Rates & Barrels - 2023 Deep Sleepers: Pitchers

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Eno and Al talk about processes for finding deep pitching sleepers, and then they discuss several pitchers whom fantasy managers should tuck away as late-round targets, especially in deeper league. They consider three groups of pitchers who may be undervalued: contact managers, pitchers on lesser teams and rookies. Rundown 1:12 - Eno talks about the projection system he uses to identify sleepers 7:05 - Is contact management actually a thing? 9:14 - Deep sleepers: contact managers (Kyle Bradish, Tyler Wells, Graham Ashcraft, Hayden Wesneski, Nick Martinez) 30:22 - Deep sleepers: starters on lesser teams (Spencer Turnbull, Matthew Boyd, Michael Lorenzen, Shintaro Fujinami, Drew Rucinski, Paul Blackburn, Braxton Garrett, Ryan Yarbrough) 48:56 - Deep sleepers: rookies (Andrew Painter, Luis Ortiz, Ryne Nelson) Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow Al on Twitter: @almelchiorBB e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at $2/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Treat yourself to Tim's new Fudge Brownie Lattes, made with freshly ground espresso beans, frothy steamed or ice-chilled milk, and topped with marble chocolate curls. Now that's music to our ears. Available hot or iced, only at Tim's. Welcome everybody, this is Rates and Barrels. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Al Melchior. I, of course, am here with Eno Saris, and we're going to be talking about some deep sleepers for pitchers on this episode. So there's going to be a lot of good stuff here. And in the process of doing that, we'll talk about Eno's rankings, pitcher rankings, which are on The Athletic, have been up there for a little bit while. A little bit of methodology talk, because there's a new projections system with some different methodology that I think is very cool that we need to talk about. But before we do dip into all of that, just a reminder that the draft kit is up.

The Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit is out there on The Athletic. Get a subscription for just $2 a month for The Athletic. That will get you, of course, that draft kit and everything else. $2 a month for the first year. Just go to theathletic.com slash rates and barrels for that awesome deal. So, you know, let's just get right into it here and talk about some sleepers. Well, actually, before we talk about the sleepers, let's talk about how you pick your sleepers. So I feel like maybe this is a dumb question, but, you know, they say there are no such things.

So I'm just going to go ahead and ask. I mean, do you how much do you use your rankings to identify sleepers? Is it just simply a matter of comparing where you've ranked a pitcher versus where they're coming up in ADP? Well, one fun thing you can do. So we got these new projections out, thanks to Jordan Rosenblum. And the cool thing about them is that they're park adjusted and they include aging. And then they use stuff and pitching plus to modify three key areas,

maybe four. One is strikeout rate and walk rate. It had an effect there where we were better able to project strikeout rate and walk rate. If we had stuff and location there. That's no big surprise. I think that makes a lot of sense.

You're like, oh, he has good stuff. He's putting good locations. Eventually, he'll get a good strikeout rate and good walk rate, right? So that's part of why stuff and location beat strikeout minus walks in small samples, because you're just looking at the very process of their undergoing. samples because you're just looking at the very process of their undergoing. But when we looked at it, stuff and location actually affected the batting average on balls and play projection, which is, I think, kind of new and exciting and interesting and possibly salacious, depending on what cruise you run in.

So I don't want to say that dips is dead. That's going too far. That's the idea that pitchers have no command, no control over what happens in the balls in play. But I will say that our model suggests that they do have some control over balls in play. So that was interesting. And then we also projected barrels.

We projected barrels, which barrels allowed, which is something I is not necessarily normally in my bag of tricks. but it is important if you allow barrels you're allowing power um and it might be a way to better project home runs because what we have found in the past is home runs per nine um become meaningful or stabilize or give you enough sample in three seasons it's like two and a half seasons before you know a pitcher's true talent home run per nine and that is way too long to to wait in fantasy baseball or in any baseball so if we can better project barrels then we can better project home runs and we better have a we have a better sense of what a pitcher's true talent home run ability is so yeah we got this this projected sheet with a projected era that's park adjusted age adjusted and all that um and one thing that you can do pretty easily

is because we also have projected ERA from different types of models on the sheet, you can just do a simple one minus the other in a category and that'll bring up the pictures that the model likes more and less. So you could take, if you're in the google sheet there's projected era in the main model that's the first line uh and you could take a projected era with babbitt neutral uh and just just just do one minus the other and you'd see

where our model diverges the most from other models so you could you could throw in a projected era from fan graphs or steamer and do that same way. But that's an interesting thing that I've done in the past to identify who I like more than the group. I mean, sometimes it gets complicated because of innings. And every place you look has a different innings projection for different players. and every place you look has the different innings projection for different players and that's the one place where i did try to put in jeff zimmerman's like injury percentiles but i feel like that's guesswork yeah i mean that's something that you can adjust for on the fly you can have that that data handing and handy and say well you know i think maybe there's a better

chance that this player stays stays healthy or i just take the gamble that the player stays healthier than, say, Jeff would predict. So that's a whole issue unto itself is how we manage all this data on draft day. But at least it's there. And for me, this is exciting and it's good news slash bad news because the way that I've gone about identifying pitching sleepers, and especially today, we're looking at some of the deeper sleepers. The way that I've gone about that is kind of zigging where the community zags because as you said in the outset of your description of this methodology, that there's a large swath of our community

that doesn't look at BABIP or that doesn't look at a history of barrel rates or something I have looked at a lot the last few years is trends in average exit velocity on flies and liners for pitchers. And there are certain pitchers who do very, very consistently well in that metric and pitchers who do very consistently poorly in that metric. And so on the one, yeah. It's something that is meaningful for batters very like i like average exit velocity on flyers and liners is very meaningful it's it's it's why it's why barrels work exactly so it's just looking at really one component of that obviously doesn't take the launch angle component

into account but that's you know well it does by by saying on flyers on flyers and lin, it does kind of good point. Yeah. And on some of the pictures we're going to talk about, we might get a little bit more granular instead of talking about a ground ball profile, talk about a low grounder profile, because that actually makes a difference, but yeah, not to get too, too nitpicky about it. You know, the, the, the bigger point for me here is that having a model that incorporates these things that I'm going to call contact management. I know there are people who don't like that term, who actually don't even believe it's necessarily a thing. I don't know where you fall. Exactly, the salacious bit.

