Talking about the materials that make up a baseball with Dr. Meredith Wills. We also revisit two-way players, dig into defensive metrics and why they're difficult, and are reminded that everything old is new again.

R.J. Anderson of CBS Sports came on to talk with us about the Rays recent usage of Sergio Romo as a starting pitcher. We talk about whether this concept will continue and if there may be other teams willing to try it out. We also talk with Anthony Rescan about his Baseball Prospectus Intern project for calculating surplus draft value. We threw in a handful of things we've learned over the last few weeks including tidbits about Kendrys Morales, Jordan Hicks, and the predictive value of xStats.

We discuss the Report of the Committee Studying Home Run Rates in Major League Baseball released on May 24, 2018. We talk with committee chair Dr. Alan Nathan, and committee member Dr. Dan Brooks as well as radar and target tracking research engineer, Dr. Sean O'Rourke. We examine what the report is saying and what it means going forward.

Sam Miller joined us to talk about his recent article about evaluating Statcast's new Pop Time metric. Surprising exactly no one, we also talk about Shohei Ohtani, again. And take a look at Robinson Cańo's Hall of Fame candidacy.

Below is a table showing the comparative ratings of some of the pitchers with the best command scores.

Shohei Ohtani is flexible

https://twitter.com/shinjibvby/status/996478920110190592

Baseball is back and we're all so glad

Other Links

When we talk about park adjusted stats, and park factors, what does all of that mean? How do we arrive at those numbers and how do we account for changes over time? We also talk about "pitch design" and how that combines analytical data and player development.

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We talk with Jonathan Judge and Rob McQuown, who oversee Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA projections to get some more insight into how the projections are made, what's new this year, and of course hip hop.

We talk to Jeff Long, Sean O'Rourke, Wayne Boyle, and Russell Carleton about their recent Pitching Week article about the Robot Strikezone and Robot Umpires.

Stolen Signs is back. Harry and Kendall talk about the slow offseason, collusion and ideas on how to change the economics of baseball. After a short break (14:05) they discuss new research by Duke University that looks into neurological and motor skills and how they translate to baseball production, a new smart baseball that can provide some pitch tracking and tease some new work by the stats team at Baseball Prospectus. To wrap up (32:00), a look into the state of pitching and try to talk about what an inning(s) eater is and also what an ace is.