B (71:28)
I think so too. Yeah. Speaking of big ERA minus FIP gaps with the Mets at least he had a 2 run gap. So the ERA was 7.2. The FIP was a mere 5.19, which is not what the Orioles want his ERA to be either. But yeah, another guy who maybe underperformed the peripherals but yeah, the predictability, you know, I'm sort of a pitch tipping skeptic but I don't know that it's even required in his case because he was predictable whether or not he was actually telegraphing his pitches by setting up differently or something. He was telegraphing just by throwing his two pitches in predictable patterns. And you know, it's usually if you're a fastball slider guy, it's kind of like, like you get ahead in the count and you're trying to finish someone off, you throw more sliders, you're behind in the count, you're trying to Throw strikes, you throw fastballs. And he did that. But he did it kind of in an extreme way and not even in the most extreme counts. And he just sort of fell into a rut. I don't know if that was the whole problem, but his stuff seemed to be mostly undiminished. Still strong at least. And Baseball Prospectus has these arsenal stats that are kind of interesting, and they have one that's, you know, they have like, stuff pro and pitch pro, the same sort of thing that you can find at fan graphs with pitching bot and stuff plus. But they have these arsenal metrics that are about your predictability. Essentially they have pitch type probability and surprise factor. And that's just kind of about how easy to anticipate what you're throwing is for a pitcher. So pitch type probability, the little tool tip that pops up. It says the likely likelihood a batter would identify the pitch type from release to decision point. Surprise factor is how unexpected a pitch's movement is given which pitches it most appears like and their movements. And so the whole arsenal is a factor here. And if you have two pitches, essentially as he does that, you're throwing kind of 50, 50, then you're behind the eight ball already, just because, you know, like Sandy Alcantara, who's coming off not a great year either. But something I wrote about during his Cy Young season was that he had all these pitch types and they were just evenly balanced, like he would throw five pitches 20% of the time a piece or something, and it was just hard to know what was coming. And he still sort of does that. And so I think he had the lowest pitch type probability, which is just kind of like predictability, basically this past season too. And Helsley was. Was not good. The average pitch type probability, depending on where you set the minimums, about 67%. And he was at like 76%. He was like 26th percentile or so in that. And he was also below average in surprise factor, which is kind of like if you throw a pitch not that often, when you do, it takes the batter by surprise. Ooh, surprise. I wasn't expecting that. And he doesn't get much element of surprise because he basically just throws those two pitches and in pretty predictable patterns. So that's always interesting to peruse. I don't think that really explains his drop off last year because his metrics there weren't so hot before that, even when he was very effective, because again, with the two pitches and everything. But they did get worse last year and. Or this year. I can't say last year yet. It is still 2025. But last season, this past season, we're getting there less than a month than we'll be able to save last year and have it be true. Speaking of pedantic things that don't bother anyone else but us. But yeah, he's kind of at a disadvantage when it comes to confusing hitters just because he he only has so many different weapons to show them. But and you know, you don't want them to be interchangeable if you're throwing a fastball and slider. You kind of want them to be differentiated because you wouldn't want them to look exactly the same. That probably meant they didn't have good movement or they just didn't have good pitch characteristics. And you know, maybe that was a bit more of a problem for him this past year. Regardless, I believe that he could probably vary up the patterns a bit and have more things go his way and get good advice and bounce back. If not to peak Helsley, then certainly good enough to justify this investment. So we'll see what else the Orioles do. But it's a start at shoring up that bullpen. And the last thing that I have for you here, because this is getting less timely by the day here, I missed this last week and, and I guess even if I hadn't missed it, we wouldn't have talked about it because it was published the day before Thanksgiving and just before the cease signing, I think. But the annual executive survey of baseball types done at ESPN by Jesse Rogers, this was originated by Jerry Krasnick. We used to call it the Krasnicks and we used to talk about it and Sam would write about it and analyze it and discover that baseball executives who in theory should know a lot of things aren't really any better than a coin flip when it comes to predicting what will happen over an off season. But Jesse Rogers has continued this tradition since Krasnick left to work for the Players association and surveys front office types and MLB executives, I think is how he described them this year and I think spoke to 16 of them and put some pressing offseason questions to them. And so what we do here is I ask you to say what you think they said essentially not necessarily what you think or what will actually happen, but what you think the common responses were. Okay, so I'll just run through these. So one question.
