TAMPA BAY _ It’s not very often you have the chance to see both defending league champions in the same day, so color me fortunate. I’m currently at the Phillies-Florida State game in Clearwater after catching the Yankees-Pirates game at Tampa in the afternoon.
The Phillies are taking on the chin against the Seminoles, trailing 5-0 in the middle of the third. Phillippe Aumont gave up a three-run, albeit wind-aided bomb, to Stuart Tapley, which can’t make those who were against the Cliff Lee trade very happy. If this keeps up, you wonder where Jay Jaffe will have FSU in the first Prospectus Hit List. Many times, the regulars won’t play in the exhibition games against college teams but Phillies manager Charlie Manuel played all his starters with JA Happ on the mound.
Speaking of Manuel, his players like to call him “Big Chuck.” However, a better nickname would be “Normal-sized Chuck.” He has lost 56 pounds in the last year and now weighs in
It was a classic spring training moment in Tampa when Colin Curtis, a guy wearing No. 98, hit a three-run walk-off home run off Virgil Vasquez — Eric Seidman’s best friend in baseball — to give the Yankees a 6-3 victory. Meanwhile, the competition for the Yankees’ fifth starter’s spot started out with Chad Gaudin, Sergio Mitre and Alfredo Aceves each pitching two innings. Manager Joe Girardi insists that those three have the same chance as the most hyped pitcher of the 21st century, Joba Chamberlain, and Phil Hughes. We’ll see.
And for those interested in the government scene, Pirates right-hander Ross Ohlendorf says he would consider going back to Washington next winter following his much-publicized internship with the Department of Agriculture in the offseason. This time, Ohlendorf is thinking about pursuing opportunties that have arose with various House committees.
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. _ The Grapefruit League lidlifter (have to get lidlifter in the first paragraph) is scheduled to be played after a heavy morning rainstorm threatened a postponement. This, it will be the New York Mets (or actually the Buffalo Bisons) against the Atlanta Braves.
The Mets decided to take all their regulars out of the lineup rather risk an injury on a wet field. Heaven knows the Mets had enough injuries last season. The Braves didn’t have that luxury as they already were already on their way from their camp in Orlando when the rain started. Thus, Nate McLouth, Martin Prado, Yunel Escobar and Melky Cabrera are in the lineup and ace-in-waiting Tommy Hanson is starting against Nelson Figueroa.
The closest thing to a regular in the Mets’ lineup is Gary Matthews Jr. and Little Sarge will only be the center fielder unitl Carlos Beltran recovers from his off-season knee surgery. Mike Jacobs is the designated hitter and I suppose there is a chance he could be the opening-day first baseman.
Oh, by the way, Jason Heyward is in the Braves’ lineup and that should be fun. I’ve never seen Heyward play but if the guy looks like a superstar just by the way he walked across the clubhouse. He is already becoming legend for the home runs he has hit in batting practice this spring.
Speaking of prospects who pass the eye test, Ike Davis is playing first base for the Mets. Time will tell if he will become a star but he certainly looks the part as he, too, is an impressive physical specimen.
Meanwhile, McLouth is now wearing contact lenses and joking predicted he wil hit .450 this season since he can now actually see the ball. I asked him if he had a VORP prediction and he said 100.8. That’d be a pretty good year.
The Mets are in an upbeat mood after last year’s disastrous season. Shortstop Jose Reyes was particularly jovial Tuesday morning.
“I’m feeling great,” said Reyes, who missed the bulk of last season with a torn hamstring that eventually required surgery. “It’s great to be healthy. I feel like I’m going to have a big year and this team is going to have a big year. Last year is over. It’s in the past. It’s 2010 and we’re ready to do good things.”
The Mets will the focus of my On The Beat column tomorrow. Also, Eric Seidman’s Checking The Numbers column wil examine Mets third baseman David Wright’s loss of power last season and whether he will rebound in 2010 and I’ll chime in with Wright’s thoughts on the potential for a bounce-back season.
Check in tomorrow for news from the Pirates-Yankees game at Tampa.
I’m pleased to announce that Clay Davenport is now working with Baseball Prospectus on a full-time basis.
