Let’s start with a riddle: Team A and Team B have both played 98 games this season. Due to the vagaries of extra innings and unplayed bottoms of ninths, Team A’s pitchers have thrown four more innings than Team B’s pitchers. However, Team B’s pitchers have faced 259 more batters than Team A. How is this possible?

OK, yeah, so this was actually a pretty easy riddle. The answer is that Team B’s pitchers stink, while Team A’s pitchers are very good. Team A gets a higher percentage of batters out, which means that it faces fewer batters per inning. Let’s put some names and numbers to our hypothetical, shall we? Allow me to introduce you to the Mariners and the White Sox.

The Mariners have better pitchers and a better defense behind them. Consequently, the White Sox have allowed a whopping 130 more runs. But take a look at the last row of that table. The White Sox have thrown the most pitches in baseball, while the Mariners have thrown the second fewest. Having good pitching and good defense has allowed them to throw 1,477 fewer pitches than the South Siders. The average team throws 146 pitches per game, so we’re talking about 10 entire games’ worth of pitches. Ten games! That is a huge number, and these teams still have 64 games left to go. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the fun things about baseball (that’s also one of the fun things about life in general) is that at any moment you can look for and find something that you alone are seeing, that you alone are paying enough attention to notice, that you alone care about. Last Wednesday, the Twins finally lost to the White Sox. The Twins had won their first eight matchups with the South Siders, and they would beat the Sox again later that day. In fact, if not for the opportunity to pummel the White Sox at frequent intervals, Minnesota’s first half would look much different and much darker. But just this once, in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader, the Twins lost to the White Sox.

The bird showed up sometime during the first inning. It wasn’t there when Carlos Correa slapped the 11th pitch of the game through the right side for a single, but in the bottom of the inning, when Andrew Vaughn grounded into a 5-4-3 double play and the camera whipped around the horn to follow the ball, there it was — perched on a steel cable right above the on-deck circle as if it had been there forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those who enjoy the loudest, simplest, most dopamine-drenched form of baseball, today is a special day. It’s Derby day, and even better, the silly hats are not mandatory. The MLB Home Run Derby takes place at 8:00 p.m. ET at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. What the Costco-coded ballpark lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in bulk. According to Statcast’s park factors, Globe Life yields more home runs than the average park both for righties (120) and for lefties (110), so we should be in for a show. You can watch on ESPN, but if you’re a nerd – and you’re reading FanGraphs right now, so I’m sure you can do the math on this one – you’ll probably prefer the Statcast broadcast over on ESPN 2.

As in any year, there’s a laundry list of Derby-worthy players who won’t be participating, with Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Elly De La Cruz at the top. Still, this a solid sampling of swatters, and nearly every participant figures to have a legitimate shot at winning. Either we’ll have a first-time winner or Pete Alonso will take home his record-tying third title.

The field features three of the top six home run hitters in baseball this season — Gunnar Henderson, Marcell Ozuna, and José Ramírez — and two of the game’s brightest young shortstops: AL MVP candidates Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr.. It also includes three sluggers who take the Derby much more seriously than your average participant — Alonso, Henderson, and Teoscar Hernández — and two others who’ve won derbies at lower levels: Witt and Alec Bohm. Finally, there’s Adolis García, an electrifying slugger whose historic power display during the Rangers’ World Series run last season is sure to keep the crowd at full throat. In the sections below, I’ll break down all the new rules and I’ll try to make a case for why each candidate has a shot at the crown.

Rule Changes

In recent years, the entire Derby has taken the form of a single-elimination tournament, with the eight participants seeded based on their regular season home run totals. This year, the first round will be wide open. All eight players will hit as many home runs as they can, and the four players with the highest totals will advance into a four-person bracket. They’ll be seeded based on those totals, with the distance of their longest home run serving as a tiebreaker.

On the one hand, this will likely make the competition a little bit more fair. Last year, Adley Rutschman hit 27 home runs in the first round. That was the third-highest total of the round, but he failed to move on because he had the bad luck to be facing off against Luis Robert Jr., who hit 28. On the other hand, this change makes the Derby much more of an endurance contest. Swinging for the fences repeatedly is tiring work. In previous years, if you were batting second, all you needed to do was homer once more than your opponent, and then you could save your strength for the later rounds. That option is now gone. Everyone needs to max out their first-round total, so we should probably expect some sweaty, sluggish sluggers by the time we get to the final. Conditioning will be key.

If your favorite thing about the Home Run Derby is the byzantine rules, you’re in for a treat because we’re just getting started. This year, the timing of each round remains the same: Batters get three minutes in the first two rounds and two minutes in the final round, with one 45-second timeout per round. However, you might recall that in previous years, the system required the pitcher to wait until the last ball had landed before pitching, at least in theory. In practice, some pitchers flouted that rule, and as a result, their hitters saw way more pitches than did their opponents. In order to curb that practice (which while undeniably unfair was also extremely fun), the rules now include a maximum number of pitches per round: 40 in the first two rounds and 27 in the final round, which works out to 4.5 seconds per pitch. If you run out of pitches, then the round is over, even if there’s still time on the clock. Keep in mind, that’s a maximum number of pitches, not swings. That could make the command of the pitcher, already a huge factor, even more important. In recent years, if batters didn’t like a pitch, they could take it and their pitcher would fire another one right away. There wasn’t much of a time penalty, because they didn’t have to wait for the previous pitch to land. In this new format, if the pitcher misses their batter’s nitro zone, it makes a lot less sense for the batter to take the pitch and wait for the next one, because they only get so many precious balls.

The bonus system has also changed completely. This year, each player concludes each round with an untimed bonus round in which they can hit until they record three outs. If they hit a ball at least 425 feet within the bonus, then they earn a fourth out. In other words, batters could get locked in and launch a bunch of homers in a row during the bonus and pile onto their totals for the round, and because of the extra out, those who hit one especially long blast during the bonus would have an even greater advantage.

If there’s a tie in the head-to-head rounds after the bonus, then both players get a 60-second swing-off with no additional bonuses or timeouts. If they’re still tied after the swing-off, then they each get another swing-off that consists of just three swings. If it’s still tied after that, they do the whole three-swing business again until there’s a winner or until the sun swallows the earth, whichever happens first.

