in his hard hit rate to make up for a loss of walks but so far those two changes are basically exactly canceling each other out so maybe uh he will be able to combine the best version of themselves and uh keep that higher hard hit rate and get his swing decisions back up and suddenly reach a new level not entirely sure I’ve got one final leaderboard here which is really just an excuse to throw Christopher morell’s name out there I shouldn’t pretend otherwise but these players have mediocre results I believe they’re all between about 90 and 120 in WRC plus and they’re all Elite in Seager they’re on the 91st percentile or better and it’s a really good list of names even though it starts with Stuart Fair child but it gets really quickly to Christopher Morell and then Nelson Velasquez Joe Adele Shay langelier Manny Machado Ronald auna H Julio Rodriguez still on here interestingly and yandi Diaz so the bottom of that list is some studs who are off to shaky starts but who are still making excellent decisions so that’s good to see in the case of Machado Rodriguez Diaz and if he weren’t injured aunia but the top five there if we’re I guess including Stuart Fairchild maybe you have something to say there he’s a Seeker God this season but Morel Nelson Vasquez Joe Adell and Shay langelier all have been at least interesting and the fact that all of them I think are very good power hitters they hit the ball very hard and they make excellent swing decisions that’s a really good combination I’m talking excellent swing decisions all these guys are 96 percentile or better yeah and it’s not uh this is like one of the more Christopher morale is one of the more illustrative examples of the differences between what seager’s looking at and what percentage or something is looking at like a lot of people think he’s like a very uh free- swinging type who just like almost because of the uniform and style he plays with maybe it’s like a little jav Bish right uh clone but um he actually it’s just like he’s Ultra Ultra aggressive within the Zone um it’s just that when he does swing he’s also Ultra aggressive swinging and misses a lot of the time in his Z too um but yeah that what that does lead to is when he makes contact it goes a very long ways but it also that’s kind of like a streaky profile uh type to begin with when you’re that kind of player right but yeah that’s he’s very aggressive go ahead I’m sorry I was gonna say there’s similarities too with Adele right I think you could say a lot of the same he’s he’s had significant contact issues but when he hits the ball he hits it hard so when you see specifically a younger player like that who does half of it right they hit the ball hard they just need to hit it more if you see them swinging at better pitches that’s huge if that sticks around I me that would be the reason Joe Adell is a good player now if Assuming he’s able to stick it out for the next four months is it that simple right if you’re if you can hit the ball hard but you don’t hit it that often and at least now you’re picking the right pitches to swing at that can be what takes you from a bust to a completely viable player yeah definitely and Ian you could toss Velasquez into that that bucket as well you know these are these guys that just make extremely extremely good contact and just have like a a marginal increase in in the ability to make contact either by not swinging at pitches they have no chance at or by punishing the ones that pitchers have to throw them basically to to get it you know into account then that’s going to make a big difference but it it can it can make them into you know All-Star type players for a year but also it kind of makes them a little they’re walking a little bit of a tight RPP there because right if you’re so dependent on home runs for your production then if you just get a little bit worse again those disappear than you’re back to being whatever you know Nelson Velasquez was before right I know he ALS Nelson Vasquez also I was I was a little uh interested in him this year because he’s been basically leading all year in in the Seager rating and I was like what’s going on and then I uh the LA over the last uh week or two he’s just started hopping home runs for fun so I guess something something finally clicked for him yeah I guess the one negative spin you could put on players like this is you could say that well if it takes truly Elite swing decisions to get them to this level are they going to maintain it forever and that’s why I’m exed to see where your stickiness analysis goes with this year to year and month to month I think that’s going to be a really big piece to add to the puzzle here because I really want to know okay Joe Adell is making outstanding swing decisions this year so is the truth that he’s making outstanding swing decisions now and going forward and therefore Joe Adell is good or is the truth that he’s running hot for two months he’s seeing the ball well and I don’t know if he’s going to see the ball next month and actually this is reason to sell high so I guess probably we should leave that question open until you’ve completed your