Rates & Barrels - 2022 Starting Pitcher Review

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Eno and DVR take a look back at the Starting Pitcher pool from 2022. Is the group getting better at assessing pitching in general? Does that make it more difficult to wait on pitching going forward? What adjustments (if any) should we make coming away from this season given the relative dead zone for pitching around the back of the Top 200 overall? Rundown 0:54 The Elite of the Elite 6:09 Older Pitchers Holding Skills Longer Than Expected? 11:11 Is the Market Getting Better at Evaluating Pitching? 17:11 Underperforming v. Overperforming the Pitching+ Model 23:40 Finding Another Shane McClanahan in the Pick 100 Range 31:58 More Comfortable Taking Injury Discounts with Pitchers? 38:35 A One-Year Blip or a Bigger Trend? 47:52 Pitching Hits Outside the Top 200 Overall 50:22 Looking for Future Breakouts Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Rates and Barrels. It is Tuesday, October 11th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. Yes, I'm still in someone else's imaginary stream yard background house. Hopefully I don't get kicked out while recording. If you're watching us on YouTube, you can see my microphone looks like a hologram, and my face will disappear depending on where I put my head. It's better than boxes. Better than boxes gives you a pretty good indication as to how much unpacking occurred in this room yesterday.

That would be a full zero. Zero unpacking occurred in this room. I will hopefully do better today with the help of four playoff games all stacked up on the schedule. But on this episode, it is our starting pitcher review from the 2022 season. We're going to look back at what we thought about starting pitching throughout draft season, what kinds of strategies worked, what kinds of strategies didn't. Of course, we'll talk about some players who really surprised us both in good ways and in bad ways and set the table for an

eventual series of starting pitcher previews i like that we do pitcher week in the spring where we have three starting pitcher episodes and we have to try and cram a review into one episode but hey i think we can do it i don't I don't. You're just going to get us talking. We're just going to talk, talk, talk. I had one show already today and a lot of conversation even after the show, so I might run out of gas in about an hour.

We'll see. Coffee also ran out, too, so we'll see if I can find enough energy to go for another hour plus. But what we thought last winter and spring, just a quick refresher. Up top, Garrett Cole, Corbin Burns were consistent first-round picks. They were top 10 picks in most leagues, looking back at the NFBC ADPs from that first week of April before the season began. We saw Walker Buehler sitting on the 1 one-two turn and then Brandon Woodruff and Max Scherzer as easy second rounders. They were sort of the consensus top five. And when you look back at how this season

played out for that group, there really was only one thing that went wrong and it was Bueller having a major injury. Prior to that injury, he wasn't pitching at the same level we'd seen previously. I think it's somewhat reasonable to expect that had he stayed healthy, there was still some positive regression coming, even if he

wasn't quite the guy that he was back in 2021. There were some warning signs. I think you were among the people that pointed them out. He's one of those early round pitchers that I decided to just blow right past those warning signs and have on a few rosters. that I decided to just blow right past those warning signs and have on a few rosters. Yeah, he didn't sit in the right places for me, so I can't claim that as a victory, but I didn't have any shares. I think that I just didn't pick there.

He went at the back end of the beginning of the second round, right? And I just... Kind of early middle round two, usually. Yeah, and I think I either picked ahead of him or behind him, and I just never got him. I don't think that is... I don't think that's a miss. Every year someone's going to get Tommy John. I don't think it's a bad process if you took Walker Bueller

at or around his ADP last year. I'm not saying that to cover my own behind because, again, I got him in that big money auction and never quite rallied to have enough pitching in that league. But if you look at where these guys finished, I think the expectation when you draft a pitcher that early is that you're at least getting a $20 pitcher. And using the Fangraphs auction calculator, the most valuable starter in 2022 for a 15-team league was Justin Verlander by a pretty healthy margin, too. $36 is what he returned. You get a drop down to Sandy Alcantara and Julio Rios and Alec Manoa.

Shohei Otani cracked the top five. But Burns was inside the top ten. Garrett Cole was lower than I expected, but I don't think he was a bust. I don't think he was a reason if you drafted him in the first round and you didn't cash. I don't think Garrett Cole was the reason that happened. No, not at all. You got a lot of value out of him. You got a lot of strikeouts. It's not a terrible ERA.

Woodruff missed a little time with an injury, but pitched well around it, especially in the second half. Even though he came in at $17 on the auction calculator, he did have a replacement when he missed time, so he was closer to a $20 guy when you factor in someone got to stream in that spot. So I don't think much is going to change as far as the early, early pitching goes.

I think you're still going to see four or five starters pretty consistently go in those first 25 to 30 picks. I guess the question would be of that group, aside from Buehler being hurt, does Scherzer get bumped because of the injuries piling up a little bit more I mean the performance was still really good overall when we saw him on the mound this year yeah I mean still a $20 pitcher by the auction calculator had his lowest

ERA of his career so I'll go back to the trough on Max Scherzer I just I think that there's going to be too many young sort of mid-career guys that i'll take ahead of him to make him like right like he's not top five anymore i don't think but he's still probably top 10 yeah so it's not that much of a fall i think if you're thinking about future adp third round he's gonna go from round two to round three it's not a not a massive drop 30 k rate walk rate was under

five percent best era of his career as you said at age 38 what what is happening here well i mean i think generally there's a trend that older pitchers uh have demonstrated some trick to succeeding late in their career it's usually an elite pitch like adam wainwright or a large selection of pitches like max serzer and if it's a proven i i say trick that makes it sound like you know like like a trick pitch or something that won't work what i mean is like they've figured something out, right? And there doesn't necessarily need to be a reason that it will stop working. I mean, just look at Adam Wainwright himself.

