Matt Gelb

And in Major League Baseball, if you have, we'll call it, eight league average players at their position defensively, but their positioning is such that before the pitch is even thrown, they're in an optimal position to field that ball, that matters more than range or probably any factor when it comes to how good you are individually, which means the thing that matters most by an order of magnitude is, well,

Can you hit?

And that's why teams that are chasing defense these days, in my opinion, are far behind the times.

See what the Mets have done.

See what the Red Sox have done.

If you have a front office whose intelligence is such that you can improve your defense without improving the players on your defense, that is the golden goose.

And in my judgment, the batting average on balls in play being so low is primarily a function of intelligence and not really even a function of how good pitchers are right now.

I mean, sure, I suppose if you know your guys are standing in the right spot, you're going to attack hitters with even more confidence.

But truthfully, I think the teams that are ahead of the rest are those that are marrying their pitch calm with the pitchers that are being called and doing so subtly in a way that you're hitting rockets all over the field.

It just so happens that the defender is standing exactly where you hit that baseball.

You just asked me about the league having a disproportionately low batting average.

And now we're going to complain about a 29 run game, but I get it.

I'm not complaining.

I just want to, you know, work through how we're going to contextualize this.

Sure.

It's a, it's a well-made point.

What, what, what I think needs to be done for most of these new ballparks is look, we have enough.

scientific data now where we can game this stuff out to know exactly how the ball should and would fly what was most pronounced to me and watching that game last night was just how small these major league hitters made this park look it was it was just outrageous it goes without saying it's such a hitter friendly environment there in the PCL but we don't want this either because what we don't want are our pitchers dreading going there we don't want pitchers dreading signing

And I think that's at least fairly important.

I think Colorado is actually a really good example of exactly why we don't want this to be the case.