analysis on just how sticky Seager is year toe or do you think you are leaning in One Direction on that um yeah so in the um in the first in the introductory piece I guess I I would call it um I did have a little uh box showing like the correlation between um seagar Chase and uh Zone swing minus Chas um with uh other statistics and then also with themselves and you know that’s very surface level analysis it’s not you know as as deep into the stickiness as as what I’m planning on on getting out there but it did show up that it was a little less sticky than uh Chase and and Zone minus swing um if you want like the actual correlation numbers it’s 082 for Chase with itself and then 66 with Seager with itself so you know there’s it’s still fairly sticky but it’s definitely less uh or it’s more prone to being variable between Seasons so yeah that does it does come and go guys can run hot can run cold but yeah there’s there’s definitely more research to be done into into that Avenue for for what it is well I’m excited to see where that research goes that’s going to wrap up our discussion of Seager I’m want to ask you real quick about the new swing speed Matrix coming out we have much time for that I also want to talk to you about the Phillies but here is a quick message from our sponsor prize picks before we get to that prize pick is the best way to get action on Sports in more than 30 States across the country prize pick is really simple to play I can make my picks and submit my entry in less than 60 seconds you just pick more or less on two or more player stats and watch the winnings roll in quick withdrawals easy gameplay an enormous selection of players and Stat types are what make prize picks the number one daily fantasy sports app and hey you can use the roota wire picks tool for help in making your picks we’ve got uh advice on every game NFL NBA MLB NHL WNBA soccer uh looking at just tonight’s Phillies Cardinals game looks like our tool is saying pick the more on Nick castiano say hits plus runs plus RBI I can get behind that pick the more on Kyle schwarber’s fantasy score I can get behind that too the pick the less on Taiwan Walker strikeouts I I can probably get behind that one as as well uh download the app today and use code rod for a first deposit match up to $100 that’s promo code r o t o p o d for a first deposite match up to $100 pick more pick less it’s that easy and welcome back to the roadwire fantasy baseball podcast talking with Robert or about how to use new stats that’s the main that’s the topic today mostly we were talking about his new stat Seager which he released last year and which you can find at the real m. shinyapps.io or you can go to his Twitter account otthe Bobby or and find it under his pin tweet there uh speaking of new stats though the one that has caught the baseball world by storm over the past month or so is all of the swing speed bat tracking stuff and we know it’s very exciting and very cool and descriptive and leads to very cool visualizations I love all the graphs and all the charts that I’m seeing about it but the question I think for this podcast is is how useful is it for fantasy players there’s some obvious wrong turns which is just hey this guy swings hard he’s good and then you get to John Carlos Stanton as the best hitter in baseball which probably isn’t true and Luis Aras as the worst which also probably not true so where are you on all the swing speed stuff right now is it just cool toys or do you think there’s some real stuff we can gain in terms of you know making our fantasy teams better more quickly than we had in the past uh yes as far as like actionable information from this I’m not I’m not sure uh I would be confident in using it as like my uh you know a foundation for any decisions um it is definitely very very very cool and interesting that we can see these things but we also kind of inherently knew things like John Carlos can swing the bat very very fast um I do think it it could be interesting for um kind of like bucketing hitters into types like you have the uh Luis Aras and Steven Quan We both we we know what type of hitters they are what their strengths are you know making a ton of contact not necessarily hitting for power and they show up at the bottom of like the average swing speed and swing length uh leaderboards and maybe using those you can see other hitters that are like them and and kind of go from there or I think Freddy Freeman doesn’t rate too well in uh the bat speed but obviously we know Fred Freeman is an extremely great hitter so if you can maybe find a few other areas where a guy kind of has Freddy Freeman swing speed and a couple other behaviors like him then maybe you can start to explain some of his production uh even though it’s not traditionally a greatl looking St cast page or anything like that um but yeah I am definitely waiting for both more more data and uh measures to be really and for more people smarter than myself to do research and telling me how what we can take away from this I was hoping you wouldn’t say that because that’s what I usually say and I’m usually referring to you