OK, that’s it. Those are all of the rules, I swear. Let’s move on to the participants. Although the players are no longer seeded, we’ll still discuss them in the order of their home run totals.

Gunnar Henderson

Henderson turned 23 on June 29, so he has the chance to become the youngest champion in Derby history. As a second-year player who won’t be eligible for arbitration until 2026, the million-dollar prize for first place would more than double his salary, and the $750,000 runner-up prize would very nearly double it as well. Based on his performance this season, he also has a strong case as the favorite. His 28 homers rank third in baseball behind Judge and Ohtani, and his 56.7% hard-hit rate ranks fourth among qualified players behind those two and Juan Soto. Henderson also leads the Derby participants with an average bat speed of 75.8 mph (which is also good for ninth in all of baseball). Not that it’s particularly relevant to the Derby, but Henderson is second in the majors with 6.1 WAR, just a hair behind Judge (6.3).

Henderson is also really invested in the Derby. On Thursday, he held a legit practice session at Oriole Park, timed by teammate Colton Cowser and pitched by his Derby pitcher, Norfolk Tides manager Buck Britton. “I’ve hit his BP well,” Henderson told reporters when asked why he chose Britton to pitch to him. “He throws good BP and it’s a pretty easy motion.” However, Britton noted a potential issue with Henderson’s approach. “Hopefully those balls just get over the wall,” said Britton. “He hits the ball so hard, but he hits it at really low angles, so just getting the ball in the air” will be key. Henderson is fourth in baseball with 112 blasts, but just 31 of those blasts have come on fly balls, which sends him down to 12th place and third among Derby participants, behind Ozuna (43) and Hernández (32). When Henderson does put the ball in the air, he’s golden. His 31.1% HR/FB rate is the best in baseball. But before you get too concerned about Henderson’s launch angle, look no further than the last two winners. Henderson’s 46.9% groundball rate is lower than the 48.2% rate that Soto ran in the first half of 2022, the year he won the Derby, and the 49.8% rate that reigning champ Vladimir Guerrero Jr. put up in the first half of last season.

Marcell Ozuna

There’s no getting around this: Ozuna was a terrible choice to represent Major League Baseball in such a celebratory event. In 2021, he was arrested for a domestic violence incident, part of which was captured on body cam footage. The charges were dropped when Ozuna agreed to participate in a pretrial diversion program. He was also arrested for driving under the influence in 2022 and pleaded no contest in 2023. It’s not as if there’s any criteria for the Derby that forced MLB to put Ozuna front and center; his All-Star selection serves as its own acknowledgement of the very strong season he’s having. So inviting him to participate in the Derby, the league’s most fan-oriented and family-friendly night of the year, is an active choice, one that sends a very clear message about the league’s values. Ozuna has hit 26 home runs this season.

José Ramírez

Since the start of the 2016 season, Ramírez has put up 46.5 WAR, fifth in baseball. But don’t let the fact that he’s one of the game’s greatest all-around players obscure his power. Since the start of the 2017 season, Ramírez has hit 220 home runs, sixth most in baseball. Also, don’t sleep on Ramírez tonight just based on how he performed in his first Derby appearance, in 2022, when he batted right-handed because of a major thumb injury that completely sapped his power. This year, he’s expected to bat left-handed, and the power is back. This season he’s tied for sixth in baseball with 23 home runs. Ramírez’s average homer this season travels 388 feet, the shortest distance among the group, but that shouldn’t necessarily be held against him. It’s a result of his focus on pulling balls on the air, an excellent recipe for success and something he does more frequently than any other participant. Likewise, although Ramírez has the lowest 90th-percentile exit velocity of the group, at 103.9 mph, he can dial things up when he wants to. His hardest-hit ball of the year was 116.6 mph, which trails only Witt among the group and ranks 12th in all of baseball.

The interesting thing is that it might actually make more sense for Ramírez to bat right-handed tonight, and not just because righties have an easier time leaving the yard at Globe Life. Over the course of his career, 69% of his homers have come from the left side, but that’s largely because he faces way more righty pitchers than lefties, meaning he bats left-handed far more frequently than he does righty. His power output on a rate basis is about the same from both sides; across his career, he’s homered in 4.1% of his plate appearances when he bats left-handed as well as when he hits righty, and each side’s HR/FB ratio is nearly identical, too. That said, he definitely has the potential for more power from the right side. His exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard-hit rate are lower from the left side this season and over the course of his career. With the introduction of bat tracking data, I can tell you that this season, his bat speed averages 74.2 mph from the right side, nearly 4 mph faster than his 70.3 mark from the left side. According to Mike Petriello, who will be calling the Derby on ESPN 2 tonight, “on balls hit in the air, every 1 mph of bat speed earns you approximately six more feet of distance.” That’s a difference of nearly 24 feet.

Teoscar Hernández

Considering he has never finished a season with more than 32 home runs — in 2021, his only 30-homer campaign — Hernández might be easy to overlook, but he’s a strong dark horse candidate. The 31-year-old has been one of the game’s most consistent power hitters ever since he became a big-league regular in 2018. If we ignore the 2020 season, when Hernández managed 16 homers in just 50 games, then he’s hit at least 25 homers in each of the last four seasons, and at least 20 in each of the last five. He may not lead this year’s eight participants in any one category, but since 2018, he’s never once finished a season below the 80th percentile in barrel rate, average exit velocity, or max exit velocity.

Perhaps even more important than his credentials is the fact that Hernández really wants to win. He openly campaigned to be included, and once he was chosen, he sought advice from Guerrero Jr., a two-time Derby contestant who won last year’s tournament, and Ohtani, his Dodgers teammate who participated in the 2021 Derby. The two warned him about the effect that fatigue can play, and Hernández has said that he’ll focus on lifting the ball rather than tiring himself out with max-effort hacks. “I think I have a little bit of an advantage because I swing a lot,” Hernández said. “I take a lot of swings every day. My body is used to going swing, swing, swing without getting rest.”

Hernández has held two timed practice sessions with his Derby pitcher, Dodgers third base coach Dino Ebel, whose son Brady just participated in the High School Home Run Derby this weekend. Anyone who’s watched the Derby regularly knows that the pitcher makes a huge difference, and in Ebel, Hernández might have something of a secret weapon. This will be his fourth Derby pitching appearance at the big-league level, and he also pitched in two minor league derbies. He helped Vladimir Guerrero win the 2007 Derby, then pitched to Albert Pujols in 2015 and Joc Pederson in 2019.

