#ICYMI - Building an MVP Machine

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel…. Move over Moneyball, something new is coming. Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore the world of data-driven player development that’s re-shaping baseball today. Featuring Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik, authors of The MVP Machine, and astrophysicist and baseball sleuth Meredith Wills, PhD. Photo Credit: Erik Drost [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chuck Nice?

  This podcast isn't the only way to keep up with StarTalk. Join the StarTalk universe on social media. That's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and youtube.com/StarTalkRadio. We'll post new shows, clips, gifs, or gifs, quotes, and more from our shows. Also, we'll keep you up to date on space and science news. And perhaps most importantly, that's where we post our calls for cosmic queries. Follow StarTalk Radio so you don't miss a thing.

• 0:34Chuck Nice?

  Thanks to our supporters on Patreon for sponsoring this episode of StarTalk. Join them and listen to every episode with no ads. Go to patreon.com/StarTalkRadio to learn how.

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly. And that's Chuck Nice. And this is Playing with Science. Today, we are back at the plate facing a pitcher who last month could not throw a party, but this time around has more spin than an election campaign. What on earth happened?

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  Well, if you look at things in a different way, well, you get different results. And the people who have done just that are Ben Lindberg and Travis Sawchak, co-authors of The MVP Machine, a superb book that sheds light on how player development techniques are taking baseball into the future and leaving Moneyball way, way behind.

• 1:27Gary O'Reilly?

  And to add to that, we will have the astrophysicist who is a baseball fanatic and is a super sleuth. Yes, our dear friend Meredith Wills will be here to explain why this year's baseball is doing what it's doing. This is gonna be a great show.

• 1:45Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 1:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I am pumped to talk to these two guys. So Chuck, introduce our first guests.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  Here in studio and via Skype, or I should say that the other way around, the authors of The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, author Travis Sawchik and Ben Lindbergh. Gentlemen, thank you for being here.

• 2:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, welcome.

• 2:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, hey, guys. Thanks for having us. Yeah, without a doubt. First of all, congratulations on the book. Very well received. Extremely excited are the baseball nerds, and they are a plenty.

• 2:26Chuck Nice?

  There are, there are, probably the nerdiest of sports would be baseball. And you guys are nerd gods at this point.

• 2:37Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so.

• 2:37Chuck Nice?

  So, so, so.

• 2:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, we have a mantra here on Playing with Science.

• 2:41Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 2:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Where jocks and geeks collide.

• 2:44Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 2:44Gary O'Reilly?

  And I think the MVP machine might be our bible.

• 2:48Chuck Nice?

  That is it, yeah.

• 2:49Gary O'Reilly?

  It might just be.

• 2:50Chuck Nice?

  This might be the perfect cross-section.

• 2:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Epi-center.

• 2:53Chuck Nice?

  Of where geeks and jocks collide. So, first of all, um, just, just a quick background on both you guys. You're both very accomplished authors, both worked with at one of my favorite places, 538. I think Travis, you're still there, right?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  I am still employed there.

• 3:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:10Chuck Nice?

  Um, how, how does this come about? What, what makes you guys say, hey, let's take a look at this. Let's do a deep dive and let's figure out what the next incarnation of the whole data infusion with baseball, how'd that come about?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we came to the subject independently and then we learned that we were each working on something and we decided to team up because we knew each other a little bit and we figured we'd be even better if we combined forces. So, I think this stood out to us as the subject of, of a baseball book in 2019 is player development. That's what this book is about, about applying information and technology to improve players. Because Travis and I both noticed that suddenly players in the middle of their careers, sometimes toward the end of their careers, or so we thought, were making major changes and reaching levels that they'd never reached before. And these were guys who should have been at the points of their careers where you expect them to be declining and instead they were peaking.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  And we were thinking, what is going on here? You know, guys like Rich Hill, J.D. Martinez, Justin Turner, all these guys who were essentially on the fringes of the game, on their way out of the game, it looked like, and then suddenly were catapulted to being superstars to landing these large contracts. And in every case, it was because there was new information, there was new technology, there was new coaching techniques that they were able to adopt and implement to get better in a way that until very recently wasn't possible in baseball.

• 4:41Gary O'Reilly?

  So, Travis.

• 4:43Chuck Nice?

  The numbers were lying in the sense of your career at this point shouldn't be telling me this and is this a lie and if it isn't, which it obviously wasn't, how on earth? And where do you go? Why do we need to, because I always, why do we need to tell this story? Why is it so important?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think for each of us, we kind of went into this book thinking, or this era of baseball, thinking talent was sort of fixed. Your career followed this aging curve and all the history of player careers and player aging arcs showed us that you should be in decline when you're 35 years old and you should be losing skill and your production, your career should be, you know, coming to a close. But we noticed, you know, Ben mentioned some of them. I used to report on baseball in Pittsburgh and the Pirates acquired Marlon Bird in the 2013 season and he was at an age where he should be in decline, but instead he was having his best year. And I don't think it was steroids or performance enhancers. It was because he dramatically changed his batted ball profile. And that is something

• 5:49Speaker 02

  that, you know, I thought talent was kind of fixed. And to see Bird kind of change how he swung, how he hit, and the nature of the way the ball left the bat more in the air than on the ground. And that a player could do that in his mid 30s really opened my eyes. And then it's not, you know, extending careers is one aspect of that, whether it's Bird or Justin Turner. And then, you know, at the other end of the aging curve, what can young players do with this and adopt it earlier? How can they change their futures, their trajectories? So just this whole idea that, you know, we flipped on its head, what we thought talent meant, what it was, how it's created. And that's very exciting to be writing about this. And really, it's still the infancy of this movement.

