The MLB Network host talks about his new book and the state of the “Baseball Revolution.”
Brian Kenny doesn’t look or sound like a stathead. The pugnacious host of MLB Network’s MLB Now talks like a guy who covered boxing for many years—which Kenny, in fact, did. Kenny’s delightfully feisty broadcasting style belies an incessantly inquisitive mind. That mind quickly gravitated toward sabermetrics in the 1990s, while he was still hosting shows like SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight on ESPN. Needless to say, Kenny was an odd man out in the mainstream sports media at the time.
Now that advanced analytics are a more accepted part of the mainstream sports conversation, Kenny has released a book this week, Ahead of the Curve. While such hashtaggable evergreens like #KillTheWin and his advocacy of bullpenning have gotten much of the attention, Kenny’s book goes deeper than just re-hashing sabermetricians’ ancient bugbears. Kenny explores his own history with sabermetrics from the perspective of a media insider, who saw the culture change drastically in his 20 years on the national stage. He also wants to know why human beings psychologically resist new information, and how those tendencies can be broken down. He does it in his trademark pugilistic voice, making the book a fun and accessible read to boot.
I sat down with Kenny at Citi Field for an extensive and wide-ranging conversation while Jake Arrieta and Bartolo Colón duelled in the background. We talked about Kenny’s history in broadcasting, his hopes for the book, and where sabermetrics is headed in the coming years.
[This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]
The thing that intrigues me about you is that you don't really fit the profile of someone who'd be into this kind of stuff. You've been a broadcaster for more than 30 years. Your peers are not the ones digging into spreadsheets or thinking about advanced metrics. My first question to get into this is, how did this stuff start to catch your eye, and when did that happen?
I always loved baseball, the history of baseball, and the Hall of Fame. So without knowing it, I was always doing comparative analysis. I was just a real fan, wondering how good John Milner was. How good was Chris Chambliss? Roy White? I looked at the Sunday box scores, the numbers, the league leaders. That's what you had to do back then! In the old days, you waited for the Sunday paper, because then, you got the whole league. That was the only time you got it! I really studied it.
When I went into broadcasting, I was a reporter. I stopped reading the sports page for a full year, maybe even two years. I knew that I was a reporter, and while I loved sports, that could not occupy my mind. With the exception of the Islanders winning the Stanley Cup [in the early 1980s]—only because I lived on Long Island—I had no idea what was happening in sports. I would occasionally look to see where the Yankees and Mets were in the standings, but I was not even watching it.
Then, at my station, they fired the sportscaster and held auditions. I thought at the time, I'm a 22-year-old kid reporter. The way the news is set up, I know I'm 15 years from being able to sit on the desk or do anything important. I'm going to landfills, I'm going to murders, I'm going to court cases, I'm going to all these crappy things. I always liked sports. Everybody who grew up around me and went into broadcasting either wanted to be reporters or Marv Albert. Everybody wanted to be Marv Albert! Seriously, you all want to do play-by-play? That's not me. I had enough training, and I loved sports, so I thought I'd give sportscasting a try, because that would put me on the anchor desk. If I go on the anchor desk, that would accelerate the whole thing.
Nobody believes it now, but my performance then was so stiff. It was so bad. I knew I was a good writer and reporter, but my performance stunk. I was terrible, uptight. I was doing a caricature of a junior newsman. I knew that the only way I was going to get better was if I threw myself into it. Somehow, I got the job out of the eight or ten guys that were trying for it, and I became the sportscaster at WLIG-TV, channel 55.
From there, when I go to WTZA in Kingston, New York, I would go looking for a baseball encyclopedia. I always wanted to do extra work. I always wanted to put things in context, into perspective. Back then, if you had an almanac and a baseball encyclopedia, you were a genius! Things we take for granted now, like on ESPN—"This is the first time since 1966 etc." "Here are the leaders in home runs in the month of April"—I did those all the time by myself as a local sportscaster on channel 62, WTZA.
