Good morning and welcome to episode 352 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast

from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindbergh, joined by Sam Miller. Thanks for joining me, Sam Miller.

Oh yeah, it's good to be here. Yeah. Before we start, I just wanted to shout out Andrew

Koo's article at Baseball Prospectus because I think that people should read it and it relates to

something that we talked about not too long ago. We talked about how the A's were built. This was

in August, mid-August, episode 266 and we mentioned that they haven't really been built like the

typical small market team. They have acquired a lot of players from outside the organization as

opposed to developing their own and we wondered how they did that and whether it's sustainable.

And so Andrew wrote about the other platoon advantage that Oakland has gotten in the last

couple of years. The article went up on Wednesday. You can read it, find it at Baseball Prospectus.

It's called Oakland's other platoon advantage and it's about how the A's have not only

exploited the lefty-righty platoon matchup that everyone knows about but they have also

exploited the battered ball platoon matchup that is less well-known but was researched in the book

and it works the same way as the lefty-righty platoon split except with ground balls and

fly balls. So the A's, Andrew found over the last couple of years, have had a far higher

percentage of fly ball hitters than any other team. They have acquired many, many fly ball hitters

to the point where it doesn't seem like it could be a coincidence and Andrew goes through the numbers

and he makes a pretty convincing case I think that that has helped the A's. They have killed

ground ball pitching because of all their fly ball hitters. Fly ball hitters also hit a lot of line

drives, line drives are good, fly ball hitters are tend to be patient hitters also.

So it's an interesting article, it's one of those articles that I wish I had written because

it kind of mixes an interesting narrative about the A's and sort of a new money ball angle that

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