• 6:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah. So let's, let's take a step back very quickly because as we talk about player development, what we're really talking about is the infusion of data into a sport and the utilization of that data in such a way that it informs the player and the coach how to make changes to improve. So baseball being such a statistical behemoth, people just love all the stats. How many times did this one spit at the plate before he hits a home? Like, okay, so we understand that that's a, but that's been going on forever. I mean, Like, uh, if you think about, uh, what's the Hall of Fame do? Uh, Earl Weaver, right? He, he wasn't he the guy with the index cards, right?

• 7:16Chuck Nice?

  And, and he had, uh, uh, even Branch Rickey, right? You know, uh, u- utilizing statisticians and stuff like that. So, let's back that, let's back what the player development is. What is the, the progression? And why is baseball so perfect for this?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think for a few reasons. Baseball is very well suited to statistical analysis in general because you've got 150 years of data and it's been covered and chronicled as much as any human endeavor in that time, I think. So, you've got this wealth of information. For the past 10 years or so, you've had a much higher volume of information because now you're not just getting the results of things, you're also getting the process. You're tracking every pitch, you're tracking batted balls. You're now tracking fielders as they move around the, the field. So, you're getting way more information than you ever had before. That's part of it. And of course, just the structure of baseball, it's just this series of discrete events, you know, batter versus pitcher. And it's sort of easier to separate the independent contributions than it is in, say,

• 8:22Speaker 03

  football or hockey where you have a lot of players in its continuous motion. But what we've seen here is a move from Moneyball, which we've all been talking about for 16 years now since that book came out and, you know, years since the movie came out. Moneyball was about using this information to find players who were already out there and were good already, but for whatever reason, they were undervalued by the market. Other teams just didn't realize that drawing walks was valuable, that on-base percentage was more important than batting average. And so, you could go get these guys who were already doing things that were valuable and you didn't have to pay that much for them because no one else realized that they were good. But that book and that idea became so popular, not just in baseball, but in every

• 9:06Speaker 03

  other field, that every other team got on board and kind of caught up and they hired their own statistical analysts and they were signing and trading for those same players. And suddenly, you couldn't just find that free talent out there anymore. So, the way to win in this era of baseball is not really by finding talent that already exists and is just undervalued and unrecognized, it's by building talent or creating talent. And so, that's where the emphasis is, that's what the book is about, and it's become easier and easier to do that because of the new technology that's available today.

• 9:39Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so what I'm hearing you tell me there, Ben, is Moneyball told me about what had happened, and I could read how good this player could be in my organization and the value I could get out of him for whatever. This iteration of data analysis is changing the future.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah.

• 10:00Gary O'Reilly?

  So now we've gone from a history lesson to, I want to call it science fiction, but it's not, it's a science fact. So, who have been the pathfinders for this influx of new technology? Because you can't just be looking at it with the human eye and saying, "Hey Chuck, this guy's good."

• 10:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, I can, but your team will be a horrible failure.

• 10:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't be down on yourself.

• 10:27Chuck Nice?

  It's like, yeah, it's just like, yeah, that guy right there, that's a winner, buddy. That's a winner. And then, of course.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  That's how teams used to do it.

• 10:33Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so, so pathfinders, and exactly what tech are we talking about here?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of outsiders really brought this movement and these ideas into baseball, and we highlight a number of them in the book. And if you want to look at within the player ranks, Trevor Bauer's a prominent player in this book, and we argue he's pushed forward player development in a lot of different ways. And we follow his, he designed a new pitch in 2018. And, you know, there's this idea, I think, that pitch, how you discovered pitches in the past is sort of incidental or magical. You picked up a ball one day, or you just got lucky flipping a ball a certain way. Where he took science and a process of trial, of measuring movement, improvement in his pitch design, and he created

• 11:21Speaker 02

  this field of modern pitch design, created new pitches from scratch, and pairing technologies like the high-speed edutronic camera, which for the first time in baseball... Really shows a pitcher how his grip, his wrist position exactly imparts spin on a baseball. And when we think about a pitch, it's one of three things. It's a velocity, it's a spin axis, and it's a spin rate. And that determines the shape of a pitch. But instead of just using guesswork in a bullpen, he put a high-speed camera on his throwing arm, his wrist, and he used Repsoto pitch tracking technology, which gave him the axis and spin rate. And he would go off to DriveLine Baseball, this facility in Seattle, and he would, he began creating pitches from scratch there. And we followed

• 12:05Speaker 02

  the slider development. And he knew exactly what he wanted to design, and he was able to monitor his progress, get immediate feedback. And that's, he also popularized weighted ball practices, which is part of underload, overlay load training to create velocity and long toss and all these things. So he's a bit of a prickly character. He's been sort of a troublemaker. But I think that's also allowed him to not care what coach, conventional coaches have to say. It's allowed him, he's always wanted to understand why things happen, and what the science behind it, the logic. And that's what's made him such an important character in this. He hasn't cared. Kyle, he's trained with Kyle Bodie at DriveLine

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Baseball, another outsider who, he's a college dropout. He was an Olive Garden server. And he went out to Seattle to be close to his girlfriend, and he started coaching youth baseball. And he wondered why, you know, these youth coaches didn't seem to understand anything about Moneyball baseball thought, how they couldn't explain the practices they were teaching. So he built his own biomechanics lab from scratch, starting in the aisle of a Home Depot, and just started fundamentally asking why things work. And we see a lot of new ideas come up from individual college programs at small Division One schools. And all these ideas seem to be filtering up into the game for the most part.