Then, I bought Total Baseball. Turned out John Thorn lived in Saugerties, New York, only 10 miles away. I started interviewing John Thorn and studying his encyclopedia. I just liked doing that. I just like looking at baseball history. Even then, it took a few years. I learned about Total Player Rating and PRO+, which was their version of OPS+ in 1991. I started reading Bill James. I get to ESPN, but I'm still not converted yet. I start doing it every day on ESPN, though. We're doing hours and hours of programming! I start doing Baseball Tonight, so I'm studying baseball constantly, and I just have my eyes and ears open. I start thinking, should I be out here on ESPN spouting things like, "Hey, this slugger's hitting .292 with 17 home runs and 42 RBIs?" I thought, there's better ways of doing this, so I slowly just kept going and going.
Once it started to gain momentum, and I really started digging into Bill James, I just stopped accepting the accepted nonsense. I've always had that contrarian nature. Once I found a real grip on it with baseball, I really expected that this is coming. This new way of thinking, of questioning things, of how things happen within the folklore of baseball—soon enough, everyone will just be with me. I mean, of course they will! Why wouldn't you be? I've learned, 20-something years later, that nobody's with me, except guys your age who are moving all the oldsters out of the way. I really thought my whole generation would accept good information.
That's kind of what Ahead of the Curve has morphed into. It's not just me slamming writers. We're all humans—baseball players, writers, everybody else. Why do we have such trouble accepting new and good information? My mind has always been open to it. I have my own biases and my own way of going about it, but I still wondered, how did this happen?
Baseball has been at the center of my thought over the last decade. It's so competitive. They're killing themselves. Players are putting hormones into their bodies. Managers and GMs are working themselves to death. If someone says, "By the way, I have all of this good information for you. You don't have to work any harder; this will in fact make it easier. Why don't you use this? It's gonna help you win!" Why wouldn't everyone do it? That's what fascinated me. I came about, and I thought everybody would be with me. Especially in the media, they decidedly were not.
What were those conversations like, especially when you were at ESPN back in the 1990s? Let's take, for example, a production meeting at Baseball Tonight. Let's say Roberto Alomar was part of the conversation, and there was a certain idea that you wanted to get across because of these numbers you were finding and thinking about more seriously. How would producers and on-air talent either accept or push back on you raising those issues? Or did you raise them at all? Were you maybe too nervous to do that back then?
I started to. That's actually where I started to have the back-and-forth with Harold Reynolds, because we were working together then! He would say something and I would go, "You know, that guy you love, you know he stinks, right?" I would instigate and poke the bear. He'd say, "That guy's the best player in the league!" I'd respond, "What makes you say that? What really makes you think that?" We'd laugh, and we'd say, "OK, let's go do that on the air!" That would happen a lot. My nickname was "Sluggo" back then, because I always brought up slugging percentage. I'd say, "You know, this is not some esoteric calculus I'm talking about. This is total bases and at-bats! This was on baseball cards in the 1930s!"
I became that guy. I guess I will say things to provoke a response, but I absolutely believed in it, and I always wondered why don't the rest of them believe in it. If there was better information, I'd listen. One guy who was on Baseball Tonight back then was Buck Showalter. Now, I'm gonna shut up and ask questions of him. Show me, talk to me! I could learn an enormous amount from somebody like Buck Showalter. I learned a lot from a lot guys--Ray Knight, Peter Gammons.
Yeah, there was that reticence. Others would say, "Well, people don't know what you're talking about." I would say, "It's our job to relay what's important." I'm out there for two hours a night talking to the audience. We're talking about statistics anyway. Bill James once said that he didn't suddenly show up telling people to pay attention to baseball statistics. You all were already; you were just looking at the wrong ones. So I was there saying, "Hey, I can't go out there and just talk about batting average and RBIs off the cuff while doing highlights when I know that Bobby Abreu is fourth in OBP and fifth in slugging in the National League." That's a very good player! That's a valuable guy! You wouldn't know that if you were just listening to his batting average and his RBIs. That's not where his value lay. I was always trying to bring more context, but yeah, that made me "that guy."
Everybody always cites Moneyball at this turning point. That book comes out, and these ideas start to get into the mainstream. Do you feel like those conversations started becoming easier or more out in the open after that book came out?
Both. Moneyball definitely forced the issue. That's actually why I ended up writing quite a bit about Moneyball in Ahead of the Curve, because I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up this thing as an agent of change. I interviewed Michael Lewis, who's obviously terrific. I wanted to get things out there. I see revisionist history happening already. Anybody who's trying to take credit away from Bill James: Nope. Bullshit. You're wrong. Anybody else who would say, "Well, Moneyball was just pointing out..." Stop. Moneyball was a major, major change in the culture. I thought that when it came out, it was old hat. I thought, "We all know this!" When I say "we," we were a very small subsection of the people. No one saw this culture war happening, and it absolutely was happening.
