Rates & Barrels - A Strange Second Day of the MLB Season & Tough Hitter Ranks w/Mike Petriello (Live at Other Half Brewing -- Domino Park)

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Eno and DVR are live in Brooklyn for their second show at Other Half Brewing to discuss a slugfest in Game 2 of the Dodgers-Padres series in Korea and a developing story around the swift firing of Shohei Ohtani's interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. Plus, they're joined by Mike Petriello of MLB.com to discuss several groups of tough hitters to rank, and much more before an excellent round of listener questions. Rundown 0:51 A Slugfest in Game 2 Between the Dodgers-Padres; Yamamoto's Debut 3:22 Continuing Struggles for Joe Musgrove 6:43 Dodgers Fire Shohei Ohtani's Interpreter Amidst Illegal Gambling Allegations 11:52 Mike Petriello of MLB.com Joins the Show! 17:02 Tough Rankings: Aging Veterans Still Producing (Paul Goldschmidt, Salvador Perez & George Springer) 22:56 Tough Rankings: Younger Players We Still Believe In (Ke'Bryan Hayes, Jeremy Peña & Andrés Giménez) 34:24 Tough Rankings: Big-Side Platoon Risk (Edouard Julien, Gavin Lux, Colt Keith) 44:22 Mike's Favorite Stats 52:08 Listener Q&A Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper Follow Mike on Twitter: @Mike_Petriello Subscribe to The Athletic for just $2/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Join us on Fridays at 1p ET/10a PT for our livestream episodes w/Trevor May! (next live show: 3/29) https://www.youtube.com/c/ratesbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, grates and barrels, it is Thursday, March 21st. Derek Van Ryper, Inosaris here, and again, special shout out to our friends at Other Half, awesome staff here. Chef Ryan, also Producer Ryan tonight, so shout out to Ryan McLaughlin for helping us in that capacity as well. You know, said be sure to grab a sandwich and a stacked lineup if you haven't done that already. He's also a fancy baseball writer.

He's a writer? Yeah, check out on FanTracks, he does pitching ranks. Not as good as mine. Harsh again, second hander. He does he does pitching ranks not as good as mine Harsh again second a and Ryan love Ryan Well is anything happening in baseball, you know a shellacking Yes, I don't know actually it was just sort of there's a different word for that in no particular order of close

different word for that in no particular order of close a 15 11 game between the Padres and Dodgers offensive explosion is the right word yes but it came in a Yamamoto Musgrove matchup I know it's so sad I will start with Yamamoto 43 pitches one inning five earned 2k is one walk four hits so simple question if you have not drafted yet, are you taking advantage of what is almost certainly going to be a discount on Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the last week or so of drafts? So I did update my ranks today.

If you're a Google Doc user, the new ranks are up there. And I dropped Yamamoto a couple spots. I cannot help it. I'm a human being. But my projections are still so good. And just watching him today, I still think he's a top 10 pitcher. But I think he's like 10th now.

So again, I'm waffling. But that's what I do. But what I'd like to say is when I was watching him today, I thought the stuff was actually sort of crisp. He had 97, 98 on the fastball. He didn't locate well. The curveball was 80. He didn't locate it well. The changeup was 90. He didn't locate it well. The cutter, which made me really nervous, you know, there's been very few pitchers that have done well without a cutter or slider. I have a list and 100 innings last year, the only two pitchers that did it were like Kyle Hendricks

and Jose Barrios. So it's hard to get by without a good slider or cutter. The best pitch, Jason Collette was here earlier, the best pitch that Yamamoto threw today was a 90 mile an hour cutter inside that worked for him. So it wasn't a good outing. I cannot claim to say that that was a good outing, but I would say that I think it was mostly command and probably some jitters, man. Like you just signed a $300 million contract,

he's in Asia, he's getting a lot of attention. I think I'm willing to say he's still a top 10 pitcher. I'm still buying, I'll buy the dip I'm also buying the dip because I just think the stuff is gonna be off the charts good I think all the reasons you mentioned explain why the command wasn't necessarily as crisp today as we're probably gonna see from Yoshinobu Yamamoto throughout the season. I'm Wondering if you're worried about Joe Musgrove because he has not had a good spring. He had the shoulder injury last year. These ongoing struggles seem to carry over into his first start against

the Dodgers. That's a tough matchup for anybody, even a possible SP1 that you trust. So you can't panic just based on the results, but because it's more of the same that we've seen from him in February and March are you making any sort of adjustment with Musgrove or do you still see him as a somewhat undervalued pitcher right now who should come through give you a low 3 ZRA a good whip and plenty of innings over the course of the year? I've got Musgrove in the back end of the top 25 you know the the narrative here for me is just that Padres Camp was really really stressed out this year they had to do six weeks of work and three weeks of work

all the pitchers that were trying to get stretched out didn't get stretched out even Michael King I know I'm ruining your next rundown spot but that's what I do too. Michael King three and a third three earned runs 5k's nobody went deep glass now didn't go deep yeah yeah I Glassnow didn't go deep. Yamamoto didn't go deep. Nobody went deep and I think that this is part of that first week. We just got some news that Kevin Gossman might miss the IL, might actually pitch in the first week, but probably will throw like 60 pitches. And so I think we're gonna see a lot of what we just saw in the first week of the regular season from other pitchers.

Pitchers that are trying to make it back from injury, pitchers that didn't get stretched out all the way, or pitchers that are just raw and, you know, their command isn't quite there in the first month. What we traditionally see from numbers, league wide numbers in the first month of the season is that hitters don't swing and that puts a lot of pressure on the pitchers to command the ball. And the reason hitters don't swing is A, they're trying to get their timing, they're trying

to get into the season, they're trying to see pitches, they're trying to get it all figured out, and it also is in their advantage because I know the pitcher's command isn't quite there yet. I don't know that I have this dialed in but I would say that command probably peaks in like May you know and so there's this interaction between the hitters and pitchers I would just say Musgrove wasn't ready you know and that's that's the way I would explain it he just hadn't gotten all the way ready yet not necessarily his fault. We saw Michael King in relief.

He got the win. So if you get a free peek at this series, you take bad ratios to get the win in this case, right? 5K is over 3 and 1 3rd. Three earned runs allowed. The whip would have been a little over 2, I think, in this outing. So wins are so clustered up in Roto leagues.

I think you just take it. Like you say, sure, I'll leave them in the lineup, and I'll just be happy with that. Yeah, I think you just take it. Like you say, sure, I'll leave him in the lineup and I'll just be happy with that. Yeah, I think it's worth it. Yeah, if you have the choice, retroactively somehow, you can change history, put him in the lineup or not, I take that win. It's one of the only things I don't like about the early start to the season. These games just get treated sort of differently for all of our leagues. Now, Robert Suarez got the last four outs for the Padres for run lead not save situation

But I think we continue to get small indications He will get saves most of the time when the Padres create those opportunities all indications like he got the save today He didn't get a save today. You didn't get a save today. No, oh cuz it was too many 15 11 He pitched the ninth. Yeah, take it finished it. Yeah in a big spot So oh god has anybody had a worse week than Shohei Otani. Yeah. In a big spot. So, oh god. Has anybody had a worse week than Shohei Otani? Yeah. eBay. Yeah, eBay had a worse week. That's right. Yeah, this is, this, this actually, like I don't know if it led directly to this. I slept really poorly last night and I spent like, like time

thinking about this. I don't, I'm not saying that like the story kept me up, but maybe it did. This is crazy and it's not something we wanna hear. It's another sort of one of these like surprise, like oh my God, what if like Shoyutani gets banned, you know, for life, for being a gambler? You know, like what, like all these like certain, this is like one of those like, oh, I hadn't thought like anything't thought, like, anything like this about Joe Otani before.