• 13:21Chuck Nice?

  You just, you just described the scientific method, by the way. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, if you just want to boil it down to a nutshell, that is, that is the scientific method in a nutshell.

• 13:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I mean, he may not be the most popular pitcher out there, for sure. But an inquiring mind has driven a lot of progress. Now, you've just described two outliers. How big is this particular tribe right now, where we sit in 2019?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, we describe it as the the end of the beginning of this movement. And we've seen, we've gone from Moneyball ideology, kind of. It was rejected at first and it slowly crept into the game. And I think we're seeing players and coaches. There's at least one or two representatives, I think, in most big league clubhouses now.

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  That many?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  I think so. I think that's fair to say. There's more of a curia. And when you see players like Justin Turner, J.D. Martinez, Rich Hill, there's these success stories now to follow. Like Adam Ottavino read about Bauer and Driveline. And his father-in-law's in real estate in Manhattan. And he was looking for a place to throw. So he said, hey, Adam, I have this vacant storefront in Harlem. How about you create your own bullpen? You can outfit it with all this technology, the high-speed cameras. And so last winter, Ottavino, kind of following Bauer's footsteps, created a new cutter from scratch and he revitalized his career. So we're seeing a buildup of acceptance. I don't think we've reached, you know, where it's 50% of the clubhouses.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  But I do think there's at least a small representation of these believers throughout every professional clubhouse.

• 15:00Chuck Nice?

  So is the information any different than the information that's been here all along? Or is it the fact that computers allow us to see patterns in ways that we were never before able to do so? Or is it the fact that, like you said, it's a ground swell? Where you now have, almost like a collective conscious that has invaded the game, pushing the game where it wasn't being pushed before? Or is it just all of that? Who knows? I don't know. I don't know, seriously.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  It's multiple things, but I think it largely is that technology that's now measuring things that just couldn't be measured before. It really was the scout out there just saying, that looks good to me or that doesn't look good to me. And maybe not being able to explain exactly why and what the flaw was and how to fix the flaw, whereas now. You have this immediate form of feedback from the technology that's telling you not just what happens, that's a single, that's an out, but why it happens, you know, what that swing was like, what was the angle he was swinging at, what was the angle that ball left the bat, how many times is that pitch spinning on its way to the plate? These were things that you really couldn't see in many cases, and even if you couldn't

• 16:15Speaker 03

  see them, you couldn't record them on a large, massive scale and get that data immediately when you're in a batting cage or a bullpen. So all of this, I think, the mechanics, the process that players use to perform, that was all, a lot of it was instinctual and going by experience and, you know, coaches in baseball historically have been former players. That's how you became a coach. And so you would teach the next generation of players the same way that you were taught. And so there was a lot of stagnation there. And so, you know, these guys would say, I didn't have this information when I was coming up and I did okay, so why should I embrace it now? So now you get these outsiders, you get these open-minded thinkers, but it really is just being able to track everything, being

• 16:59Speaker 03

  able to quantify these mechanics, you know, what is a player doing, how is he swinging, how is he delivering the ball? And once you analyze that and break it down in unprecedented detail, then you can identify the flaws. And once you do, you can fix them.

• 17:13Gary O'Reilly?

  So what sort of speeds are we talking about with cameras? Because you've got, is it TrackMan and Edge Tronic? How many frames a second? Because if I-

• 17:22Chuck Nice?

  Well, now they have this modus throw, which you can put a sensor in a sleeve-

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:26Chuck Nice?

  And the modus throw uses your iPhone or your Android phone.

• 17:31Gary O'Reilly?

  So the thing is, the most miniscule movement of my hand or a finger will completely change the pitch. As much as I know about baseball, I know that much. But then I read about the last season's World Series with the Red Sox. The two pitches, is it Heath-

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Hembry.

• 17:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Hembry and a guy who scares me when I looked at him first, Joe Kelly. He's got something going on that's scary. They threw sliders, but during October, didn't throw one slider. Red Sox are using this technology. What did they see? How did they see it? What did they use to make this difference?

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Right, so the Red Sox have all this technology that we're talking about. The cameras, the spin tracking devices.

• 18:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Set up in the outfield, in the bullpen before games, and the pitchers are constantly throwing. So they have a baseline of this is what this guy's stuff looks like when he's going well. And now it's a little different from that. Maybe he's slumping, he's not doing so well, and you can see why he's sort of straying from what he should be doing. With both of these guys over the course of the season, they sort of lost the feel for those pitches. You know, they were guys who threw a lot of sliders, they had good sliders, but their arm path sort of just changed, you know, in very subtle ways as the season went on. And so by the time they got to the playoffs, those pitches were not as effective as they had been before.

• 18:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Why don't you just change the delivery?

• 18:59Speaker 03

  The arm path.

• 19:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  It turns out to be quite difficult to do that at times. You know, sometimes you can, this technology can allow you to intervene and say, hey, here's what you do when you're playing well, go back to that. And it's a subtle adjustment, and that's something that this technology can be very helpful to for also.

• 19:17Gary O'Reilly?

  So this becomes a double bluff. If you know all I, my best thing is a slider. And I get to October, and you're expecting, guess what? A slider, and I don't throw any.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:30Gary O'Reilly?

  How long before an opponent goes, whoa, that's not fair? But I mean, as an advantage, as a percentage, how much is that for an organization?