So based on what you said, I'm guessing you're not going to take too much of an issue with me using that label of contact managers. I mean, I was born in dips like that's that's where i started i started with fip i started on fan graphs i started with the belief that if i just followed strikeouts and walks i would do well and that did serve me well but there's always kind of like the michael pinata types you know where you just and ricky lalasco was another guy where you just had these great strikeout minus walk totals and then huge home run totals and there's been lots of different ways to explain it people have tried to approach it in different ways but um i think that's either a failure of stuff or location and that by better putting a number on stuff and location, we can better figure out the process and figure out what processes lead to these.

You can mess up and give up a homer by locating it middle-middle. That's a failure of location. You can mess up and hang your breaking ball and that could be a failure of location or of shape, you know. And hanging a breaking ball in particular is rough because if you throw your fastball middle-middle, at least it goes 90-something, you know. If you throw your breaking ball middle-middle, now it's 80-something. So, you know, there's all this sort of interaction of stuff and location that could lead to batters hitting you better. Absolutely.

And I like your Pineda example. I also thought of Kyle Hendricks. He was somebody that I just would be drafting a lot every year up until a couple years ago. You're like, wait, when they hit him, they hit him hard. That's been happening more often than not the last couple of seasons. But long stretch for him of being a consistently good, and again, I'm going to use the term contact manager. So providing myself with that segue,

let's start talking about some possible deep sleepers here in the contact management group. So in other words, saying that they may fall under the radar of your fellow league mates because maybe they're just mediocre as a strikeout pitcher, but they're going to help you in ERA and whip and wins perhaps because they're just really good at minimizing the damage that batters do when they connect off of them. So let's start this discussion with Kyle Bradish.

And some of these categorizations, lumping him as a contact manager maybe doesn't make the best sense, but I will put him here because he was a completely different pitcher when he came back from a shoulder injury in the second half last season, put up a 3.28 ERA and he did it. I mean, he would fit this model really well, you know, a 5.0% barrel rate over those second half starts and a 253 Bbit rate now i'm very suspicious about the first of all i should be suspicious about both of these because it's a really small sample but the barrel rate especially he gave up on uh batted fly and line drives 94.1 miles an hour that is that's that's hard contact so i'm not sure he'd be able to sustain that barrel rate,

but maybe he'd be somebody who could be helpful in whip because he can control the damage done on balls in play. Yeah, I think there's some risk if his price inflates that I won't be in as hard. But the model says he has above average stuff. And I think the part of the reason why I'm at all nervous about him is I think the four-seam fastball is not great. And I think that's when he gets into trouble. I think that's the pitch that allows the barrels. That's the pitch that gets him in trouble. And early in the season, he was trying to establish with the

four-seam. And what you can see when you look at his pitching mix is that he really dialed down the foreseam usage and started establishing with the slider. And the slider is his best pitch by any metric. He commands it the best. It's the best stuff. And this is the kind of league now where you can establish with the slider instead of the fastball. He now think uses the four seam more as a whiff pitch high in the zone if he misses with it that's the 94 mile an hour you know line drive fly ball exit velocity there but he now has you know five pitches uh that he can mix it mix around and the idea of establishing with the slider i think is good too because he doesn't command his sinker that well he's he kind of went to the sinker more than the foreseam

but he doesn't command it as well so this idea that if i need a strike i can throw a slider and i can use my foreseam and sinker as action pitch pitches i think is a really interesting one it's a kind of a newer one i mean people call it pitching backwards, but it's a, to, to throw, you know, more sliders or to throw as many sliders as he does, or he did late in the season where he's throwing 30, 40% sliders. That is something new in today's league. And I think it'll serve him well, the plus the ballpark changes served him well. And I think generally there's a lot to like here. Anybody who has like an elite slider that they can locate, I'm already sort of in the tank on them. You know, I'm like, you know, that could be,

like if you need one thing, people used to think you need a great fastball you can locate. I think the new league is, do you have a great slider you can locate? Sure, and then that also increases your potential for whiffs and strikeouts, which we love in fantasy. And I'm going to go to a teammate on the Orioles,

and that's Tyler Wells, who got off to a really nice start last year. And I don't think he has that same strikeout potential, but I think that he fits even more in this mold of somebody who could really be a cheap source of low whip because he does get a lot of those high flies, a lot of easy pop-outs. And so the strikeouts are probably not going to be there. But another concern too is, do you think Wells is going to make a decent number of starts this year? Is there room for him in that rotation? And if he gets that opportunity, do you like his chances to perform well enough to be helpful?

Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, the one kind of soft argument I have, it's like soft science argument I have is that they just sort of nurtured Tyler Wells. They nursed him through a season, right? There was a lot of careful work when it came to his innings in terms of, you know, early on it was 80 pitches and he couldn't, you know, he couldn't go past 80. You know, it was kind of the Tampa Bay Rays approach where, you know, okay, it's going to be four innings. We don't care. We're going to give you 80 pitches and that's it. Then they pushed him a little bit and then it got closer to 85, 100. And, you know, he got a few wins and it looked good, but then shoulders barking and they moved him back off. That fits, I think, pretty well with his injury history in the minors. That's why they were able to get him from the twins.

And so, you know, I just feel like, do you invest all that energy and time and attention to someone and then just say, eh, we got Grayson Rodriguez now, like you're out. So I kind of think maybe he's at worst a guy who's on the roster in the Keegan Aiken role, where he's two to three innings at a time behind Braddish or Kramer or Rodriguez, and that Rodriguez is going to get a similar treatment. Grayson Rodriguez, who this model loves, by the way, spit out a three ERA. You can't put him in your Deep Sleepers episode, but I have to mention that.

But what if they treat Grayson Rodriguez like they treated Tyler Wells last year, ERA. You can't put them in your deep sleepers episode, but I have to mention that. Um, but if, what if they treat Grayson Rodriguez, like they treated Tyler Wells last year and it's 80 pitches per start and it's the Drew Rasmussen, you know, raise thing where he barely gets any wins and, uh, and Tyler Wells comes in and steals all his wins. Like there's still, there's still a situation in which Tyler Wells, um, you know, doesn't start at the beginning of the year, but gives you 125 innings, 150 innings by the end of the season, uh, with good numbers. And, you know, yeah, he doesn't, he didn't strike guys out in his first approach and there's not really the swinging strike rate to suggest, uh, very much better. I would say a little better than 6.6 k per nine like you know 11 11 strike rate suggests better than that and then uh he had good strikeout rates in the minors so i'm wondering

if he's just going to improve the breaking balls right now his changeup is his best secondary and that has a lot to do with why you would have low babbips and uh and low strikeout rates that's a change up thing but he does throw a slider and a curveball he locates them decently well if he if this can take any step forward in terms of stuff this year then he could be a breakout pitcher so i think it's a decent floor pitcher that the team is gonna need to use that the team is going to need to use, that the model likes better. But all that adds up to more deep sleeper than like I need him, like he's not really viable for a 12-teamer. 15-teamer, I would pick him as a bench pick and watch the early season and be like, oh, Kramer's hurt or whatever.

Oh, he's in the rotation. Or, oh, I just got a drop in week one for something else. So I wouldn't invest too heavily because I think you're right. The team context is iffy. Well, and I'm going to branch off away here from draft strategy for just a second. And I think we can talk about sleepers in a fab context too. So let's say you're drafting on the late side. That Orioles rotation picture is crystallizing.

It seems pretty clear that Wells is going to have that, maybe that vulture role that you were talking about. And if that appears to be the case and you talk about monitoring his pitch mix, at what point, how much do you need to see from Tyler Wells or any pitcher for that matter before you say, hey, I think this is somebody who's going to have an opportunity for a more prominent role or to be really great in that limited role where he might have some usefulness? How many do you need to see? Two starts? Four starts? There's one complication. So what if he is in the pen and he starts to air it out, right?

What's going to happen is all his stuff is going to go up. That's just, we know that. Velo goes up when're uh in the pen and velo is a part of stuff you know um the adjustment is uh about five points of stuff so if you uh if he all of a sudden comes out and has like a 120 stuff plus uh you can't be like wow he just he's gonna be awesome he's gonna be you know he's gonna slide right in and be an ace. You have to subtract five. And I think that's probably going to be true on the pitch level too. So if he comes out and is throwing right now, last year he threw a 98 stuff plus slider.

If he comes out this year and throws a 103 or 102 stuff plus slider out of the pen, you may not have seen much. You know what I mean? It may just be the same slider and so and so i would say in that situation um i would just wait and see i would still like him if he if someone got hurt and he slid into the rotation and and you're talking about fab then then i'd still be like someone i'd pounce on but your other question there's sort of more general question about like, how quickly can I react to these things? I mean, especially on fastballs and breaking balls, the number of pitches to stabilization for stuff plus is on the order of like 50 to 60.

Oh, wow. So not, yeah. So for example, I have an example here that's not necessarily a deep sleeper but a little bit higher in the in the in the pecking order joe ryan um was throwing a slider last year that at the end of the year looked like a below average stuff plus for the season right and that's because you're aggregating all the sliders over the course of the season but near the end of the season like in september he started throwing basically a sweeper a new kind of slider and if you look at uh the seasonal the monthly splits in september he threw a uh he threw let me make sure that's september that's yeah in september he threw a slider that had a 106 stuff plus the rest of the season it was a 93 stuff plus okay so now we're talking about a 13 point difference that is significant and we're

talking in september he threw 20 30 58 he threw 100 sliders yeah and uh by the way you remind me to correct myself too because yeah that the key unit of measurement here is number of pitches. I'm saying starts. Setting up a scenario where Wells would make starts. So it does depend on how many he throws in each start and stuff. But in this case for Joe Ryan, I think we knew about three starts in that that slider was different, three starts into September. I mean, you're looking at how different the movement

numbers are and you're looking and you can see that on Brooks so you can see if you look and you see oh the stuff pluses up you go over to Brooks and you're like whoa he just added six inches of horizontal movement like that's that's sort of an aha moment that's a different pitch and how many more do you have to see if the stuff model says it's good and there's this huge

change in movement so you know that and that's tough to do in a uh really regimented way and that's something that you can even get beyond the model in terms of finding uh changes like that quicker the model is just going to look at you know the full season you know so that's why it's important to sort of track differences and if you notice someone's like you know, the full season, you know? So that's why it's important to sort of track differences. And if you notice someone's like, you know, changing something, you know, check, check the recent, uh, changes in the, in the pitches. And so anyway, um, three starts can be, okay. All right. Very good to know. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App.