But my read on the situation, this is only my personal read, there's some slight sourcing to this, but not, not heavy, and I don't want to, like, I'm not saying this is definitive, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a legal advisor in any way, but I do believe in Occam's razor and I think the most simple explanation is that Otani did not know that it was illegal to bail somebody out of their gambling debts. And so I think that explains a lot of the differences in the story. So Ipe, his interpreter got in trouble, I think most of you guys know what the story is, his interpreter got in trouble. I think most of you guys know what the story is. His

interpreter got in trouble, four and a half million in debt. I actually think that's a plausible number knowing that this bookie is looking at that dude and saying, you're best buds with Otani. Like you're good for this four and a half million. I think he lets him rack that number up. I think it's totally believable for a guy to lose that much money, you know, just chasing, chasing, chasing. And I think that Otani believable for a guy to lose that much money, you know, just chasing chasing chasing And I think that Otani stepped in tried to pay the debts said that Basically said he did that and then his lawyers are like, oh by the way, there's a statute that says in California

You are not allowed to basically bail somebody out of their gambling debts. He said oh no, no, no, no He stole it from me. So there's that I think is the simplest explanation of all the stuff that we've heard. And so I don't know if I'm just like trying to make excuses for Atani because you know I want him to keep playing baseball. But that's sort of how I see the case. We'll know a lot more in the weeks ahead. I think the only other question about this is what do you think the chances are that he faces some form of discipline as a result of this? Well, I read the statute and the statute basically says that if you give credit or remove someone's debts for gambling in California, you can be two years in prison or a certain amount of fines and probation.

I just, the way that I can't imagine he's going to prison for this. Like, faced with two years of prison. When there's an or there and you've got like a judge up there who's like, I'm a Dodders fan. Yeah, we're going to go with the fines on this one. And then even if he, so let's say he gets the fines and he's in court and he does this and he's like, yeah, okay, I lied and yeah, I did bail him out and I'll pay the fines. I don't actually think that's a reason to suspend him.

I don't, I'm not, like it's not his own gambling. He did something bad, but it's not, it wouldn't go under like, you know, they have different statues, domestic violence, like there's nothing in place. Maybe they have to put something in place after that, but there's usually the first person who does something like this, then creates the need for this, you know, for the rules in baseball.

Like, this is the first person, the first time something like this has happened. So you know, this is like when the Yankees cheated before the Astros. Does anybody remember that? They got a slap on the wrist. And then the Astros did it again, and they got in trouble. So Otani here is the Yankees, and I think he'll be fine. But it is one of those things, it's like it just awakens those demons. You know, we're like, oh my god.

Oh, Jesus. Like it could, yeah. He could be a bad guy. It is a little bit tied into how little access we have to him. I can tell you that behind the scenes, the Baseball Writers Association has had to fight for any access to Otani. Last year, Otani won the MVP, and he didn't talk to reporters after mid-August. And that's just such a sort of glaring thing in our media coverage that we as a writers association have been trying to gain more access that's in the collective bargaining agreement and should be

there. I don't know how important that is to the story, but it it does mean that like we don't know that much about him. So if there's something like this comes out you're like, oh god he could be a terrible dude. We don't know. We just know he has like a dog and I guess he's married. You know? Like he doesn't let us in. The information comes in bits and pieces and I think we're giving Otani rules kind of a whole new definition with this story so a lot more to come on this I'm sure in the weeks and months ahead but we have a lot of other great stuff on the rundown and we have another good friend here Mike Petriello of MLB.com is here to join us tonight so Mike come on up the stage.

stage. Hi guys. Hey. Yes you can. Yes you can. No video today. Oh yeah. No rules. All right. Let's take our shirts off. No. No. No. No. No. Never mind. Let's stop. It's cold and I am comfortable. Mike, oh we didn't clear this before the show. How do I introduce you? Are you an MLB.com writer or you work at MLB.com? It's not really BAM anymore. You can just say MLB.com. Oh wait there is no BAM? Not really. Oh okay. Statcast connoisseur? Let's go with that. Alright. I like it. Alright Mike. I can't wait for the nerdcast this year, by the way. Thank you. Yes, you, Trevor May, and? Kevin Brown.

Kevin Brown. Who does the Baltimore shows. I'm very much excited about it. Way better than that other thing. What other thing? You know, the K-cast or whatever. That was great. No, it wasn't.

It was terrible. You don't have to say that, though. Yeah, it was great. It was great. Alright, Mike. We'll get you off the hot seat right away. You don't have to say that though. Yeah, it was great. It was great. All right, Mike, we'll get you off the hot seat right away. You don't have to lie. That was pretty odd.

Thank you for that. Give us a sleeper. Give us someone on the hitter side that you think is just undervalued, kind of overlooked right now as we get closer to the start of the season stateside. Yeah. So I regret to inform your podcast listeners this, but I do have notes. I know everybody likes to listen to a guy reading off a piece of paper, but there's so many numbers. I have to tell you about them. Here's what I've got.

Mike Kelly Garcia from Kansas city, but not for the reasons you think. Okay. I've read it because he hits the bar. It's not just because he hits the ball. Most of the reasons that I've read about Garcia, right. Hits the ball hard. Obviously everybody's like, Oh, a guy who hits the ball hard, but you know, maybe he'll hit in the air. Maybe he'll be great. There's a number of things I like about him. First of all, and I know this isn't really fantasy relevant, he's an outstanding defensive third baseman. And I say that because that'll give him some run, right? Like he'll provide value. That makes it fancy relevant. Right. Exactly. So he will play. He stole, I think 20 plus bases last year as well. So it's like right there, there's a floor.

He has to hit absolutely horribly to not be in the lineup. The reason I picked him is because I want to share with you guys a sneak preview of some of the cool bat tracking metrics we're going to have for the upcoming year. Let me preface it with this. When we launch, it will only be 2024 going forward. 2023 is like test data. It's not going to be on this. What I have is like partial season data. But this stuff is so meaningful, so fast, that even though this isn't full season data. Oh, a little like stuff plus, huh? It's something like that. It's going to take like a game or two for swing stuff to be meaningful, which is amazing. So what are you going to give us? I'm going to give it to Spice. This is what I had to write it down, right? So like here's the stuff you know, it doesn't chase, it's the ball hard, right? Like a little Which is amazing. So what are you going to give us? Give us a spice. Here's what I got. This is what I had to write it down.

So here's the stuff you know. He doesn't chase. He hits the ball hard. A little bit of Yandy Diaz, I guess. Yeah, hits the ball on the ground. Here's what I got for you. So his bat speed, slightly below average, but similar to Cody Ballinger. You can still get something out of that.

Here's the one that I think is cool, and I'm going to have to do a little bit of explanation, because these are brand new metrics. If you look at how often, he swings he squares up the ball you'll be shocked to know that Luis Arias is better at this than anybody. Yeah nice. You'll be shocked to know that Stephen Kwan is third best at this of anybody. There you go. Michael Garcia number two. Wow. But the difference is he swings like six miles an hour harder than either of those two guys do. Right?