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it can surprise a hitter certainly if the scouting report says this guy throws a lot of sliders, expect sliders, and then you don't see any sliders, you wonder what else is the scouting report getting wrong here? And am I completely unprepared for this plate appearance? So that can be a problem, but you know, those guys, just their pitches were not performing as they used to. And so this technology enabled the Red Sox to say, These pitches are not the same as they used to be. They're not as effective. Let's just abandon them, even though that seems somewhat radical because this is how you've succeeded in the past. Just throw your curveballs instead. Your curveballs are actually performing better. So that's what they did. And hitters weren't expecting it and the pitches performed really well and the Red Sox bullpen was great all the way through that World Series run.

• 20:23Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. So they documented cases where this was a failure.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do cite some players who try to change their swings or they try to design a new pitch and it didn't quite work out for them. That is detailed in the book. And we're not arguing that the guy who throws 50 miles an hour at the county fair is going to adopt this and become a major league player. You still have to be a very good athlete. You still have to, I mean, you can only take so many lemons and make them into such quality lemonade, that sort of thing. But we're seeing this impact so widespread across baseball. And the promise of just any pitcher being able to design new pitches from scratch in an offseason, if even 50% of major league pitchers could do that, that would have a

• 21:10Speaker 02

  huge effect on performance and career trajectories. And not everyone who's gone to drive line baseball has added velocity or improved. But they've shown enough that if you use weighted balls in a particular manner and you teach your shoulder to be more flexible, if you train your body to have more, create more force and have a greater range of motion, that can lift skill levels. It can't help everyone, but it can help enough players where it's definitely, you know, a revolutionary breakthrough in talent creation and the idea of talent formation.

• 21:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's cool. I know we've got to take a break, Gary.

• 21:47Gary O'Reilly?

  We do. Ben Lindbergh, Travis Sawchik are going to remain with us whether they want to or not. And we are going to talk more because there is so much more I want to talk about. For instance, we've just discussed elite level Major League Baseball. I'm looking at this saying, you could build an army of top end baseball players if you took this to a high school.

• 22:08Chuck Nice?

  With my weather machine, I shall one day rule the world.

• 22:13Gary O'Reilly?

  And on that note, we'll take a break. See you shortly.

• 22:23Chuck Nice?

  Looking for that perfect space merch? And who isn't? StarTalk has just the store for you. We've got shirts, hats, mugs, pins, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, posters, books, and more. Head over to StarTalkRadio.net/store for the perfect gift, even if that gift is for you.

• 22:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Playing with Science. We are in the privilege company of Ben Lindbergh and Trevor Sorcek, the co-authors of The MVP Machine.

• 22:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:57Gary O'Reilly?

  If you've listened to the first part of this show, you'll know that it is fascinating to see what is now happening. If you're doing Moneyball, then you're so way back at the beginning of this century. Things have changed.

• 23:10Chuck Nice?

  No, this is Moneyball for the guy that wants to emotionally scar his child by forcing him to play baseball and become a professional sports player. Okay? It's just now I have science that can help me scar my child. It's great.

• 23:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Spoken like a true parent.

• 23:29Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, before the break, I sort of teased a bit about if you took this equipment to a high school, junior college, and you start to work on the adjustment, development, pitches, and swings, you are going to raise the floor level of... Because the MVPs are going to come anyway. They... You don't do anything, they appear. I think that's about a given in just about every sport. You can polish certain surfaces, but they're there. But raising the level, now that could be really interesting. How much of this equipment, this technology, this thinking is filtering down the baseball pyramid?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  That's really starting to happen. It's everywhere in college these days, especially in Division One. There are more than 50 schools now that have these TrackMan systems installed. So all their batted balls and pitches are being tracked. They often have a lot of these cameras and devices that we've been talking about. There's at least one Division Two school now that has it. There's a high school, two high schools actually, that have them as well.

• 24:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  And if you go farther down, you might find even youth leagues with swing sensors and that sort of thing. So, I mean, I think kids and people who aspire to be professional players, they look to what the big leaguers are doing. And this is what the big leaguers are doing now. So they're embracing these ideas. And often, these guys are getting drafted, just entering the minor leagues, knowing things that a previous generation of players would have had to bang their heads against the wall and trial and error and see what fails over big samples to learn. Now they know because they're getting introduced to these concepts.

• 25:11Gary O'Reilly?

  So if I want to install this system in Wayne Manor, right, and have Bruce start pitching, how much? What's our price point?

• 25:21Speaker 03

  It's going to cost you at this point. A lot of this stuff is still pretty pricey. I mean, the TrackMan systems will cost you thousands of dollars. The cameras will still cost you thousands of dollars. So you either have to, you know, be affiliated with some institution, or be from a fairly privileged background, or be located close to a facility that has some of this stuff installed. So it's not accessible to everyone, which is a shame. In the future, it will probably be more widespread and more affordable, which I think would be a good thing. But, you know, there's affordable stuff that you can get. Swing sensors that you attach to your bat, or the sensor that Chuck mentioned that you attach to your elbow. That stuff is actually pretty cheap and pretty affordable, and that

• 26:06Speaker 03

  can give you good insights, too.

• 26:08Gary O'Reilly?

  So who is it geared towards benefiting most pitcher or hitter? Because if it's the pitcher only, you know what you know what comes or doesn't come on the back of that.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it started, I think, as more of a pitcher centric thing where we had pitches tracked before we had batted balls and bats tracked. And and the hitters kind of in a reactive position, he's seeing what the pitcher does and trying to adjust to it. Whereas the pitcher is planning and he has time to think about what he wants to do. But now the offensive side is catching up and there are more tools that can quantify that hitting performance too. Which I I think is important because we're seeing in baseball these days more strikeouts than ever before.

