 Aloha. Welcome to the Figments Facebook Network. No, actually, this is still Think Tech Hawaii, and this is Figments. It's the power of imagination. But my figment is that I'm a baseball commentator. I'm one of the sports networks. Now, my wife, Holly Honda, would tell you that if the game's on, I am a commentator, especially dumb parts. But this feels natural. It will be fun because joining me as my good friend Ross Rowley to take a look at the status of MLB at the all-star break. Ross, Aloha. How are you? Aloha, Fig. Thanks for having me back. Second time. Do I get a jacket or anything? Yeah, no, but you are the first repeat offender on Figments, the power of imagination. So, yay. Well, for those of you who missed season one episode nine, I know many of you have a list of them on your refrigerator. But in case you missed it, Ross and I are both baseball fans, longtime friends and golf buddies. Here we are on the Mammala Bay course in our Cardinals Brewers standoff, if you will. Hey, that's hole two, isn't it, Ross? Yes, I know someone who got a hole in one there. It's you. Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. I was hoping you would. Well, Ross is a great friend, as I said, and a math whiz, math major taught math at the Air Force Academy, looks at everything statistically. In our first episode, season one, episode nine, he presented some statistical evidence for why instant replay is a good thing. And I think he's right. But today, we're not going to talk too well. Statistics always fit into his conversation. We're going to take a look at the MLB season thus far. All-star game is tomorrow. The home run derby is happening as we record this. I won't tell you who won, Ross. Don't worry. Give pretense about that when people spill the beans. But I think you'll hear new things. And Math Man here will help you sort through the myriad of offensive statistics and know what really matters. And we're going to put a little bit of pressure on ourselves because we're going to predict the World Series champion or opponents and champion. And I haven't made up my mind yet. This will happen after I get the math insight from Ross and then go against it, probably. But let's start, Ross, with the season thus far and things that make you say, I think the first one is it's sure great to have fans back in the stadium, isn't it? It is. Although I was watching a Detroit Tigers broadcast and they said, hey, it's first day that we have 100% capacity and still there's only 10,000 fans in the crowd. So depending on the venue, it makes a difference. Yeah. If we look at the standings, I think we'll understand why that is. But it's just so much fun to hear the drama, the agony and the ecstasy that goes with it. My Milwaukee Brewers, and I'm absolutely biased, have lost three tough games. The crowds were really into it. But then there's that letdown. But I love having fans back in the ballpark. What makes you say, Ross, this season? Well, the crackdown on cheating with pitchers using sticky stuff. On some cheating. On some cheating, right? And it reminds me the three most recent cheating events in Major League Baseball were steroids, and the Mitchell Report had 89 cases. And they finally, I think, cleaned that up, although there's still a lot of ways to make yourself stronger and bigger and faster and so forth. Like go to the gym. Right, exactly. And then the next one was a trash can banging at the Astros did. And I saw an interesting statistical study that showed that the effect of that knowledge was really not as great as everyone thought because there are so many false positives where they said, oh, it's going to be a fastball. And it turned out to be a curveball and the guys swinging wildly. And so if you can get a positivity rate up around 99%, that will work. But it was only like 92%. So my prediction for this particular cheating scandal is that the pitchers, yeah, they're going to outlaw spider tack and outlaw sunscreen. But the pitchers are eventually going to find another way to better grip the baseball. We'll be back to what we had early in the season. I suppose that's possible. But if it's a foreign substance that's that other way, then they're likely to get caught. My thinking is that they'll pitch better. I mean, through the use of sticky stuff, they've learned the value and learned to apply spin rate and be more difficult, even more difficult to hit. And I suspect they'll adjust and find other non-pharmist, non-chemical ways, I guess, to get the spin rate. I hope they don't get back to nearly unhittable because I want to see the ball get struck. I do too. But there's a revolution that most people aren't aware of. We had the Moneyball Revolution. Now it's a developmental, a player development revolution where players are going off-season to places like driveline in Seattle and perfecting their mechanics and optimizing their spin. The same thing with the batters and launch angle. They're doing all these things to end up with the three true outcomes, right? Walk, strike, bounce, and