I ran the auction calendar for 12 teams, which was my mistake. Huge error. Four people playing 12s and 15s. Yeah, I guess so. But I think of Adam W rainwright as someone who did well this year you know who returned value in 12 teamers he was a minus dollar player but minus minus 250 or something so it's like i i think of him as uh someone who still worked out and so how many and cory kluber was at the same level. So if you're talking at least 15 teams,

was there a player this year that was just too old? Rich Hill was available. It felt like every week in my leagues, even though I picked him up a few times. Minus $5 in 12-teamers. Yeah, but I mean, look, I think we've seen enough from late career Rich Hill to have a reasonable expectation for him as more of a streamer on the roster.

He wasn't drafted on draft day. That's not a surprise. Yeah, I think that I'm not going to – innings is still a concern. So I'll shy away from an older pitcher because of innings concerns, perhaps, but not because of talent concerns. I tried to shop Justin Verlander in a Dynasty League at the end of the season, and nobody really bit. At some point, I was like, this guy could do this for three, four, five more years. I'll just

keep him. I threw this out there on the Athletic Baseball Show last week. It was the Friday episode with Keith Law. I said, Justin Verlander's range of outcomes for next year include retirement because what else does he have left to prove? If the Astros win the World Series, Justin Verlander could just go be a dad

and be done. Everybody would say, awesome career. See you in Cooperstown. Way to like win a Cy on your way out. Right. Or he could win the Cy Young again next year. Right. That's also possible.

So I have come to this point where I no longer doubt players because of age or whatever level of skepticism I used to have about guys either this close to 40 or eventually on the wrong side of 40. It's fading. It's much less concern than I used to. I care about it more. We've seen changes. I care about it more with non elite players.

I care about it more with an okay player who just turned 33 and didn't have a great year. You know, don't need to jump on that train. It's just such a hard thing to clearly define at the borderline. What makes a player elite and capable of aging like this? Was Rich Hill a Cy Young winner? No, no, no, no.

Right. No, I think he's a good example. Justin Verlander is a Cy Young winner. I care a little bit about his age, but not that rich hill had you know two or three pretty good seasons you know your wayne wright example is the one that i think is a little trickier because wayne wright and the velo before he looked done for a while and he at times this year he looked done i mean he got it was down to 87 miles an hour at the end of the season. You could not have told me after what happened from 2016

to 2019 that Adelman Inright was coming back to crank out three different seasons. I know one was pandemic short. Yeah, sub four with a good whip, high volume of Ks because of the innings. The K rate did finally dip some more. He was in the low

20% range for a long time. He got to 17.8% this year. But I think a guy like that is a little bit harder to figure out because the peak was definitely better than Rich Hill and he pitched really well for a long time, but he still was a notch below a Verlander or a Scherzer when he was at his absolute best. There was always more finesse with Wainwright than completely overpowering, dominant stuff, even when he was very good. I'll throw an asterisk in. I don't care as much about age if I know the pitching plus as well. Because Wainwright still

had good stuff plus built on that elite pitch. Rich Hills is down. He does have an elite pitch but the other pitches aren't as good he doesn't have as wide a variety uh and his command is worse so he you know way rain right had like a 104 pitching plus this year and rich hill was under 100 so i do think there's a little bit of difference there one thing thing that occurred to me was I just put up the auction calculator next to the Pitching Plus for this year. And this is

a question I have for you that's sort of larger than just the model. It's not the Pitching Plus show. I think we did fairly well on pitching. As a group. I think as a group, fantasy players are getting better

at pitching analysis. I think back to when I started playing fantasy in 2002 or so, I would literally wait until the 10th round to take a starting pitcher. I mean, that sounds impossible now. But the idea was, and I was pretty simple, I just looked for strikeouts and low walks.

That's literally what I did, you know? And I would fill my staff with great pitchers that maybe came off a bad year with balls in play and that sort of deal. You know what I mean? It worked. I still had that bias in me. Most recently, I've decided, you know what? Not only I think just the investment is higher in pitching across fantasy baseball, so therefore I just need to jump in the water. Imagine waiting until the 10th round now.

That probably wouldn't go well. In fact, I think you'd be- You had a league where you did something similar. Well, yeah. Tyler Malley, SP1. We'll revisit that at some point. He's on the rundown today, so we'll get to that. I think you're

more likely to go the other direction you're more likely to run off all pitchers to start and then find all your hitters after that or even running off four to six starting pitchers and or we'll count the closers as part of that too depending on what kind of league you're in where you might just take six pitchers and then go get bats that to me it sense. It's two-part, which is one part is where there's just more higher investment, so you just got to jump in at some point. It's like if your auction values tell you that there is no $40 player and two $40 players go,

then you better adjust all your top guys by a dollar or two and try to get at least a $38 player. You know what I mean? You got to jump in there. Yeah. And then the second one is i just think we're getting a little bit better at identifying good pitchers and this is becomes a little bit more meaningful i just i think remember what i'm saying uh now when we start to

go into the next clusters because oh yeah you like in order for you to think i can get pitching late and i'll be fine you have to look at these later clusters and be like aha i did that you know and and now and as we do this i'm surprised by just generally as you go down there's fewer big names that turn around fantasy seasons. There's fewer quote-unquote sleepers. The quality of the pitchers generally goes down. You know what I mean? It's like you get what you pay for to some extent.

So that's an overall thought I had when I was looking at this rundown. I was thinking about pitching this year. Yeah, because if you go past the big five, as they were, Shane Bieber was going at the 2-3 turn. There were some slight concerns about his injury from last year that were lingering, but that's where he consistently went. Julio Urias was going in a similar range, maybe because there have always been some innings concerns,

even though I think we'd finally reached the point where those were gone. It was more just a, well, will he stay healthy with year over year full season workloads? That actually ended up being, I think the thing that ended up being the least important. A young pitcher who had not had a ton of innings this year was a good bet. McClanahan, Urias, Cease. Look at the totals on the auction calculator in the innings column. Verlander, 175. Arias, 175. Alcantara, of course, the outlier at 228.

