A baseball podcast, analytics and stats, with Ben and Meg, from Fane Grouse, effective

Hello and welcome to episode 2052 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fan Graphs

presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Linberg, of the ringer, joined by Meg

Rally of the Grasslele make. Hello. I don't know if I would call this a peave or a slight objection

or reservation, but you know how infield throws are all the rage these days, the stat cast measurements

of how hard infielders are showing. I think this may have come up on one of the episodes when

I was away, just the difficulty of distinguishing between two velocities when you have an infield

throw. Sometimes you'll see a throw and it's like, well, that was hard, but was it that much

harder than that other throw? I don't know, it's kind of tough to tell. But also, we're hearing a

ton about this these days because Ellie Dela Cruz seems to tap himself every week, right?

And my objection reservation, though, is that some of these record-setting throws that he's

making as an infielder are from the outfield, their relay throws, right? And that is part of why

they are thrown so hard. Now, to be clear, he throws very hard on regular infield throws also.

So it's not like a product of the play entirely, but I think it is partly a product of the play

because his two fastest on record are both relay throws. So he had a 99.8 mile per hour

tracked throw. This was back in July. And then just this week, he had a 99.7. And those were both

relays where he was way out in the outfield. And he was catching and throwing and really laying out,

like on the first one in July, he may have actually fallen down after the throw during the follow-through.

On this most recent one, he didn't fall down, but he definitely put his whole body into the

heave and sort of stumbled after it a bit. And to me, that's a different category than just your

regular infield assist when you're on the grass in his case, I guess, or it wasn't this most recent

game because they were in Arizona and Corbin Carroll was the, I mean, it was a pretty, pretty

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