You're going to be. Hello and welcome to episode 624 of The Sleeper and the Bust. It is Wednesday January 2nd. I'm your host Paul Smore, flying solo for the first time this year. In fact, this is the first pot of the year. It's only the second day. I guess it's not terribly surprising that it would be my first solo and

pod at large you know sometimes I have that little pause right before I say the day

because I have to kind of remember what day it is I did this one in three takes. I said the day wrong three different times.

So I got it though. For those of you that can maybe kind of here faintly my space heater in the background,

I apologize it's freezing here, literally

freezing and if you know me you know I really don't take well to the cold so when

it's actually freezing and not spore freezing which is like anything below 70

it can be brutal so you might hear a little worrying in the

background of that and I do apologize but hopefully it doesn't detract from the

the content at hand which what we're talking about today is the best

pictures of 2018 I got a couple things set up here for how I want to

organize this and hopefully this is exciting.

I think it will be worth talking about, you know, it's not something that is guaranteed to

carry over year to year, but I do think there's some interesting stuff behind it and hopefully you guys find it interesting as well.

I use not only the pitch values on our website but also you may have heard Nick Pollack

either on this podcast when we do the fireside chats or on his own podcast talk about

something called money pitches and he's kind of come up with a baseline on that I think he's actually

adjusting it so that's interesting because I made a few adjustments myself.

Basically he has a threshold on the chase rate, swinging strike rate, and zone rate of a pitch

to make it qualify for being a money pitch.

Now, I think one of the things that we both realized right away

and this is where he's going to make the changes is that it doesn't apply universally to pitches,

...