Clay was one of the original five founding members of Baseball Prospectus (which Steven Goldman reminisces about in the preface of Baseball Prospectus 2010), and his statistics have formed the building blocks of the Baseball Prospectus operation since its inception. Even before that, those of you who have been with us since the Usenet days will remember the awesome Davenport Translations reports that Clay used to spool out to rec.sport.baseball in the mid-1990s. In addition to the DTs, Clay is the creator of the True Average (TAv) performance metric, which until recently was known as Equivalent Average (EqA), and has been responsible for most of the statistical product in the annuals. At the website, Clay’s the keeper of the Adjusted Standings and Playoff Odds reports, the DT player cards (which will soon be converted to the new PECOTA.beta format), and the Depth Charts. Clay’s also a wonderful writer whose work we’ve always wanted to publish more regularly.
In his spare time, Clay likes long walks on the beach, Dan Brown novels, and classical music of the baroque period.
Clay Davenport has been the statistical backbone of Baseball Prospectus since day one on a strictly limited time basis, while holding down a day job. We’re happy that we were able to reverse Baseball Prospectus’ recent trend of some of our best talent being hired away by others and bring Clay on board on an exclusive basis. Clay’s responsibilities will include managing the completion of the translation of PECOTA from its previous form to something we can run quickly and regularly; assisting in the creation of research and metrics; and writing regularly for Baseball Prospectus Premium subscribers.
I don’t usually sound this press release-y, but that’s how excited we all are to be taking this step.
There have been a lot of questions about PECOTA in 2010. Here’s what we’re going to do to resolve them.
There are two concerns that we are currently working to address, and they apply to most of the questions people have asked. The first regards the fitness of the 2010 PECOTA projections. Clay Davenport posted some analysis that he did of them in an Unfiltered post on February 13. To summarize Clay’s work, there do not appear to be problems with the 2010 PECOTAs. The PECOTAs have changed since then, and we want to provide comprehensive analysis, so Colin Wyers will be repeating and expanding the tests that Clay did and we will report his findings.
The second concern is of the fitness of the ten-year projections which were released as part of the beta PECOTA hitter cards late Friday. As several commenters on the beta release announcement have noted, there are problems with the ten-year projections. Most of us saw those for the first time at about the same time you did, in our rush to get the cards released, and we’ve not yet gotten to the bottom of the issue. We will be getting help from our old friend Nate Silver on these, and will provide updates as we have more information. In the meantime, we’ll be prominently displaying a link to this post on the beta PECOTA cards.
PECOTA is currently in a state of flux as it moves from Nate Silver’s old Frankensteinian STATA/monster Excel spreadsheet process to a more automated, easier to maintain, easier to execute environment. We’ve pushed this along as fast as we were able, but we’ve plainly still got some work to do. I apologize again for the issues we’ve had with this transition, and I hope you will bear with us a little longer on this. I fully expect us to give you the best long-term projections we have ever generated soon.
We’ll have much more on these topics, but I wanted to get this information out as soon as I could. Thank you for your patience.
I promise I’ll talk about things other than my Scoresheet Baseball team once the season starts. It’s just that, well, this is what’s on my mind at the moment.
As previouslynoted, I’m participating in this year’s BP Kings league. We started our spring draft not long ago (we’re wrapping up round 16 as I write this), and… it’s been interesting, as drafts tend to be. You make plans, prepare for different scenarios, and then watch as things unfold in ways you couldn’t have imagined. It’s the best.
Anyway, I had cut down to five veteran players, which meant that I started drafting in the sixth round (first full round is the 11th). Here are the first 20 picks of the draft:
Justin Masterson — I’m probably too big a fan from having watched him in college
Andy LaRoche — As with Peralta and Scutaro at shortstop, I doubled up early at third base (I’d protected Kevin Youkilis); this gives me some flexibility and keeps me out of the mad scramble for lousy-hitting utility infielders that inevitably comes in a deep league
Rafael Soriano — I didn’t need another reliever, but he shouldn’t have lasted until the end of the 12th round
Delmon Young — This is crazy stupid, but I need to take some risks; either he’ll continue to hack at everything and be useless or he’ll figure out what he’s supposed to be doing with all that talent
Randy Wells — Here’s hoping his rookie performance wasn’t a fluke
Mike Wuertz — I’m a little uncomfortable being this pitching heavy so early in the draft, but I have a hard time separating the available options at positions of need so I’m hoping others will help me decide; plus I love Wuertz’s strikeout numbers
Melky Cabrera — He has center field range, he’s young enough to improve, and he won’t bat higher than eighth for me
Lyle Overbay — I’d fully intended to grab another outfielder here, but there were too many to choose from and only a couple of first basemen I liked; at least two or three of my outfield targets should still be available at my next pick
I won’t give you a blow-by-blow of the entire draft, but I will pop in from time to time. If you’d like to follow along, thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can do just that.
