SABRcast with Rob Neyer: Tyler Kepner (Episode #2)

Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a new weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer.

SABRcast will feature insights and analysis of what’s happening in modern baseball on and off the field, plus compelling interviews with figures from around the game — and music from The Baseball Project.

Neyer is a longtime baseball writer and editor for ESPN.com, SB Nation, and FoxSports.com. He began his career as a research assistant for groundbreaking baseball author Bill James and later worked for STATS, Inc. He has also written or co-written seven baseball books, including The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (with Bill James), winner of the Sporting News/SABR Baseball Research Award, and most recently Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game, winner of this year’s CASEY Award.

 

Current Episode

Episode #2: April 8, 2019

Our guest this week is SABR member Tyler Kepner, New York Times national baseball writer and author of K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches. Rob also talks about the “Waxahachie Swap,” invented by longtime MLB manager Paul Richards, in which a pitcher swaps positions with a fielder for one batter for a platoon matchup. Click here for the world’s only complete list of Waxahachie Swaps in MLB history.

Click here or press play below to listen to Episode #2:

 


What’s Rob reading this week?

Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball
By Christopher Phillips
Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, SABR member Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor in order to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players.

 

Archived Episodes

Episode #1: Brian Kenny and Scott Bush (April 1, 2019)