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

I'm your host Nate Schwartz, joined by Director of Analytics, Kyle Bland. Kyle, how's it going?

It's going great. How had a great weekend? How you doing, Nate?

Good. Ready for baseball this week. It came up so quickly after the

World Baseball Classic ended, and I'm really excited to have real stats, new things, to analyze,

to look at, to watch. It felt like half the spring training games this year weren't even on TV,

so really excited to just get all of the baseball all at once and really get into it.

But today's topic is going to be a bit of a fun one, not necessarily traditional when you're going through your drafts or even, you know, analyzing pitchers from a top level.

And so for looking at stats that identify underrated or underappreciated pitchers, we come to whip.

It's often in fantasy a forgotten category at times, even in just general analysis, you see whip all over the place.

But with how we like to look at stuff these days, you know, your stuff plus models,

even just your ERA strikeout rates, whip can really get lost in the equation.

And we really want to go dive deep into talking about how not just it goes hand in hand

sometimes with defining good pitcher quality, but also how sometimes pitchers can evade

whip and also make the most out of what is a good whip and how you can use that to really

fuel either fantasy success or finding guys who might break out who aren't on the top of lists

because they don't throw 100 miles an hour.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, I think it's it's something that is always

feels like a tacked on category in a lot of fantasy leagues are like, oh, it's traditionally included.

So I guess we'll do it. But it can tell you a lot about a pitcher and there are a lot of

fun ways to kind of game the system and get like guys who are undervalued by it or maybe

guys who underperform it,

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