Joe Cronin is a big part of baseball history, having spent half a century in the game as a Hall of Fame shortstop, manager, general manager, and American League president. Cronin’s playing career spanned from 1926-1945, with the bulk of that time spent in the dual role of player-manager with the Senators and Red Sox. Mark Armour, the author of Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball, sat down with Baseball Prospectus to address the player-manager aspect of Cronin’s long career.
David Laurila: How common were player-managers in Cronin’s era?
Mark Armour: Cronin was hired as player-manager at a time when the concept was making a bit of a comeback. Most managers were players in the early 20th century, but at the time of the stock market crash in October 1929, there were zero player-managers. With money tight, suddenly it seemed like a better idea. By the mid-1930s, you had Cronin, Frankie Frisch, Bill Terry, Jimmy Dykes, Mickey Cochrane, Pie Traynor–generally star players, and many of them won pennants in their dual role.
After the 1932 season Clark Griffith fired manager Walter Johnson, making about $25,000 per year, and gave the job to Cronin, along with a $5,000 raise. Although Griffith loved Cronin and likely thought of him as managerial timber, saving $20,000 was a big deal in 1932.
DL: How did serving in that dual role impact Cronin’s career, and the teams he was with?
MA: I believe that it affected Cronin a lot, especially in his early years in Boston. At the time he became manager, Cronin was a great player, one of the best players in the game–a good defensive shortstop with extra-base power (playing in a terrible hitters park) who drew walks. He was also known as an incredibly hard-working player, a guy who really had no interests other than baseball. Once he became manager, he began to put on weight, which especially affected his defensive play.
In his early years in Boston, the team had a number of veteran players who made his job a living hell. Lefty Grove would turn his back when Cronin went to the mound, Wes Ferrell once walked off the field when an error was made behind him, Bill Werber would publicly question Cronin’s defensive play, Jimmie Foxx would stay out all night. Cronin’s bosses let this stuff go on, and the writers of the time thought Cronin was way over his head with this team. Cronin’s play suffered, and by 1936 some wrote that he might be washed up. By the late 1930s, as some of the malcontents were dealt away and were replaced by younger players who liked him, Cronin began to be seen as a good manager and his play improved substantially, offensively and defensively. After the 1941 season he became a bench player, but this was a decision made largely because he wanted to concentrate on managing–he was still a great hitter.
One can not know for certain, but I believe that if Cronin had never managed he would have been a better player in the mid-1930s and he would have played a few more years as a regular. His teams would have been helped by his better play. As most of the Red Sox malcontents in the 1930s were the team’s best players, it’s hard to say that the issues impacted anyone other than Cronin.
DL: Who was a better player, Cronin or Pee Wee Reese?
MA: Cronin at his best and also probably for his career, although their years of great play did not overlap. What I suspect you are referring to is that the Red Sox controlled the rights to Reese briefly, but let him go to Brooklyn in 1939. A lot of people have blamed Cronin for this, reasoning that Cronin was the team’s shortstop and did not want to lose his job. Cronin later acknowledged that he did not think Reese was big enough to play, and that he was too erratic defensively, judgments that proved to be quite incorrect.
Three things. First, this is inevitable when you have a player-manager, right? One of the attributes that makes great athletes great is their confidence in their own abilities, their belief that they are great and always will be great. Asking a man to judge for himself when his skills have eroded is asking for trouble. Second, at the time of the Reese deal (mid-1939), Cronin was 32 years old and the best shortstop in baseball. He was voted the best shortstop in baseball by the writers in 1938, and would be again in 1939. In 1941, two years after the deal and Reese’s first full season, Reese hit .229 with a league-leading 47 errors while Cronin played in another All-Star game. Reese subsequently passed Cronin and had his own fine career, but one can certainly understand the notion that the Red Sox did not need a shortstop in 1939. Third, Cronin was still a good player when he stepped aside in 1942 for Johnny Pesky. In fact, with Pesky and then Vern Stephens, the Red Sox had great shortstops for most of Reese’s career.