• 26:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Ever before.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Not a coincidence, it's that these pitchers are getting so good that it's just incredibly hard to hit them.

• 26:52Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna ask you about that is the fact that we've seen more immaculate innings.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:59Chuck Nice?

  Than ever before, which by the way, I think is pretty freaking awesome. I mean, it's a thing of beauty to watch, you know, to watch a guy go out and just, you know, nine pitches, nine strikes and bang. You know what I mean? Like, is that because of this or is that is that anecdotal?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  I think some of it, certain cases are examples of player improvement. Some is just, you know, I think over time athletes have always gotten better to form that my old times has gotten better in track, that sort of thing. And we even had a quantified for us where the talent level in baseball has improved over time. But it's never accelerated like it has over the last decade.

• 27:41Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  We suspect and forecast it's going to even increase in that acceleration as more of these practices are adopted. It's more the best athletes adopt these practices and Mookie Betts, the MVP last year in the American League. Is an example of a guy who did change his swing. He was already good and he went to great. So he's an example of a guy actually becoming an MVP because he adopted some of these swing, swing change philosophies. So, yeah, I think some of the talent improvement, I mean, you can just look at velocity. It's increased every year in the pitch tracking era since 2008. And I suspect that's going to continue. We're going to see more pitches, more pitchers develop better breaking balls. And I think it's going to lead to talent improvement across the board.

• 28:23Gary O'Reilly?

  So the owners are going to love this because it's more or less organic growth. I don't have to open my. Dust-encrusted bank vault and pull out another hundred-something, three-hundred-million-dollar contract. I got me a little farm full of demons coming straight through, and they're not costing me that much money.

• 28:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. It's really kinda like, it's like real estate.

• 28:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this gonna just really all over the free agency market?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  That has happened these past couple winters. We've seen it happen. It's funny because this is helping individual players, obviously, but in the aggregate, it's hurting earnings in a sense, and we've seen the average major league salary now decline for the past two seasons, which has never happened before in the free agency era.

• 29:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Mike Trout would disagree.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Well, even he's probably underpaid, but, I mean...

• 29:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh! Are you his agent?

• 29:17Chuck Nice?

  By the way, let me just say, that's why this is the greatest country on the face of the earth, that we can actually have a statement where someone says, "Mike Trout is probably underpaid. God bless America! Thank you!"

• 29:30Speaker 03

  He's that good. He's the MVP machine. But, yes, you're right. Because you can build players now, because you can promote these prospects who in baseball don't make very much money, or you can go get this guy off the scrap heap who's never been that good before, but if you make a certain change, maybe he can be good. Teams don't feel like they need to go out and pay a premium for the established star anymore.

• 29:52Chuck Nice?

  All right, now with that being said, is there any technology right now that does that kind of analysis from afar? Or, you know, for instance, okay, I'm a GM, right? I got this technology, and I'm looking at guys, I'm like, "That guy right there is underperforming. I know that, so I'm gonna go get him. I'm basically gonna just harvest substandard players by the metrics that are being used by their team, but I know I have a different set of metrics that let me know that this guy could come up to a level of play that's gonna make my team great." Is that, is that something that's happening?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have a whole chapter dedicated to Houston Astros and we argue that they're the vanguard of this movement in the pro game as an organization. And just to bring up the Edge Tronic camera as an example again, where most teams are experimenting with one for the first time in spring training this past spring, the Astros had 75 of these cameras hard mounted throughout all their minor league affiliates, all their minor league stadiums, and they have tons of cameras installed at their major league stadium. And they're taking all this pitch grip info, biomechanical information, who knows everything they're extracting from the cameras and TrackMan and everything. They're gaining all this intel, not just on their own players, but other players. What we've seen is when they've acquired players from other teams, like a Garrett Cole, Ryan Presley, Justin Verlander, they'll

• 31:13Speaker 02

  make sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic changes. We've seen so many of these players go to the Astros and become much better players. I mean, Garrett Cole is a Cy Young contender this year, and two years ago with the Pirates, he had a very disappointing year. Justin Verlander had this renaissance in Houston, in part because of slight grip tweaks to a slider. So that's an example of an organization taking data, whether it's biomechanical or otherwise, and applying it and improving players they acquire from other clubs. And that's a great advantage to have.

• 31:44Gary O'Reilly?

  So you've touched on something there. With the biodata, that's probably next gen from where we are right now. Through other sports, there's a lot of acquisition of biodata to stop injury prevention. They do a lot in soccer. Yeah. And they use that football as well. Football as well. However, here, you're going to run into the players' union. And the utilization of information of a medical nature. That's right. Is that, uh-uh. They're not going to be happy with that. But is there a way through that? I mean, I agree that the biodata is vital. I'm actually waiting for someone to do the psychological profiling. I was about to bring that up.

• 32:28Gary O'Reilly?

  That's the next thing. Because I can turn up in the stadium chat. Exactly. And I'm the same guy, and I've just been an MVP for the last 75 years. Right. I don't feel like it today. And you don't know, because I've got this history that tells me I'm really good. But today, I don't feel like it. So think of that.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  Is there any data right now that's being used about the player who makes the impact without making the impact? For instance, for some reason, when this guy is in the game, we always win. But yet, when we look at his numbers, he really hasn't done anything spectacular. But yet somehow, every time we play this dude, we win. Is there anybody like that?