Pete Alonso

Alonso has been in a funk lately; he has just two home runs this month, and over his last 12 games, he’s batting .196 with no extra-base hits and a 41 wRC+. But don’t kid yourself: Alonso is a prolific home run hitter. Since the start of the 2019 season, when he was named NL Rookie of the Year after leading the majors with 53 homers, Alonso has clobbered 211 home runs, the most in all of baseball. He’s played in only four full seasons, and he’s already one of just 48 players in major league history with at least three seasons of 40 or more homers. The 6-foot-3, 245-pound Polar Bear is also proficient at crushing Derby dingers. He won back-to-back titles in 2019 and 2021 and has participated in every subsequent Derby. A third victory would tie Ken Griffey Jr. for the record, though he’ll need to appear in three more after this one if he wants to tie Junior’s record of eight appearances. Alonso has asked former Mets bench coach Dave Jauss, who pitched to him in 2021 and 2022, to come back and pitch again after last year’s first-round exit.

This season, Alonso’s average exit velocity has fallen all the way down to the 35th percentile, but he can still bash the ball when he gets hold of it. His maximum exit velocity has never dropped below the 97th percentile, and his 75.1-mph bat speed is second only to Henderson among Derby participants. Crucially, Alonso doesn’t need to lift the ball to hit it out. This season, 9.4% of his line drives have left the ballpark. That ranks second among all players who have hit at least 25 line drives, and it’s more than twice the rate of six of his seven Derby competitors. Alonso also boasts the hardest-hit home run of all eight participants, a 115.3-mph blast on May 16.

Adolis García

García is one of the most exciting players in baseball, but he’s currently sitting on -0.1 WAR for the season. But even in a replacement-level year, his power numbers are still formidable. His hard-hit rate, barrel rate, average exit velocity, and 90th-percentile exit velocity, while down from last year, still rank in the 83th percentile or higher. Moreover, García clearly still has top-level power, as he hit the hardest ball of his entire career, a scorching 116.1-mph line drive double, back in May.

For a few reasons, García has to be a favorite. First, he’s got Derby experience. Although he crashed out of last year’s first round with 17 homers, the second-lowest total of all eight participants, he was pacing for a great round until he fell into a funk and he hit just two home runs over the final minute. The next factor can’t be overstated: García excels under the bright lights. He launched 39 home runs last season, and then added eight more in the playoffs, including a five-game homer streak that stretched from the ALCS to the World Series. In front of a home crowd that is certain to be going crazy for him, García will be giving it his all, and his all is a whole lot. If you watched the Fall Classic, you know that when García wants to hit one out of the ballpark, he’s got just about the fiercest home run hack in the game. No matter how he fares, García is sure to put on a show.

Bobby Witt Jr.

This may be Bobby Witt Jr.’s first MLB Home Run Derby, but it’s not exactly his first rodeo. In 2018, Witt won the High School Home Run Derby at Nationals Park, out-dueling Rece Hinds – yes, the same Rece Hinds who has done nothing but crush monster home runs during his first week as a big leaguer – in the final round. In a competition like the Derby, it makes sense to look at how players do when they’re served up pitches right down the middle, and both Witt’s 71.7% hard-hit rate and 99.6-mph exit velocity on those meatballs lead the eight participants by far.

Witt’s Statcast sliders are red enough to make a vampire salivate, and he tops all participants in barrels and 90th-percentile exit velocity. This season, his average home run has traveled 418 feet. No one else in the Derby has an average above 410. Witt is also the only participant to hit a homer more than 450 feet this season, and he did it twice. In short, there’s no one in the Derby who can hit the ball harder than Witt.

Don’t let Witt’s placement this far down on the list fool you. Although his 16 homers are the second-lowest total among participants, Statcast credits him with 21.2 expected homers, fourth most. That gap of 5.2 homers is the largest in baseball. Not only is Witt the kind of all-around athlete you shouldn’t bet against in any kind of skills competition, he’s also coming into the Derby with a full head of steam. Over the past two weeks, he’s batting .409 with four homers and a 215 wRC+.

Alec Bohm

Bohm is the obvious underdog. With a 130 wRC+, the 27-year-old is having a breakout season. But even as he’s added a tick of exit velocity and nearly four percentage points to his hard-hit rate, he’s hardly a home run hitter. His 11 long balls put him in a 16-way tie for the 89th-highest total in baseball, and he’s the only Derby participant who is not on pace to reach the 20-homer threshold. Bohm has hit just one ball long enough to earn a bonus this season, a 427-foot shot on June 30. However, before you conclude that Bohm doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Arlington to win this thing, keep in mind that none of the last three Derby winners was seeded better than fourth.

Also, Bohm has won a derby before. In 2016, he won the derby of the Coastal Plain League, a wood-bat collegiate summer league. Scott Wingo, who coached Bohm’s Wilmington Sharks and pitched to him in that derby, will pitch to him again tonight. It’s also possible that Bohm could benefit from the new rules. In a Derby where taking a pitch comes with a higher penalty, the ability to drive anything you see could matter more. Consistency has always been an underrated part of success in the Derby, and no participant comes close to squaring up the ball as often as does Bohm. On a per-swing basis, he ranks seventh among all qualified players in hard-hit rate, ninth in squared-up rate, and 11th in blast rate. If he can get in a groove, he could have a chance.

Who’s Going to Win

If you’ve read Jay Jaffe’s previews in previous years, you know that Jay closes with a prediction. Even more annoyingly for me, he’s quite often right. Jay predicted Bryce Harper’s 2018 win, Alonso’s in 2019, and Vladito’s just last year. I can’t promise Jay’s level of accuracy, and I genuinely believe that the field is wide open, but my gut tells me to go with Bobby Witt Jr. I say that not just because he’s capable of putting on a show when he’s locked in, but because he’s such a physical marvel that even when he’s not locked in, he’s got enough power to push him through. I now look forward to watching Witt flame out in the first round.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ryan McMahon’s first stolen base of the season. McMahon, whose sprint speed was recently downgraded from the 19th percentile to the 18th, managed that first bag by way of a delayed steal. By completely dismissing McMahon as a threat, the Pirates presented him with a perfect storm of opportunity. He took an enormous lead off third base because no one bothered to hold him on, and he waited until catcher Yasmani Grandal unleashed a lollipop back to the pitcher, then waltzed home.