Now I'm going to give you another one. Intriguing. There's another version of this where it's squared up, but also with a hard swing, which our eyes and quad are terrible at because I never swing hard. Right. Right. So this is going to be called blast.

And this is why I'm looking at this. So he's going to be, at least in this test data, which I hope will be consistent, top 15. So he's 15th. Who's that? Garcia. Yeah. 15th in this hard swing squared up. Oh.

So listen to this. He's 15th, right? So that has like, does that have like, is that like a quantity stat? Like it's like a combination? It's like a combination. Well, you can do it per swing or per contact or whatever you want, right? So listen to these names. He's 15th in baseball where Acuna is first.

13, 14 are Devers and Schwaber. Jesus. 16 and 17, Seiya Suzuki and Manny Machado. All right. Now you might be saying, hey, that all sounds great. Why didn't he produce last year? Yeah. Because he hit the ball on the ground.

But he's 24. I think there's time. Are you going to give us anything about the shape of the swing? Initially no, but in the future, yes. Towards the future. That might tell us a little bit about that last bit. It's like, you know, I think of this as like almost the stuff plus of hitters. It's like the shape and the velocity of their swing. Yes, exactly right. And he might just be super flat. Am I willing to bet on a 24 year old

who hits the ball hard, swings well enough, squares up the ball with great defense, and who can run a little bit? Yeah. That seems like a guy I might be interested in. Yeah. That's good. Can I borrow some of that for my bowl predictions article? No. No. Maybe you'll text me later. So we want to talk about tough rankings because it's that time of year we got to make some decisions and we're putting hitters into a few different buckets. The first one are the aging veterans who are still producing. So

we're talking about guys like Paul Goldschmidt, Salvador Perez, George Springer. Part of the reason why these guys are tough is because you get to a certain point in your career where the projection almost becomes less reliable even though you've got several years of performance. So how do you handle projecting and ranking players like this where they're well past the wrong side of 30 and they could fall off a cliff if there's some rapid skills erosion? Yeah, I mean obviously there's some guys who just do that and they can't be predicted, right?

It just happens at that age and, you know, sucks for all of us, right? But I was thinking about the names that you mentioned and I look at those three guys, I think extremely differently. I'm very confident in Paul Goldschmidt because I think what happened was he had this great year in 2022

and he had a lesser year last year. And people were like, oh, that's it, right? Here's the cliff, he's on the cliff. Right. And it's like, he was a wild over performer in 2022. You look at the underlying metrics, they looked almost identical from year to year. 22, that was the fluke. All right. 23, to me, was not the fluke. There's no reason, and he wasn't bad last year anyway, right? There's no reason. I look at the hard hit, I look at the expected everything. He was still really good. Whereas I look at George Sprenger and I feel like we're kind of into that soft decline

It's already started to happen. The hard hit isn't quite there I mean, you know, the defense isn't quite there and I don't look at those two guys similar What in the goldsmiths older one thing that sticks out for me about George Springer though is I remember Curtis Granderson signed with the Mets and The only time I ever beat Dave Cameron in an argument was that he said it was a bad signing as it was a good signing. And the reason I thought it was a good signing was that Curtis Granderson could help your team in so many different ways. And so he had power, he had discipline, he had speed, he had defense.

Each of those things ages differently, but if you're good at all of them, you can retain enough of some of them. And we saw that with Curtis Grant's and the Mets. Well, he's not a center fielder anymore. Well, he's a decent corner outfielder. Oh, he strikes out a little bit too much. He still hits you some homers. So that's what I see with George Springer is, here's a five tool guy, you know?

And he didn't pull the ball enough last year. He's saying he wants to pull the ball. That's a kind of an anecdotal thing that I like to hear. He's like, oh, well, that was the kind of outlier thing. You didn't pull the ball last year. You want to pull the ball for power this year. I like that. Which is generally, I like that type of player

because what if he only hits 17 homers next year but also still 17 bags and hits 275 and like you know what I mean? Like it's there's all these different ways that he can help you so he's ended up on a lot of my teams. Sal Perez is the one that sticks out for me in a negative way. Oh I'm out. I'm so out. You're out? I'm out. Oh okay I thought you were I mean I thought you were gonna be you were gonna say that you liked it. No. I mean, listen, when was he at his most valuable, right?

When he was hitting 30 homers and providing some kind of defense behind the plate with a strong arm. You know, like this framing was never that great, whatever. But he was always going to do it with like a 300 on base. Well, now he's going to be, I believe, 34 years old this year. The power's fine. It's not great anymore The on base was never good. The catching is really bad now Like the the value he might give you now is maybe he'll be first base eligible

I say might have to play him there because he can't really catch anymore So, you know, you'll still get 20 empty homers out of him works for a catcher is maybe not the worst thing in the world You know, I take him over Austin Barnes or whatever? Sure. Yeah, but like the days of him being a superstar are years ago. Well, he gets lumped in with guys like Wilson Contreras, Sean Murphy, younger players that have better plate skills that you just feel better about. Even though you get that year over year base from Sal, the way he gets there seems unsustainable.

Like that's where the problem comes in. And even though he'll DH play some first base and rack up more playing time than some of the other catchers, it could actually work against you. If the batting average falls apart and you take on that deadweight in the category for 450 or 500 plate appearances, now you've got a problem. And you know, he only struck out 23% of the time last year,

but he led the league in a terrible way and that way is Hitters over 30 in terms of chasing on pitches outside the zone Salvador Perez number one Amazingly over Javier Baez Anybody who's watched Javier Baez is surprised by this fact because Javier Baez is the league leader going back one, two, three, four, five years. Somehow last year, Sal passed him, but the list is bad. Salvador Perez, Javier Baez, Eddie Rosario,

Nick Castellanos, Elias Diaz, Jose Abreu, Tim Anderson, Teasca Hernandez, Trea Turner, a little bit surprising there. Should Jose, well Jose Abreu, I think he's just not the same player he was even two years ago. Like you can see he kind of fell off that cliff. This is not a, this may not be a group that ages well. Trea Turner though has that George Springer aspect where even if these things are not going well,

he is still like the second fastest dude in the big leagues. Ah, something like that. Can he steal more bases or at least try to this year is bad I know yeah you can you can be caught five times and steal 45 instead we would all like that we would love at least the people who drafted him yeah I'm in on Turner still I think we've talked a lot about how the projection systems don't seem like they've fully updated for the run environment from last year. And Turner's like the perfect example

of someone that should run a lot more this year and absolutely could run a lot more this year. Let's get to some tough rankings for this other group. Young players that we've been waiting on forever. They've been on breakout lists for two or three years. Y'all know, wait, wait, wait. Can anybody guess the number one name on this list? Because we talk about this dude all the time. We love this dude. We said his name a million times. Just shout it out if anybody knows.

Cabrion Hayes! There it is. I knew it. Yes, Cabrion Hayes. This is the Cabrion Hayes category. We do have two other names on this list. Right, right. Jeremy Pena, I think, would qualify here. Even Andres Jimenez. We're seeing that up and down. Oh, Victor Robles. Victor Robles?

Who did it? He couldn't say it. He couldn't say it. What year is this? Do you know that Victor Robles is like top 25 in Seeger, which is like a different place? I know what Seeger is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I met Robert Orr for the first time last week.