Now, there's a lot of people coming out and saying, "All this stuff about stats vs. scouts was way overblown." Nope, nope, nope. No it was not. It was absolutely happening. It's still happening now! It happened on Twitter today with me and C.J. Nitkowski! If the war is over, how come I'm fighting every day? I'm not looking for it. It's there! I don't fight when I sit down and talk to Rob Neyer. What's to argue about? Moneyball made it very polarizing at the time. Once it became so popular, that old guard really struck back. You can see it. I bring up some stuff in Ahead of the Curve. There's just a lot of haters out there, and part of this book is that I'm holding y'all accountable. Moneyball deserves an enormous amount of credit. And then, the stunning thing is, the movie comes out eight years later, and there's another explosion because then it reaches the mainstream. It spreads again!
I'm seeing all this happening and I thought, I'm never gonna write a sabermetric book. Why would I do that in 2002? That's not me. This is all happening and we all know it. But after seeing the wars being fought, I realized that I had a unique vantage point in all of this. I am at the hub of the mainstream media--anchoring the 6:00 SportsCenter, Baseball Tonight, now at MLB Network surrounded by ex-players and national network guys. I'm seeing all of this unfold, and I don't think anybody else had that vantage point, to see it unfold while also recognizing the amazing advances these guys made. Guys like Pete Palmer, Dick Cramer, Bill James, John Thorn. They did remarkable things that really changed the way a lot of us think—not just about baseball, but about everything.
You just mentioned Pete Palmer and The Hidden Game of Baseball. We can talk about The Book by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin. Baseball Between the Numbers, The Extra 2%, Moneyball—there are so many books about this subject, and I always feel like the subtitle for every single one is, "Everything you know about baseball is wrong." How does Ahead of the Curve fit into that tradition, and how does it move that tradition forward?
I just wrote what I found fascinating from my vantage point. I didn't see it as anything but me wanting to write about my perspective, which I recognized at a certain point is unique. I've really seen this unfold, and I wanted to put those things out there while they're still happening, before they're forgotten.
There's revisionist history. Again, history is shorthand. You can see history get screwed up all the time. I asked John Thorn if I should write this book and he said, "Brian, plant your flag." A lot of people I respect—Rob Neyer, John Thorn, Bill James—they all said write your book.
While it's going back and...I don't know if it's setting the record straight, but it's setting the record straight for the next generation. This is what happened. These are the players. It may not be perfect, and I might not get everybody right, but I try to pay proper respect to the pioneers who were ridiculed for decades. I want to straighten that out and now give you the state of the art. This is my full-time job. It is satisfying to see it sweep through the game and just start to see it accepted. At the same time, we're all human. We all have our own biases, our own limitations. It still happens relatively slowly. What fascinated me is the why.
I also wanted to know how this applies to the rest of life. This is not just for baseball. This happens in everything. I learned an enormous amount by researching and writing Ahead of the Curve. The biggest thing I learned is that we are a lot simpler than we think. Most of our thought process is automatic. It's habit. Your mind is always looking for an easier way to get through the day. The less it has to think, the happier it is. It's in our hard wiring.
I wrote a chapter about Sig Mejdal, Director of Decision Sciences for the Houston Astros. He has several degrees in this. He's very well versed. As I started looking at biases, he told me that we all have blind spots. A big influence was Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. There's some pretty funny lines in it, in a book written by a Nobel Prize winner. One is, "Once we tell you things that we've found, you will resist them. You will think they are not true, and then you will think they are not true for you. Realize that they are all true and they are all true for you."
Learning all of that, I started to connect all of the things in baseball. We're all interested in competitive advantages. Let's learn about it through history. I have a quick synopsis of it in the book. The live ball was introduced in 1909. The live-ball era started in 1920. Well, that's 11 years. I'd always read that, but it never really sunk in. I would always say that Major League Baseball was blind to it, they couldn't admit to it. They must have introduced a new ball after Ray Chapman got killed in 1920. No no, that happened in August of that year. That hard ball was there in 1909. It was 11 years before anyone started really doing it, because Babe Ruth was there training as a pitcher. He didn't have a power swing drummed out of him. He was only hitting sporadically. By the time he starts hitting 54 home runs, it's too late. Cat's out of the bag.