home runs. So that's not necessarily good for baseball, but these players are doing everything they can to optimize their performance. Yeah, and that I think is a good thing. You mentioned the sign-stealing crash-can banging incident with the Astros. I view it having been either a pitcher or a hitter as two different issues. If I'm a pitcher, I want more in my head. I want to be able to put more thought into the pitch and refine it and do that. If I'm a hitter, I would like to have less in my head because it's so hard already. And I've watched Christian Yellow choose a great player. It has some numbers in the past that are awesome, but it looks to the interested but not educated observer like there is just too much in his head. And if you're guessing at a 75% positive rate, man, that would just wear you down, wouldn't it? Yeah, and there's a common phrase, see the ball, hit the ball. Take everything out of your brain and just try and hit the ball. Every walk-off home run, they interview the perpetrator, and he always says, I was just trying to make contact. That might be a good swing thought. We should do that in golf, too. I do. It doesn't always work because I have too much in my head. So here's what has made me say this year. It's the disparities in lateral, inside, outside strike calling. I don't know if you've noticed that, but they're all over the map and there's no consistency to it that I've noted. And it's not just against my brewers, it's their opponents. It's the other games I watched, but with that little rectangle on the screen. Ross, it seems to me that that would be the easiest part of calling balls and strikes to get right. I agree. And we talked about this in the last episode, but there's a specific case on Saturday. Ohtani was in Seattle facing the Mariners. Here we go. And he struck out on a pitch that was clearly a foot off the plate, and the announcer was going, oh, my God. And Ohtani, to his credit, just shook his head and waved his hand like, you blew that one up. But I have seen, and people go to the ballpark to see Ohtani hit a home run, not to see him strike out. And to deny that experience, I think is a grave injustice. I have seen in the past sort of the heat map of balls and strikes. And it's not a rectangular, it's more an egg and oval. And so the wide part is middle in, middle away. There's some, you know, there's a lot more ball strikes. This is where strikes are actually called, where the batter swings, right? Correct. And then down on all four quarters, it's very unlikely that the umpire is going to call that pitch a strike because it's both down and away or down and in. So yeah, and we talked last time, I sure hope we get roboumps very soon. And, you know, we have instant replay. The umpire core and their management have statistics. They certainly analyze and they grade them afterwards. But going back to the fact that baseball is a business and they are employees with the union. I wonder how much leverage Major League Baseball has to punish, if you will, bad, bad calling, bad umpire. I have yet to hear an umpire get suspended for blowing a call. Yeah, as we talk about on the golf course, there is at least one umpire who'd be asking you if you want fries with your meal if it wasn't for a pretty strong collective bargaining agreement. And I won't mention his name as much as it hurts me not to mention his name. So hey, let's look at the standings and see where we stand. So to speak, because they are the standings. And I hope you folks can see it at home. If not, look on your computer or your phone because they're readily available. And what strikes me, Ross, is the, and I've color coded a few of them, one in yellow, one team of yellow San Francisco Giants. Look at that. Is that real statistically? Yeah, they have the best record in baseball. And from an analytic perspective, you go into a season and you see all these predictions. And this is the outlier, right? And this is what makes baseball late is that you can never nail down the predictions. But sure, they have sure exceeded expectations. And a lot of it is smoke and mirrors because I've got in front of me the run differential for the Giants and the teams that are chasing them. Giants are 116 positive Dodgers are 142. And there are two games back and then the Padres are 75. So the Dodgers should theoretically, if run differential really matters, which it should, Dodgers should be in first place. Yeah, there is always a disparity. You know, the Brewers had a run differentials like minus two. And we're in the hunt, but then they went on their 11 game winning slash hitting streak. And now they're plus 40 something. And so I look at run differential because I want to feel good about my team. But that's really the only reason you really think it's an important and folks for in case you're not as in the baseballs we are. So that's the difference over all your games between the runs that you score and the runs that the other team scores. So 15 to one victory helps you run differential. But