UnCapped

from 72 HOURS Sept. 22, 2022

Family

Baseball and beer writer Eno Sarris

In this episode of the UnCapped podcast, host Chris Sands welcomes Eno Sarris back to the show, along with guest host Dan Baumiller from Full Tilt Brewing. Sarris writes about baseball for The Athletic, occasionally writes about craft beer, and posts photos of sandwiches on Instagram @enosarris. They talked about Stuff+ (the beer and the stat), baseball and craft beer in general. Here is an excerpt of their talk.

UnCapped: Eno Sarris — is it safe to say? — specializes in all things geeky when it comes to baseball?

Eno Sarris: I’m a big dork.

UnCapped: I mean, we could put it that way, too, if you want.

Sarris: There was once a player, Darwin Barney ... I said something to him, he walked away, and then from across the clubhouse, he yelled, “Nerd!” I tell myself it was affectionate.

UnCapped: That was definitely with love. Eno also loves craft beer. You used to write more about craft beer than you do now, right?

Sarris: I’m not that hardcore anymore. Once or twice a year, I write a piece for The Athletic. I’ve ranked all the ballparks by their beer offerings, I’ve gone through different baseball markets and scouted new breweries ... I usually have one or two big pieces about beer. My latest one was about why beer in ballparks isn’t better. I went into all the distribution issues, all the quality control, all that sort of stuff, and mostly talked about why beer in Yankee stadium is so awful.

UnCapped: Which brewery do you think is the best one near Oriole park?

Sarris: Full Tilt, baby! [Laughs.]

UnCapped: Speaking of Full Tilt, joining me this evening as special guest host is Dan Baumiller, cofounder of Full Tilt Brewing, Nickelback fan extraordinaire and friend of the show.

Dan Baumiller: Thank you for having me. Thank you for recognizing me for all that I am.

UnCapped: Last time we had Eno on, he’d discovered a controversy about people cheating, and Dan thought it would be a great idea to commemorate the occasion with a beer named Sticky Stuff. So now we have a new beer and something else new. You’ll have to explain what Stuff+ is, other than a West Coast IPA.

Sarris: Hold on. [Pops open beer.] There we go. Cheers to Dan for having this idea and putting this together.

I can’t believe it, that there’s a stat. [Stuff+] is a baseball stat. This is one of the nerdiest baseball stats out there. This is high-quality nerdism, right here.

Stuff+ is a statistic that tries to measure the physical qualities of a pitch. Things like spin rate, yeah. But also velocity, movement. It’s all defined off the fastball, too, so it’s movement differential. It’s trying to look at the physical characteristics of a good pitch.

I think it’s really important because one of the things we’ve always looked at is velocity. That was, like, step one: “That guy throws 100!” But then we had enough guys where you’re like, “That guy throws 100, and they still spank it.” The guy I think of a lot is Nate Eovaldi. That dude throws 100, and people love hitting his fastball because it’s super straight. He had a whole breakout when he started throwing his fastball 30% of the time and had a cutter and a splitter and all these other pitches he was throwing instead of his fastball, because even though his fastball was 100, it wasn’t that good.

This metric tries to also catch the guys who throw 90 and have incredible movement on their pitches. Movement is as important as velocity, in a lot of cases.

Baumiller: You kind of explained what it is, but who records all this and shoves it into whatever metric that spits [it out]?

Sarris: The data collection is really important. I think about 15 years ago, we started having cameras that could tell you how much the pitch moved — because they’d have the beginning location and the end location — and that was about it.

Then you started putting numbers to it. The first time I ever saw anyone write any sort of Stuff metric was in 2018, Jeremy Greenhouse, who’s now the lead nerd for the Cubs. He wrote about Stuff [using] just movement from these cameras.

Since then, we’ve had Trackman, which was a little more precise, and then in 2020, we installed Hawk-Eye, which is the thing that, if you’re watching tennis, goes “beep” when they make a fault. These cameras can tell you the direction of the spin on the ball, they can tell you all sorts of cool stuff that we didn’t know before, and that’s allowed us to make the best Stuff metrics. MLBAM, which is a wing of Major League Baseball, collects those stats, and this is what makes them different than other sports. They allow us to have it. There are a lot of stats in soccer and basketball and football that the general public is never allowed to see. But baseball, I think they did the right thing, because you’ve got a bunch of nerds like me, trying to develop secondary stats, and then people end up in front offices. It ends up being a farm system for analytics for baseball, where there are literally people who use the free data, do cool stuff, and then get hired by baseball. There are guys like me who have made Stuff metrics who get hired by teams. I’d say about half to two-thirds of teams have their own Stuff metrics by now.

This excerpt has been edited for space and clarity. Listen to the full podcast at fnppodcasts.com/ uncapped. Got UnCapped news? Email csands@ newspost.com.