DL: How intertwined are the careers of Cronin and Ted Williams?
MA: Cronin managed Williams for the first six years of his career, the first four of those as his teammate, and then was his general manager for the next 11 seasons. As your readers likely know, Williams had a career filled with off-field difficulties with the press and the fans, and Cronin had to deal with almost all of it, generally not to the satisfaction of the media. (As an aside, when Cronin hired Joe McCarthy to succeed himself for 1948, the press was ecstatic–”Finally, someone that can reign in Ted Williams,” they wrote. But McCarthy liked Williams, too. Williams hated the writers, but he never gave his managers any trouble.) If you review Williams’ most controversial off-field issues (problems with the writers, issues surrounding his military call-ups in 1942 and 1952, his spitting, his bat throwing), Cronin was there for all of it, either defending Williams or bawling him out.
Though they could not have been more different as people, Cronin and Williams got along well and grew to love each other in their later years. The Red Sox had a ceremony to retire their two numbers in 1984, the first two numbers the team retired. Williams always resisted having a ceremony like this, but agreed only because they were honoring Cronin, too. Williams spent most of his speech on Cronin, who was not healthy enough to go out on to the field. Cronin only lived a few more months, but Williams talked to him many times on the phone that summer.
DL: When and why did the player-manager disappear from baseball?
MA: By the late 1930s the role was just about extinct again. Lou Boudreau did both roles for many years with a few teams, but since Boudreau it has been a novelty–generally a bench player. Pete Rose did it for a few years, and played himself more than many people thought he should have. Rose might have killed it off forever.
Although it sounds romantic to think about having a player-manager again, I think teams just gradually realized that the job of managing a team is a full-time high-stress job, one that does not afford a lot of time to things like “batting practice” and “fielding practice.” Cronin’s career was affected, and in Boudreau’s last full-time season he was 31. Other than an interim end-of-season gig, I think we are through with player-managers.
Some of the new features you’ll see on these cards:
* ten-year projections, versus the seven-year projections previously offered.
* top 100 comparables, versus the top 20 previously offered.
* better integration with the rest of the site, including links to articles, chats, and roundtable mentions. Much more coming on this front.
* update: forgot to mention that tables are sortable by column. We’re not sure that this has any use with these particular tables, but since we’re going to be using it for a lot of other stuff, we figured we’d throw it on these and see if you all wanted it for anything. Just click a header to sort, and click again to reverse order.
Some stuff either doesn’t work yet or requires more explanation, including but not limited to:
* we have display issues with Internet Explorer, and I’m sure the cards are screwed up in interesting ways in other less mainstream browsing environments.
* search box performance is marginal. Try using the index to manually browse if you have trouble with it.
* similarity scores. We have them, but they’re very different in scale than they were previously, so we’re not displaying them. More on those next week.
* top comparables. The criteria for comps has been refined frequently over the past couple of months, and that explains the differences you see between the comps on the weighted means spreadsheet and cards and those in Baseball Prospectus 2010. More on that soon as well.
* multiple projections for 2010. Here’s the decoder ring: in the “Biographical” box, next to the hitter picture, is our best available PECOTA projection for this hitter, including statistics that our friends who play fantasy will be interested in. If the hitter is on a depth chart and has a playing time projection, we use those numbers (which should match his team’s depth chart). If the hitter is not, we use his 50o projection.
The 2010 projection in the “2010 Forecast” section of the card is park-adjusted, while the 2010 projection in the “Performance Forecast” (10-year projection) section of the card is not park-adjusted, which explains the difference between them. [update: we decided to make these both park-adjusted, because the additional information didn’t seem to merit the confusion having both would cause. Please be aware that in the “Performance Forecast” section, the 2010 projection is park-adjusted but later years are not, and let us know what you think in the comments.]
* weighted mean. We don’t have it (yet). We’re using the player’s 50o projection for this first pass.
* update: we got the “k bar” reversed in the player profile graph. We’ll fix that in the next run of the projections.
* you can’t log in and out of your Baseball Prospectus account from the cards (yet). Just head back to the front page to log in if you need to. This will be fixed soon.
