A (9:42)
If you can cast your mind back to the last time this happens. Yeah, that's a tactful time to bring it up. Yes. I'm sure it doesn't feel great, but I have at times at least heard a pitcher express appreciation for a true bomb hit against them, where they're just like, yeah, he got me. Like, I had to turn around and stare at that thing to see how far it went. Which I always appreciate that there's almost. There's almost a pride. It seems like at times when the pitcher contributes to a ball that's hit that far because they do make some contribution, the pitch's speed does make a minor contribution to the ball's exit speed, and so you can feel like you had something to do with that too, even if it kind of went against you. So yes, I will add this to my list of questions for Aaron Judge, and I'll ask him if he calls people brother, which actually reminds me of Hulk Hogan more than anything, which is not the most positive association, but I see why your sentiment does suggest some tenderness. Here's another story that suggests some tenderness, although in this case in the form of a quadriceps strain. Oh, you know that I'm kind of fascinated by hidden injuries that we find out about after the fact, or perhaps never find out about. And we got some insight into one just this past week, courtesy of Cincinnati Reds popo Nick Krall, who made a disclosure of sorts about Ellie De La Cruz and what he was dealing with late in the season. And if you will recall, we talked about this and I think maybe even speculated about this in mid September episode 2373 we talked about how Ellie had been in an extended slump and how he just hadn't been playing like himself. And I didn't go back and listen, but I think we may have at least raised the possibility that perhaps he was not a hundred percent physically. That turns out to have been the case. So Crowell first described this injury as a partial tear of the quad on the Reds Hot Stove League radio program. And that kind of made the rounds because partial tear sounds scary. And then the day after he clarified kind of that it was a quad strain, which is the same. That's what a a partial tear is. It's a strain, it's a tear. It's sort of the same thing, but strain doesn't sound quite as serious. So. But this is something he was dealing with on the radio on Wednesday. He said if you look at his year last year, and I think a lot of people don't know this, at the end of the year, like toward the end of July, he was dealing with a partial torn quad and he has been rehabbing. He was at the ballpark today. He's been rehabbing this whole off season. To his credit, he played every day. He tried to grind through it. He tried to play through it. If you look at his defensive numbers, he made 12 errors through roughly toward the end of July when he got hurt, and then he made 14. From the end of July on, he was trying to play through it, but he wasn't able to do it as successfully as possible. And that shows up certainly in the defensive stats and also in his offensive stats too. And Carl said, I do think that you look at where he was up until that point where he got hurt and he was definitely better defensively. He just didn't finish the way he started. Cause there was even some talk of will he still be a shortstop. And the Reds are trying to quiet that down by saying that he was not his healthy self late in the year. So don't judge him by that stretch of performance. And offensively too. I don't know exactly where to draw the line. I don't know if there was a particular day that we can identify when this happened. But if we just look through the end of July, he had a 129 WRC plus and 29 steals and 4.2 WAR. And thereafter over the last two months of the regular season, 66 WRC plus, 8 steals, 0.2 WAR. So he was essentially a replacement level player while he was dealing with this quad straight. Evidently. And I'm, I'm always fascinated by this because I continue to think that if we could perfectly account for the player's physical state at all times, and that could mean any number of things, that could be just how well rested you are and a serious injury or a nagging injury or even psychological stuff just dealing with off the field, if we could account for that, then a lot of what looks like inexplicable or random variation in player performance would turn out to be pretty explicable. We would just be able to say, oh yeah, he was dealing with this thing that made him x percent of what he usually is. And if we had that perfect information, I'm sure that we could really improve projection systems and we could really ramp up how well we think we understand baseball. But that knowledge is not public most of the time. And he didn't go on the il, right. So it's not as if someone looking in the future, it's not as if a projection system can really take this into account. Because if you're on the il, if you miss some time, then there's a way to incorporate that into data. That, that is data. You could factor that in. But if you're playing through it and you're playing every day the way that Ellie was, there's just, there's no way really to account for that. Clean. And it's something that could easily be forgotten if you just didn't see this quote or, you know, if we're talking decades ago or something and you're not doing the research, you're just looking at someone's stat line and you're not digging into what was said about them at the time, then you'll probably never come across this and you'll never know and you'll never be able to explain why that was. And we lose out on a lot of knowledge that way. And, and this is. I'm just talking about injuries that the team is aware of. Of course, there's the whole other genre of injuries and that the team doesn't even know about. We talked about the Sean Murphy of Atlanta injury that was unpleasant surprise for his team when he decided to come forward about that as well. So there's like two layers of secrecy. There's the layer where the team is aware and the trainers are helping the player manage it and everything, but it's just not public knowledge, at least not until after the fact. And then there's the, the double secret probation kind of knowledge where no one knows maybe ever. And the player just takes that to the grave, basically. So I just, I wish, you know, I don't want to be like, invasive of anyone's privacy here, but I wish that we had that information at times because I think it would really aid our understanding of player performance.