• 33:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, Harry Potter.

• 33:09Chuck Nice?

  For some reason, we always win Quidditch.

• 33:13Chuck Nice?

  Harry Potter always gets the snitch. We must have him in here. No, seriously, I'm serious. Have we gotten to the point where there's data like that?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  There are good clubhouse guys, good glue guys, they call them in baseball.

• 33:25Chuck Nice?

  Glue?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:26Chuck Nice?

  Glue guys?

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Glue guys, because they make the team stick together. I think that's probably less important in baseball than it is in some sports, just because, you know, you're not passing the ball around so much. It's kind of this series of individual events.

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  Terrell Owens would not be as caustic effect in a clubhouse as he would in a locker room.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's harder to quantify, but, you know, we touch on all these things in the book, too. The teams are making mindfulness and meditation and mental skills a big part of their training now. And, you know, as you were just talking about, I mean, some of the sports science, high-performance stuff, teams are getting into that, too. They're hiring people who've been in football and rugby and bringing them over into baseball now. And as you said, the Players Association is very powerful in baseball, and so major leaguers can opt out of all of that stuff, but minor leaguers are not part of that union. And so, teams can essentially make minor leaguers do whatever they want and wear whatever censors they tell them to. So, they are very much...

• 34:22Gary O'Reilly?

  That doesn't sound good.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  No, it's a concern. It's a privacy. It's an invasive thing. And, you know, it can help players, but you can also construct scenarios where it could hurt players. So, that's gonna be a big concern, I think, for the union.

• 34:35Chuck Nice?

  Or to just get to a point where this becomes so ubiquitous that the playing field is just level across the board. And it really will come down to what division you play, what school you go to, and who can afford to do this. Or scouting will change from scouting guys like we normally and traditionally do to going to the places where they don't have this technology with this technology to find those guys. Does that make sense?

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, very much so. That's happening. The Astros are sending their people with these high-tech cameras to, you know, backfields and high schools and international fields where no one has this information. And that's been a big advantage. But, you know, even if the technology is everywhere and all of these stats are available, I think there will still be a difference between players because of their mental makeup, because of how hard they're willing to work, how open they are to this information. I think that's really going to separate players. It's now that talent maybe dictates a little less than it used to what you're going to turn into. Now, I think what's even more important is are you receptive to this information? And can you incorporate it into your practice?

• 35:44Chuck Nice?

  And that's where the psychologically scarring father comes into play.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  I'm worried we're going to ruin a few childhoods with this.

• 35:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, don't worry. The idea of your little junior becoming a major league something, there's crushed many in history. Right, gentlemen, I'm sorry because we are going to have to rant.

• 36:06Chuck Nice?

  You guys are amazing. You guys are great.

• 36:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I'll say it in English. Oh, you're really rather fun. No, really, it's been an absolute thrill. Thank you to Ben Lindbergh.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 36:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Travis Sawchik, the co-authors of The MVP Machine. If you haven't, get a copy.

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  Get a copy.

• 36:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Go buy it. Find it, read it, think about it, because what's happening in this book is out there and it's evolving, just like Moneyball evolved. You'll find these guys will be sinking their way through and there's lots of different chapters on lots of different things.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  And for the low price of $1,000, I'll give you an audio version where I read it to you.

• 36:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, dear. Right, we're going to take a break. I might need a break. One with a beach and a palm tree. Right, thank you both again, gentlemen. What a pleasure. Stick around because when we come back, we have our favorite baseball sleuth, Meredith Wills. And she's not just an astrophysicist, she is a baseball data analyst and she's fantastic. And we'll talk to her and, um, no doubt, Chuck, have as much fun as we have with these guys.

• 37:15Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 37:16Gary O'Reilly?

  So stick around.

• 37:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Playing with Science with our baseball data analytics, our new cutting-edge technology, everything we just spoke to with Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sorchik, the co-authors of the MVP Machine, but now our dear friend, our baseball sleuth,

• 37:48Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:49Gary O'Reilly?

  our astrophysicist.

• 37:50Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:51Gary O'Reilly?

  And.

• 37:52Chuck Nice?

  Our data analytics extraordinaire.

• 37:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Meredith.

• 37:55Chuck Nice?

  Meredith Wills. Hello, Meredith.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Hi, guys. How you doing?

• 37:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, good. So good to have you back on the show.

• 38:02Chuck Nice?

  Back on the show.

• 38:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Chuck, you do this far better than I do.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 38:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Introduce Meredith.

• 38:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, listen, everybody knows about Meredith, the fact that she is an astrophysicist, a brilliant astrophysicist, as well as a baseball aficionado, as well as a baseball superfan. I follow you on Twitter and I get to see all the cool stuff that you do in the world of baseball, a well-respected voice and editorial presence in the world of baseball, and the person who pretty much, single-handedly, flipped the whole home run surge controversy

• 38:43Chuck Nice?

  on its ear by giving us research that showed that perhaps there was one definable difference in a baseball.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:55Chuck Nice?

  That caused, perhaps, the increase in home runs that we were seeing. And I'll let you tell it, because I love telling the story, because, quite frankly, very, very quickly, people, sometimes you've got to think differently. How about you just change the way you think, period? And that is what Meredith did, because everybody, when they were researching this problem, they were cutting balls open. Well, I'm going to let Meredith tell us what she did and her findings. Meredith?

• 39:27Speaker 04

  All right. Well, I got to start. Visual aids.

