Hey, everybody. We're alive here on the Rotoire Fancy Baseball podcast. I'm a little rusty. I didn't do a little cheesy intro before playing the music, but here we are anyhow. Of course, if you listen to Gaming Golf, the dozens of you that do that, you would have heard

the most botched opening ever anyhow, so maybe you didn't miss on anything at all. Anyways, Fred,

how you doing? I'm great, and it's good to have you back. We just, before we started recording,

did a little quick trip recap. But yeah, it's good to have you back here. You said you miss baseball deeply while you were gone, and I understand that. But it's always good to get away for a while. It is always even better to get back home. It is. Both things are absolutely true. And there's like that fulcrum at, like, what point in time on that trip do you start feeling it. And is it the third night in a row of bad sleep usually for me? I'm not a good sleeper in like hotels usually. Okay. Especially with the family. You know, we're all crammed in together and all that. It's a little different. When you, you know, I just, I'm kind of a finicky sleeper, I guess.

And then, you know, the flight home was just forever. It takes two hours longer to fly back than

they get there basically because you're into this big headwind the whole time. Wow. I didn't know that.

Flew flew over you at some point. Actually, probably we are well north of you we were like

over hudson bay even in fact the north part of hudson bay and then they turn you go up because

of the curvature of the earth because you save a lot of time and then coming down but it's still

just a long flight we're hitting all the big topics right away here so uh let's just jump right

into it here um let's start off with O'Neo Cruz. How can we not start off with that? What a fun experience yesterday. Statcast mania, I tweet about that. That got a lot of traction tweeting about that, even saying like, hey, isn't this awesome just to have all this data at our disposal? And somebody were like, man, I'd rather just say, that guy's got a cannon. No, he threw the hardest infield throw of the season, like of anybody in baseball. That's crazy. Yeah. So stat cast data is awesome when it puts a number behind something that's like really cool. Right. So you can be like, that guy has a cannon. It's even better when you're like, holy moly, in his first game, he had the hardest infield throw the season. The only time stat cast data is like a buzzkill is when it takes something, I can relate to this with Kevin Pilar, who made all those diving catches. And then statcast would sometimes step in and be like,

you know,

12 major league center fielers would have just caught that ball on the run and not had to dive for it. And you're like, oh, you just took, you know, you just took all the fun out of it for me.

So I can see how stat castes sometimes takes the fun of the things.

But in this instance, I think it made

everything even more fun, the exit velocity on its hit and, and the throw. It's awesome.

He's a really unique specimen. Like, this is something where, okay, so we got four RBIs.

Okay, that's really not that exciting. Like, he just happened to have a hit when the bases were loaded.

We know that's not going to happen with the pirates all that often, just those opportunities.

But more the eye test, like, he's a really unique, like a six, seven shortstop with great speed and power, has power skills and a canada of an arm.

Yeah.

This guy's going to be really fun.

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