Where did McMahon, who had been caught stealing four times to that point in the season, get the idea for such a brazen daylight robbery? Probably from Garrett Stubbs, who had executed the same move just a few weeks prior, stealing third base right from under McMahon’s nose. Stubbs didn’t get the same gargantuan lead that McMahon did, nor did he get to take advantage of a catcher’s big, slow rainbow tosses back to the pitcher. He simply went because he saw that catcher Jacob Stallings was paying him no attention whatsoever.

On Monday, the Rockies were involved in yet another delayed steal. After walking in the bottom of the second inning, major league stolen base leader Elly De La Cruz somehow waited two whole pitches before taking off for second as Elias Díaz tossed the ball back to Ryan Feltner.

This latest delayed steal was very different from the first two. McMahon is extremely slow — and Stubbs, while not slow, is a catcher — but everyone in the ballpark was aware that De La Cruz would likely try to take second. Both broadcast crews were talking about the threat of a steal and both feeds made sure to cut to shots of De La Cruz’s lead. While Díaz has one of the quicker arms in the league, Feltner is extremely slow to the plate. He has allowed 20 stolen bases this season, second only to Corbin Burnes with 24. Díaz stared De La Cruz down before returning the ball to Feltner after the first pitch, and Feltner attempted a pickoff before delivering the second pitch. None of that mattered against a threat like De La Cruz, but I still found it surprising that he opted for a delayed steal considering that with a pitcher like Feltner on the mound, a conventional stolen base attempt was more or less a sure thing.

De La Cruz, being De La Cruz, stole third base four pitches later; then one pitch after that, he was caught stealing home on a first-and-third steal attempt because Díaz (legally) blocked home plate. Sam Miller wrote about the rise of first-and-third steals back in February and then again this weekend. “As long as I’ve been baseballing,” he wrote, “the first-and-third situation has been what separated the pros from the amateurs.” That’s no longer the case. Sam calculated that in May and June, the runner on first took off roughly 14% of the time, compared to 10.1% in 2023 and 6.6% in the 2010s. After watching all of those plays, he concluded that defenses still aren’t really sure how to handle that situation.

Much like first-and-third steals, delayed stealing has historically been reserved for amateur ball. Because it’s a difficult thing to search for, I’m not sure whether they’ve been happening more often too or whether I just happen to have noticed a cluster. Either way, this cluster made me wonder whether baserunners should be pulling this move more often. After all, the three that we’ve seen could not have been any easier. Only one of them even drew a throw, and that was a play when everyone knew a stolen base attempt was likely. It’s true that McMahon’s steal of home came when nobody was paying him the slightest attention and the catcher returned the ball to the pitcher like a grandfather pitching horseshoes, but Stubbs isn’t exactly a burner either, and his came on a normal throw from the catcher, following a pitch where both the pitcher and the shortstop were making a real effort to keep him from getting too big a lead. Maybe this is easier than we realize.

In order to get a sense of how often these opportunities are presenting themselves, I went through footage of every game from Monday night, gauging how attentive the catchers were when they returned the ball to the pitcher. Where possible, I chose situations where the baserunner possessed enough speed to be of concern.

The primary method for a catcher to ensure the runner doesn’t attempt a delayed steal is to simply glance their way immediately after receiving the pitch. Most of the time, this move is perfunctory, and it consists of nothing more than a slight glance. From the looks of it, the motion is so automated that I doubt the catcher would register that anything was wrong even if the runner were testing the limits of their secondary lead and edging toward the next bag.

However, a few catchers really did take the time to make their point. It’s just an extra quarter of a second or so, but I suspect that makes a world of difference. Nothing makes you feel quite so guilty as the sensation of being X-rayed by a pair of particularly suspicious eyes. Ryan Jeffers, Joey Bart, and Bo Naylor all took that extra beat just to make sure that the base-stealing threats on first felt the fear of God. Most impressively, Detroit’s Jake Rogers not only stared down the runner but fired a fastball back to the pitcher. The runner he was so worried about? Naylor, whose 35th percentile sprint speed makes him faster than McMahon in the same way that a turtle is faster than a rock that looks like a turtle.

That left a few catchers who really didn’t look over at the runner at all. Logan O’Hoppe, Keibert Ruiz, and Willson Contreras never so much as glanced at the runner, and Martín Maldonado combined that indifference with a rainbow toss that took 1.3 seconds to go from his hand to Chris Flexen’s glove. Even a rock that looks like a turtle could have swiped the next bag in that situation.

This was a small sample and an extremely unscientific study, but it does seem like the catchers were split into three roughly even-sized groups: Those who really did pay attention to the runner, those whose attention seemed largely performative, and those who paid no attention to the runner at all. As Stubbs showed us, it’s possible to run on the throw when the catcher falls into either the second group or the third, and it doesn’t take top-end speed. If swiping bases this way were to become more common, just like the first-and-third steal play, then catchers would surely grow more vigilant, but that clearly hasn’t happened yet.

The obvious risk here is that the catcher will recognize what you’re trying to do, and your goose will be cooked. Not only will you be out by a mile, you’ll be embarrassed, and that can be a powerful deterrent. However, there are a few real benefits to stealing this way. First, you’re not distracting the batter during the pitch. Second, catching the runner requires a relay. The pitcher and infielder need to recognize what’s happening, then the pitcher needs to turn and fire a strike to the infielder, who needs to get there in time to place a tag. Third is the element of surprise. The pitcher needs to get over their shock, and pitchers are notoriously sketchy when it comes to throwing to a base to catch a runner rather than executing a pitch.

More importantly, you can pick your spots based on what the catcher is doing. De La Cruz can run pretty much whenever he wants, but McMahon and Stubbs were taking advantage of patterns that they’d recognized several pitches earlier, situations that sure seem to happen pretty frequently. The wildest part about McMahon’s steal of home had nothing to do with him; it was the fact that even after the play, Grandal continued lobbing the ball back to the pitcher with runners on base. These opportunities will continue to present themselves, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see runners take advantage of them more often.