He's dying. So I'm dying a little because I really like Robert Orr a lot. His work is fantastic. I like Seager a lot, and yet I didn't know that. And that's confusing to me. Well, we can talk about paying him hands instead. I do actually have some shares of Victor Robles and like draft and holds and stuff. He's the starting center fielder. Washington only league. That would be pretty deep. Imagine having a player pool as big as baseball and being me and choosing to die on the hill that Victor Robles would become good some day. And somehow I've taken that mantle from you. And now I'm pimping Victor Robles in very specific cases around PIC 600.

Anyway, so who do you like about the other guys? Tell me something you like about Peña or Jimenez or Hayes. Yeah. As guys who are still young, they're good. Are we going to wait too long? Like are we gonna wait forever or are they gonna do it? So here's where I'm at, let's talk about Hayes for a second. I have probably read all the same research you have, right?

Where it's like, don't- The launch angle's going up. Well not, no, not even that. Don't split the season into halves and pretend that the second half is the only half that matters. Oh, right. Because like you get sucked into that

and it usually doesn't last. And yet, his second hat was awesome. He slugged like 5'30". His launch angle this spring is 11, which is better than it used to be. We're not on everything. There's only the track days. Yeah, that's right. I like supporting evidence, right? So we've always known he's hit the ball hard, yes. We've always known he's a great defender. None of that's changed, right? And then you look at him last year, right? A little closer, yeah. Oh, sorry's changed. And then you look at him last year, right? A little closer, yeah. Oh sorry, yes. And then you look at him last year and the launch angle went up like month by month by month. And we were just talking about this article in the Athletic where it's like they maybe had internal discord about hitting coaches,

but didn't John Nunnally worked with him and Stonks went up? And is still working with him. Even though he doesn't work with the pirates anymore. I've always wanted him to succeed, and I feel like I know you shouldn't just buy in the second half stuff, and yet I am. I am totally buying into this. This is the year, man. It's gonna happen.

Because it ticked enough boxes on the process side to give you the story you wanted for it to be meaningful. Oh, exactly right. I look for what supports what I want to believe. But listen, we know he hit the ball hard. That's not new. Right. We know he's going to have a great floor because of the glove. And if he's actually hitting the ball in the air, like just a little bit, doesn't need to be like 2017, Ryan Schimpf here, right?

I'm going to give a little love to Jeremy Pena. We do this thing where like we had the first year and you're like, Oh, he's young. He's a rookie He had this 250 year. We took 22 homers 11 stolen bases. Then he went crazy in the postseason What did he do that postseason? he had 345 with four homers and looked like he was an all-star and like you know and then he got overdrafted last year because He wasn't the guy that hit 345 in the postseason.

He was the guy that hit 250 in the regular season. I, I'm I don't know if I'm faith casting, wish casting some growth, but we're talking about a guy who's in his peak season. 26 is your peak year and we're talking about a guy who's seen some ups and downs and he's been better than average at making contact, better than average at raw power. He has 11.6 max TV, better than average in terms of foot speed. He's better than average in a lot of places and these are the kind of guys that I like to bet on. I like to take a shot. It's almost like this spring, it's like a young springer. it's like you have five different things or like a pitcher who has five pitches and

you're like well one of those pitches could get better well for spring for paying you I feel like any one of the five things that he does in the sort of an average or above average way could get better this year and that just gives him an opportunity to break out you know and so I don't know if there's another player Parker Meadows sort of hits me the same way, where he doesn't have elite skills anywhere, but he's a young player who has a job, who's pretty good at everything,

you know, those are the kind of guys I like to bet on. So my thing, the lies I like to tell myself, which would be the name of my biography someday, I like to go through a player's last two or three seasons, cherry pick the best skills and say, what if they did all of those things at once? Even though most of the time it's not possible because you have to give something to get something

in a lot of ways as a hitter, right? If you're selling out for more power, your K rate might go up. There's all these adjustments and things you can make, but I look at Panya and say, what if we get the 2023 K-rate and walk rate with the 2022 barrel rate, which was close to 10%, and he hits the ball in the air a lot more like he did in 2022. Suddenly we could have that breakout. Suddenly we could have a 25 plus

home run season with the speed that Eno mentioned. And I think defense matters so much more in fantasy than people have given it credit for for a long time because it drives playing time Playing times huge. It's everything in our game It's not gonna be platoon everyday guy in a good lineup with those skills when you Frankenstein it together You can tell yourself a great story about Jeremy Pena. Can I can I make a comp for him? That's gonna make no sense whatsoever Oh, yes Jordan Montgomery. No Now I understand how insane that sounds because he's like an older pitcher and not a young shortstop. This is pitcher group 7 all over again. I don't mean to pick on him because I know he's unsigned or whatever. The

reason I say that is because you kind of alluded to this already you know he was fine in his rookie year, painted, and then he went off in the playoffs and everybody like wildly overrated That's kind of what's happened with Montgomery. I think a little bit a good pitcher he got on a real heater in the postseason and now You know, there's trying to get a deal of like an ace pitcher, which I think is gonna be tough for him That was nothing to do with pain you other than that's just kind of what I think about him Is that you you've got his page up right in front of me or you did a second ago.

His weighted on base in each of his two years is almost identical like almost identical. It was a little bit of a different shape. Oh wow look at that 309 Woba 310 Woba. A little more you know a little more power the first year. A little more on base. Grounders were up this last year. He's a young guy so like there's still more of his story to be told and I agree with you about the good defense raising the floor right because you, you're gonna get that playing time. But it's like, what would we think about him if not for that post-season run in 2022?

We would think of him as the 14th best shortstop in baseball. Would I even have put him in this list? Well, right, exactly. So I'm still actually being biased by that, even though I'm trying to be aware of that bias. I'm not trying to like, you know, back on him. He's a good player, right? But it's like, do I think of him as a top 15 shortstop right now? I can tell you this, we did our top 10

lists for the position at MLB Network. And he wasn't on it. He wasn't on my top 15. Andres Jimenez is kind of interesting too though, because he got to more power than expected in 2022. And the follow-up last year wasn't quite as good, but it wasn't that far behind. He lost about 48 points of batting average. OBP came down, but the K-ray didn't balloon. Another kind of similar thing that Peña and Jimenez have, they both chase a lot of pitches outside the zone.

I'm just curious when you look at Jimenez, another guy that's a great defender who gets max volume of playing time, like which guy is he? Is he the 2023 guy, the 2022 guy, or are those just the upper and lower bounds of his normal variance? Well, so that's right. And I was really interested when I looked at Jimenez, and without really like knowing his numbers, I was just like, oh yeah, this guy was great in 2022 and took a big step

back in 2023. And it was kind of a disaster. And then I looked at it as like, oh, he was like a league average hitter. He had like a 97 or whatever WRC was. I was like, that's not actually that bad. I know it was like 135 or 140 the year before. So was it worse? Yes.

But it's like that's his bad year, an average hitter and a tremendous defender. Like, no, that's really good. So I kind of look at these things. I know this is the boring answer. It's the same one I'll give you about Cody Bellinger. He's in the middle. It's right. He's not the terrible guy for Bellinger Cody Bellinger. He's in the middle. He's not the terrible guy for Bellinger for two years ago. He's not the great guy last year.