Ross, do you think that's a big deal in the long run? I think it's a good indicator going forward. That's my opinion. It shows the true talent level that takes away the noise that happens with randomness. And you know, you win some really close games and you lose some blowouts and you're going to have a negative run differential. The other thing I wanted to point out in the standings was a couple of bad teams that were unexpectedly bad. And one of which is your twin sisters favorite team, the Minnesota Twins. Yeah, they were expected to be very good this year. And they've got a great lineup, but they just haven't put it together. And then the other one is the Arizona Diamondbacks. They are on pace, the challenge, the 1962 New York match for the worst season in baseball history. And that came out of nowhere also. So imagine that the baseball season is a grind for the fans. I mean, it's a long haul for our families. It's an eternity, says Alejandra, who's more into American football than baseball. But can you imagine being on a team going to work every day when you're that far out of it? But these guys are professionals and they realize every bad counts and it goes to their future salary value. And some of them are just begging to be traded away at the trade deadline to a contender so that they can actually have meaningful games again. So that brings me to another question, because we'll get to the trade deadline, buyers, some teams will buy to look to build whatever cracks they have in their wall to get to the finish line and be in the World Series. Others will do really math, business math and and be sellers. So if we look at these standings, is it a good basis for predicting the future? Do we have to leave sort of a wild card out there for the outcome of the trades that will approach the deadline? The trade deadline is impactful to some teams, depending on how well the guy does. But there's been a lot of cases where guys get traded to a contender and they're expected to lead them to playoffs and they flop. And so it's really a mixed bag and there's just a lot of randomness there. I want to go back to one thing because you asked me things that make me go home. Opening day, and we talked about this a little bit on the golf course. There were three pitchers starting pitchers from the same high school that all started as their opening day started. Dak Flaherty, Lucas T. Alito and Max Freed. And I looked up the statistics on this. There's 24,000 high schools in the U.S. That's not counting. There's a lot of high schools in Japan and Dominican and all the other places where ball players come from. But if you just look at the American high schools, the probability of three guys from the same high school, all three starting opening day are one in 500 million. So that's about the odds that the Mariners are going to ever win a World Series in my opinion. But certainly the odds are greater than that against Arizona making to the both seasons this year. Right. Yeah. So I found that to be that's amazing. Huge. You could probably grind those odds down when you, if you called it out to high schools with a good baseball system program in an area that was competitive, etc. It's all the things that make a high school program a feeder to the big leagues. And of course high school folks are getting there, getting to the big leagues more quickly now. I was going to talk, you mentioned the times where mid season trades have not helped pretty much, not as much as expected. If we have time at the end, let's talk about Willie Adomas who came to the Brewers and the Brewers have had one of the best record records in the league since then. And it's, he seems to be a catalyst. So if you get that in your trade deadline trade, good for you. But first, before we get into yet more numbers, your offensive metrics and folks to stay tuned for that because you'll understand baseball better figments on reality next on July 17th. I don't know what I'm going to talk about yet. I will by the time I get on, but I know it will be apolitical, non-political, and it won't be vitriolic. So please tune in for that and hear my opinions and make your own or consider your own opinions. And thanks to ThinkTech for giving me a chance to do both figments, the power of imagination and the figments on reality. Okay, Ross, now we're on to offensive metrics. As much as I love baseball, numbers make my head hurt. And there are a lot of numbers in baseball. You love it. It's maybe what you love most about the game. But I want you to talk through this graphic in how we should value, how we should look at different offensive measures of performance. Yeah, it's sort of in a top 10 list, the David Letterman list, but it's only eight. And starting with vanity and average, that is the old-time statistic that's number of hits divided by number of plate appearance at bats, but it ignores walks. So they don't count as in a bat, right? Right. And then the next one is on base percentage, which does include walks, but it doesn't include like if you