This is a bounce-back season for Yandy Díaz, and not in a good way. After two straight seasons with a wRC+ above 145, the Rays first baseman is at 106 so far in 2024. When Jay Jaffe checked in on him on June 13, Díaz had just climbed out of a hole. Through May 10, Díaz was running a wRC+ of just 77 with a 90.9 mph average exit velocity. Since that date, he’s been at 128, and his exit velocity has jumped all the way to 93.7 mph. Even more important, he was running a 60.3% groundball rate on May 10, but has run a 53.3% groundball rate after that point. For the season, that still leaves him at 56.4%, highest among all qualified players, but for Díaz, that handful of percentage points has always been the difference between being a good hitter and being one of the best in baseball. When his groundball rate is up, his wRC+ is down, and vice versa. The relationship is plain to see:

MLB’s new bat tracking data put the issue in stark relief. Blasts are a combination of two metrics: fast swings and squared up swings. The official definitions are here, but if you swing hard and you barrel the ball up, you’ll end up with a blast. That’s a good thing, because so far this season, blasts have a wOBA of .731, and a barrel rate of 27.7%. For Díaz, however, those numbers are .423 and 16.0%. He’s tied with Gunnar Henderson for fourth in baseball with 100 blasts, but just five of those blasts have turned into home runs. Of the 260 players who have hit at least 25 blasts this season, that 5.0% home run rate puts him in 248th place. Why? You know why. He has a launch angle of 1 on his blasts, tied for 259th out of 260. On the left, with the infield dirt almost completely obscured by dots, is Díaz’s spray chart on blasts. On the right, with home runs sprinkled liberally on top, is Henderson’s. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re going to start with a little quiz. Here’s how it works. I’ll show you a short video clip. There’s something weird about the clip. Don’t make it full screen, at least on your first viewing. I just want you to see whether you can spot what exactly that weird thing is. Maybe you’ll catch it the first time you watch. Maybe it’ll take a few more views. Don’t scroll down too far or you’ll see the answer in the paragraph after the video, and that would defeat the point of our little exercise.

Ready? Here we go.

Did you see it? Did you not see it? Am I just vamping for two more paragraphs in order to give you a better chance of watching the video without spoiling the surprise?

Maaaaaybeeeee.

OK, here’s the answer: There’s no baseball in that clip. You can pause it at any point to check. I removed the ball, frame by frame. I took it out of Charlie Morton’s hand during his windup, I erased it from the air on its way to the plate, and I plucked it from the sky as it descended into Yankee Stadium’s right field bleachers. I didn’t manipulate this video because I was planning on writing about it. I was just fooling around in Photoshop. I thought it would be funny. But then I showed the clip to someone, and they didn’t notice anything remarkable about it. So I sent it to another person, then a third, and then a fourth. I edited another clip and sent it along too. This one wasn’t a home run, but a double play.

Only one of those four people, Daniel R. Epstein of Baseball Prospectus, noticed that the ball was missing, and even he wasn’t positive of what he’d seen. “This is going to sound weird,” he texted back as I kept pressing him to watch again and look for the anomaly, “but I can’t see the ball during the pitch.” When I told him that was the answer, he wrote back, “Wait seriously??”

To be certain, video quality played a role here. I was mostly texting the videos to people at 540p, and they were mostly watching on their phones. I’m sure this would’ve been much easier to spot at full resolution on a bigger screen. And later on, a few people did catch the manipulation on the first or second viewing. Still, the result of this impromptu experiment left me staggered. You can watch baseball without the baseball and not only is it possible that you won’t mind, it’s possible that you might not even notice the difference. What are we looking at when we watch baseball, and what are we looking for?

Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. Eyes are slow, and humans are hard-wired to hunt for patterns and rely on shortcuts to fill in the gaps. It’s an evolutionary trait that helped our ancestors survive in the wild for millennia. These days it helps us enjoy cinematic masterpieces like Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, and I imagine that in a decade or two it will help us avoid marauding bands of water thieves as we scavenge our way across the barren wasteland that once was America. But there’s more to this than a simple optical illusion.

When I was growing up, my family had an enormous, extremely 1980s, wood-paneled console television. It wasn’t a big screen TV or anything; it was just an old, almost cubic behemoth that dominated the family room. At some point, the screen acquired a small black spot that couldn’t be cleaned off. It was located about an inch to the right of the center. It wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it didn’t affect your viewing experience at all — unless you tried to watch hockey. If you tried to watch hockey, you’d inevitably find yourself staring at the spot rather than the puck, and the game would no longer make any sense. All of a sudden, the action would be revolving around an axis that meant nothing to you. This would happen over and over again until you got frustrated and turned off the game.

I remember trying to explain this to my hockey-crazy cousins from Buffalo, who were aghast that I didn’t share their love for the sport. My excuse didn’t wash with them. They said I didn’t need to see the puck in order to watch the game; the players would tell me what was going on and where to look. Maybe if I already knew the game that would have worked for me, but I was a child and there was no way I could learn from watching it on that television. I still have trouble watching hockey, but decades later, I see (and don’t see) what they meant.

Even if you remove the ball from the frame, the architecture of the game remains in place. You can still tell the shape and location of the pitch from the way the catcher sets and adjusts his target. Daniel Epstein didn’t need to see the pitch Aaron Judge hit out to know that it was a four-seamer. You can tell how well the ball was hit by the swing and the reaction of the batter (as well as the reactions of the pitcher, the catcher, umpire, and the fans behind home plate).

Besides, sometimes the ball can lie to you. How many times have you seen a ball leave Bryce Harper’s bat and travel straight upward, looking for all the world like a harmless popup, only to somehow land in the 20th row of the bleachers? Carlos Correa hit this ball last August. It looked for all the world like it was going to be a popup, and not just to the television audience. Second baseman Nick Maton was fooled enough to point up to the sky. But if you ignore the path of the ball and focus on Correa, the way he finishes his backswing, the way follows the ball with his eyes, holds onto the bat, and eases into an ever-so-subtle strut, you’ll see that he thinks it has a chance to get out.

Once the ball is in play, it exercises a gravitational pull on everything around it. In the same way that astronomers don’t need to be able to see a black hole to know where it is, it’s easy to see the influence that the ball has on the fielders, the baserunners, and even the umpires. On a bouncer up the middle with runners on first and second, the catcher ventures a small, triumphant fist pump, the runner on second takes off for third, the pitcher leaps to make a play but then realizes it’s wiser to let the ball through to the second baseman, and the batter busts it out of the box in a futile effort to avoid the double play. The second base umpire scoots into position in front of the base, the second baseman hangs back for a juicy hop, the shortstop jogs toward the bag in order to receive the feed and throw to first in rhythm, and the runner on first sprints for second but has to slide early in order to avoid the throw.

