Good morning and welcome to episode 582 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Baseball Perspectives presented by the Playindex at baseballreference.com. I am Ben Lindbergh of

Grantland joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hello. Hi. It's how are you?

Okay. Good. Yeah. It's a listener email show. We're going to enter a few emails. We will do a

Playindex segment. But before we do, we have a guest for the first segment of the show. He is

Rob Arthur of Baseball Perspectives whom we've had on before. You may remember him as the Batcrackman.

And he wrote something that is relevant to a topic we discussed twice last week. The Chase

Headley, Pablo Sandeval, Value Gap, and Y teams were rumored to be and actually we're willing to

pay so much for Sandeval and our rumored to be willing to pay much less for Headley. And we

talked about the difference between them and whether there's anything we're missing. And Rob

wrote something that might be a potential explanation. He wrote it for Fox Sports. And we have him

to talk about it. Hey, Rob. Hey, how are you? Okay. So we know that Sandeval is a strange hitter

that he is a bad ball hitter that he will swing at things in the dirt. He will swing at things

above his head. And often he will hit those things, which is the even more fun part of Sandeval.

But you did some research and it turns out that that is not the only way in which Sandeval is unique.

So explain what you did. Sure. So I was intrigued by this property of Sandeval. And I thought it might

somehow make him a steadier hitter one who is less sensitive to the competition that he was facing.

And people have argued this before based on like playoff statistics and things like that. But

that's it's really hard to do any kind of rigorous sabermetrics on the small sample of the playoffs.

So I was trying to think of a way to get around that issue. And I had the idea of looking at

looking at it on an individual pitch by pitch basis instead of at the at bad level. So the idea was to

sort of take every pitch that's thrown to every hitter and then model how well the hitter should do

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