Manoa, 196. Otani, 166. Nobody pitched 200. I think there's three guys who pitched 200 this year. One? One of the top five got to 200. Two of the top 10 because Corbin Burns got to 202. And looks like maybe a couple guys got there

at the very end. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think Nola got there. Bieber, I believe, ended up getting there. Cole got there. And Frambois Valdez. We're barely touching 200.

So basically, you think that like better pitchers get to 175. Yeah, that's sort of the new 200. If better pitchers get to 175, and you have a young pitcher who's thrown 125 the year before, if you can get him at a discount, you get him. Right.

Are you worried about Spencer Strider's innings next year? You shouldn't be relative to the pool because it's not going to be that far below the top options. That's right. That's what I think. And I think he'll have such an excellent strikeout rate that he'll strike out more. He could strike out 20 more than Sandy Alcantara in like 30 few rings. Oh yeah. That's the gift.

So anyway, yeah, this group doesn't look as good as the top five. You know, we're already a step down. But we mostly still got, we were pretty good at all those guys are pretty good except for Giolito who, by the way, Pitching Plus didn't like. Right. Giolito disappointed. Wheeler pitching plus didn't like so right giolito

disappointed wheeler ended up being fine there were concerns about his shoulder those ended up being kind of a non-issue nola was great sandy alcantara was great robbie ray was good ready peralta got hurt that's your one that's your one hurt guy you know every cluster has a hurt guy robbie ray's interesting uh so what i did do this thing where I put together a spreadsheet where I have it sorted by pitching plus, and then I have the auction value after it. There are very few, but there are some guys who have negative values that have high pitching plus values.

Nathan Eovaldi and Hunter Green jump out at me. Jacob Junis, Jose Barrios, Trevor Rogers, you know, Tyler Wells. Okay, so that's a decent amount. Like I just, I went down to, that's the top 40 in pitching plus, i had uh four misses right still pretty good it's actually on the other end that pitching plus does really well there are very very few at the bottom that have positive auction values i can i can do so like starting at 240 like i have 240 pitchers right and i'm going upwards from 240 with with with pitching plus right nothing nothing nothing i'm at 200 so i haven't i haven't hit a positive value yet i'm at uh okay i got to 195 so about 50 pitchers in jose quintana all right well is anybody like really mad at me about that one

did anybody else think quintana was going to be amazing going into the season and it's all command like it's not stuff um so anyway we keep going we keep going uh we keep going 177 cal quantrill now that's a really like sort of top line one that everybody knows. Everybody knows the pitching plus missed on Kyle Quantrill. But we are 75 pitchers in, right? And we've got two guys. I'm going to keep going. Eric Lauer at 164. So we got three, like we're getting close to 100 pitchers.

Okay, 100 pitchers in, we got Jesus Lizardo. So four pitchers in the bottom 100 return positive value. Four. And I think no matter what your model, however good your model is, there are always going to be four pitchers in your top 100 or your bottom 100 that just have a year.

Yeah, I think Quantrill and guys like that, I mean, Martin Perez kind of fits into that group for me. Oh, yeah, maybe I missed him. You can't beat yourself up when a pitcher like that comes out, and instead of pushing the 4 ERA and the 125 whip, they push a low 3 ZRA and a 120 whip they push a low 3's ERA and a 120 whip there's some good fortune that happens

and it's just it's part of the game that's not a go chase those guys next year veteran pitchers that change their mix a little bit maybe I could adjust next year and if I see a guy who's a veteran who has multiple pitches who's just adjusted something little

but I still don't want to go heavy on fab who's a veteran who has multiple pitches who's just adjusted something little then I could but I still don't want to go heavy on Fab maybe next year the next Jose Quintana I put $2 on instead of $1 in Fab that's the adjustment I hope to make I don't know, Cal Quantrill I don't want to over learn from

I want to see what he does next year yeah, I think you could afford to miss on guys like that and still have a lot of success. So I wouldn't sweat having a handful of guys that beat your expectations there. Robbie Ray, however, is on the top end. That's the biggest miss where we were low on. Where the pitching plus number was very good, but the amount returned was poor.

For Robbie Ray, it's the other way. Robbie Ray is the guy who outperformed his pitching plus the most on the top end. That everybody was buying as a top pitcher and pitching plus said, I don't buy it. It's strange. I mean, 371 ERA, 119 whip,

212 strikeouts, and 189 innings. It looks like a very good season, but I'm surprised the stuff was down that much. I think the adjustment there is easy. If a guy has been doing it, like the Shane Bieber adjustment, if the guy has been doing it really for a long time and has a really great strikeout minus walk rate and has a good strikeout minus walk rate in season and had a good strikeout minus walk rate the last three seasons, then why are we looking at a stuff

plus number too hard you know what i mean we're talking about innings and innings and innings stuff plus shines in the first 50 innings of a pitcher's career like let's not use it too hard for robbie ray so we're working on i do have some news on that front that uh looks like we have a partner uh for creating pitching projections using using pitching plus so that should help us with the robbie ray's and shane beaver's right because they got a long track record then you can use your traditional pitching metrics in your pitching projections uh to to gain knowledge about the pitcher and you don't push robbie ray down too far so let's be clear when

it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents electronically? Mm-hmm. The answer is FedEx. Okay. But what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments? How do I find all the... Also FedEx. Impressive.

Is there a regulatory specialist I can ask about? FedEx. Oh. But let's say that... FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions.'s say that. FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks.

No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. experience and lead by example you want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you this is for you the canadian armed forces a message from the government of canada let's check this out there is a good bit of value in what i'll call the sp2 range we're talking

about pick 60 to 75 that was max freed logan webb justin verlander who turned out to be the best pitcher on the board joe musgrove kevin gossman and dylan cease so if you played the i think you can i think you can expand it to the next one. With Alec Leno, Carlos Rodon, Hugh Darvish in there. Yeah. Trevor Rodgers and Charlie Morton. I mean, Rodgers was the biggest bust

of the bunch. Morton kind of fixed it a little bit in the second half. Montas was pitching well before the trade and before... But 1690 is a good place to go shopping, man. I think it still is. You get one guy up top and then get one pitcher out of the top 10 and then get somebody around 80.