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For details, visit your local Ford store or Ford.ca. Well, let's talk about a pitcher who I think we could include this category of being a contact manager, but in a very, very different way than Wells or Bradish, and that is the Reds' Graham Ashcraft, ground ball pitcher. What's your thoughts on him heading into the season? Is he worth targeting just a little harder than maybe some others? I've been really making sure to get him in my draft and holds. I think I've had two NFPC draft and holds so far and have him in both. And the reason is that he's in the rotation.

He should be useful no matter what on the road. And there's going to be a lot of weeks in Pittsburgh and cold Wrigley and stuff where I think he could be a good matchups pitcher just without any advancement. There's an interesting thing that happened in the model where we used to count cutters as breaking balls and he didn't look that good in the model. But you watch him and you're like, man, he throws a 97 mile an hour cutter

as his primary pitch. Like, are we sure this model is capturing this correctly um when we threw cutters in with fastballs he took a real big leap and so now he has a 114 stuff plus cutter now and a 113 stuff plus slider i think that's a really interesting combo that we don't see a lot of and so i can't say, you know, I put the rubber stamp of approval and got to rank him 50th, you know, like, he's still in the back end of my 80s back end top 100, especially with that park when we when we park adjusted his model numbers, he went from like a three five, you know, true talent guy to someone who had like a four one ERA. That's a really tough

park. It's a, it's a bottom three park for, for pitchers. But it's also an interesting foundation where what if he did add one more pitch, you know, like what if he added a change up or what if he added a curve, you know, and went cut or slider curve, like he seems like he's good at, at shaping the ball that way at breaking balls. What if, what if that was the ticket forward for him? I have an old article from him where he's talking to Kyle Bodie about, uh, improving his curve ball. So he has a curve ball in there that he doesn't throw anymore. So what if, what if that comes out? So anyway, uh, I just think that anybody with a 97 mile an hour cutter like that deserves attention. And, and that's basically, you know,

sometimes it's as simple as that. Like, you know, I really liked this one pitch this guy has, and he's super cheap. I mean, that's good enough for deep sleep or something. All right.

Well, let's go to a picture that may not at least initially have a rotation spot, but you've got him relatively high in your rankings. And that's Hayden Wisniewski. What is it that you like about him? I think this sort of one pitch thing has uh has been really an undercurrent for all of us right we had uh Wells is the change up you know and that's that'll lead to lower strikeouts but managing contact uh Bradish was the slider uh Ashcraft is the is the cutter and Wisnenski is the sweeper.

And that's what we were talking about with Ryan is this – it's a seam-shifted wake pitch that moves differently in the pitchers than batters expect. And what that actually does is it looks like a slurve, but it stays on one plane. It's slower than a cutter, but it's got that kind of movement. So it's a sideways breaking ball uh that's more effective at like 85 and 86 and 87 um but it's a sideways breaking ball that doesn't drop as much as the batters expect and they swing under it because they see slider spin and then uh doesn't

quite get slider drop so wisnenski's is pretty good. He's got a 114 stuff plus on that and he actually commands it well. That can be a difficulty. Mitch Keller added the sweeper and had to figure out how to command it. What is also exciting about Wesnensky is that he already comes blessed with an above average sinker and an above average cutter. And that's, I think, a combination, sinker, cutter, slider, that we are actually going to see more of. It actually harkens back to, I remember Justin Masterson as a guy that I was like, oh, sinker, slider, like, it can work. It can work.

I promise it can work. Those are ones that have bad platoon splits. But the cutter has the other way platoon splits, and that replaces the changeup in our traditional, you know, fastball slider change up approach to starting pitching. So cutter, slider, sinker is the new fastball slider change up. Matt Brash is trying to put that together. I think we're going to see more and more of this, especially with the sweeper, because the sweeper has big platoon splits. So you've got the sweeper for one side, the cutter for the other side, and you have to have a good fastball.

Wesnenski has those three things. I think he actually threw his changeup and foreseeing too much, given their numbers. If we see a slight alteration in the pitch mix, we could see another step. Even the way he produced when he was on the field is good. And I don't see anything. It's a little bit like Johan Oviedo in Pittsburgh. Johan Oviedo and Adrian Sampson in Chicago are guys that are in the way of more exciting guys.

In Chicago, I'm a little bit more sure that they're just going to be like, hey, we're going to try and win. Adrian Sampson, thank you very much. You're going to be up when someone's hurt, but Hayden Wenceski is a little bit more exciting, so we're going to use this guy. In Pittsburgh, maybe they slow walk it, but Pittsburgh has otherwise this offseason worked as a team that seems to have a little bit of, what is it?

They want to get better. They want to win more games. You don't sign Carlos Santana and G-Man Choi and some of these smaller deals. You don't bring Kutch back on these smaller deals unless you're actually trying to win more games. If I'm in Pittsburgh,

Luis Ortiz wins me more games than Johan Alviedo. That's my theory on Wes Nensky is that his talent will will out and he will make the post the opening day rotation. All right. Well, we will find out in just a few weeks. It is a bit of a it is a bit of a gamble still. So this is why we're still exactly exactly. And why is ADP is still low?