hit a bunch of home runs, it doesn't really matter. So that's not a good statistic. Slugging percentage includes the home runs and the doubles and triples, but they don't include walks. So that's not good. On base plus slugging, now we're getting into some really meaningful statistics. This is a good statistic to understand a batter's overall value offensively. So what goes into on base plus slugging for the image? I'm glad you asked. It's just the sum of the batting average, or excuse me, the on base percentage plus the slugging percentage, OPS. And I'm happy to see over the last decade or so the Major League broadcasts have started to incorporate this more and more to the point where basically they're on all the time. You can see a batter's OPS 20 steps to the play. 800 is good. Really good. 900 is a lead to the league average is around 715 right now. The next one on the list is when probability added. This is a favorite of mine because it takes all the 27 outcomes and the score in the game. And you know, and at bat, will either improve a team's chance of winning that game or not improve it, make it worse. And so this is a way to measure how each batter has helped his team in each game. And you add that over a period of time and you get a good aggregate of who's the real MVP, who helped his team the most. But does it give you a good way to measure somebody who's not the real MVP? I mean, is there enough discrimination so that your number seven hitter occasionally does good things but mostly doesn't do horrible things. You don't get an average player. Yeah, the problem is if you're on a bad team, you're not going to get as many opportunities in high-level situations. So if you perform in high-level situations, you're going, that's going to be reflected in the win probability added. Zero is league average. One is good for mid-season now and two is a lead. And I think Otani is at 4.5 in win probability added already for the half of the season. That's good, right? That is good. He leads everyone. Weighted runs created plus. This is another one that's coming more and more into the mainstream, WRC plus. This takes all the outcomes and assigns a weighted score to them and it levels it on 100. So 100 is the average. If a guy is 120, he's good. It also means that he's 20% better than average. 140 is a lead. So that's a really good purely offensive stat. But the one that's probably got the most cache right now, especially teams looking at the trade line is win probability, wins above replacement, sorry, war. And that is not just offensive, but it adds in base running and adds in defense. It adds in the ability to throw out runners at the plate, so forth, if you're an outfielder. And 0.5 is average. This point of the season, 1.5 is good and 2.5 is a lead. So that sounds great. I understand them better. I still need to know what the number, you know, batting average was good because for people like me, it was simple. If you're batting over 300, you're good. If you're below the Mendoza line, I can't remember what that means. You're not good. But there must be the perfect statistic. Would it be the overall value? Yes, it would, overall value. It's just my favorite because it's in my humble opinion. When I was a young kid, I started taking, you know, at putting a value of 1 to a walk and a single value of 2 to a double value of 3 to a triple and a value of 4 to a home run, add that up and you get a number over a season and normalize it around 4 as the home run. And then I realized when I went to get my master's degree, hey, there's, you can do some cool little statistical tricks here and actually do a linear regression to figure out what those values are because walks and singles clearly should not have the same value. So I did that and I refined it and I've kept refining it over the years and now I've got a number where I use in my fantasy and just ranking players throughout the season that I'm very comfortable with. So why haven't you sold this to MLB or, you know, come on, there's some money in this, right? There is. Funny you should ask many years ago. Before Moneyball, shoot, I was, I think it was before I even got married. I met on a cruise. I met Seattle Times reporter and I said, hey dude, I'm an analyst. Can I, you know, write to the Mariners? He gave me Woody Woodward's address and I actually wrote a letter saying, hey, I've got some insight into how to make your team better and I never got a callback or anything. And now I'm making too much money to go back into entry level to do one of those statistical jobs. But now the ball teams have groups of 15, 20, 30 analysts who are working on various aspects of all the things we talked about, spin rate and war and launch angles and all those kind of things. Well, I've got at least 38 coaches now for every team. The dugout has got to be packed. So, hey, we're, this is going quickly. We knew it would, but your considered statistical analysis made me think about the all-star game and, you know, it's done by vote now and everybody's not