That group of pitchers this year is a strong argument in favor of avoiding the pocket aces because you could get one ace that you believed in if you thought that that top five range was really safe you i think generally right so you could get one up in round one or round two take a break from pitching for a little while and then come back in five or six and you'll be just fine you could end up with pocket aces i mean shane mcclanahan at pick 100 kind of points back to what you were talking about with Spencer Strider. I think the reason Shane McClanahan was available there was because there were concerns about his innings. Strider is going to go for more than McClanahan, guaranteed. There will not

be a pick 180. Especially because McClanahan sees just happened. There's going to be some effect from that. Yeah, we're going to see people chasing that a little bit. I understand that that's part of how the pool reacts. Who could go there next year? We're going to do previews, but who could go there next year? Do you think Gallin still goes in that area? Or does he graduate from that? Gallin's going to be up, I bet.

Gallin went in the early part of round four of the draft i'm doing with zola right now pick 51 for gallon okay uh christian javier javier okay i do think christian javier makes some sense as a player that could probably go in the pick 100 range because he didn't do it for a full season as a starter right so the workload's a little bit lighter yeah and just like just like um like spencer strider had being the season not that we were looking at strider this way the role being a little bit uncertain that's still there but people are still going to look at christian javier and say are the astros fully committed to him largely a two-pitch pitcher but him? He's largely a two-pitch pitcher, but he's not a two-pitch pitcher like Strider.

It's a little bit more conventional. Yeah, 148 and two-thirds in the regular season for Christian Javier. So not to put the preview in the review, but are you drafting Javier if he's sitting in that pick 100 range based on what you know about him? Yeah, I like him there.

I'm actually trying to pick the hits that might be available there. I think Hunter Green would be an interesting one. That might be a little bit early on him, but he's a surging stuff plus loves him

Dylan Cease type to me. I wish he'd had a little bit more track record. Dylan Cease showed us a little bit more before he jumped into that group. I don't know. Do you think Logan Webb falls down into that group? Yep. Nick Lodolo is in that range.

Yeah. Right around pick 100 from this draft that I'm in right now. Kirby's a little bit in that range. Yeah, Kirby, that would be an interesting one. I like those names. The guys that are on the rise. It seems a little bit. It seems a little.

I think there is a little part of my, there's a little bit of a nervous feeling in my lower back when you're like, ooh, that's going to be your second starting pitcher is going to be like hunter green or nicola dolo you know i mean where it's like wouldn't you want somebody with more of a track record but i i think that the whole point of these metrics that were coming out of this is to move faster and pick somebody like that instead of you know i think the boring number twos that might be traps, like who's a boring number two that might be a trap. It would have been when healthy last year,

Jose Barrios was brutal. You know, like who's, who's the next, you know, Barrios that's like, you know, Montas,

like, is he going to drop down into that? And what's, and what's, you know, how do you feel about that shoulder injury? Who's another? Tristan McKenzie? Do you think he'll be there?

I think he's an alright pick. Yep, McKenzie will go probably in that 90-105 range. That's where he went in this draft. I'm trying to find a trap for you. Hold on. Who's a trap for you? I think Morton might be a trap for you there. I mean, he is aging.

Mike Clevenger? If somebody thinks he's a number two? You think anyone thinks he's a number two? I don't think so. The K rate was pretty low this year, right? Relative to previous norms. Miles Michaelis? Merrill Kelly?

Merrill Kelly. I think Miles Michaelis and Merlly are would both be kind of trappish there because people would say oh they had such great seasons they're you know they're good veterans blah blah blah but their stuff plus isn't great and they're they're command guys so i think a little something could go wrong and they're just not as good as they were chris bassett somebody you'd be worried about i think yeah i? Yeah, I think I would rather go for like green Lodolo types than Michaelis, Kelly. Bassett's a little bit better than that,

but I think, especially with your number two, I think that there's a lot of like, oh, I should do the safe thing still. And I think there's an illusion of safety. And I think the top 10 or so, there's more safety. And then, you know, I think that safety-ness really just drops off. So, I'm building a team with Todd Zola right now that is waiting on pitching relative to the room. Some of those teams we were talking about, Hunter Green went the first pick around nine.

That was the fifth pitcher drafted by that team in the first position. That's a really good player in that spot. Four starters, one closer on that team. Nick Lodolo, who I mentioned before at the beginning of round eight, was the other end of the draft, team 15.

Another good player. Six pitchers drafted. Lodolo is the fourth starter. It's a one-year. Not a keeper. Just an NFBC satellite league. We'll have moves. We'll have pickups. All that stuff. It's not a DC. Just a typical early

30-rounder. Zola and I had the fourth pick. We took Trey Turner in the first because we were surprised he was there. Shane McClanahan was our first pitcher in round two. Then we went Trout, Cedric Mullins, Will Smith to get a good early catcher.

Devin Williams is our first closer late in round six. Wander in the seventh. Luis Severino in the eighth for our SP2. Back to bats with Jose Abreu in the ninth. Then three pitchers, David Bednar, Luis Garcia, and John Gray clustered up 10 through 12.

There you go. So two closers we like. I think Severino's an SP2 with an up arrow. It's just a question of innings and health. And then Garcia and Gray are kind of just those high volume guys that are steady that you hope just come through for 180 innings. In Gray's case, maybe you're taking a little bit of risk, but that's what waiting on pitching, at least to some degree,

looked like in this particular room. This is full of seasoned, very good players. But you still got a top-ten pitcher, you know? Yeah. We got one for sure and possibly another. Severino has the ceiling of a top 10 pitcher. Just don't know if he has the durability of one. Yeah.