when I talk about that so man who who are we waiting on who do I need to have on this podcast next year to talk about swing length uh there are plenty of people doing exciting stuff out there you’re doing some good stuff as well you had an article a couple weeks ago in baseball perspectus called in defense of Isaac paradus or that is a great example of looking at hitters who swing in unconventional ways but who have success and trying to figure out how I think just noting how similarly paradus shows up next to Nolan arado was really significant because if you look at some of the baded ball data that has been the Reason to Believe In isach prus For example he is somebody who has very low hard hit metrics but seems to consistently get to his power because he drops pulled fly balls just just over the left field wall just like Nolan arado and it’s really cool to see that oh the results are similar and guess what here’s why their swings are really similar so isach pus and guys like him the slow swings and long swings that seems like it would be so bad but it actually works right yeah so um that was the first takeaway I had like immediately that week um there was a few articles that went up that were kind of like you know uh throwing up red flags on guys because they had um slow bats and long swings and you know naturally that seems like a terrible combination for a hitter you’re right just um on on face value normally you’d say that about a bad hitter but these guys clearly make it work and it it turns out the swing length actually can tell us a lot about how a guy is trying to hit a ball because it includes contact point in there uh we just haven’t been able to tease out the part that’s just the contact point which would be really interesting to look at right but because it it does include it you can kind of figure out work backwards from there you know um really long swings are because guys are making contact very far out in front of where their swing starts and that is exactly what guys who are trying to pull fly balls are shooting to do um is hit the ball like foot and a half two feet out in front of the plate and yank it right inside the foul po and you know that’s a whole class of hitters that’s had a lot of success despite not really having John Carlos Stanton’s bat speed and or exit velocities is you know used to look at but um you know Marcus semi and one of these guys Jose altu does it so that could be a successful strategy and they don’t look great by these new metrics or the old ones but it’s definitely a plausible strategy for a lot of hitters so the main takeaway here is that I think a lot of the ways you could intuitively want to use bat speed are actually just going to make your fantasy teams worse if you’re just saying oh well gotta cut isak Paredes has there any has there been any promising research that you’ve seen or done yourself that you think is hinting to where this is going to go and how people might be using it to make their fantasy teams better um as far as fantasy goes I don’t I don’t know if I’ve seen any research yet um that’s a fair answer I mean the answer that were too early right right yeah it’s only a couple weeks removed it’s it kind of takes some time to figure out what you’re looking at whenever you get a new batch of data like this it’s humongous um I think uh I’ve seen some interesting attempts and and had one myself at like kind of like 3D Mo modeling a swing um I don’t know how applicable it would be to Fantasy because you might almost be getting into like pitcher versus hitter matchup stuff by then and I don’t know who goes that in depth into F but teams teams certainly would have some use for that but um yeah so we’re so we’re still still kind of waiting on on some more ground to be broken there right I think the one that I’m waiting for is just once we get multiple Seasons worth of data right next right next April 15th aren’t you going to be writing an article saying here are the players who have improved their bat speed the most and here are the players who have lost the most bat speed I mean I know I am I’m sure I’m not GNA be the only one that I could see as being pretty clearly useful for Fantasy right that’s just a that should be as useful as a pitcher has lost two miles per hour on their fastball the batter’s lost two miles per hour on a swing is it going to be that important next year at this time uh yeah I would imagine there’s gonna it’s it’s gonna um there there will come a time where we will have like a particular probably percentile swing number or something that we’re looking at and if a guy doesn’t match up year-over-year kind of like a Max EV or something like that does for hitter then um that’ll be a sign that you know there’s Decay there or you know this this could even be relevant this year uh sign of like an injury or something happening on like a rolling swing speed you know guys playing through like an oblique injury or something it’s possible that their swing could slow down a lot and I I did uh you asked me for research I did want to point out to the um piece that Alex Chamberlain uh put up I believe earlier