• 39:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes, visual aids. We got the baseballs.

• 39:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, baseballs.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  And so...

• 39:36Speaker 04

  I have a really awesome editor at The Athletic who got in touch with me and said, "So, Meredith, you wanna look at this one too?" And so I did, and it turns out that the ball's different again.

• 39:48Chuck Nice?

  Again.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  And it's way different from not just the ball that we had for 2017, but from every, every baseball that's like ever been made.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  Awesome.

• 39:59Gary O'Reilly?

  It's square.

• 40:00Chuck Nice?

  This is, um, this is exciting. Please continue.

• 40:03Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a cliffhanger.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  I, I love watching Chuck get excited about this stuff. It's so great. I'm bringing you to like every presentation I ever give from now on.

• 40:13Chuck Nice?

  Uh, well, it is exciting stuff.

• 40:15Gary O'Reilly?

  So where are we?

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  So what happened?

• 40:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Where are we?

• 40:17Chuck Nice?

  So we know what, what.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  I'm gonna show you what last year's ball looked like.

• 40:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:21Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. We're looking at last year's ball.

• 40:23Chuck Nice?

  Yep, official Major League Baseball.

• 40:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  With the seams, like the, with the seams, look at the edge there. Can you see the edge?

• 40:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  That's last year's ball. This is this year's ball.

• 40:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  They're next to each other. Once again, we kind of have different.

• 40:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, one's shiny, one isn't.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  That to be different is that on the new balls, the 2019 balls.

• 40:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm, right.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  The leather is smoother.

• 40:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  The laces are thinner.

• 40:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  But the two that are really contributing to the aerodynamics or to the, the change in the home runs is that the, um, seams themselves are lower and the ball is rounder.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 41:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So thank you, because that's what I was looking at. I was looking at the new ball having a, a greater spherical presence than the older ball. And when I said shiny, I, I wasn't being rude. It, it.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  No, shiny, shiny's a good description.

• 41:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's smoother.

• 41:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Chuck Nice?

  So now, listen, uh, everything that you just said, uh, judging from the last, uh, research that I read that you put out, basically, all of that leads to a lower drag coefficient. And so.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Pretty much.

• 41:28Chuck Nice?

  Pretty much. And so that lower drag coefficient means that the ball is gonna fly farther if it's hit with the same power.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Yep, the way I like to describe it is that the ball just doesn't slow down as fast.

• 41:41Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I like that. That's even better. That's even better. Doesn't slow.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  It goes further. It's literally not slowing down as fast, hence it can travel farther with the same, you know, being hit.

• 41:52Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, now put that, put that next to the discussion we just had with the two guys, the author, right? And they're saying that at the moment, the high-tech cameras, the Edge Tronics, the TrackMan cameras is improving pitching. And it's the hitters that are suffering to a certain extent because of the improvement in pitching. Throw in a ball that favors the hitter.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  And a ball that's very, very hard to throw.

• 42:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  You have to realize is that this, you're getting better aerodynamics, the ball is not slowing down as quickly. But that, that shininess you're talking about, that slicker leather, and the fact that the seams are lower, make it really, really hard to pitch with.

• 42:35Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's not as if you, you don't use, if I relate to cricket, that ball will hit the dirt, come back. You can shine it and create this, this shiny surface against a, a cut surface, if you like. That hits the dirt, that's out of here. It's no longer used. So every time you go back to this particular surface.

• 42:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:58Gary O'Reilly?

  And therefore, pitchers have got to learn how to pitch again because this thing's, whoa, it's like a bar of soap. It's all slippery and shiny. What's going on?

• 43:07Speaker 04

  That's, that's a good one. Noah Syndergaard called it an ice cube.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Ice cube. Pitching an ice cube.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 43:12Chuck Nice?

  Nice. So you put this research out there and, you know, it makes perfect sense. For some reason, it doesn't get the kind of attention. I, I mean, I, first of all, I think it's great. Um, I, it's, it's, it's kind of solving a mystery that people are interested in. And it doesn't really make a difference. Everybody's playing with the same ball. You know what I mean? So it's not like you're, and these aren't necessarily juiced balls, which is what a lot of the headlines say. They say the ball is juiced, but the ball is different. And that difference creates different outcomes. And that's really what we're talking about, right?

• 43:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, for some reason, there's been this focus on the interior of the ball.

• 43:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  In a way that that I hadn't thought about, even to the point where I guess there's one. I mean, I guess I got it on the, I didn't see it till I read the article through the second time sweep, and I missed it. Uh, nineteen fifty's, I think, where you had a physics professor going through and looking at the ball traveling and he right off the bat discounted the leather and the laces as possibly being able to contribute to home runs. And decided he was gonna look at the interior, uh, particularly the way, the term is coefficient of restitution, but all it really means is how the ball bounces off the bat when it's hit.

• 44:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  And that's been like what everybody's super excited about all the time.

• 44:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  How does the ball come off the bat? We can see that in exit velocity.

• 44:43Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  That's basically what exit velocity shows us.

• 44:46Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Is the ball coming off the bat, you know, if it exit velocity is higher, then one of the possible changes for that can be coefficient of restitution. However, if the exit velocity hasn't changed, it's probably not that.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  So.

• 45:04Chuck Nice?

  Right. I mean, yeah, I'm not a scientist and I got that exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Super cool stuff.

• 45:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Looking at the same thing from a different angle to get a different outcome.

• 45:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:16Gary O'Reilly?