It can be done, but that's what it looks like early, and you take more shots late. We took a shot on Ashby and Ivaldi and Ruanzi Contreras, and we'll take a few shots in reserves, and that league will have fab before the season starts, and a million things will happen between now and then. So that might be a team that has to stream a lot of pitching, but it might be in a position where

the hitting is elite. I'm trying to avoid streaming this here. I think I'm going to build teams both ways again. I think some of these other builds that went more pitching heavy, I do feel slightly better about them than what we're doing overall, even though I like

how we're doing this i think if you gave me another team against the same people i might get a completely different combination of players just to try the other routes i think you could win both ways yeah yeah but i streaming uh what i found especially in the nfbc was that there's so many people focusing on streaming that it becomes more expensive. And then on top of that, if you actually look at the player pool,

in any given week, I thought that the pitchers that were one-star pitchers in the pool were more attractive than the two-star pitchers. Because we're always chasing the two-star pitchers. And I think I could have just done a better job of just picking the one-star pitcher

and pitching him two weeks later. You know what I mean? So I want to focus a little bit more on talent. I want to invest a little bit more in talent, and I want to have a deep bench that's mostly pitchers. So here's a counterintuitive sort of thought, or at least a question, is with pitchers,

are you more comfortable taking the injury discount now than you used to be? Because there was Bieber up at the 2-3 turn, there was Wheeler up early, there were more later on. Verlander coming off Tommy John, I think would qualify. Carlos Rodon stayed healthy I would say

relatively speaking for this season that's a good outcome for him innings wise you look at the discount people were getting on Kershaw for the early part of draft season he settled into the pick 120 range once we got to April but that was after a healthy spring and a lot more information if you were drafting early winter late fall last year Kershaw was a major question mark. And so if you're willing to take a chance on injured pitchers, it might actually pay off. It might pay off more often than not. I mean,

Luis Castillo was the guy who was hurt during draft season, who fell a lot. He went down to 150. Snell is always quote unquote, quote unquote, always hurt. Right. And yet he's not.

Our perception of the amount of times Snell misses might be a little bit off from the amount of time he actually misses. Yeah, we're going to backtest Jeff Zimmerman's injury list projections that we made

and get a sense of how far off we were so some of this is just an anecdotal look at it but you know i do remember that a an executive once told me that the the first thing he learned when he got into baseball was the pitchers are always hurt so maybe uh we see the outward manifestations of that that pain when we see the outward manifestations of that pain when we see ILs. And so we think, oh, that guy's hurt because he's on the IL, and this guy's not hurt because he wasn't on the IL. And maybe that's where we're wrong. Maybe they're all hurt.

They're all hurt to varying degrees. I mean, that's fair. It's a very demanding thing to do to your arm so i think morton's first half at least he you know he was kind of saying to me that that was related to his foot injury because he said at some point car right told him to uh focus more on being in his back leg and he realized that was the leg that had been broken and that you know maybe he'd been favoring it or babying it without really thinking about it jacob junis you know he hurt his hamstring uh during the season and when he came back he thought

everything was fine he didn't he didn't feel any pain in the hamstring but he told me that once they looked at his numbers he realized that he wasn't finishing his pitches and he wasn't landing on that front hamstring the same way. He wasn't getting out on it. He wasn't trusting it as much. And so he had to make an adjustment to be like, no, you have to you had to sort of emphasize that hamstring to kind of to trust it to to get where he used to be. So their injuries are affecting some of the misses that we're getting high and low too because features are pitching through this sort of stuff um and uh and it's affecting the way they're pitching so morton pitched right he pitched so you could say yeah

i don't care about injury risk look at morton he pitched but he was affected by injury. He was worse because of it. What does that mean for next year? Is he a good pick again? I think what's going to happen is Morton's going to get a very steep discount relative to the stuff that he still has and he's going to end up being a good undervalued

guy to draft as your sixth starting pitcher and pitches like a three or a four. I think I would expect a pretty big drop for him. It was a weird group, though, kind of outside the top 100 because that's where Luis Garcia, Tyler Malley, Eduardo Rodriguez, Frambois Valdez, Logan Gilbert. Yeah, but now the wins are lesser.

I think back when I used to wait till that time to pick my roster, I used to get aces. Are you getting aces? Pablo Lopez is the closest. But he really fell off too. I think it was mostly twos. Twos and

threes for the hits. And a few big misses sprinkled in. I think the after pick 150 got a little sloppier than i expected sometimes i feel like i get a lot of value in that range when lance lynn was going there he was already hurt and i don't think he was quite the same guy when he first came back looked a little better and you can even count it's funny to think look back on a season be like lance lynn and assign a value to him because Because that's a free agency pickup.

You know what I mean? That's not... Yeah, long wait. Nobody who drafted him probably ended up with him. So you can't be like, oh, assign that value to him for the season. It's more like, oh, that was a good fab pickup. I think of this group. You've got Lynn.

Ian Anderson was a pretty big bust for a lot of people. Tarek Skubal was good before he got hurt. Zach Gallin was the clear smash pick of this range. If you got Gallin here, he did exceptionally well. Severino's innings were great when he was out there. Just had that lengthy IL stint in the second half. And then it was a lot of mostly mediocre. Ranger Suarez, kind of okay in the second half. Rough first was a lot of mostly mediocre Rangers Suarez, kind of okay in the second

half, rough first half. I think Patrick Sandoval was solid. I think people think Sandoval was better than he was, though. What auction value do you have on that? I'm guessing it's like three to five bucks. It's not. Because he had a really high whip and

kind of a lowish strikeout rate. In 12-teamers, Patrick Sandoval was a replacement pitcher. Yeah, in a 15-teamer, yeah, he was 370. So probably about pitcher 65. Pitcher 65 and you're getting him after the

150th pitch. I mean, that's, yeah, solid. If solid means you got what you paid for, like, yeah, okay. You did okay. Didn't hurt you. Didn't get cut. Wasn't a bust. Yeah.

Returned positive value. But the only real like, oh, you did well, is Zach Allen and Luis Severino, I guess. Yeah, I think Scooble. I'd count Scooble as part of that group too. It was fine when he was out there. Yeah, he's pretty good.

