Good morning and welcome to episode 431 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcasts from

Baseball Prospectus presented by the baseballreference.com play index. My name is Ben Lindbergh, my co-host Sam

Miller is still sunning himself on foreign shores. So I am joined today by Baseball Prospectus

Director of Technology, Harry Publetis. Hello, Harry, welcome back. Hello. So it's not just Harry

today. We have a crowded podcast because we're going to be discussing and dissecting and debating

one of Baseball's biggest stories over the last few seasons, the rapidly rising strike outbreak.

And to do that, we have brought together a panel of some of Baseball's brightest minds from a

number of different disciplines. And before we begin, I'll introduce everyone so that you'll

know who's who when we start talking. First, we have Rob Nyer, the senior baseball editor at Fox

sports.com. And outspoken anti-strike out activist or maybe you'd prefer pro-contact advocate.

You can follow him on Twitter at Rob Nyer. Good morning, Rob.

Good morning, great to have you. We also have Brian Bannister, a former major league pitcher for

the Metz and the Royals who endeared himself to the internet by publicly professing his affection

for pitch FX data while he was still playing and actually used it to increase his ground ball rate

by trading Forbes seam fastballs for cutters among other things. You can find him on Twitter at

real banny, hey, Brian. Good to be here. And finally, we have Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus

of physics at the University of Illinois and a physics of baseball researcher who contributes

pieces to baseball perspectives. You can find him on Twitter at P.O.B. Guy. Welcome, Alan.

Thanks for having me. Okay, so to set the scene, hitters have struck out in 21.1% of their

played appearances so far this season, which is up from 19.9% through the same date last year.

And on its own, that's not a huge increase, but it's just the latest uptake in a trend that's

really been going on more or less since the dead ball era and seems to have accelerated in recent

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