Same thing for Jimenez. I really do go back to reliability and floors. Excellent defense. He'll steal you some bases. You know he's got the power potential in there. He hasn't had a ton of years to really figure out who he is. He's gonna be, I believe, an above-average hitter who is not as good as 2022, who will play every day because of the defense. Some homers and some stolen bases. Like that's a really solid player. Yeah, I don't know how much... One thing I wonder about him is what the real power is, what the true talent power is. And I think what I settle on is it's a little bit below average. Like I think it'll be like, you know, 12 to 15. He's

got projections up to 19, and I don't know that I buy that. When you look at his max EV, it's under 110. His barrel rate peaked at 6%. I just kind of see him as a guy who's going to hit you 15 homers. That's going to be good with what you get. But the batting average, I guess, is just going to fluctuate. He had a 3533 BABIP last year,.289 this year. It's like, you know. Hard hit rate dropped a lot. That is actually concerning. Yeah, that's true. He went from 38% to 27%. That's a big deal.

Yeah, I'm looking at CJ Abrams now as a younger player with similar skills now, but because of the age difference, I'm wondering if there's still another level with CJ Abrams. Well, I was going to point to some research that Robert Orr had done But now that you've talked me out of it because he likes Victor Robles Robert already did a great job on this right? So I mean obviously Abrams was about 47 of 50 I think for stolen bases, which is unbelievable. That's another man who should run more 47 of 50 and he's young. I think people forget how young he is and you know he made some real improvements. 23 years old. Yeah improvements in plate

discipline down the stretch to kind of go back to what I said to before should you just buy in second half? No. Can you buy into... But the players improve over time and like you can sometimes see that in the rolling graphs. Yeah. So are you more likely to believe in a second half improvement from someone with Abrams amount of time in the big leagues or Hayes? Or does it not matter? Hayes. Because I've seen him at the ball hard for a couple years now. Okay. It's about an adjustment that I'm hoping we've already seen him make. But the flip side is that Hayes has been here for so long and he hasn't really, it's been taking him so long to make that adjustment that maybe he's just never gonna make it. His first year is 2020. Could he be the next JD Martinez except the guy who's an excellent third baseman?

That's a similar idea, is that JD Martinez hit the ball hard but didn't have any loft and you know, studied hitters and figured out how to loft the ball. Right, I'm in. I'm cautiously in. Yeah, I like that profile. We got one more bucket of players. The platoon risks, the big side platoon risk, guys that do really, really well against righties and often sit against lefties or they struggle against them. Edward Julian is probably the best example of this, just destroys righties.

He is a bad, Edward Julian. I heard there was a great song written about this. I've been butchering his name because in German J's are one way, in French they're another way. His name is Edward Julian. I can do this. They call him Eddie. I can do it. Eddie. Eddie. He's from Quebec. Yes, but he went to Auburn. Oh, yeah. Eddie from Auburn. Very surprising.

That is quite the trek. But like, you know, the analyst in us says, you know, small sample versus lefties is not useful. Don't look at it. Heavily regress it. But you know teams work faster than we do. I don't know what they're looking at. Are they looking at process stats against lefties? What are they looking at? How are they making swing pass to some extent? Swing pass, yeah. It depends on who we're talking about, right?

So like not to scoop the names you've got written down here, Derek, but like Julian, Gavin Lux, and Colt Keith, right? I don't care about this for Colt Keith. He will play and if he hits, then he'll continue. They're not gonna like straight up Platoon a guy that young. I also kind of don't care about it for Gavin Lux. Except that they're SF North. What? So what's his face? Scott? Harris? Harris came out and said like East. East? North? Giants East? Giants North East?

Giants East. Yay. Good radio. I'll get you a map. Anyway, give me a map out please. He said that basically everyone on the roster is gonna play and we use all 14 hitters and like I mean it's it sucks as a fan I think but if they do the Giants thing they Keith and Meadows one of them is going to sit. You think that if Keith gets off to a red hot start they're just going to sit him against the lefties. This isn't Jock Peterson who is like biologically incapable of hitting a left-handed pitcher. This is a young guy who's not even made his major league debut yet. They will play him. Gavin Lux I feel differently about just because I don't buy him as a hitter.

Forget the platoon part. I know better than to question. You can't be kidding me. What? Yeah. I've been pooping on him for a while. Yeah. It's like you and I should both know better than to question the Dodgers that much and think we're smarter than them. But he was like, untouchable. We will not trade him for a friendly door.

We will not trade him for Jose Ramirez we both know have him we both just like public machinations no we both know what's gonna happen he's gonna be playing in front of Derek in Wisconsin later this year back in his own state do you know how many people have brought that yes a lot a lot in the last two days I've heard it like four or five times. Well, he's from Kenosha, so he'll love playing in Wisconsin. No. People from Kenosha often leave.

I mean, I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I'm not from Kenosha. No, Lux does not hit the ball hard. And I'm predisposed to not liking guys that don't hit the ball hard. When is he produced? That's my question. Even in his quote-unquote good year, he was like 8 or 9% above average. And I just don't see it. And I know this year people have been saying, well in spring he's hitting 300.

Do you know how many extra base hits he had this spring? As same as many as the three of us combined. Zero? It is zero. Wow. That is an empty 280-300 battery. you don't want to make a living on singles singles are the worst thing to project singles the worst thing to live by I don't know how our eyes does it he's a unicorn I think singles are something that we all you know I was talking to Andrew Perpetuo about this we

were talking about Andrew Perpetuo recently and he was just talking about modeling singles suck so bad because of every rock on that infield. Every little nook and cranny on that infield. A single finds those things. The double doesn't. The double flies by at all. The double's like, I don't care. I don't care what your infield is like.

Is it hard? Is it soft? I don't care. So we can model doubles well. We cannot model singles. He's not going to last the season with the Dodgers. Mookie will play second base. They will trade for a shortstop.

I know Adamas is the obvious guy, but they'll come up with something. Well, you changed your handle, didn't you? What was your old handle? What? What was your old handle on Twitter? Like 10 years ago? Yeah.

Mike Sosa's tragic illness. Yeah, yeah. I still have the picture. That's most of my picture. That's your old picture. Yeah. No, still the picture, currently. He's a Dodgers guy saying no Lux.

See, I think I see more of an Andres Jimenez type hitter. Gavin Lux does walk. He hits the ball hard about 40% of the time. At least the last two seasons he was healthy. There's a little something there to work with. I think if he becomes a good fantasy player, it's with his legs. It's becoming more of a base dealer. We haven't seen him... With his surgically repaired leg. He looks fast. He looks good this spring. He doesn't have the playing time guarantee.

He meant as his problem at or near the best defensive player in his position. Lux may not be able to play even second base. That's a big problem. And all of these teams, which is which which teams are most equipped to platoon these guys, it seems like the Dodgers and then maybe the Twins. Who is Julian fighting? Kyle Farmer is the platoon guy. Let me ask you a question.

