I sing for free

Good morning and welcome to episode 451 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcasts from

Baseball Perspectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index.

I'm Ben Lindbergh, joined as always by Sam Miller. I have no particular topic today. I have

many topics that are worthy of a few minutes of discussion and no topics that are worthy of

half an hour of discussion. So we will string some of them together and see how it goes. I think

but did you want to start with something? I do want to start with something. Okay.

In reference to our conversation about 3.0 swinging. Yes, I was going to ask you about that.

A few days ago, I saw today the most, to me it was the most remarkable statistic. I didn't know

it before. So I'm going to tell you and now you'll know it. And I'm fairly certain that you

wouldn't have guessed this. But 3.0 swings. Let's see. If I'm understanding this correctly,

this is according to Chris Moran of Beyond the Box score. It was just from a few weeks ago.

According to Chris, if I'm reading this chart right, 28% of 3.0 swings are on pitches outside

the strike zone. That's incredible. That's incredible. That's incredible. Isn't that incredible?

Yeah. I'm sure a lot of them are in in-ch outside the strike zone. But even so.

I mean, everybody said you should be key-holing it. You should only be looking for a pitch that's

dead red. You only want a perfect pitch on 3.0 otherwise you shouldn't swing.

I guess there are pitches outside the strike zone that are super hittable. But usually,

there are off-speed pitches. Usually it's a breaking ball that's an inch high. It might be incredibly

hittable. But it's hard to imagine a fastball that's outside the strike zone anywhere that would

be an ideal pitch to hit, right? Yeah, right. And you and I often talk about how maybe people

overrate pitchers command and their ability to actually hit their spots. And it seems like

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