I don't know if that means avoid that group in the future or if that was just a bit of an outlier or if it speaks to what you were saying earlier where the group collectively, the rooms are just getting a bit smarter and the guys that used to go in the 150 to 200 range

are mostly getting pushed up 50 to 75 picks and they're more accurately assessed. Are we steeping ourselves in recency bias getting pushed up 50 to 75 picks and they're just, they're more accurately assessed. Are, are we, are we steeping ourselves in recency bias or is this actually. No, I think it's legitimate step forward.

I think it also makes sense. You have to test whatever your theory is against things outside of the model and against like just common sense. So would it make sense that we're getting better assessing pitching? I think it does. We now have more tools. We we have more and we have also more technology than we ever had hawkeye is like directly looking at the spin on the ball we've been three years into that you know track man gave us spin rates and movement in a way we hadn't gotten before we're like eight years into that so like of course we're gonna get better We got a lot better at knowing how good pitchers were

when we just had PitchFX. So, I think that's sort of outside information that helps the anecdotal make a little more sense. And I think, you know, basically, I don't want to shop that much in there. Like, if this is the group, I want this to be like where i'm shopping for like an sp5 almost you know what i mean if if it's gonna be maybe you get a guy who's above replacement and

if you're really lucky you get a really good pitcher and most of the rest of the pitchers you're gonna drop i mean that's that's that seems weird and pick 150 if i told you that if i was if i came in the draft room and told you pick 150 right before you're about to pick that pitcher hey uh so about 50 likely you cut this guy in a month uh another 25 likely he's eh you know and then maybe you know five to ten percent likely you just got the picture you think you're getting. Because at one point you're like, ooh, Ian Anderson fell to us. Right, especially the 12-teamer. I think your breakdown for a 12-teamer is spot on because those margins are so tough.

Deciding who to wait it out with and who you have to cut. And you'd have been better off cutting a few of these guys sooner than most people probably did self-included yeah so just be realistic about the value of picking a pitcher in the 150s and then um maybe invest a little bit higher up so that you know i bet you could you you switch over real quick to hitters in the 150 range? I can. If you can play a little ditty, that would be great. I bet you might.

I mean, what I'm doing is I think the hitters here are probably better bets. I mean, you're going to get some that are hurt or some that were blah, but like, you know, 150, I'm hoping to get a starting guy that's going to slot into my starting lineup. Well, let's see who we have. It is loading. I am scrolling and we are in that range. Akil Badu. Nope.

Jared Kelnick. Nope. Gleyber Torres. Yep. Matt Chapman. Yep. Marcelo Zuna. No. Ty France I think would be a yeah. Gleyber Torres, yep. Matt Chapman, yep. Marcelo Zuna, no. Ty France, I think would be a yeah. Yohan Mankata, no. Dylan Carlson, no. Brendan Rodgers, no.

Hunter Renfro. Hunter Renfro was a hit in that range for sure. Rodgers, no. Rodgers is the Patrick Sandoval of infielders. So he returned you positive value. You probably didn't cut him. You probably looked at him and said, yeah, he's got half his games in Colorado. Half of these starts are going to be good starts

against weak teams in the division, so I'll keep Patrick Sandoval. I think Patrick Sandoval and Brendan Rodgers are friends in the fantasy universe. Brian Hayes, because of the bags, I think ended up being fine where he took him. Austin Meadows, just a lost season for him for all sorts of reasons so no need to pile on him or anything josh donaldson was a bust nelson cruz was a bust adelise garcia big hit adelise garcia at 170 that's gonna come up probably on the outfield that's your zach gallen so there's

your zach gallen there's your there's your crush there's your Zach Gallin. There's your crush. There's your, whoa, hey, look at this. Is it exactly the same? It's close because you're talking 2020, and that's a top 10 outfielder. No, no, no, no. I mean, is the pool of hitters returning about the same value as the pool of pitchers? I think it's pretty close in this range. It's close. Yeah.

Avi Garcia, big bust. Verdugo was a slight letdown. Probably didn't hurt you. Joey Gallo, that was a bust, right? I mean,

no one's happy with that. Yeah, there's more, there was more hit or bust than I expected. I'll be honest. Yeah, this was a pretty, pretty chunky part of the draft board.

Both, both sides. It's like, you think you're getting more value at $115,000. You're hoping for a lot there and you're probably getting on average less than you expect.

Is it then better to maybe go for high floor there? Is that a player type you should get there? Does that make us better off if we're going for high floor there? I think of Zimmerman being draft plate appearances in innings pitch.

If you did that... That'd be Donaldson, Cruz, Avi Garcia. Those guys are all your oatmeal-y guys that you'd say. They probably returned a couple dollars value. What if you did it on the pitching side? Let me look at the rundown. The oatmeal pitchers there, Adam Wainwright would have been an oatmeal pitcher. Lynn Oatmeal, Ranger Oatmeal, Sandoval would have been oatmeal, Stroman was

oatmeal. I think it might be a good time to go oatmeal, actually. Or, counterpoint, I guess this changed in the later part of draft season but remember when julio rodriguez was going in that range he ended up shooting into the so near top 100 jared kelling there take julio rodriguez take like a if you if there's like a top five good player no i know i know but also if there's a top five prospect that like down there, then yeah, sure, maybe go for it. But I think that we take shots there. We think, I'm going to get my guy.

And maybe you get Zach Gallin. And maybe you get, I forget what the high, what was the high-end batting name that you said? Adelise Garcia. Adelise Garcia. Maybe you get those guys there. But I think it's really interesting. I think it's really interesting

how bad the return is there for everybody. Yeah, Spencer Torkelson, elite prospect in that range. Nope. Didn't happen. I managed to... I took Spencer Torkelson as my shot in the dark

in our listener league, the Brit listener league, and I did manage to win that one. Nicely done. That was a nice battle for you. It actually makes sense because it was a 10-team league, so it's like... Torkelson was on my roster for like a month.