Oh, that's not very exciting. No, I have a question for you guys. You're more fantasy players than I am. We can't find more time for Julian over Farmer? Do you look at it as a good thing or a bad thing to be platooned? The bad thing is you lose playing time. The good thing is you're putting positions to succeed. Your game per numbers are better. Right, exactly. Which side of that do you want? I Play in enough weekly leagues where the playing time matters more though in a weekly league. I need those plate appearances I need those chances for RBI's I need that bulk right in a daily league

I can I'm more likely to be able to be like take that guy out. I have a I have jock Peterson on the bench Well, that's that's it I want to talk Peterson who slugs 500 because it's only face on righties Yeah, jock peterson is like, but you know what we do. What do we see in game one with Jason Hayward? You can buy Jason Howard and say oh, he's facing a righty. I'm gonna put him in it's gonna be good He went 0 for 1 with one RBI and got replaced in the 6 by KK Hernandez, right? So you can lose playing time even in the games you start. Yes So I'm gonna take the guy who plays all the time. Sometimes this makes me

predisposed to liking righties because righties come up. My kids are in Little League. We see one lefty all year and so righties come up. They see righty, righty, righty. If you're a righty and you're getting platoon, something has gone wrong. Yeah that's not gonna end well. Right? Like you're on your way out, I feel like. So righty's coming up, I'm like, yeah, this guy's probably gonna play all the time because he's probably demonstrated that he can hit righties to get here too.

He's seen way more of them. So I get a little nervous with the young lefty. I think if you ranked him by talent, what do you rank him by talent? Julian first, Keith second, Lux last, I guess. Yes. I believe in Julian's bat. I believe in Keith's bat too, but I think Julian's at least shown it a little bit in the major leagues. I think there's a defensive problem with him, so you have to kind of worry about that.

But also there's performance levels far above what Lux has done, so you want to get the bat into the lineup somewhere. You'll figure that part out for what he does against righties because he's like 50% better than the average against righties. It's absurd. His platoon split was so big last year in like you know 45 plate appearances that I can't possibly believe it will still last like that. How good is Colt Keith? I don't know. He hasn't played in the Major League yet. I thought you had new tools, minor league tools. Well, we do minor league tools. Listen, if we were just looking at AAA stat lines, then Gavin Lux would be a superstar.

Oh, that's why I started the light. Yeah, because I feel so badly. I'm trashing on Gavin Lux so much. I don't know how good Cole Keep is yet. Well, he has some fun stuff on the minor leagues. 110 max EV in the minor leagues. No, but he hit it today. He hit a 110 again? He tied it exactly. His max EV from last year in AAA, he did it today with a home run 110.1. I'll take that. I don't know if it was off a great pitch or not. Where do you get nervous? Like 108, I get nervous. It's a round average. Under that, your power cap is like 10, 12. There's only so much you can do if you can't hit the ball one away. There is an interesting idea though. I talked to Zach Gelof about this where I said, and I can't believe he didn't punch me or Tyler Soderstrom didn't punch me.

Wouldn't be the first player to try to punch you. But I was saying to him, well, you don't hit the ball as hard as Tyler Soderstrom. And I was like, it was demonstrably true. Tyler Soderstrom's max EV is like two miles an hour harder than yours. And he's like, yeah, I know. Why would he be mad about that? Well, because I'm saying someone else hits the ball harder

than them on his own team. And then I said, well, because I'm saying someone else hits the ball harder than among his own team. And then I said, well, your barrel rates are higher. Are you getting to your power better? And his explanation was, if I try to hit a ball 118 or whatever, I'm going to take a crazy swing and it's not going to be good for me. I'd rather get to 106s regularly. I just don't know that we've proven this as an ability yet in the sort of analytical community. You know what I mean?

Like this idea that like some people are better at getting to their raw power, don't have as good of raw power. I guess what we know is that Max CV is not as predictive as barrels, right? I rarely look at Max CV, to be honest. You don't look at it? I don't look at it as barrels right I rarely look at max EV to be honest I don't look at it that I like looking at it for young players because I think it describes their raw power their power potential I guess

that's true just to see like hey can you do it or not it's like a binary yes no yeah can you throw 98 or not right exactly that's mildly interesting but it's not on like the top five list of things I look at what are your favorite stats well there's gonna be a We have a podcast named Rates and Barrels. Oh is that right? Yeah. So we're a fan of stats so what are your favorite stats? Well I mean listen obviously I look at all the stack as stuff right you know expected everything, hard hit rates, all that stuff. Stuff plus is a pretty good metric. Tell me a little bit about the expected

metrics. Sometimes they get poot on. They get poot on. Yeah like oh expected batting average doesn't have spray angles. It doesn't have spray angles. And oh they're not as predictive as they should be. That's right. But you still like them. But you like them. Yes I do like them. But why do you like them? Because they're yours. They're your children. No. They're running around with snot out there and then they're just like you know. That's my. No! They're running around with snot out there, then they're just like, you know. That's my actual children. They're beautiful with the snot and everything. I don't, they're not the end all be all, right?

They don't absolutely predict the future, like that's a hundred percent true. Well, none of them, except for Stuffloss. No, but how do you use them? Like what's the best use case? How should we apply X-TATS? I look at them a lot for pitchers actually, right? Because like, you know, people love to talk about about ERA as though that's what the guy was. I read an article today I won't say from where that argued that Jordan Montgomery was a

better pitcher than Aronola. No. No. Because the ERA was lower over the last two years. And I was like I don't think... ERA is like one of the worst predictors of future ERA. So for example Blake Snell, not to like rehash Blake Snell's entire free agency here, he's not gonna have a 225 ERA next year. Doesn't mean he's gonna be worse. You might actually pitch better, right? True talent wise. Right, ERA just doesn't tell you that much. So to the point about like what do I look at with the expected stats? I really like it for pitchers, especially for relievers. I don't want to know that a reliever had a 180 ERA. I don't actually care about that very much. You know, I want to know

like what happened under the hood. I think that's a little more interesting. I do know that that Kyle Bodie, when he went to the the Reds, created an XERA that I think was very similar to yours or maybe even was the same and that was one of his key performance indicators for the player development process. For pitchers. Yes. So he had XERA, K-BB and Stuff Plus were his main performance indicators that he wanted everybody to be sort of coaching towards and excelling at and that's how he judged himself and the team. So there's that and then you know very soon we'll have a lot of bat path and swing speed stuff and that I think that'll be interesting

and I can't tell you if it's predictive because I just don't have years of data but we'll all learn that together and I'm very excited to see what happens. I mean I'm really excited and one thing that I know that teams have that we don't have in the public space are bat path grades and they've been working on it. I know that teams themselves are not sure how much to believe them yet and how good they are and I know that teams have made draft picks based on bat path grades. We heard Dave Roberts talking about this a couple years ago. Yes. It was I can't remember who the pitcher was. Was he talking about matchups? He wants to do certain matchups.

Everybody was like, why did you bring an Austin Barnes to pinch it instead of Chris Taylor? Because Austin Barnes can't hit. And he's basically like, well Taylor has more of an uppercut bat path and Burns is a little flatter. I can't remember who the pitcher was, but it was someone with like a high, it was like a high IVB kind of fastball. And didn't work anyway, because like Austin Barnes can't hit. But that doesn't mean the ideas were wrong. Good process, just didn't have the right players. So we're going to take some questions here in just a few minutes. If you have questions for us,

you can make your way over to this concrete pillar. There's a laptop back there. You see Chef Ryan, he's got a microphone, so you can head over that way. Mike, before we let you go, is there anybody you're looking at as a possible bus, someone that might be just overvalued in fantasy circles or even

just advanced stat circles heading into the season. Is it too obvious to talk about Cody Bellinger? I feel like it might be. I was actually going to poke you a little bit earlier when you were talking about that. So did you hear Boris today, had a quote about this? No. So someone who was asking, oh, Travis Satchek, a friend of the program. And Travis Satchek was talking to Scott Boris about Cody Ballinger particularly and he said the

advanced metrics didn't support Ballinger and Scott Boris, he's an advocate for Cody Ballinger so like obviously. So he said that basically the reduced hard hit rate was all on purpose in two strike counts and that his hard hit rate in non-two strike counts is about the same and so therefore it was a good change and is something we should celebrate and give money to. Yeah. Does he share in that money? Yeah. Just checking.

