Bet the Process - Eno Sarris

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hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-04-19 17:36:03
Rating: 7.00

Notes:
Eno was great at delivering a ton of info in a pretty short amount of time (less than an hour). My bias - I don't bet baseball, I did a lifetime ago. I don't know a lot of the newish research so I might confuse something that's well know to the baseball sharp community as "important". As for grading, to get out in front of the Down Unders, pre-10 minutes was not good, but Eno was great, I am choosing to grade it on the Eno part.

2:00 - Oh no. Rufus repeats the same wrong factoid that a famous person mentioned a week ago. Off to a good start! Goes into Masters Calcutta recap. Talk about difficulty in predicting the weather.

4:50 - SplashsportsGate - Apologizes for the mixup. Sounds like they are talking to the sponsor, sounds like Rufus is attempting to offer some solutions. I'm sure there is going to be a pretty large contingent that wants blood (I'll give you one guess), mistakes happen, it was a bad mistake, it sounds like they are attempting to rectify it and as long as it gets rectified in some appropriate manner I'm going to just move on. If not, then go get the pitchforks. Yeah, two seasoned vets like this shouldn't make errors like this, but it's just an error there was no malice here. 9:50 - Rufus makes a pretty sincere apology. Mistakes happen, hopefully it gets rectified.

10:30 - Eno comes on. Eno sounds like he's calling into WFAN from a car phone in 1993 wanting to talk about the Jeff Kent's recent batting slump.

11:20 - xWOBA / bat speed correlation, "50 or better bat speed". 13:00 - "Is it easier for a power hitter to learn to make more contact of a contact hitter to increase their power?" - hitters hit fewer ground balls as they age. "We have training methods for adding power, I haven't seen a great method for adding contact." Eno thinks there are inefficiencies in team building around this topic and says he met with a team that said "bat speed is correlated with swing and miss" which Eno thinks is a study issue due to selection bias. Brings up Red Soxs bringing in Driveline guy who has some of their contact hitters on a weighted bat program.

17:35 - Brings up pitching. "Is command a skill?" Eno says that teams have seemingly settled on looking for "stuff", command there isn't that much variability, it isn't that sticky.

18:00 - "You'll see now that slugging is more correlated to team success than OBP" which makes the slight loss of contact skill for increases in power/bat speed.
19:30 - "Contact rates in the postseason are more predictive than they are during the regular season for team success." 20:10 - "At the upper ends of velocity, contact matters more." Follows with some park talk where the Giants are trying to make their park more vanilla to attract certain types of players (this is beyond my knowledge).

Question preceded by peak Rufus/Jeff talking over each other. 23:50 - "Player development is still an edge for teams that do it well." Talks about how it's really hard to measure the results of player dev - "a lot of noise measuring the player before, the processes during & the player after". "Credit is a really tough thing" - coaches "asking" for credit sort of goes against the team building ethos.

28:50 - With emphasis on swinging harder, will we see more hitter injuries? Eno brings up uptick in oblique injuries.

32:20 - Talking about a "stuff" metric and how in the public space not a lot of work has been done on what would happen if you added a pitch, what the shape of that picth would be and witch pitches are ideal to add to a pitcher (sounds like a crazy good research idea to get yourself noticed in the public space). Some type of Projected Optimizing Pitch Adding Model. 35:10 - "The fastball is the anchor in a model" followed by "this is why sometimes pitchers with 3 fastballs are more difficult to model because don't know which fastball to anchor to." "What if we anchor the pitcher to his cutter and not his 4 seam?"

36:30 - If betting baseball what are some of the things you'd be looking at to be "early" on something? Mentions still some value in Stuff+ - "can learn something quickly even after 20 fastballs". Hitter biomechanic modeling which "the high end teams are already doing". Looking to do Path+ and Decision+. There's more we can do with plate discipline.

43:00 - Says he talked to Will Caroll (@injuryexpert) that says he has a test better than the Wonderlic. It's been a while since I've seen Will's stuff come across my feed, but my recollection 5 years ago was it wasn't great curious to see if there's been some huge change there. 46:30 - Mentions Tread Athletics (like Driveline) which I only knew from Youtube shorts. https://treadathletics.com/ based in Charlotte. 47:30 - "On the edges, chemistry matters." Eno ends at 52 minutes.