And I'm going to go to one more pitcher here. Wasn't really sure where to categorize Nick Martinez, but I've included him in this category because last season with the Padres, a.276 BABIP rate, although that was really more line drive rate driven, which to me, that's very variable. So I don't know that,

I didn't see anything in the profile that suggested that that's something that Martinez can sustain. I wonder if he fits this pattern, you know, though, of, you know, having the one really good pitch. He went to his change up a lot more last season than when he did back when he was with the Rangers, had a good whiff rate with it. So is that part of the appeal for you with Martinez? I'm checking his fore-seam fastball stuff

over the season because he changed roles and I want to see if his overall numbers are inflated by that. Yeah, I mean when he was a starter his four-seam fastball looked I think maybe below average. It hopped up a little bit game to game. But there were some games in there with 87 stuff plus and 85 stuff plus on the four-seam. So I think as a starter, he's a little bit less exciting.

But I think he's kind of an ideal draft and hold guy because he does have these four or five pitches. I do think his changeup is his best pitch. But the cutter is decent, and in relief, the four seam is enough. As a starter, he's got to really mix his pitches. I don't know. I think in certain matchups, he's good. I don't want to throw him against the Dodgers. But in Arizona, in San Francisco, against those teams in San Diego, there's going to be matchups I like him in for sure.

I kind of think he'll be an interesting guy. There's a line where this might be a little bit NFBC-centric, but I think there's a lot of leagues like this where you've got someone who's a little bit NFBC-centric, but I think there's a lot of leagues like this where you've got someone who's a little bit better than streaming and you don't know whether you should drop him for a streamer or just keep him on your roster

in the weeks you don't want to start him. I think Paul Spohr calls them team streamers. I think Nick Martinez is likely to be someone like that. I don't see something in the profile where I'm like, I want to throw this guy against the Dodgers. Yeah.

Again, not something you would probably say about many deep sleepers anyway. So that's not a knock against him in this company for sure. All right. Well, let's move on to another category of pitchers that could be going later than maybe they should. Maybe because of the teams that they're on. There were three pitchers in each of the Tigers rotation and the A's rotation that were a little bit higher in your rankings than I would have expected and higher than you would

expect based on their current ADP. So let's start with the Tigers pitchers. So we've got Spencer Turnbull, of course, returning from Tommy John surgery, already hitting 94 miles an hour with his fastball. In spring training, we've got Matthew Boyd returning to the Tigers after a brief relief stint with the Mariners last year, and then Mike Lorenzen coming over from the Angels.

So a trio of pitchers that you seem to like. Yeah. The one thing that I struggle with here is that Detroit is changing the park dimensions. And I'm trying to get right here. The first big change, the center field wall is going to 412. And they're lowering the right center field wall and it's it's going to be a little bit more picture friendly the reason I mentioned that is I think that the reason why why those pictures pop in the model a little bit

is the park factor okay oh okay which obviously should change this year although it was interesting because i was reading recently about that change in park dimensions and how uh you know they want to give uh riley green an opportunity to to show off his defensive skills i mean i'm not sure how much that that actually did play into it but uh you know you can certainly factor that in. No, no. I think what you're seeing is Scott Bush coming from – yeah, I mean, they're going to say all sorts of things. I think they had Matt Boyd being like, well, if I give up a deep fly, then it should be a home run or whatever.

He doesn't believe that. But anyway, Scott Bush came over from San Francisco, and I think San Francisco made a lot of the changes too, and they said it was for bullpen, it was for player safety, and the bullpens, you know, were on the field, and someone actually did get hurt, I think it was Mack Williamson, like fell on the bullpen mound and got a concussion against the wall, so there was some aspect of that that was true, however, what the upshot of it was that San Francisco was not quite the extreme pitchers park that it was in the past. And so it makes it a little bit more appealing for hitters.

It makes it a little bit less of a problem for Mitch Hanegar and Michael Conforto to sign these deals to come to San Francisco because it's not quite as extreme as it was in the past. I think most teams are doing this where they're trying to make the park more uniform and more average so that they can attract any sort of sleeper or free agent they want. If you cut yourself off from any sort of population, then that just doesn't want to sign with you like for example imagine trying to scour the free agent market for pitchers as a rockies front office person yeah well they've not had a ton of success in that regard well but it also means that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel because there is no pitcher that is like i remember how often brandon mccarthy would just be talking about something and he would just start talking about how bad colorado is it's just randomly out of the just kept coming up yeah so so like uh i i don't think there's any pitcher that really wants to

sign in colorado unless they add like five million to the package or they're the only team calling yeah yeah no they're not not big buyers i big buyers. I do think you bring up something interesting, too, with Turnbull. You know, hitting 94 when he used to sit 94 is not quite ideal because usually you want to hit about two miles per hour over where you're going to sit. Well, but it's February. But it's February, yes. And I did have one pitcher tell me that, you know,

before he attends spring training, he was somebody that would sit 93-94 during the season, and before he got to spring training, he wanted to sit 88. So that means at the very beginning, you're talking about if he's already hitting 94, that means he's sitting 92, it's totally plausible that he gets another two ticks over the next six yeah i took that as an encouraging sign uh so yeah this early i mean obviously if yeah we're getting into mid to late march that's that's a whole different thing uh so anybody in that rotation and i mean you know i've mentioned three that were ranked pretty high

relative to adp but i mean is there any being that rotation that you don't worry about even with the park changes? No, it's going to be really interesting to track because none of the pitchers are rated very highly. And in fact, the model was a little bit pessimistic on guys that the prospect community liked, like Matt Manning, Casey Mize, the model was a little bit pessimistic on guys that the prospect community liked, like Matt Manning, Casey Mize, and Turek Skubal.