Easy drop if it doesn't work out. I think this will need further detailed study to know for sure if there's a clear player type you should be targeting in this range, but I don't

know. I think the takeaway for me is that I always expect to come away with a really good player there and I don't think I come away with as many good players in that pick 150 to 200 range as I like to believe that's the that's what I'm saying that's what I'm trying to say and I did go shopping in that in that range I didn't get a lot of Severino there. I got a fair amount of Gallen and Marcus Stroman were my most common from that group. I like Stroman too because of the park. I just thought every home start was going to be safe

and a good number of road ones for sure. I thought he'd be a 75% to 80% in my lineup sort of guy with room for more. He ended up being a little bit less than that. I didn't start him every week. He was healthy and he was unhealthy. I think I ended up dropping him

and then maybe picking him back up again. It was not the easiest season to roster him, but still a decent pitcher. Try Tim's new Sweet Chili Chicken loaded wraps and bowls today. Take your taste buds on an exciting new adventure for lunch or dinner with our delicious new Sweet Chili

sauce. It's time for Sweet Chili Chicken. It's time for Tim's at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Going beyond the top 200 just leads me to more names that I'm disappointed in. Look how idiotic we were.

Yeah. If you want to really feel dumb, look at an ADP report from more than one season ago. It's amazing how fast the player pool actually changes. You can know that and yet still go into a season

thinking you have it all figured out. And then you're quickly humbled and reminded that you do not have it all figured out. I want to do this now. How far back are you going to go? Let's see here. No, no, I just want to even do it for last year. We don't want 22 drafts and finish it all right so all drafts not actually i'm not

should i do main event only main event yeah you can do that i mean that's a group of sharp rooms all right so pitchers main event um and average adp over 200 you're saying yep John Gray Alex Cobb Anna Wainwright whoo hey I'm in Joe Ryan Noah Syndergaard Jose Urquidy love it means over now it starts to really fall apart. Shane Boz, Lizardo, Ashby, I'm still into it. Ashby's one of those guys that I had had a few places, had high expectations for. I'm buying him again next year. I'm still in, but I didn't get a good return with that pick. Yeah, I got a bunch of Jurasmas' down here.

I'm still into this, man. pick yeah i got a bunch of jurasmuses down here i'm still into this man i i think i think the play might be uh take a break from 150 to 200 you know what i mean i think it really might be to take hitters then i mean you miss out on lance mccullers you know you miss out on tyler anderson dude i think you start shopping again around 200 anyway it gets really bad again after 250 225 even garrett richards kyle muller max meyer you had to wait forever on you probably didn't yeah that was probably gone after week two george curby at 243 you know you weren't holding on to that until you got him so um yeah i don't know yeah this stuff moves fast, and we've got better tools. I still think I'm going to try to push up.

I'm going to try to push up out of 150 and down out of 150. You know what I mean? Get more starters before 150, and then maybe take a little break. There were some pretty good pitchers that cracked $20 in the league format we were describing earlier that were like $2.75 and later. Tony Gonsolin was real late.

Either a late pick or early fab. Christian Javier, who we talked about earlier a little bit. Tyler Anderson, I think, was pretty affordable in most leagues. Spencer Strider ended up being really good. I started to think about this. Who could be Spencer Strider for next season? There might not be one.

We do this every year. Last year, who's the next Cedric Mullins? You try to take the breakout player and find a pattern and follow it and do it again. Kyle Wright ended up being a really nice undrafted player that finished 26th in pitcher dollar value. So that was a heck of a pickup if you got him in the early part of the season. And it can't be somebody like Hunter Green because that doesn't count.

Spencer Strider had 19 innings. No, we're talking about guys. And Kyle Wright was an up-and-down guy that we had zero expectation for realistically going into the season. Until spring training, at least, there was little reason to believe that he was going to be an impact guy for mixed leagues this year. I don't think we get another Cedric Strider, but my closest, the two names that I want to put forth

are Luis Ortiz and hayden wesnenski because not only luis ortiz the stuff is outstanding the command is not hayden wensnenski is above the above the board all the way through it's a little bit of a elite pitch and maybe good enough other stuff but he's got an elite sweeper. So if you like sweepers, you like Wes Nensky. Wes Nensky. Those are my two names if you want to look for the next Spencer Strider.

I landed on one of the Diamondbacks prospects. Ryan Nelson. I like Ryan Nelson, but it was a guy that didn't debut this year. Brandon F Nelson. I like Ryan Nelson. Yeah. But it was a guy that didn't debut this year. Brandon Fott. I think he's sneaky productive in terms of the strikeouts. Look at what he did at AA and AAA this year.

P-F-A-A-D-T. Brandon Fott. Fifth rounder in 2020. How about 218 strikeouts in 167 innings between double A and triple A? Look at the swing strike rates, all over 16%. Big swinging strike rates. A lot of innings, so you're not even worried about innings next year. For a guy that threw that many, he's fine.

He could be used like any other starter. Didn't debut, so he's not going to get as much attention as Jameson and Nelson probably will as late darts, at least early on. I mean, why not? And, oh, hey, look, the success they had with Gallon. I mean, there was a lot to like about Gallon going back even a couple of years. Brent Strom being the pitching coach there. A couple of the young guys coming up and looking good this year. Brent Strom being the pitching coach there.

A couple of the young guys coming up and looking good this year. I think it's an organization that we're kind of inching toward trusting a little bit when it comes to bringing these guys up. Plus, as has been noted on a few pods recently, Amarillo, the AA affiliate, and Reno are both extreme hitter environments. So you can take that.453 ERA and that.125 whip and double A, and you can just keep on walking. It doesn't bother me. It's relevant to the Dre Jameson situation, right? I'm not worried about the ratios.

I'm looking purely at the skills for Diamondbacks pitchers at double A and triple A. Yeah. I would say with Fott, is he a two-pitch guy? Because that home run rate is high. Fott's not even in the NFBC draft room right now, so you've got to use a placeholder. Might make him even more sneaky if you're doing the early draft.

