Hello and welcome to the Approach Angle podcast, a pictureless podcast dedicated to teaching you all things baseball analytics.

I'm your host, Nate Schwartz, joined as always by Director of Analytics, Kyle Bland.

And today we have a very special guest.

Alex Chamberlain joins the show as a two-time FSWA award winner, has tons of brilliant research at Fangraphs and has built his pitch leaderboard,

which is just a very invaluable tool these days where a lot of the stuff that we're going to

talk about today actually lives. But Alex, welcome to the show. How's it going? Wow. Thank you. I'm doing

great. How are you guys doing? I'm good. Yeah, I can't complain. You know, it's starting to

get hot out here in the desert, so happy to be inside recording a podcast. Yeah, when I, you know,

when summertime, you know, rolls on, the thing I want to be doing is being inside and, you know,

recording baseball content. But today's going to be a great episode.

You know, we're finally going to be transitioning into talking about

pitcher stuff and pitch shapes and all of the fun jazz that comes along with it.

Over the last couple weeks, we've been covering hitters and hitting stats,

getting into some player analysis over the last episode, but we're really starting

in to go into the deep dive into pitching. So for this episode, we're going to be talking

about pitch movement specifically and get into vertical pitch movement, horizontal pitch

movement, and approach angles. So get hype. It took us 13 episodes, but we're finally talking about the namesake of this

podcast, and we have a phenomenal guest for it. So we're going to be talking about the foundations

of that pitch movement, you know, what factors can change how a pitch moves and performs, and then how

that creates vertical and horizontal approach angles. So let's kind of start from the foundation.

Kyle, what is induced vertical brake actually measuring and why is the induced part so important?

Yeah, so induced vertical break is measuring the

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