But Skubal, I think, really changed his pitch mix and improved his lot in life. And so I guess I like him the best, or him and Turnbull, I guess I like them the best, coming into this season with the asterisk that health is a question for both, health and health. Right, exactly. And I guess that same asterisk is true for Eduardo Rodriguez. He's the kind of guy that just survives on command in multiple pitches, and I think in a pitcher's park, that's fine. In a hitter's park, it's a little bit less fine.

I don't know if it'll switch all the way to being a hitter's park. But then he had just such an awfully bizarre season last year with being away from the team and just not, we don't even really know what happened. I don't know how many innings to give him either. So I guess I would say I'd like Eduardo Rodriguez, Spencer Turnbull, and Tariq Skubal some, but they might average 120 innings. All right.

Well, let's shift on over to the A's. And of course, a team that I know that you, you know, especially well. And I picked up on a trio of pitchers there too that were ranked higher than I would have expected and of course we're all very interested in what you see with Shintaro Fujinami who has not yet pitched in the majors Drew Rusinski coming back to the majors after some time in the KBO and also I want to talk about Paul Blackburn too because I got a little excited about Blackburn early on last season, a little bit.

He wasn't, I won't say he was a good strikeout pitcher, but Blackburn was always somebody who really had very, very low strikeout whiff rates and just relied almost entirely on ground balls. And he got to a point where he was a decent strikeout pitcher getting more whiffs on at least a couple of his pitches. So, I mean, I guess we could open up to the whole rotation,

but especially with those three rather being ranked a little bit higher than one might expect. Who excites you in this rotation? Fujinami is someone that's interesting to me. I think Blackburn is like the pro, like, I don't know if he is the prototypical, but he's in the family, the Hyunjin Ryu family of, I have five pitches and I do my best when I control all of them and try to surprise you with each of them. each of them. The cutter is really the only one that rates well by Stuff Plus. So he's always going to be dancing around that cutter a little bit. But he does throw six pitch types, according

to Savant. And he had above average command on five of them. So that is his game. And I'm cool with that at home. And I think the 399 projected, pitching plus projected ERA is sort of indicative of that. That's like, that's probably like a 4-3, 4-4 away

and a 3-7 at home. So like I'm going to be trying to, you know, use him at home the most. Fujinami, I think is a wild card. And honestly, the ERA projection in there is just a traditional model one because we don't have stuff in location on him. But I've been watching him for a long time,

and he has stuff. So my guess is he's like a 108 stuff plus 97 location plus guy, which means he's right on the border where the command will make him a reliever that's exactly the story that was told in japan where he was up and down sometimes starter sometimes reliever um always uh some a lot of really bad command years his most recent last two years better command um and i think i think there's something about the american approach that might do well for him so i you know like for example if his teams were always asking him to establish with the fastball uh and uh use the slider and the splitter for action right uh and he doesn't have great fast command. He could easily come over here and they'd be like,

man, you command that slider pretty well. Just throw that in the counts where you need a strike, you know? Use the fastball, which is 99, and this awesome splitter otherwise. So he's the highest stuff guy in that rotation. The rest of the rotation, other than Waldachuk, is mostly command guys.

So I think that's why I'm excited about him. A high stuff guy in a park like that, I think that's worth... And they promised him a spot in the rotation. GM already said, we promised him a spot in the rotation. He's in the top three in the rotation. Everybody else is fighting for four

and five. So that's obviously a big plus. Do you think that he will have 12-team appeal at some point this season? That's a little bit of a wait and see. But the nice thing is that with a model like Stuff Plus, like we'll know fairly early on, two starts in, we're going to know if he does actually have good shape on his fastball and if the Stuff Plus is good. The the location plus takes a little bit longer, but you could do some eye scouting too, where you're just watching the games and seeing how well you think he's

commanding the ball. But he's going to get more chances than that. And he does have the upside. Rusinski, I think, is Blackburn and Irvin-esque, where he's just going to be someone we want to use at certain times. But he was listed in the top three, too. In order to sign Rusinski and Fujinami, the GM had to promise them spots in the rotation. Okay. So that's part of why I'm higher up than the most,

because I'm like, dude, they're in the rotation in Oakland. I'm always interested. I mean, they turned Cole Irvin and Paul Blackburn, people I would not have put on any sleeper list, into couple of pitchers that have pretty much guaranteed rotation spots, and there's probably not enough depth to really have us worry about them getting pushed out, to Marlins rotation. I know some people might actually take issues with the Marlins being categorized here as a lesser team, but there's certainly a lot of pitching depth there.

You've got Uri Perez on the way. You've got Uri Perez on the way. I noticed that on fan graphs that they do not have Braxton Garrett projected in that starting rotation. And I can understand why, but I just thought what he did last year was so impressive. And he really excelled at a couple of indicators that I look at a lot. His CSW, which is called in swinging strikes combined, almost 31%, 30.8%. That's outstanding. And a whiff rate or O swing rate on, on out of zone pitches, 37.0%.

That's also pretty much an elite figure. So does he somehow work on work his way into the rotation or do you maybe just have enough doubts about Trevor Rogers rogers holding down the spot how do you see that playing out for for garrett yeah garrett's a little bit uh in the blackburn school where he's got five pitches that rate by stuff plus between 85 and 96 so uh nothing that's above average but five fairly good ones and it's possible we're missing something on the slider because it's an 84-mile-an-hour slider with two-plane Blake that looks kind of like a baby curve.