Might have to use a placeholder and take him before this podcast comes out. Is Harper just bunted against Max Freed. What? Hmm. How'd that turn out? Looks like he's out at first. Oh! Oh, they're reviewing it, I think, because he's throw off the bag.

Relevant news to what we're doing here. Max Freed was down in velo uh only four pitchers lost more velo over the course of the season um and uh oh cassiano's big double and he's down again and his max velo did not go down as much as his sitting Velo, but he's sitting 93-4 today. So that seems a little bit relevant to... A little bit relevant. Not a lot relevant, but a little bit relevant to where you want to put Max Reed next year in your drafts. I want to throw one more name out there.

I don't know if he's the next Strider, but I think people would be curious to know what we make of his 2022. How about D.L. Hall? He debuted in the model, I think I compared him to maybe a left-handed Matt Brash. Yes.

Boatloads of stuff. Highly questionable command. 99.5 location plus. That gives you a glimmer of hope that Brash never got there. What's Brash's on the year? Brash's on the year is 94-4. Mm-hmm.

So right in that sweet spot. Could be. Awesome stuff. I mean, so you're taking flyers on D.L. Hall in the 25th-ish round and later, right? Oh, yeah. That's not a pick wasted, is it? Yeah. Yeah, I like him wasted, is it? Yeah. Yeah, I like him as a draft and hold guy.

I mean, he's going to pitch in the major leagues. And worst case scenario, he's like setup guy, and then maybe Bautista gets hurt, and all of a sudden he's closing. I mean, he has obviously closer stuff. He even got a save this year. I do think D.L. Hall has actual innings risk. We were talking earlier in the show about

people overlooking Shane McClanahan just a little bit because of his past injury history paired with the number of innings he threw last year. Hall was a level below 2021 McClanahan workload-wise.

83. We're talking 94 innings. Oh, I didn't do the major ones. Yeah. 98 actually. All the way down to some I think he tops out at like 130 or something. Something in that range. Which again, not a big problem. If he did get to

130 with an amazing strike out. If he does get to 130, it's good, right? That means he's in the major leagues for most of the year and has a great strikeout rate and probably gave you a lot of value. That's actually Spencer Strider, 131 and two-thirds innings. With a 13-14 K-9? Yeah, no, that's the best-case scenario.

That's pie-in-the-sky dreaming scenario, but just in terms of really good per-inning numbers and we didn't see it in terms of ratios, off the charts good stuff. I think D.L. Hall's a little buried right now and might end up being a good late flyer. Well, the Phillies put a four spot up on

Max Freed. That's different. My coward. Should have taken the Phillies. Disappointed in myself. I had the confidence to do it for one series and then abandoned it.

At least you got him here. Yeah. Yes, in my mind. I could be right there, but on the official record, wrong. You could be more of but on the official record wrong yeah you could be even more of a coward like I was where

on the show I picked the Cardinals but in my daily picks if anybody was paying attention I picked the Phillies in both games and that is why he is the king of walking that maneuver right there game. And that is why he is the king of walking. That maneuver.

Right there. That's the shady stock tip trick, right? Where they mail out two options. Oh yeah, I picked it here and I panned it there. Right, and you just gotta, you know, for the handful of people where you gotta write five in a row, they think you're brilliant because you were just sending every combination.

In my defense, what I'm doing with the picks this year is I'm not looking at the numbers as much. Because I tried. I had a system last year, and I was last. So this year, I'm just sort of looking at the starting pitcher, what I think, and picking. I think you should have given the system more time. Not because of your gut or not being able to.

You'll probably still come to similar conclusions to what the system was spitting out anyway, but you were quick to abandon that system. Yes, I was. Because it's the playoffs, man. Chaos. Best kind. Best kind of chaos.

The natural breaking point is here. A lot of interesting pictures that popped over the course of the year that were available late and they weren't easy to see coming. I'm trying to learn as much as I can from Gonsolin and Nestor Cortez and even Tyler Anderson.

Counts on them quick in FAB, but don't make your draft model about them, I don't think. No, I think the lesson with Tyler Anderson is probably to follow a smart team when they fill out a rotation with someone like that. And this is something we've been doing for a while. I think it's okay to be on board with them.

Andrew Heaney is a good example of it too. The parenting numbers from Heaney were great. And look at the depth charts. You know, be like, oh, this is the Dodgers' fifth starter. Yeah, I'll take him. You know what I mean? Like, Giants' fifth starter. Right? Take him.

Yeah, admittedly a little bit of a Captain Obvious nudge as we go out the door, but don't ignore team context. Smart teams are taking chances on players for a reason. We should try and understand what those reasons are, but even if we don't,

take more educated guesses with these late picks. Sometimes opportunity means as much as quality. Yeah, I'm with you there. I just kind of wrote off Gonsolin because of what happened to him last we saw him in the postseason.

And I didn't know if he'd come all the way back from that shoulder injury and too much about what he might not do versus what he could do. Thought too much about the downside and not enough about the possibility of some things going right for him. So that to me is the lesson with Gonsolin in particular.

With Cal Quantrill, I'm not seeing, we are running an experimental version of the model with a couple improvements. I'm not seeing any improvement on the numbers for Cal Quantrill, but I am for Gonsolin. He actually jumps from below average stuff to above average stuff in our newest model. So we'll see more news on that to come.

Hopefully, for his sake, he's healthy here in the postseason as well. It'll be nice to see him turn things around after that last postseason run he had. That is going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. If you've got questions for a future episode, send them in. It might be a little while before we get to them

just because chaos in the postseason, but Rates and Barrels at TheAthletic.com. You can find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. You can find me at Derek Van Riper. Schedule's a little bit wonky because it's the postseason as well. We had a 3-0 show drop on Monday. We'll have another one go up on Wednesday afternoon,

but usually we'll do an early week episode of Rates and Barrels most weeks here as we continue going through our position review series. That's going to do it for us. We're back with you next week. Thanks for listening.