Take bullpens as another example. I learned about the history of Firpo Marberry and the 1924 Washington Senators in various places over the years. Until then, the bullpen was just for washouts. Suddenly, you get a pretty good flamethrower in the bullpen and it becomes a real advantage. When did relief pitchers really start to dominate and be accepted? Joe Page in 1947. Joe Black in 1952. Jim Konstanty won the NL MVP in 1950! He deserved it, by the way. I was right on that, too.
Marberry has his breakout in 1924. Relievers don't accepted until 1947. Why wasn't it picked up in 1925? Same thing with sabermetrics. By 1985, Bill James is tired of writing about walks. He writes, "I am tired of writing this. I know you're tired of reading it." Walks! How come it took 20 more years before everyone just jumps on board? There's a 10-15 year lag period.
I write about three-point shooting in the NBA. There's a comparison between what Larry Bird was doing and what Steph Curry is doing. You have Larry Bird! It's not like he was a guy who didn't have a shot. You have Downtown Freddy Brown a decade before him! Why wouldn't you use these guys? If knowing that this is in our nature—not to push it all in, to go incrementally so that the herd is with us and doesn't dislike us—what if we know that that's a part of our blind spot? What if the next time you recognize a competitive advantage, why don't you just jump there, get there? Next time you realize you recognize bullpenning, why not just do it? This guy goes two innings, this guy goes one, this guy goes three. Why are we running this guy out for six innings until he's exhausted and gives up three runs? That's something we know right now, and yet we can't get there.
Why do you think that is? Do you think it's possible to break that psychological barrier?
It's being broken all the time, but slowly. It's happening now. What I write in the book is, why doesn't someone just jump in and do it now? You need the right circumstances. Colorado tried bullpenning with Dan O'Dowd, who works with me now at MLB Network. He tried it, but as he said, getting people to change their minds is very, very difficult. You need someone to just come in and blast through. Or you need someone desperate enough to do it. I still think there are some bad clubs that could try it. The problem is that if you're too low, it won't work and then the culture will backlash. That's what happened with the Rockies. This stuff happens incrementally, but again, it's Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift. It doesn't happen in linear fashion. It happens in fits and spurts, and then, BAM! Somebody is probably gonna do it, and then it will be commonplace.
Right now, look at the number two hitter on every team. It was only a few years ago that you would never put your best hitter there in the lineup. It never happened. Not even Harold Reynolds gives me crap on that anymore. It's just fact. Why do you have some weak-hitting second baseman batting second? Why? There's no reason.
In the 2004 postseason, the number two hitters were A-Rod, Mark Bellhorn in a really good year, Larry Walker and Carlos Beltrán. I'm on ESPN going, OK, all bets are off. Now, this was the era of big super-teams. Big offenses. They were all monster teams. I realize that that was happening, but I also said, what are we learning? Get your best guy hitting second! This was three or four years before I read The Book. I didn't have the data, but I knew that something was happening. But even then, it took another 10 years before it was commonplace. It wasn't commonplace even when I got to MLB Network. That was only a few years ago. Now, it suddenly is. Things that we think won't get there probably will in five years. People will say, "We always knew that was a good idea." No, you didn't! No, you didn't!
Is that why you feel like things such as pitcher wins and bunting still have to be central issues in the book? Obviously, you and I don't even think about these things. You look at the last 100 years, and things like bunting and intentional walks are vanishing from the game, relative to what they once were.
See, you're over that. The vast majority of baseball fans are not. Most of the 40,000 people in this stadium are not. The players, too. I hear this from Ken Rosenthal all the time, and he and I are good friends. He'll say, "BK, you're like one of these guys from World War II who's in a cave and still fighting!" No, Ken, it still happens. We had a big brouhaha about pitcher wins and I said, "Ken, next time you're on a show without me, just keep tabs on how many times pitcher wins come up." He goes, "It never even comes up." OK, Ken. A week or two later, he goes, "I have to tell you, I did a couple MLB Tonights and it kind of came up a lot."
