Best of the Mets on WFAN: Does Juan Soto miss the Yankees?

**Shaun Morash** (0:00)
Steven Whitehouse Station, Steve, what's up?

**Tiki Barber** (0:01)
What up, Steve?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:02)
Hey, hey, hey, guys, how you doing?

**Tiki Barber** (0:04)
All's well, man.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:06)
All right, so you've been talking about, you know, protection for hitters and how much protection an average judge provides and how to calculate a protection stat.

**Tiki Barber** (0:15)
Yeah, that was the story. That was the assignment I gave Evan on his vacation. Calculate it.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:22)
Yes, yes. So I have a way to do it.
We can't, yeah, so we can't do it and that I don't have the data and the computing power, but sad officials do.
So hear me out. But essentially when one talks about protection, they're talking about how a pitcher pitches to a batter before they face Aaron Judge versus if Aaron Judge is behind them, right? Yes. Yeah. And usually what happens is when there's a better batter behind the pitcher, the batter in front will see A. More fastballs and B. More strikes or more better pitches to hit, more solid in the strike zone. Okay. So these guys have stats on every single pitch, every single pitch location, pitch counts by type of pitch and everything else. If you calculate the percentage of fastballs that the two hitters before Aaron Judge get in an order versus what those hitters get when Judge is not behind them, and you do what's called a heat map. And a heat map would show the location of the pitches and whether those pitches are more consolidated in the center of the strike zone or versus the outer parts. You can come up with basically a stat, right, or a relative measure of how pitchers are pitching to batters when Aaron Judge is hitting behind them versus when Aaron Judge is not hitting behind them. Yeah.

**Tiki Barber** (1:44)
I mean, that sounds simple. And I'm sure it's relatively easy to do once you have the data.

**Shaun Morash** (1:52)
Once you have the data. And then all you have to do is create four random letters to label the data and everybody will go crazy about it on them. Oh, it's DVOP? Yeah. Who doesn't know about that?
Divide and conquer protection stat? Yeah. It's been around for years. You know how that is, Tiki. Of course. Tom and Sparta. Tom, what's up?

**SPEAKER_4** (2:12)
Hey, Tom.
Hey, good morning. Hey, I just wanted to talk two things about the Netflix coverage.

**Shaun Morash** (2:18)
Sure.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:19)
Of the Home Run Derby.
First thing is, the coverage was terrible. They were showing the pitcher pitching the ball to the batter, not even the batter. They're showing fans in the stands while the guy was hitting. I mean, the angles that they had, you couldn't even see half the time.

**Shaun Morash** (2:39)
Tom, see, that's interesting.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:40)
You say the producer was terrible.

**Shaun Morash** (2:42)
Tom, I find that interesting because, I mean, maybe I was just in a different length. I thought the camera angles and stuff and the moon shots and actually seeing where the balls landed in the crowd. I walked away thinking the coverage was actually pretty freaking good. And I gotta be honest with you, I was really down on Netflix's opening day coverage. I didn't think they handled it well. I think they kind of handled it like a gimmick and I wanted to watch like a baseball game. Last night's meant to be gimmicky, but overall, I thought the coverage now, could it get a little convoluted with too many voices? Yeah, I mean, that would be kind of my only negative takeaway. But other than that, man, crowd shots and showing the picture, I didn't mind that because I also want to see where the ball is located.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:17)
I was hitting the ball and you couldn't even, you weren't, you were watching the pitcher pitch, like, and just the pitcher, not even from the pitcher's point of view.

**Shaun Morash** (3:26)
Yeah, I mean, Tom, I gotta be honest with you. I don't think that was as frequent as you're making it seem like, because there was at no point last night that over two hours that I feel like I couldn't see the hitter.

**Tiki Barber** (3:33)
I know what he's talking about, though, because I remember sometimes looking at the pitcher and I was like, okay, that's his dad, like for Ben Rice, that's kind of cool. But like, I want to watch Ben. So I know what he was saying, but I think if you watch the whole thing, like, and so in context relative to the whole, it wasn't really that bad. But if you saw it in moments, there could be, I see what he's kind of saying.