So I don't know why it's bad in our model. Sometimes I get frustrated by that where I'm just like, I don't know. I don't know why. So if we're undervaluing his slider, then he does have an out pitch. He has four other pitches he can command, and he pitches in a great park. That's part of why I like him. The other part is Jesus Lizardo does not stay healthy.

Eduardo Cabrera does not really stay healthy. Trevor Rodgers does not really stay healthy. And Johnny Cueto is the other guy. I'm not saying that Johnny Cueto has been really that rough health-wise, but he has not only sort of potential collapse by just being old in terms of quality of pitching, but, you know, just as you get older, the health risk goes up. So I think that's a fairly risky health-wise rotation behind Sandy Alcantara. And I just think Broxton Garrett, like I could easily see him stepping in

before the end of spring training. Because, you know, it's six weeks. What's the likelihood that one of those four guys gets hurt in six weeks? I think is like 70%. Yeah. And do you think that there's some long-term potential there that he would, given that opportunity, he would pitch well enough to withstand some of the promotions that would likely be coming during the season.

Yeah, that's another question. I mean, I do believe in Uri Perez, Sixto Sanchez has a new body. And Sixto Sanchez used to throw a hundred mile an hour sinker with a devastating change. So there's a lot of moving parts there, but you know, they're always trying to trade pitching for hitting and they could just keep that train going really i don't know i don't know that i want braxton garrett if he ends up in new york i will say that fair fair enough there all right well i'm just gonna toss out one more pitcher in this category and it was somebody i

thought of late because i had just written about him in my latest piece for The Athletic on the top 10 players that gained value in the offseason. And I think that the move probably a better chance of pitching more innings with the Royals. Also a pretty good ballpark, at least from the perspective of avoiding home runs. And Yarbrough, for me, could have easily included him in the first category as well because he's been one of the best pitchers, actually, in the majors over the span of his career at limiting hard contact on flies and liners. Hasn't always shown up in his final stats, but I like this situation for Yarbrough. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I think that he does have contact management as a skill. It shows up in good curveball stuff plus and then good cutter location plus. So he locates his cutter real well, works off that cutter with the curve ball and then manage you know a change up and sinker also going to provide you low launch angles if you use them right so that all four of his pitches really are designed to have low launch angles and he doesn't have like 60% ground balls, but he does, I think, limit the barrels. And I believe that is a skill of his.

The one thing is, it's funny to say this about a guy who throws 80 poo, but I think every mile per hour counts. So I would want to know what he was throwing. And it seems ridiculous to say that about somebody like is he throwing 88 is he cracking 90 um but i think he is so much better if he is averaging 88 89 than when he's averaging 87 it's just it's something that the research found too which is that there's a band in the middle and this research was done a long time ago where it found that you know between 90 and uh 93 or so uh there wasn't that much difference between gaining a tick or losing a tick and fastball velocity um because that was kind of the hitting range right that was where that's where batters were training to hit between

90 and 93 and that research found that over 94, 94 and over, the fastball started to perform so much better in terms of swing strikes and home runs allowed and stuff. I believe that that's probably even higher now as 93 and a half or 93.9 was the average fastball in baseball last year. So it might take you know averaging 96 to kind of start getting those results on the fastball but that also suggests that maybe the bottom range is higher so maybe really want to be above 91 or something to really avoid what happened on the other end where home runs go up and whiffs go down um so he's living on the edge at 87 miles an hour. I do love the park. I wonder if I could make him my final pick

or a reserve in AL labor, like a monoleague reserve or a final pick in a draft and hold because he's going to pitch. There's going to be innings. You could manage those innings in that park. You could manage those innings against certain divisional opponents.

And I think you would do well for it. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of wish for his sake. That's about the deepest cut we could get. The guy throwing 87. But to get back to the schedule too, with,

you know, for his sake, I do wish there was the, the unbalanced schedule. Cause that would be a huge upgrade for him getting out of the AL East, but alas. Getting a ton of Cleveland in Kansas City. I would like that.

Yeah, well, he's probably going to get that. So let's go to one final category of pitchers, and that is rookies slash prospects. And Andrew Painter, pretty high on your list, and for obvious reasons. I think the only question is just how much of the season does he pitch in the major leagues but i you know is he somebody that you think would be worth stashing uh in in 12 teamers i i think the answer is yes to 15 team if you think there's uh some controversy there um you know certainly address that but what where where could he be

stashed do you think i think he would be stashed. I think the amount of lease you have changes a lot. What you're doing is you're stashing him and saying he's going to win that fifth starter role. He's up against Bailey Falter, Mick Abel. I don't think he's actually up against that much. But he could do poorly in the spring and not get that role. Or they could decide to manage his service time or his innings or whatever it is and send him down then that's when the real intrigue happens i think it's you know in a 12 team so i'll just get somebody that made the

rotation i'll just you know there's going to be the you know one of the final pitchers on your 12 team squad you just keep moving you know just keep moving 15 team do they send him down and say he's going to be it's just to manage that first run through the rotation and like he'll be back up soon when the fifth starter roll you know like we're just going to skip the fifth starter roll for a little bit and when we need him he'll be back up um then i might try to nurse him on those 15 teamers for just a little bit longer because i mean i do think he has a type upside everyone talks about how hard his fastball is how great his breaking ball is there's some debate about whether or not his fastball has good play and good shape but he's also six foot seven