Bob Carpenter is in his 41st year calling major league games and his 19th year with the Nationals. He told me about a game when he was forced to rely on the movements of the fielders to intuit the location of the ball. It was getaway day in Atlanta on September 21, 2022. The combination of a 12:20 p.m. start, an extremely bright day, and the fact that the right field line in Truist Park points nearly due South meant that the sun was shining directly into the eyes of everyone in the press box. “It was extremely hard to see the ball,” said Carpenter. “And I couldn’t rely on my monitor a lot either because it was so bright in the booth that we were putting cardboard shades over the monitor and going MacGyver on the thing with duct tape and all that, trying to shade the monitors so we could watch them. And that was nearly impossible. Probably for the first two or three innings of the game, if there was a ball that was swung on, I was watching the fielders to figure out where the heck the ball was. It was impossible… [Color commentator Kevin Frandsen] was having the same problem, and later we laughed about it, but it wasn’t a whole lot of fun while we were trying to do it. That day, my mind’s eye really had to picture where the ball was going.”

If you think about it, you might be surprised by how little we actually see the ball anyway. In every play, the ball starts in the pitcher’s glove and ends either in another glove or in the stands. When it’s in a glove or a hand, it’s usually not visible at all. Often, the ball moves too fast for either the eye or the camera to keep up with it. When it’s hit high in the air, it can be hard to see at all. When it’s hit or thrown hard, it’s a blur. As in the clip of the double play above, when the ball is hit hard at an infielder, he often secures it in his glove before the broadcast has time to cut to a shot of him. If you’re in the nosebleed sections or you’re watching on your phone, you really might not miss the ball much.

I asked Carpenter whether he thinks about the difference between what he can see up in the press box and what actually gets broadcast. “All the time,” he replied. “I’ll look at the monitor because I want to see what the fans at home are seeing.”

Carpenter also noted that the people bringing you the action might not always have the best view. “Sometimes our monitors in the booth are a lot smaller than the ones people have at home. And we were hearing from people on Twitter asking why didn’t we see this because they saw it… So they got us bigger monitors and to this day we have probably 40- to 48-inch monitors in the booth. But when we go on the road, we might get a monitor that’s like 12 inches diagonal. They’re tiny. And in that case, it’s hard for me to use that, being as lame as it is, to try to experience what the viewer is seeing at home.”

I sent the video of Judge to John DeMarsico, the director of SNY’s Mets broadcasts, who instantly clocked the missing ball. As it turns out, he was uniquely prepared to spot it. DeMarsico explained that the feed for the center field camera is actually routed to Major League Baseball, which superimposes the PitchCast strike zone on it, then routes that augmented feed back to the network (causing a delay that leaves it roughly eight frames behind all the other cameras). Because the system has occasional hiccups, he’s always on the lookout for problems with the center field camera. “So when I first saw it,” he said, “my initial reaction was, ‘Oh, it must be a PitchCast issue, that the ball got lost in some sort of glitch.’”

Once I explained what I’d done, DeMarsico had his own interpretation of why nobody missed the ball on its way to the plate: The PitchCast strike zone relieves us of the burden of paying attention to the flight of the ball. “You’re blocking the view of the flight path by putting a circle up across the screen. And honestly, on balls in play, it even happens to me. I lose the point of contact… It’s the most important thing in the game, and we’re putting a graphic over it. I think it’s become important for people to see the result of the pitch rather than engaging with the pitch, engaging with the game.” Where I saw the fact that people didn’t miss the ball as evidence that we’re using our imagination to fill in the gap, DeMarsico saw it as evidence that we’ve been trained to turn our imagination off entirely and just wait for a little graphic to tell us what happened.

As the foremost advocate of the idea that baseball is and should be cinema, DeMarsico worries about how this emphasis on the results rather than the journey — the proliferation of gambling, homogenization due to advanced analytics, the expanded postseason, PitchCast, and the impending ABS system — affects our ability to appreciate the narrative of the game. He described the three things that used to happen when the batter took a pitch: The catcher would flash signs to the pitcher, the pitcher would throw the pitch to the catcher who’d receive it, and the umpire would make a call. “So you have these three small little dramas that happen every single pitch. And over the course of a three-hour game, those little dramas add up to something. They force the viewers at home not to be told whether it’s a ball or a strike. You have to engage with the game and judge for yourself: Was that a ball? Was that a strike? The umpire said it was a strike. I thought it may have been a ball. Now, we’re being told: No, that was a ball. No, that was a strike, and now the umpire is wrong. And so now we have no engagement with the actual pitch; we’re being told whether it’s a ball or a strike, and over the course of a game, we detach a little bit.”

Once the ball is in play, DeMarsico agrees that seeing the ball does not necessarily equate to understanding what’s actually going on during the play. “We’re all there for the game. And you’re obviously trying to document the game. You don’t want to lose the ball; you want to keep the action in frame. But what really tells the story of the game is not the ball. It’s the human beings playing the game, the fans in the ballpark, all the things surrounding the event.” He told me that he enjoys cutting away from foul balls much later than other directors. He likes to see the person who ends up with the ball because it means so much to them. “My dad caught a foul ball, a Todd Zeile foul ball, in the late ’90s, early 2000s. And you would think that it was the Bill Buckner Game 6 ball. It’s so interesting, such a small moment as a foul ball can become such an important story within the grand scheme of the game. I really try to approach the job that way. That it is about the humans playing the game, less so than the mechanics of the game itself sometimes.”

Thomas Zinzarella, who calls games for the Single-A Bradenton Marauders, a Pirates affiliate, watched the video while he was on the phone with me. He caught onto the missing ball on his second time watching the video. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked him whether he gave much thought to exactly what he looks for when he watches a game, and how that might be different from what an average fan looks for. “That’s definitely something I’ll think about now for sure,” he said.

