I'm not sitting in my garage today, but if I were, there's a cricket in my garage just like all the time.

Not for long.

Oh, that's a good point.

Good morning, and welcome to episode 203 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from Baseball Prospectus.

I am Ben Lindbergh with Sam Miller. It is Wednesday, so it's an email show.

We got a lot of really good emails this week, so many that we are considering doing two email shows

just so we can get to all of them.

So maybe we'll do that unless something pressing comes up, we'll see.

You can continue to send them in at podcast at baseballperspectus.com.

But we have picked out a few for today. Do you want to start with one?

I can't find the one I want to start with, so you start with one.

Okay. This one is from Timothy.

He says, a lot has been made of the high strikeout rates over the last few seasons.

Does a high strikeout rate negatively impact the value of defense positively impact or have none at all?

How large will strikeout rates have to be to impact defensive stats?

And I think this is a really interesting subject, and I talked about it.

I guess it was a few months ago on clubhouse confidential, but I think it definitely has an impact.

And we are already seeing that impact.

It's not really something that you would notice necessarily just from watching the game.

But I looked up the number of battered balls that the typical pitching staff allows just through the BP sort of reports.

And last year, so 2012, the average pitching staff pitched around 1,450 innings or so.

And allowed 4,392 battered balls.

...