  And we've, we've looked at this through so many different things. We started off the show with our two authors saying basically that. And it, and it talked about outliers thinking differently. And then all of a sudden finding they're no longer out there on their own. They've become a tribe and that tribe is forever growing. And I think Meredith is an, is another example of this.

• 45:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Chose to look at it at a different way.

• 45:42Chuck Nice?

  At a different way. Yeah.

• 45:43Gary O'Reilly?

  And the people are beginning to go. That makes sense.

• 45:47Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly. Well, listen, I gotta tell you, I love what you do, Meredith. We are, we are almost out of time, but I gotta ask you about this because I thought it was really, really funny.

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  Rob Arthur of, of The Slate. You know who he is, and he wrote an art, he wrote an article postulating that Barry Bonds would have hit a hundred home runs using the current MLB balls. Uh, how, how do you feel about those suppositions?

• 46:14Speaker 04

  I, I, I, Rob, one of the things I love about Rob's piece is, and this is, this is, this is a compliment, Rob, I promise, is he is very, very good at taking into account that there are uncertainties around things. So, you know, maybe this would happen, maybe it wouldn't. And so, the situation that he comes up with for, yeah, you know, if it wasn't, if it was really warm and he's playing in Minnesota, or whatever, then maybe it could have happened, you know, such and such was pitching against, I don't remember all the details, but it gets all these lovely caveats after a while. It's like, yeah, it's possible.

• 46:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, it's basically.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  It's absolutely possible, but I just love the way it's, it's, yeah, you know, by all means.

• 46:54Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, right?

• 46:56Speaker 04

  It's also a moving target anyway, no pun intended, Jesus, sorry.

• 46:59Chuck Nice?

  Hey, you know what? It is what it is. I got one last thing for you, because I, I know, I know you're a huge baseball fan. I know you got 10 games. I know you have caught a foul ball. So, this has nothing to do with anything that we're talking about now. How do you feel about this movement to put netting up all around every park so that foul balls have no chance of injuring fans, which have happened in certain cases in certain parks? Do you think that takes away from the fan experience of the game, or do you think the safety is more important?

• 47:30Speaker 04

  I think, say, honestly, I think safety is more important, especially, again, this ball doesn't slow down as fast.

• 47:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's right.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  This ball is actually more, I don't know how much more dangerous, but we know it's

• 47:43Speaker 04

  It's more dangerous or we wouldn't be seeing the home runs that we're seeing. So. Good point. There's. The way that I've been looking at netting is it's almost like a fan equivalent of baseball equivalent of seat belts. People are gonna complain. People are gonna think it's, you know, taking away from your driving experience, your fan experience, whatever. That's fine. You, as a fan, are not capable of catching a line drive like that. I don't care if you're not on your phone. I don't care if you're paying attention. I don't care if you're holding a glove. You are not going to catch that ball. You're not that good. I'm sorry. No, you're not.

• 48:22Gary O'Reilly?

  I feel like I've just been, I feel like I've just been grounded.

• 48:25Chuck Nice?

  That was great.

• 48:27Gary O'Reilly?

  I've been, I've been sat down, come in late, and I've just been grounded.

• 48:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh, but that's perfect.

• 48:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Meredith, you're right, though.

• 48:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God. I don't know. MLB needs you. I'm telling you, they need you.

• 48:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, we need you. We love you.

• 48:38Chuck Nice?

  That should.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  My dad's been saying that for years.

• 48:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 48:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Chuck Nice?

  That should play before every game at every stadium. You are not good enough to catch a line drive. That's why you're not on the field. That's why you're sitting in the seat.

• 48:51Gary O'Reilly?

  That's why you're that side of the net.

• 48:53Chuck Nice?

  Right. And that's why, and that's why we put up netting. That's amazing. Oh, man.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  I'm turning to a ringtone from my phone because you've been talking to me.

• 49:01Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 49:01Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  What the heck it sounds like.

• 49:03Chuck Nice?

  That is so great.

• 49:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Meredith Wills, I'm never disappointed when you come on the show.

• 49:08Chuck Nice?

  Thank you so much.

• 49:09Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's gonna happen again, I can tell you. Thank you so much. Really, absolute pleasure.

• 49:13Chuck Nice?

  Great to talk to you, Meredith. We'll see you.

• 49:15Gary O'Reilly?

  The pleasure's ours. Oh, Chuck.

• 49:17Chuck Nice?

  What a great show, man.

• 49:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. A baseball-loving astrophysicist who brings a brain power to just simple things like, yeah, this thing travels further. And it's for your safety. Yeah, put the nets up.

• 49:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Just thinking, just basic thinking like that. That's why it's changing the game. And that's why we have Meredith on the show.

• 49:40Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 49:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep. All right. Well, that's our show, everybody. Um, I hope what we've done is make you think differently. Get you to take a pause and look at the same thing from a slightly different angle and maybe come up with a thought for your own.

• 49:55Chuck Nice?

  And stop practicing with your kids without that data analytics equipment dog on it. They're never gonna make the pros without it.

• 50:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, get down to the electronics shop and drop about fifteen thousand dollars. Wow, easy peasy.

• 50:09Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 50:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, isn't it just? Right, I've been Gary O'Reilly.

• 50:11Chuck Nice?

  And I've been Chuck Nice.

• 50:12Gary O'Reilly?

  And this has been Playing with Science.

• 50:23Chuck Nice?

  Hey bud, come here. You could have listened to this episode with no ads. I tell you how, for five bucks a month, you can join StarTalk on Patreon and lose all the commercials. Learn more at patreon.com/starTalkRadio, but you didn't hear it from me.