As he was describing what he looks for when he calls a game, Zinzarella picked out one play in particular. It was a ball that outfielder Shalin Polanco hit just a couple weeks ago. He knew Polanco had gotten hold of it, but he wasn’t sure whether it had enough juice to leave the ballpark. The Marauders were down, 5-2, with one out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th inning. “The wind was blowing in from right field at like 25 mph, but he hit a line drive, and it’s like, ‘Alright, we’re down three runs. Is this one going to get out?’” From the press box, he had a perfect view of both the ball and the right fielder who was tracking it. But sometimes you just have to wait and see what happens.

Baseball is truly a game of goops and gunks. Clubbies prepare pearls with Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud. Position players paste their bats with pine tar and pamper their gloves with leather conditioner. Trainers soothe sore muscles with Icy Hot or Tiger Balm, and coaches spray the field with foul streaks of tobacco juice. Between innings, players wolf down caramel-filled stroopwafels specially designed to replenish high-performance athletes while fans slather hot dogs with mustard, ketchup, relish, chili, and blindingly yellow nacho cheese sauce that is, in fact, none of those three things. And of course, pitchers have been known to secret everything from sunscreen to petroleum jelly to Spider Tack on their person. If it defies easy categorization as a solid or a liquid, there’s a place for it at the ballpark.

Rosin sits somewhere in the middle. It’s powdered plant resin that sits on the mound inside not one but two cloth bags, but it doesn’t work its magic in that form. It requires a liquid to coax out its adhesive properties. The only approved liquid is sweat, for which a player might go to their hair or their forearm, but even then, there are limits. David Cone demonstrated the power of rosin after Max Scherzer’s ejection last April. With just a small amount of water and rosin, enough to create only the slightest discoloration on his fingers, Cone could create enough tack to make the baseball defy gravity. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn on September 24, 1957. They won 2-0 behind rookie Danny McDevitt, who scattered five singles and never let the Pirates get a runner past second base. They’d finish the season on the road, never to return. Five days after their season ended, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in human history. With the Braves and Yankees in the midst of a seven-game thriller of a World Series, the 23-inch sphere transmitted adorable beeps down to earth until its batteries died three weeks later, so frightening the public in this country that the government established NASA and embarked on a 12-year sprint to put American boots on the moon. Among other things, the Apollo astronauts studied to become geologists so that they could recognize and bring home samples that would teach us more about the history and composition of both the moon and the earth. They also installed reflective panels for a laser ranging experiment that revealed the moon is moving away from the earth at the rate of 3.8 centimeters per year.

In 1918, before they were in Los Angeles or even officially called the Dodgers, the Brooklyn Robins earned just 212 walks in 126 games for a walk rate of 4.6%. Shortstop Ollie O’Mara managed just seven walks in 450 plate appearances. Since the beginning of the modern era in 1903, that team’s 67 BB%+ is the lowest in AL/NL history. Only one other team, the 1957 Kansas City Athletics, has finished a season below 70. Like the Dodgers, the Athletics would drift away from Kansas City. Like the moon, they would keep on drifting.

The Marlins are running a 5.7% walk rate, worst in baseball this year. Their 67 BB%+ also puts them second from the bottom since 1903, snugly between those Dodgers and Athletics teams. When I started writing this article, they were at the very bottom, but in an uncharacteristic fit of ecstatic restraint, they picked up three whole walks on Monday. It was their 27th game this season with at least three walks. Every other team in baseball has had at least 40 such games. The Marlins have gone without a walk 18 different times. That’s twice as many zero-walk games as 28 of the other 29 teams. In all, the Marlins have walked 164 times in 79 games. Since 1901, only 22 teams have walked less over their first 79 games. Every single one of those teams played more than 100 years ago.

The reason for Miami’s inability to ambulate, at least in a baseball sense, is very simple. Since Sports Info Solutions started tracking these things in 2002, the 2024 Marlins trail only the 2019 Tigers as the most chase-happy team ever recorded. (Once again, they were in first when I pitched this article, and I am taking their ever-so-slightly improved patience very personally.) SIS has those Tigers at 34.3% and this year’s Marlins at 34.0%, while Statcast has the two at 35% and 34.4%, respectively. In all likelihood, the Marlins will spend the rest of the season locked in a very breezy bullfight with that 2019 Detroit team. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been five weeks since Major League Baseball unveiled its first trove of bat tracking data. In that time, we’ve learned that Giancarlo Stanton swings hard, Luis Arraez swings quickly, and Juan Soto is a god who walks among us unbound by the irksome laws of physics and physiology. We’ve learned that Jose Altuve really does have the swing of a man twice his size, and that Oneil Cruz has the swing of a slightly less enormous man. Mostly, though, we’ve learned when and where batters swing their hardest. This is my fourth article about bat tracking data, and in gathering data for the previous three, I constantly found myself stuck in one particular part of the process: controlling for variables.

As baseball knowledge has advanced from the time of Henry Chadwick to the time of Tom Tango, we first found better, more descriptive ways to measure results. We went from caring about batting average to caring about OPS. We found better ways to weight the smaller results that add up to big ones, going from ERA to FIP and from OPS to wRC+. Then we got into the process behind those results. We moved to chase rates and whiff rates, and the ratio of fly balls to groundballs. With the advent of Statcast, we’ve been able to get deeper than ever into process. We can look at the physical characteristics of a pitch, just a single pitch, and model how well it will perform. Within a certain sample size, we can look at a rookie’s hardest-hit ball, just that one ball, and predict his future wRC+ more accurately than if we looked at the wRC+ from his entire rookie season.

Similarly, when I looked at average swing speed and exit velocity from the first week of bat tracking, I found that swing speed was more predictive of future exit velocity. Exit velocity is the result of several processes: You can’t hit the ball hard unless you swing hard and square the ball up, and you can’t square the ball up if you pick terrible pitches to hit. Between 2015 and 2023, our database lists 511 qualified batters. I measured the correlation between their average exit velocity and their wRC+ over that period. R = .63 and R-squared = .40. But because bat tracking takes us one more step away from results and toward process, it’s further divorced from overall success at the plate. The day after bat speed data was first released, Ben Clemens ran some correlation coefficients between some overall metrics of success. He found a correlation of .11 between average swing speed and wRC+. Now that we have more data, I re-ran the numbers and found that correlation has increased to .25. That’s a big difference, but over the same period, the correlation between wRC+ and average exit velocity is .47.