The first odds have been posted for team win totals at some online gaming sites. And for the past month, BP Fantasy’s John Burnson has been running expected win-loss records in Heater e-Magazine. So, I decided to see how the two matched up. As a Heater writer, I will note that one of the aspects of it is that there is a local “expert” for each team. This tends to lead to slightly optimistic projections, though perhaps not as much as one would guess.
For history, last year I scaling the final “Radar Tracking” (the pre-season edition of Heater) projections from 2009, and compared the RMSE of the variances compared to the actual win totals, and the Heater “team experts” were right up there with the best projection systems in the report which vegaswatch.net runs (and in which PECOTA has been known to far exceed the others - at least in 2008). Anyway, here are the win total projections from the Heater writers and 2 well-known online gaming sites (opening line, not accounting for movement, though if you wanted to bet on the “under” for Toronto, the line seems to be moving downward quickly…)
All win projections have been scaled to add up to 2430, some rounding has definitely occurred, since the oddsmakers frequently have half-wins in their lines:
Key: Heater - Site 1 - Site 2
Arizona 81 - 82 - 82
Atlanta 88 - 85 - 86
Baltimore 71 - 76 - 73
Boston 90 - 94 - 94 Cubs 83 - 83 - 83 White Sox 82 - 82 - 82
Cincinnati 79 - 79 - 78
Cleveland 68 - 75 - 73
Colorado 86 - 83 - 83
Detroit 78 - 78 - 81
Florida 83 - 81 - 81
Houston 74 - 73 - 77
Kansas City 70 - 72 - 71
LA Angels 93 - 84 - 84
LA Dodgers 87 - 86 - 84
Milwaukee 76 - 80 - 80
Minnesota 90 - 84 - 82
NY Mets 79 - 81 - 81
NY Yankees 93 - 95 - 94
Oakland 78 - 79 - 78
Philadelphia 88 - 92 - 92
Pittsburgh 74 - 69 - 71
San Diego 70 - 72 - 71
San Francisco 84 - 82 - 83
Seattle 87 - 82 - 83
St. Louis 88 - 87 - 88
Tampa Bay 89 - 89 - 89
Texas 85 - 83 - 83
Toronto 68 - 72 - 71
Washington 68 - 70 - 72
Well, as you can see, some of us at Heater are more optimistic about our covered teams than others, and these can be expected to change as we get closer to opening day… so if Kazmir or Liriano report any health problems, you can expect their team win expectations to decline. I write about both Chicago teams, and am actually rather surprised that the oddsmakers and I are so much in agreement at this early juncture.
Got another round of updates done and sent out for PFM, depth charts, and the weighted means spreadsheet late last night. What’s changed?
* SS/Sim is in. Thanks to Mike for the help with those.
* Upside - the Upside is calculated from a series of player forecasts; it is essentially the players runs above average for a six-year period. Nate calculated the upside only by looking at the current set of comparable players; I’ve calculated by iteratively running the player’s forecast into the future. The first time I ran that the forecast was definitely too ‘hot’ - virtually every 20-year old was eventually turned into a .350 hitter, as optimism up like a runaway resonance effect. I’ve put a quick damper on that for now (reading from a lower forecast level will reduce the influence of age, which was the primary variable being over-emphasized); a larger fix, with the forecast starting out highly optimistic but regressing towards a median level over time, will take more time to run. I’ll also revisit the “classic Nate” method - I changed it in the first place because the iterative method worked better, but I’ve made enough other changes since then that I can’t be sure that’s still the case. I’ll run some tests from the early 2000s - whichever version makes the best projections for the late 2000s will enter the program.
* Steals - I know there was some discussion of stolen bases looking too optimistic, and there was a good bad reason for that - a piece of code that was regressing stolen base percentage towards the league average was actually regressing it towards 1, making a ~10-point gain for the typical player. Not noticeable on a guy with 5 steals - but very much so on a guy with 30.
* Strikeouts - hitter strikeouts were an area where the initial version was performing noticeably worse than last year’s PECOTA, and I did make some changes that wipes out 75% of that difference (which does mean that the current one is still doing worse than last year for some reason, but with an average error about 0.3 worse instead of 1.3 worse). The change had to do with how the stats are weighted to determine a player’s baseline rate of performance. For both the tested players and his comparables, we build a weighted mean of his prior three years of performance - this establishes a baseline that is then tested against the fourth year, and those differences are what drives PECOTA. How that weighted mean is built mainly depends on the age of the player - for very young and old players, the most recent year is the strongest driver, while for mid-career guys you tend more towards a simple three-year average. Among all age groups, though, strikeouts need to be strongly driven by the most recent year - and that change, allowing different stats to weight differently for the same player, is new. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that other stats will also benefit.