this week it was um I think it’s the one titled uh something about daddy hacks but it was looking into how the percentiles of Swing speeds correlat like xoba and exit velocities I think uh was very good and showed you know it’s uh not quite like 90th percentile swing speed that is super important I think but like a little bit lower and correlates to contact rate and that kind of thing but people should go check that one sure interesting I will uh try to remember to put that one in the episode description and that will hint at the direction that I think a lot of this exciting research is going to go we only have a few more minutes here but let’s finish the show by gloating about or discussing the first place Philadelphia Phillies who happens to be a team that both Robert and I have watched a good amount over the course of Our Lives how real is this Robert and that’s that’s what I want to ask is this is basically the same Phillies team we’ve seen for a couple years and I was used to this team being a solid good wild card team that was my expectation heading into the year they didn’t really make any changes everybody’s a little bit older so maybe this could be the beginning of the end but probably it’s going to be another Wild Card season and instead it’s just been an incredibly uneventful best team in baseball what’s what’s going on I’m not used to this yeah it’s a little unsettling if you’re you’re a Phillies fan yeah this is this is what we do this is what like the Braves and Dodgers do but um yeah the uh I think um I’m most confident like the the pitching has been like pretty much the best in the league top to bottom I guess um the starting rotation in particular I think that’s I think that’s legitimate because all those guys you could say are good we were kind of waiting to see what happened with Chris Sanchez if there was any regression there or not he looks better than ever almost like he was throwing 97 after throwing 95 pitches earlier this week and that’s from a guy who was sitting like 92 last year so that was pretty impressive um yeah and and we know the bullpen full of fireballers starting rotation is good I think that’s legitimate I don’t know how long they’ll keep getting Supernova stretches from edmundo Sosa who’s basically been Trey Turner while Trey Turner is out that doesn’t seem super sustainable but or he’s been Cory Seager as we’ve discussed ah there you go that’s that’s a nice nice way of circling back there um but yeah I think uh I think it’s a lot of the older hitters haven’t taking taking big steps back yet like Realo looks better than he did last year he looks uh like he did two or three years ago actually um schwarber is still schwarber Bryce is still Bryce um but then you’ve had guys like stot and bow taking steps forward so it’s a little bit better on the whole I think um yeah how much do you believe those steps forward maybe from bom in particular I think bom is the one who’s been getting the wider fantasy Community the most excited and every time I tried to look under the hood I don’t see big changes so I’m not totally sure I buy into into him being all that different and maybe he was just a little bit underperforming before and he’s a little bit overperforming now or am I too pessimistic here and this is really the start of Superstar Alec B yeah I uh I tend to agree with you it’s he’s he’s gonna have a little bit of variance with the way he he is he it’s very babit friendly hitter so there’s there’s going to be some hot and cold there um he has made some some gains and swing decisions it was it was a lot better earlier in the year he’s kind of cooled off a little but uh I mean just going back Seager he went from 12.4 last year which is a little bit below League average to just about 15 this year which is above like pretty decent amount above League average um so he’s he’s improved there he’s chasing less uh he’s always been an extremely gifted contact hitter hits ball fairly hard so I think those are sustainable skills he still doesn’t really hit for a lot of power which would be great um so yeah I think he’s he’s just going to be like a merely like good to very good contact hitter but not like the Superstar he was where he was like up there with Otani and Mookie Betts for the first month of the year production right yeah he does have his career best strikeout rate 13.6% but that’s only a little bit better than last year’s 15.4% so maybe this is just you know slight steps forward from a player in his age 27 season and enough slight steps forward definitely make him a legitimately better player even if like you said not quite show he Otani we’ll see if he can pitch I guess um one other question on the Phillies what do you think happens at the deadline because I from the one hand this has to be the year the team goes all in right if your biggest division rival in Atlanta lost the best hitter in baseball and the best pitcher in baseball right that’s your year to go all in especially with the Mets are you know metsing as hard as ever this year nobody else in the division has gotten good yet and all these Phillies they are kind of old all