a math major. But guess what? It looks to be like the voters were pretty close to right on this, weren't they? Yeah. When I built this slide, you said your all-star team was going to be all brewers and I told you I was going to take a more analytical approach. Well, it is all brewers. So just assume that everybody in every position is a brewer. I did war and I compared the war leaders at each position with the ones who were actually voted in. And like you said, and nationally, especially it was pretty good, but who would have predicted Ryan Reynolds would be the war leader in the center field for the National League? And if you go to the next slide now onto the American League, who would have predicted Cedric Mullins or Sean Murphy? Cedric Mullins in center field, Sean Murphy as a catcher. Well, who would have predicted Shohei Otani? Yeah, right. Let's talk. I've got some interesting statistics on Shohei Otani I want to share with people. So he leads the league in homerun. Most people don't realize that he's also fourth in the league in the major leagues in triple and 14th in the major league in stolen bases. His OPS, we decided, you know, 900 is elite. His OPS is 1058 as a batter. As a pitcher, he's allowing an OPS of 627. He's got 3.8 more as a batter, 1.5 as a pitcher. So here's a quiz for you that I don't think you'll get right, but there are three people. You'll get two of them, right? Three people in the history of Major League Baseball who have 75 homeruns as a batter and 150 strikeouts as a pitcher. Who are they? Well, Babe Ruth has to be one of them. Shohei Otani has to be one of them. And the third one is Rick Ankeel. He came up as a Vietnam pitcher and then he flamed out because he couldn't find the strikes out and he came back as a batter. So he got in two iterations, not in the same season. Yeah, he works well back through the minor leagues. Otani, so incredible. I just have to say his swing is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen. That swing is the thing of beauty. So we only have a couple minutes left here, Ross. So go ahead. One more thing about Otani is that he hit home around the other night against some errors. That was the highest exit velocity in the history of that ballpark, which he now has four such ballparks where he owns the highest exit velocity. And this is his first full season in the Major League. Isn't that incredible? Unbelievable. So who's going to play in the World Series? All right, my prediction, and I base this once again analytically on run differential, I'm going to go with the Astros in the American League, Dodgers in the National League, and it's going to be Trashcan 2.0, because the Dodgers were denied their opportunity a couple years ago. What's your prediction? Well, I think from the National League, it's got to be the Brewers. I can't say anything else. It's been only 39 years since we're in the World Series, I think 1982, if my math is correct. And from the American League, I don't feel good about Houston. So I'm going to say Boston, even though you said they're smoking mirrors. So I'm saying that Boston, where the Brewers or the Milwaukee Braves came from Boston. So there's a connection. Boston, Milwaukee wins. Who wins in yours? I think LA, because they're out for revenge after that Trashcan. Yeah, but it's a game that needs emotion, but at times doesn't. So who knows, right? So it'll be interesting. Anything else you want to talk about, you'd like to ask me? You know there is. We talked about it before. Yes, there is. We touched upon this last time, but you are friends with the great Bob Euker, and I love him as well. Tell the fans how you met him and how you became friends with him. I say we're friends and Bob Euker probably say I think I met him, not because of memory, just because he has lots of friends. But we did build a friendship after we gave speeches at the same venue in Wisconsin, and I got to go see him up in the booth and get an autographed baseball. He also autographed some things for other people. I'll just say this, those who are aware of Bob Euker and all you have to think of is just a bit outside. First of all, he's funnier in person if that's possible. And second, he is really a gracious guy. He stayed at the dinner we spoke at for an hour after everything was done, just chatting with people, signing autographs. And if you ever get a chance to meet Mr. Baseball, do it. And next time when we do our postseason wrap-up show, I'll bring a couple pictures of me and Mr. Baseball. Hey Ross, we're out of time. Can you believe that? I cannot, but Bob Euker is the only person with three statues in his home ballpark. You got that going for him. Yeah, exactly. I like the one of the Euker seat best. Yeah, me too. Okay, folks, thanks for joining us on Figments to the Power of Imagination. Thank you, Ross, for being my partner in crime here. Please tune in to Figments on Reality next week. And when you get a chance to go to Think Tech Hawaii's website, and please support this very worthy non-profit. Aloha.