If you want to know how hard a batter is swinging, you’ll find that it’s dependent on the count, the type of pitch, the velocity of the pitch, the location of the pitch, the depth of contact, and whether contact takes place at all. As a result, if you want to measure any one factor’s effect on swing speed, you need to control for so, so many others. The more I’ve sorted through the data, the more I’ve come to appreciate the old adage that pitchers control the action. Bat tracking shows us just how right people are when they say that hitting is reactive. It shows us that different pitches essentially require different swings.

When Tess Taruskin started putting together her Visual Scouting Primer series, she asked around for scouting terms and concepts that people had a hard time picturing. Barrel variability was at the top of my list. I know that Eric Longenhagen is giving a glowing compliment when he says that a player can move his barrel all around the zone, but I’ve always had trouble picturing that. Maybe it’s because of the way I played the game when I was younger, but I’ve never really understood the concept of a grooved swing. When I was digging through the bat tracking data, seeing the effect of the pitch type, the location, and where in space the batter has to get the barrel in order to make solid contact, it finally clicked.

There’s obviously a reason that every hitter has a book, a certain way that pitchers try to get them out. I’m just not sure I ever connected it quite so clearly to the physical act of swinging, the flexibility, quickness, strength, and overall athleticism required to execute a competitive swing on different kinds of pitches in different locations. And that’s before we even get to the processing speed, judgment, and reaction time that comes with recognizing the pitch and deciding not just whether to swing, but how to attack the ball. Bat tracking highlights the how.

There are a million ways to succeed at the plate. Derek Jeter used an inside-out swing to send the ball the other way. Isaac Paredes uses an inside-even-further-inside swing, reaching out and hooking everything he can down the line. Chas McCormick and Austin Riley time their swings in order to drive a fastball to the right field gap and pull anything slower toward left. Arraez, like Tony Gwynn before him, stays back and places the ball in the exact spot that he feels like placing it. Ted Williams preached a slightly elevated swing, making him the progenitor of today’s Doug Latta disciples, who try to get on plane with the ball early and meet it out front, where their bat is on an upward trajectory. Some players talk about trying to hit the bottom of the ball in order to create backspin and carry. I could go on and on. But no matter what school of thought batters subscribe to, they’re not the ones who decide what kind of pitch is coming. Bat tracking data show us just how adaptable their swing has to be. Here’s a map of the 13 gameday zones, broken down by the average speed of competitive swings in each zone for right-handed batters.

The batter can bend at the waist and drop his bat head on a low pitch, especially inside. A high pitch requires a flatter swing, and it’s much more about pure rotational speed. An outside pitch requires hitting the ball deeper, where the bat might not have reached full speed yet, but it also allows the batter to get his arms extended. I just described three different skills, and there are plenty more that we could dive into. Because every batter is an individual, each will be better or worse at some of them than others.

At the moment when all this clicked, I thought of Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani hits plenty of balls that are very obviously gone from the second he makes contact. But he also hits some of the most awkward home runs imaginable, swings that end up with his body contorted in some weird way that makes it seem impossible that he managed to hit the ball hard. He looks like he’s stepping in the bucket and spinning off the ball, he looks like he’s simply throwing out his bat to foul off an outside pitch, or he looks like he’s just not swinging very hard, and yet the ball ends up over the fence. Somehow this ball left the bat at 106.4 mph and traveled 406 feet.

It might appear that this swing was all upper body. However, a swing is a little bit like cracking a whip, where you’re working from the bottom up to send all of the energy to the very end of the line. Some hitters are better than others at manipulating their bodies to time that energy transfer perfectly. Here’s another way of looking at this.

On the left are the 26 homers that Cody Bellinger hit in 2023. On the right are Ohtani’s 44 homers. I realize that because Ohtani hit 18 more, his chart looks more robust. But it’s not just about the number of dots. It’s about the spread. I’m not trying to pick on Bellinger. I used him in part because he had a great season. I found his pitch chart by searching for players with the highest percentage of home runs in the very middle of the strike zone. At 46%, Bellinger had the highest rate of anyone who hit 20 home runs. If you make a mistake in the middle of the zone, he’ll destroy it. On the other hand, Ohtani is capable of hitting the ball hard just about anywhere. It’s even clearer if you look at the two players’ heat maps on hard-hit balls from last season.

Bellinger has never been the same player since his 2019 MVP campaign, and it’s generally assumed that the significant injuries that followed affected his swing. He can still do major damage, but on a smaller subset of pitches. This is one of the reasons that scouts focus so much on flexibility and athleticism and take the time to describe the swings of prospects as grooved or adaptable, long or short, rotational or not, top-hand or bottom-hand dominant. These things may not matter much in batting practice, but if there’s any kind of pitch you can’t handle, the game will find it. The best hitters find a way to get off not just their A-swing, but a swing that can succeed against whatever pitch is heading toward them.

You’re surely familiar with the trope of aging sluggers who sell out for pull-side power because they can’t catch up to the fastball like they used to. They need to start gearing up to swing earlier, forcing them to guess what pitch is coming instead of reacting to what they see. They hope that extra homers will offset the extra whiffs that come when they get fooled by slower stuff. The interesting thing about this trope is that its strategy is very similar to the one that swept through the entire baseball world roughly 10 years ago. Justin Turner was a leading light of the launch angle revolution, the movement that emphasized getting on plane early, attacking the ball out front, and pulling it in the air. Essentially, that movement turned the last refuge of an aging slugger into the mainstream way of hitting. At 39, Turner is now an aging slugger himself, with a wRC+ that has fallen in each season since 2020. His swing is already optimized, and now that he’s largely relegated to designated hitter, his 106 wRC+ doesn’t quite cut it.

A cursory look at his stats might tell you that Turner’s been unlucky this season. After all, he’s running his highest xwOBA since 2021 and his highest walk rate since 2018. Meanwhile, his BABIP is the lowest it’s been since 2011, and his wOBA is nearly 30 points below his xwOBA. Unlucky, right? Here’s the problem: Turner’s 30.6% hard-hit rate and 87.1-mph average exit velocity are not just career lows, they’re miles beneath his career averages of 39.6% and 89.8 mph. Turner’s popup rate has also ticked up. If your quality of contact gets drastically worse, luck probably isn’t the thing that’s driving down your BABIP. But there’s still that pesky xwOBA to worry about. Why hasn’t it plummeted along with Turner’s barrel rate? Read the rest of this entry »