That's a certain percentage. Gotcha. You look very skeptical of that explanation. Yeah, well, I mean, I think you have to be, right? Listen, I have no doubt that Ballinger made a two-strike approach change. I think that's true. I do think that's true, and that's cool. And I think from like an aesthetic point of view, great. That's wonderful. But if you actually break it down, he hit almost like Luis Arriz in two straight counts. Do you think that's sustainable? Do you think he's actually Luis Arriz? And as a pitcher, you're like, oh, this dude is doing something different. I'm going to go further out of the zone or throw him sideways instead of fastballs or fastballs instead of

sliders, whatever it is. So you think about all the conversations about Bellinger. And they kind of come down to two things, right? Very good year after two disaster years. And outperformed expected stats and hard hit rate and all that. The thing we never actually talk about that I feel like we need to talk about more is he got destroyed by high velocity

last year. And if you look at the end of the season, in September, he saw more fastballs than he did in any other month. And he had like a 3.10 on base or whatever it was and I think this year teams are gonna challenge him with high velocity and say prove it prove you can do it but I think the largest mistake people are making is saying there are two Cody Ballingers there's the pretty good guy we saw last year or the total wreck we saw the year two years before and not to be boring

he's in between he's not he's not 30% better than average, he's 10% better than average. Everything is lukewarm milk. But that's like exactly what the projections spin out. Like 10% better than the average player. It's an easy story to believe. Even though the two strikes story is more fun, it's actually fun if that's true and real and sustainable. It's such a small sample, it seems impossible for it to be sustainable. I looked into this and I can't remember exactly how I worded it, but guys who had a hard hit rate

or hard hit percentile of like 10th percent and under and also slugged 500 in here. There's only really two ways you can do it. One is if you're Jose Altuve and you've like really perfected not only speed but pulling the ball into the Crawford boxes. The other way you can do it is if you played in a homer ball season like Zach Kozart or Eduardo Escobar. That's like the only way you can do it and I looked at everybody who outperformed their expected slugging by

whatever I said a hundred points or whatever like he did. No one ever was able to maintain that the next year with one exception and this man did it twice, Didi Gregorius in the short porch and that's it. Pulling it to the short porch. It can't be done and again I don't think he's gonna be bad he's not gonna be the guy who essentially got non tendered he's gonna be pretty good player I just don't think it's gonna be what he was last year. A lot of it comes back to health too he's healthy after years of dealing with that shoulder issue the approach has changed he chases a little more outside the zone than he did at his peak. So he is a different player than when he broke into the league. Many

players are. It's been seven years now. Yeah, he's gonna be a good player. I would want him on my team. I just don't look at him as like a six or seven war player. That's not who he is. Yeah, you're probably paying a premium to get him. Mike, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Mike. Is anybody in the back going to ask a question? We got questions. You might be rewarded with merch. Come on, Jesse. So I have two questions again. Okay. Okay, so one, every couple of years there's like a long article about, oh, so city fields suppresses exit velocity and we don't really know why. Are we any closer to

getting the answer to that? And second question is, have you been following all of the turmoil in the players union and what percentage percentage you have on JD Davis being essentially the Franz Ferdinand of the next CBA wars? Well again, like last time, I'm going to answer the second question first. I think that there was a major misstep that we all overlooked in that CBA negotiation, they wanted to have arbitration figures guaranteed so badly that when the owner said, sure, we'll guarantee all numbers and arbitration that don't go to the arbitrator, that don't go to that meeting in particular, that's fine.

That obviously creates an incentive that's horrible that the giants use in this case, which is that anybody who's close and you're not sure you want to pay them at all, the veterans who are in their last year of arbitration, you're going to do crap like show up on the last day and be like, we're going to give you two million. I mean, like, what? And then like be like, we're going to give you two million. I mean like, what? And then like, okay, we're going to the trial. We're giving you zero. And so I got texts from a couple players about that immediately thinking that was a big deal.

And as soon as I saw that, I knew that this was going to lead to something. So I would bet that that rule in particular is sort of indicative for players that like y'all thought you got us a good deal. In some ways they did. The minimum came up high. There were some really good parts of that deal. But this particular rule is one that's like pretty obviously going to be misused or abused by teams to keep that like sort of middle tier free agent in his last year of arbitration to push that guy down. Davis lost five million dollars. Yeah and that's like his chances of getting that back are almost zero.

Because now he joins in with all the other mid-tier free agents who we know have been slaughtered for a while. Even when he gets into free agency, he's going to be looking for a one in five or a one in four or something like that. So it affects all of his future earnings as well. So yeah, that was not a good moment. I think that, I think JD Davis, I think that was what caused it. And they were like, you as a leader of the MLPPA should have been able to sort of price this out and think about all the implications that is going forward and you didn't and you failed us so that was and not to answer both but the

first one, Citi Field I think there was actually storage issues ball storage issues and I have some sourcing on this and I can't, I never could push it to the point where I had enough confirmation so I couldn't write a story that was definitive. But I think there was a ball storage issue that caused some exit velocity issues. But one thing I can say for baseball is there has been a real effort to customize and, that's not the right word, standardize like all of the ball storage issues so that we don't get these these things in the future. That's why the humidor's are in all these parks. That's why. So that was, I think that's solved some of them, but we do have some

unexplored mysteries of parks. I think it's weird that some parks augment strikeouts and some parks augment walks. Those things are part of just how hitters perceive the park, the batter's eye, some things like the LED lighting. So if you think about a ball lit in LED lighting, it's going to be lit from one direction, you know, maybe the different places. Oh, somebody was talking about the refresh rate on lights. Someone sent me an email on this. The refresh rate on lights is a certain number. I saw this with my kids.

I was talking to the photographer on my kid's little league team, and he said the refresh rates on the lights at our little league stadium were such that if he takes a like one of those like quick pictures like we I don't know how to I'm not a photographer but you like take like five pictures in a row it's like and you see he takes five pictures in a row like three of them look like they're like vampires and red light and then two of them are well lit so that's the refresh light so that could have something to do with how the ball, the seams, you're looking at the seams and the refresh light, refresh rates has changed. So there are all these kind of like little mysteries in parks that are kind of cool, kind of not, let me know if I was saying analysts, I'd be like annoyed

by them. It's like, you know, Perpetuo talking about modeling singles. Well, yeah, but like some parks have retractable roofs on them. So like, you know, in Milwaukee you've got these panels and depending on the time of day, the way the batter's eye look changes a ton. More than it would in other parks. Day and night, most parks. Based on whether the roof is open or not? Yeah, because roof open, roof closed on a day game is gonna make a difference. Sun, no sun, you know, the light, the effects of the lighting would be greater with the roof closed than with the roof open, kind of obvious. You have these quirks that would make that park play a few

different ways and then the combined park factor number doesn't necessarily split all those conditions out. And we've talked about park factors by month changing too with cold temperatures certain places. Cleveland is a big deal. Cleveland is a pictures park for the first month or two and then it's a hitters park. The refresh rate on the lighting is something I never thought was possible. I never thought that was a thing. I don't know who would tell me lights, you know, stop bugging me So, you know along those lines the refresh rate lighting sounds super wild and fantastic and I can't wait for that article