* Depth charts - John Perrotto collected a series of depth charts from the beat writers for each team, with their opinions about how the lineups would look come April. I’ve allowed those to influence, and in some cases strongly influence, my thinking on various players; I’ve also rejected it in places where the result simply made no sense. The beat writers were focused primarily on an Opening Day lineup, while I’m trying to establish patterns for the entire season - I can readily believe that teams would be stupid enough to start Sucky Player A in April, but don’t think that they’ll continue sticking with him in July.
Another slew of words about the depth charts in general. PECOTA is a system geared for the projection of individual players. It is not run for teams - the depth chart takes playing time estimates from a person, looks up the PECOTA projection for that player, and adds those up for every player on the team to generate “team totals”. That is not the way to optimize the projection for a team. The sum of the individual projections is going to be greater than a proper team projection, and the sum of those is going to be higher than a proper league projection. The reason the league doesn’t end up as high as the projections is not because the individual players projected will all do worse across the board - it is because teams will go deeper on their depth charts than we can reliably predict (and beyond the top two, its generally a crap shoot which minor leaguer gets called up). Some players are going to get hurt and fall dramatically short of the projected playing time, and there are likely to be more high estimates of PT than low ones. We’re listing 2-4 players per position, probably about 30 ’slots’ per team. The Diamondbacks, to pick a team more or less at random, last year used 3 players at shortstop, 4 at catchers and second and third, 5 in center and right, 6 in left, and 8 at first, plus 13 used as a DH or PH at least 5 times, which is somewhere between 39 and 52 ’slots’ depending on how you count the PHs. We list 17 or 18 pitchers per team - the average team in 2009 used more than 24. Attempting to constrain PECOTA to the depth charts - by changing the numbers to match the expected league total - will damage the forecast. There were elements in the depth charts that were doing just that - I’ve been removing them as I find them, but we’re still doing it for playing time. I may change that soon as well; since the new PECOTA does make a specific major league playing time estimate (the “Major” column on the spreadsheets is the expected percentage of his playing time that comes in the majors) it doesn’t need to be nearly so totally reliant on the depth charts.
But we also use those depth charts, rightly or wrongly, to assess a team’s expected wins, we have to find a way to reconcile the individual projections (which tend to produce too many runs for the offense, and not allow enough to the defense). The runs scored and allowed totals that show up for the team have been balanced - the total runs scored and allowed made to be equal, allowing pythagorean win estimates to create a balanced won/loss record for the league. However, the batting line that goes with it is still just the sum of the individual player projections. So yes, there is a disconnect between the team slash line and the runs scored, and there is a disconnect between the sum of the players runs scored and the team runs scored. I haven’t figured out any way around that without compromising the quality of the individual projections.
Writing any book is a solitary task, even if you’re collaborating with a dozen other people. Part of our reward begins now, when we get to hit the road to talk about the book and the upcoming season.
This Sunday, Kevin Goldstein, Christina Kahrl, Jay Jaffe, and myself, as well as annual Annual contributor Cliff Corcoran will be making our yearly trip to the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center at Montclair State University in New Jersey to kick off our tour. Please join us beginning at 3 PM; see the Yogi website for directions and other information.
The following day, March 1, the Fab Four (I would say “Fat Four,” but I’m really the only one that qualifies) of Goldstein, Kahrl, Jaffe, and and Goldman will reunite in Manhattan at 6 PM at the Barnes & Noble at 18th Street and 5th Avenue, where we will hold forth on almost any topic that you might hit us with. We look forward to seeing you at what is always a popular event.
Looking further down the road, Kevin, Jay, Clay Davenport, and I will be in Washington on March 9, but we’ll mention that again as the day draws nearer. Until then, feel free to peruse the events page for all of our tour action.
I hope you’re enjoying Baseball Prospectus 2010, and once again, we all look forward to getting a chance to chat with you face to face. See you in a couple of days.
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