and releasing from pretty high release points so you add that with the velo and I think it might perform well even if stuff plus doesn't say it's the most amazing pitch so I'm pretty into Painter and I would definitely take him as a speculative ad, especially if I can do it in the bench rounds. All right. And I just want to come back to Luis Ortiz because you did talk about him earlier, but just want to give you an opportunity to expand on him if there's more to say,

because you did talk about the fact that you just, you think the Pirates are getting closer to a, win now is probably not realistic, but more of a winning mode than they've been in in a while. What else is there to like about Ortiz? Yeah. I mean, it's not like Luis Ortiz doesn't have anything to work on. He came up and was really wowed with a 96-mile-an-hour fastball

with unique shape. It's almost a little bit Woodruffian, where it has horizontal and vertical movement um and then he's got a power slider that's ridiculous and a really good change up you mean he's a power pitcher with power stuff but the locations weren't good and so it's easy enough to say hey kid like let's start the year triple a and work on your locations and we'll put vince velasquez and rich hill in this rotation to start the year um and uh and just have a credible veteran uh squad at the major league level while while we wait for you um that's i think probably the most likely

outcome um but uh just like we were just saying with like the florida rich hill this vince velasquez often injured. Royce Contreras lost like two and a half miles an hour on his fastball over the course of last season. So that's a big question mark for me in terms of, was that a harbinger of injury? Like what was going on there? And so I think, and I just like Luis Ortiz a lot more than Johan Oviedo.

Yeah. I think, and I just like Luis Ortiz a lot more than Johan Oviedo. Yeah. So, you know, I think Johan Oviedo is, like I said, the Adrian Sampson, like, plug-and-play role where you keep him while he has options. I don't see much upside beyond that. And then Luis Ortiz is, Roenze Contreras, Luis Ortiz, and, you know, either Burroughs or Priest,

that's our, like, that's when we're going to be really rocking. Rowan Z. Contreras, Luis Ortiz, and either Burroughs or Priest, that's when we're going to be really rocking. Those are our studs in the future. So I don't know. You're right. It's not quite the same as Chicago. I think the Cubs have more pressure on them to start winning games. Their front office group, I think,

has more pressure on them to start winning games. They talk about wanting to win games. They've been making more significant acquisitions. Right, yeah, you don't go out and get Danzy Swanson if you're not trying to make a move exactly. So they're a little bit closer. That's why Winslenski is going to be higher on my list than Ortiz. All right. And Ryan Nelson is somebody that you really like.

I think the Devonbacks are going to be a fun, interesting team this year. What is it about Nelson that you like? Yeah, Nelson is one of the guys that the model likes much more than a BABIP and Stuff Plus neutral model. He's one of the top 40 in terms of the difference between the two models. He's still only projected for a 4.08 PPERA, but to me it's a little bit of a play against Jameson. Dre Jameson has a 4.02 ERA in the model, does not have the same stuff according to the model.

And there's going to be a winner or loser there. And I'm staking my flag with Ryan Nelson. He's got a good foreseeing with great hop to it. I think he could use the secondaries more for more whiffs. He did that in the minors. He had more whiffs in the minors. So I think he's just sneaky good.

Yeah, well, that's interesting what you said too about him not doing as well in the BABIP neutral model because, to me, he could have a very similar statistical profile to Wells, probably with more strikeouts. But, you know, to me, that's a good thing. So I like that call as well. Fastballs with hop are going to have lower BABIPs because they create pop-ups.

Exactly, yeah. So I like that profile and it's, you know, typical of a pitcher that, that typically does get, uh, get underrated. So anybody else, you know, that I, I've left off this list that you think people should definitely be tucking away. Well, I, I gotta save, uh, I gotta save a little leg, uh, for my, um, my deep Sleepers piece that's coming out tomorrow. But we did talk about a lot of them, actually. So I'm going to save the rest of my leg for that.

I guess one guy that I do like that the model just loves the heck out of, but has a bunch of asterisks is dl hall and it's interesting because the first time we ran the model it didn't it didn't love him as much but as we've made improvements he had a 112 projected stuff plus um and despite all the talk of how bad his locations were, his projected location plus is 101. So that's really not that bad. That could be a starting pitcher. This does use his reliever stats, though.

So 112, you've got to take that 5 off, and it's 107. But he's right next to a guy Zach Gallin who has a 107 stuff plus in terms of difference between the models 3-3 projected PPRA like if he's a starter and it's 3-8

or if he's a reliever like Bautista's leg is hurt right what if he just takes reliever like Bautista's leg is hurt right like what if he just takes over as closer so like he has elite stuff and so it's like what's the role and how much am I going to pay to find out what that role is

yeah well there's upside in at least a couple of those potential roles so you know sort of like I was worst cases is just Keegan Aiken again. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll save the rest for your column. So people should be looking for that.

And in the meantime, if you've got questions for us, of course, you can find us on Twitter. Eno is at Eno Saris. I'm at Al Melchior BB. You can also reach out to us by email, ratesandbarrels, of course, and spelled out ratesandbarrels at gmail.com or ask in the comment section

under this video on YouTube. Lots of ways to catch us and also the comments on our columns as well. So next up for us is going to be, I know you're very, very excited about this, you know. Yes, Lars Neupahr, you interviewed him. So that's going to be on the Friday show. We'll have a little discussion as well. So hope you tune in for that. So thanks again, everybody. And we'll see you again on Friday. Thanks for listening.