I'm praying for a guy like Stephen Strasburg or Chris Sale to have some outlandish win-loss record with a 3.50 ERA. OK, writers, what are you gonna do about the Cy Young award now? For me, you need a real flashpoint. Have Kershaw have his super year, and have Strasburg go 23-0. I'd love it. What are you gonna do now? I want to hear the arguments!
Part of the challenge with the book is that I know all the people who read FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus get this. They're tired of #KillTheWin. They're tired of me beating the dead horse. I'm like, OK. Go talk to some average fans. The fans are there. The people who really love baseball will ask, "I grew up loving baseball and grew up with these stats. Why would you do that?" Realize that there's data behind this now.
I tried to get a bigger tent for the book, just as I did when I was writing Clubhouse Confidential. I wanted someone who was just a good baseball fan, like my wife or my father or my brother-in-law, to be able to understand this stuff, while at the same time not alienating people like you. Take for example the year Jayson Werth led the National League in wRC+. That was only three years ago. It's lost to history because the Nationals didn't make the playoffs, and his OBP and slugging wouldn't have told you that on their own. But then you put it all together, use linear weights and make your adjustments, and suddenly he's the best hitter in the NL. If you ask anybody, "Was Jayson Werth ever the best hitter in his league?" They'll say no, but he actually was.
We talk about this a lot. In our MLB Now meeting yesterday, Joel Sherman of the New York Post said, "Hey, we all live in our little bubble here. We're always talking baseball." But even the least sabermetrically inclined fan is still really hardcore into baseball. Ex-players live it and breathe it. We're all really hardcore, so are we leaving out a large portion of the population? Even on MLB Now, do we not want to get too wonky without explaining why this is important? Instead of just blowing by high leverage, we need to explain what high leverage is, just for a second.
Ahead of the Curve is the same thing. I've been heartened by the reviews we've gotten. I've gotten a few newspaper reviews from people who are baseball fans, but are not hardcore types like yourself. They'll say, "I really enjoyed it!" Thank god. I could have easily lost all those people.
That brings up a really interesting issue: communication of these ideas. Throughout your career, including your book, what are some of the challenges that you feel have come up in trying to communicate some of these heavier ideas? What are best practices for people when trying to get those ideas across?
I'll give you an example of when we did Clubhouse Confidential. The first year we did it, it was just me doing essays, and then I would have a guest like Dave Cameron or Rob Neyer. It was a very self-contained show. I had an essay in it every single day. When I got home, I would have dinner and then watch it with my wife. If my wife got lost, that was my fault. That's how I would judge it. You have to be able to sit down just as a baseball fan and be able to digest it. I would have conversations with my researchers when I would write the essays, and they would help me shape it. They'd say, "Hey BK, why don't you add this, why don't you take this out, I think you're overselling this guy, I think you're underdoing this." Everything would always come down to how digestible was it. You gotta really ratchet it back and slow down on TV.
It's always a challenge to explain it. It's a challenge for your website, too! I read lots of stuff on various websites these days where my eyes glaze over. It's too thick and wonky for me. It's all in that writing style of digestible communication.
I had good notes from Rob Neyer. I sent him a chapter early on. His one thing was, "Stop with the numbers and the charts! Explain it to me!" That's the challenge: Try to make it interesting and digestible.
You said that everyone has biases or flaws in their thinking. Do you recognize some of those biases in yourself? Any examples?
I probably have an OBP bias, because it was undervalued so long. I will champion the cause of Keith Hernandez, Doug Mientkiewicz, and Mark Grace. I still like the nice little player probably more than I should. I like Nori Aoki a lot more than I should. He's not Matt Holliday, but I like the uniqueness of it. I do recognize that bias, mostly, but I will get sucked into it.
Even now, I have to retrench my thinking. I wrote an article for Sports on Earth last year called "The End of FIP as We Know It." I came of age sabermetrically knowing that if a guy had 10 strikeouts and one walk, he had a good day. That is no longer the case. So even up until a year ago, if I saw a guy missing bats, I would go along with it. Now, since we're at a point where the strikeouts are so out of whack, so outlandishly high, I have to retrench my thinking and think, don't fall in love with just that. Maybe this guy is inducing weak contact. Maybe he's surviving. What's working? Is he executing his pitches at the right time? All this pitching craft stuff is coming to the fore, I think.