every single one of the Phillies best players outside of I guess Alec B is between 31 and 34 years old so guess what next year they’ll be 32 to 35 and after that 33 to 36 it only goes in One Direction so there’s a lot that I would think is pushing the Phillies to say we got to go now because our world series odds are you know three times four times as high this year as they’re gonna be next year but there’s also not a lot of holes in this team what do you think the Phillies do do they just add an outfielder and combine Marsh and Roos into a platoon in Center that’s the only real hole I can see on the offensive side do they just add more pitching because everybody needs more pitching even though the pitching is good yeah so I think uh my my two biggest needs would be a a right-handed Bullpen arm because s Anthony and uh Dominguez and oryan kirking have kind of been a little Hit or Miss at times or just aren’t like established too well like Kirk ring is um although they both look better in recent weeks so so maybe that’s not as big of a need but I I think uh I think a right-handed hitting outfielder with some patience would do wonders for the lineup um the kind of uh elephant in the room of this ph’s lineup is is castios he’s his his numbers are not pretty um it has been better he got off to a god awful start it has been better over the last month but it’s still you know he’s not a great defender out there um not really slugging the way you would like your hundred million uh Corner outfielder to slug um and he strikes out a ton and he’s always chased a ton so that may or may not improve so yeah like a a Taylor Ward type of outfielder I think would be perfect for this team it would really round out the lineup you could you know do what you’re saying with with Marti and roas you can spell casos or just not be as dependent on him if he’s in a humongous slump like he was in the NLCS last year to do a lot of things there but yeah I think that’s the biggest need and they they should go pretty aggressively at the deadline Taylor Ward makes a lot of sense maybe they can throw in maybe Carlos Estes does just enough that they can get him as the righty reliever too or something I don’t know maybe he doesn’t even help at all I was thinking maybe a Tommy fam Michael copc double swoop or something I don’t know does that move the needle it’s an interesting one I just don’t know if the Phillies are going to go try to get a big piece right a lot of teams will try to add a Frontline starter if they’re trying to compete but that would be you know a a fourth starter for the Phillies I mean right now their fourth stter is Christopher Sanchez you’re pretty happy with him in a playoff series so unless somebody gets hurt you know that that’s the most common way you could make your team a lot better heading into the playoffs is to say oh well our game two starter is now our game three starter our game three starters now our game four starter and hey look here’s a new Frontline arm but I don’t think the Phillies are going to do that right yeah I can’t see that I can’t see them spending a lot of resources for that um I mean you they’ve had deep playoff runs the last two years pretty much riding uh the wheeler noler Nola and Ranger uh Trio right in every playoff series so Chris Sanchez was uh nominally their number four last year and I think he only got into one playoff game yeah so I don’t I don’t think you want to put Ranger Suarez on in your Bullman I mean it’d be interesting he’s done it before but I I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to go about trying to improve the team yeah so we will see what they do we’ll see if it ends up being a tailor Ward I like that show that would be relatively exciting maybe it’ll just be somebody less than that but it’s a strange position for us Phillies fans to be in looking down on the rest of the league but I don’t mind I wouldn’t mind if they did this every year that’s yeah yeah well we’ll see how about every single season everything that I want to happen happens I would be okay with that uh that’s going to do it for today’s show and thank you Robert and hopefully you listeners learned a good deal about my favorite new stat Seager and hopefully we can help you figure out how to use it in your fantasy teams does your cat have anything to say there in the background uh he’s probably wondering where his treats are his food went off earlier he normally gets treats so I don’t know well I will let you get to that thank you so much for being my guest today Robert anything you’d like to plug on your way out um had a couple pieces go up at baseball perspectus last week uh one on Randy Rosara struggles another one on Robert Suarez I mean we both know what Robert Suarez is pretty good but you know if you’re interested in reading about him they’re both they’re on baseball perspectives nice check that out and you can follow Robert at notthe bobor on Twitter where you can find his Seager stats and a whole lot more thanks again Robert thanks to our sponsor so rare and we’ll be back tonight Jeff and Scott with the late Sunday show wrapping up tonight’s Fab
