☀️ Good Morning:
You are probably reading this newsletter in-between filtering through work email, glancing at your phone for a text notification — and another, and another — while chatting with your colleagues or friends on your desktop messaging platform and thinking about what you might want for dinner tonight.
We live in a hyperactive society that expects us to constantly switch between tasks.
While we know this is a bad thing, are there some hidden benefits to this?
Perhaps baseball can help us answer that question. In a research paper recently published by Oxford Economic Papers, a group of researchers tested how pitching performance (measured using a variety of outcomes) changes following a pitcher’s own at-bat (from the days when it wasn’t just Shohei Ohtani attempting this feat).
As explained in the abstract, “Faced with difficulties in the measurement of productivity and task switching, we turn to an industry that produces accurate, detailed, and comparable measures of worker production, namely starting pitchers in Major League Baseball.”
The results? It turns out there is a “small but positive” effect on pitching outcomes following an at-bat, including increased velocity.
“As for how we can explain these results in a baseball setting, it is possible that the switch between pitching and batting offers pitchers an opportunity to recuperate both mentally and physically. For example, batting could act as a distraction from the core task. A pitcher between innings but not batting would have more time to ruminate on any previous mistakes, which might distract their mental focus and diminish their subsequent pitching performance. Batting could simply reduce mental stress associated with pitching.”
So the next time you jump from one unrelated task to the next, realize you might be actually gaining steam to get things done. With that, we jump into a conversation about Brett Baty.
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There’s a world where Brett Baty is a more productive baseball player than Pete Alonso over the next year, two years and definitely three. (No, I’m not suggesting Baty should switch between pitching and hitting to find that added productivity).
It’s one most analysts and fans like to ignore alongside the world where meme coins are a thing. But it’s a world we can live in. And that’s not saying something negative about Alonso, but offering a higher ceiling for Baty.
If there’s one thing we know the young third baseman can do, it is hit minor-league pitching. After being demoted last season to Triple-A, he produced a .504 slugging percentage in 62 games, sending 16 balls over the fence and using a more cautious eye than the one we saw in the majors to reach base nearly 35% of the time.
🕺 NEW SWING: Baty hopes to bring that positive momentum into the 2025 season, along with a few important adjustments that he made during the offseason.
It’s paying early dividends as Baty is 5-for-8 to start the spring, including a home run on Tuesday.
Yes, that was a breaking ball that he pulled over the right-field fence. After falling behind 0–2 on two called strikes, he remained patient, taking three straight balls before pouncing on the sweeper.
Most importantly, notice his hands on the swing.
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