I'm constantly looking for that. You have to go in with that basic Bill James sabermetric tenet: Don't go in with the answer. Go in with the question. James's famous line is that sportswriters will use statistics as a cudgel to back up their arguments. Sabermetricians use statistics to find the truth. Ask the question, then find the answer. It seems simple now, especially to guys your age, but that was not always the case. In the old days, you came in with what you thought and then tried to back it up. It's a big difference.
Explain the vetting process on MLB Now, in terms of what stats you do end up using. I feel like ERA+ is one you like, wRC+ and OPS+ are two you like on the hitter side. You seem to like DRS for defense.
I just try to use what makes sense, what is the state of the art. Only over the last few years have I gotten really into run expectancy and Win Probability Added. I ask everybody now if they are a context-neutral guy or a context-dependent guy. Which are you? There's no right or wrong answer. Ask the questions. I know that a lot of times, it would be better to use FIP- or something else. Sometimes, it's better to just get the message out there.
Take OPS+. I'm on Baseball Reference and I see everyone's OPS+ numbers. For the most part, it's close enough. And I don't like OPS! I've never been an OPS guy. Ken Rosenthal and these guys who are now joining the party love OPS. I even have to do the math in my head. I think it's too crude to slap them together.
I always want to know the OBP and the slugging because they tell me two different stories. If I know them independently of each other, I have so much more information. OPS+, though, tells me another story in a snapshot, which I love. I've had researchers say, "BK, I think you should use wRC+ here because..." and then they'll give me a reason. OK, but now what are we doing in the rest of the essay? And if I use them both, audiences will go, "Well, why did he just show me two similar but different numbers? Where's my clicker?" There's no ideology except determining what works best for this occasion. What answers this question best?
So now that Ahead of the Curve is out in the world, and you've been living with this stuff for 20-plus years, where do you see the "baseball revolution" headed? What do you think is the next thing, be it specific stats, different ways to think about players and teams, or how the media more broadly discusses analytics? What is the next phase of all of this?
I think that the next phase is the forging of analytics and culture, which you can readily see in teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals, Houston Astros, and Tampa Bay Rays. It'll just be a more logical, efficient world. That doesn't make it cold and ruthless; it just makes it smarter.
For example, I went to town on Twitter about two weeks ago, because I had just watched a White Sox - Red Sox game. It was the ninth inning. The Red Sox loaded the bases with nobody out. The White Sox brought in Zach Duke. They brought the five infielders in, and just moved Adam Eaton to whichever side of the field the power would fall—left field for righties, and right field for lefties. I thought, damn, that's smart. They're getting after it!
Now, Zach Duke threw every pitch right off the black. He's fighting like hell. They even got a ground ball to the fifth infielder, who threw the runner out at the plate. Al Avila made a nice scoop. The broadcasters are going crazy, saying Al Avila saved the day. I'm recognizing that Zach Duke is fighting his ass off. Al Avila made a nice scoop. These guys were fighting and clawing. They were at Fenway Park. You're about to lose, man. It's bases loaded, nobody out in the bottom of the ninth. You're about to lose and they're about to laugh at you. That's the feeling. Instead, they fought and they fought and they fought. If you're fighting like hell, why not be smart about it? Why not give yourself the best advantage? Bring in five infielders! Move Adam Eaton back and forth!
I think that's where it's at. Fight like hell. Recognize that it's a physical sport played by athletes. At the same time, bring some intelligence in here. The White Sox absolutely did that that night. Ten years ago, no chance you'd see that. All I know is, that's smart. Robin Ventura is not the most forward-thinking manager out there. All I know is, that night, he gave his team the best chance to win.
That's where I think it's headed. Statcast is bringing it back to a very scouty nature. That's what I tell all the ex-players I work with. I say, you're gonna love this stuff! You are the guys always telling me, "Yeah, he made a diving catch, but look at the route." They're telling me that, because they have a scout's eye. They've seen it a million times. We're gonna know all of this stuff now, and see exactly how players are tracking balls, for example.
In the game itself, these coaches are getting a hardcore education with this information. When you talk to these guys now, they're smart. They're not sitting there, chewing tobacco and drinking whiskey. They're studying this stuff. We're gonna have a much smarter game very very, soon.