Think about what you know about hitters and pop-ups. Pop-ups, for all hitters, are bad. They might as well be one-pitch strikeouts. And, you know who doesn’t hit them? Joey Votto. You know that Joey Votto pretty much never hits a pop-up. It’s among the many things that make him extraordinary. Joe Mauer also doesn’t really hit pop-ups. Christian Yelich. Ryan Howard. Shin-Soo Choo. On and on. And there’s Howie Kendrick. Kendrick doesn’t hit pop-ups. But:

@based_ball ICYMI: Howie Kendrick hit a pop-up today. (leading off the 7-th inning).

— Santiago Padilla (@SantiPadillaR) September 25, 2016

That was tweeted at me yesterday. And when I checked the live statistics on FanGraphs, Kendrick had an infield fly. Yet when I check those same statistics today: nothing. It’s as if it’s been erased. Here is the batted ball in question:

Fielded comfortably by the second baseman. We’d all identify that as a pop-up, right? In one sense, then, Kendrick did pop up yesterday. You could say it’s the most important sense. Yet, here’s the leaderboard, when I look at everyone who’s batted at least 500 times over the past three calendar years. This is why this matters. (It doesn’t matter-matter, but, you know.)

Kendrick is the only guy with double zeros. Everyone else has hit at least one infield fly. So, what are we supposed to do, here?

In truth, it’s not that much of a mystery. We get batted-ball data from Baseball Info Solutions, and they have a specific definition of what makes an infield fly. Yesterday, when I checked the live stats, those were getting fed in by MLB Gameday, and that has a different, looser definition. So Kendrick’s fly ball was a pop-up by one definition, but not by both. If you take the BIS data as gospel, Kendrick objectively remains without such a blemish. But you can’t really say Kendrick hasn’t hit a pop-up. He just hasn’t hit one particular kind of pop-up.

Heck, this was just a matter of weeks ago:

The last time I checked, the BIS cutoff was 140 feet. That is, any fly ball hit more than 140 feet wouldn’t count as an infield fly. Kendrick still hasn’t popped up within the infield. But these flies flew only a little beyond 140. And now that we have Statcast, we can try to run some numbers ourselves. We’re still going to have to define things arbitrarily, and Statcast sometimes has trouble picking up batted balls hit at extreme angles, but let’s just see what we can do for 2016. Why don’t we set a cutoff at a launch angle of 60 degrees?

Joey Votto has zero such batted balls. Christian Yelich, zero. Joe Mauer, one. Howie Kendrick, one. Starling Marte, one. I don’t know how many batted balls are missing from the sample, so it’s not authoritative. But, it’s something. No definition of a pop-up is going to be the definition of a pop-up. This is the issue with bucketing. But Howie Kendrick either has a pop-up or two, or he doesn’t. According to the numbers we have here, Kendrick hasn’t popped up once in three years. That’s amazing! It still, no matter what, reflects a legitimate ability of his, but his is a soft zero. There’s no arriving at a one true answer.

Howie Kendrick most certainly doesn’t hit pop-ups. Except for the rare occasions when he does. Welp?