What is the one stat metric factor? Something that you know is affecting baseball or players or something that nobody else really believes you yet that you're just like willing to die on that hill for? Yeah, it's a bad path grade I was talking about. I know that teams are doing this and the interesting thing about a bad path grade is a lot like stuff plus. I want to have a bad path grade eventually that will be like stuff Plus because what we know from Stuff Plus is shape matters, right? We did the like

radar gun thing for a long time. We're like, ooh 98, 98. We love that, right? And then we realized, oh there's some guys who throw 98 who get clobbered and there's some guys who throw 98 or 93 and get strikeouts. So shape matters. So you know, we're in a little bit of a stage now where they're even driveline is like bat speed is everything and so there's like definitely people out there like we got to trade for bat speed It's like the 98 moment for bats and it's like how fast your back go how fast your back go? But there's gonna be people who are like no, but it matters matters if you can debate right now in circles is does it matter can you vary your swing can you have a flat swing up here and then a steep swing here or is it better to have

a steep swing up here. Julian does this he keeps his hands above the ball no matter where the ball is pitched and so he can have a high and Vato does this. Vato gets to the plate and practices this weird swing and the reason he practices this weird swing is he's trying to keep his bat with a high vertical bat angle even up here but then there are other players that kind of come flat through here I think Schwaber and others have tried to figure out a flat swing up here and then have their old steep swing.

So bat path is like variability, is vertical bat angle everything. There's a guy who, DK Willardson wrote a book on quantitative hitting. He thinks vertical bat angle is everything. Other people think he's a crack, he's over-skis. So that's the debate that's going on in front offices that has not at all come out to us because we don't necessarily have the tools to study it. And I've seen some good stuff on Fangrass and some other places where scouts will tell you

a little bit what they see in terms of bad angle, but I wanna have those numbers so we can start talking about the shape of a swing and not just the speed of it. Yeah I think we may have talked about it back when the story came out but Tess Taruskin from Fangraphs wrote about Zach Galoff swing being really flat there's some really good images in that story if you go check it out it's kind of geared to hit high fastballs and the question is can he make adjustments if he gets a lot of breaking balls, low off speed stuff that's not the way he was attacked this year when he went off.

I just thought it was really interesting. I don't have an answer necessarily but I think Galov is good but I want to see how much of an adjustment phase he has to go through this year. Yeah, it seems like the more extreme you get in one shape of swing or the other, the more you can demolish a certain type of pitch and you're more open to like Schwaber and early Bellinger were like, you know, they demolish low pitches and then they got found out, you know, and who are the best pitchers? Who are the best hitters? Does Manni Machado have the ability to like be flat and be steep? You know, so that's I think a new era in baseball. Teams are ahead of us.

I'm just trying to keep up. Hi there. You know less of a, not a statistical question, but I'm a Cardinals fan. From a personnel perspective or someone closer to the game, like what does it take or how easy is it for a team to say or an organization, we want to develop pitching better, we want to develop hitting better or whatever, and then hire that in or what's the timeline?

Because they've been talking about like building like a pitching lab for the Cardinals for like four years now and it's still not there. And obviously our pitching sucks and like our young pitching sucks and like our young hitting is fantastic. And like they've been great on developing. Ryan's a Cardinals fan. Yeah so like but like is that it seems like it's easier said than done like how long does it take to hire that in what kind of resources needs to be

behind that to turn that around? You know the stories that I have are the Blue Jays wanted to change their pitching development around. They've built the lab, they've invested the thing. I don't know if they're any better. So the Blue Jays are three or four years into it. Maybe we're going to see some results with Bowden Francis this year, but you know, it takes a while.

Who's another team? The Mets have really tried to improve their player development. They've hired some of the best people that I could think to hire. I came up with a list of like, yeah, Jeff Albert, that's on the hitting side, but like Ben Hanson is their backhand mechanist, Eric Yeagers. They have hired a lot of really good pitching minds. We'll see. What you kind of want to see is Tyler Megill be the best version of himself. You kind of want to see Tekoa Roby be the best version of himself.

You want to see them kind of hit on the higher ones. And you want to see a big one of the thing is relievers. You want to see them start to turn out some relievers that are unexpected because that's pitching development is like, get me a half grade better than you expected make this 45 of 50 in scouting parlance make this 50 of 55 but I would say if I just guessed you know I have this story coming out tomorrow about how many coaches you have we basically doubled coaching staffs across baseball in the last 10 years and so if you used to have eight coaches in the major leagues, now you have 15, 16, and that's happened in the minor leagues all the way down. And so if you

think, okay, you got six levels, you got 15 coaches, you got a pitching director, you know, so like it's a lot of coaches and you have to evaluate them right, you have to fire them. One of the reasons John Daniels got fired from the Rangers was he didn't fire enough people. So it's because they're people you know, and you hired them for a reason, and it's hard to fire people, and it sucks, and like, you know, they may not have other skills.

But that's not your concern. Your concern is your organization and making your organization and making organization better So that takes I think you know conservatively you might have a hundred coaches in the minor leagues And so think about just evaluating hundred coaches giving them time to know how good they are And then firing enough of them and hiring good enough ones And you can't just come in and fire a hundred coaches and hire a hundred you won't find a hundred So even guys who take over organizations,

you'll find that they don't fire big in the first year. They start firing in second years and third years. So I would say four years, and I would say the Cardinals are in year one. I know they've been talking. I know they've been talking, I know they've been talking but they didn't do anything. I like I heard people telling me I don't think the machines are plugged in. They were Cardinals pitchers or were like yeah

they're over there but I've never seen anyone look at them. So you got to get different players in the organization too. It takes time to draft and scout and draft the players that you're even going to put through the system. Your analytics, your pitching development will inform what you do in terms of scouting. Like, oh we know we can scout up vertical bat, we can sort of IBB. So then let's coach people, let's buy people who are here and get them here. So it's a whole organizational thing that does involve scouts. I think one of the things that's a pretty problem with the Royals is that the Royals are drafting differently than they're developing. Yeah, so they've done this really recently where they've drafted a lot of sinker

guys. Daniel Lynch, you know, and there's other examples. Brady Singer. Brady Singer. J.K. Kowar, I think, you know, too. They've drafted a lot of guys that were sinker guys and thought we can give them a four seamer, try to give them a four seamer, and now both their passports just suck. And that's been the description of a lot of the Royals pitchers. And I don't know if it's the development side problem or the scouts. So it's a lot of people you have to evaluate. I think it takes four or five years.

I would say the Mets are on year two or three. The Blue Jays should be on year three or four, but we're not really seeing the results yet, so maybe it hasn't gone well. And that's the other thing, like maybe you could do all these things and not be doing it well. And then be like, oh, we're year five and let's start over. S1 05302 Are you more excited about the Mets building a pitching lab with David Stearns being in charge of the front office there knowing that in Milwaukee they had it up and running. They had the machine in place.

What did they do? They turned all of their guys into good pitchers. Cutters. I mean cutters but also just yeah a of like, you know, you know inconsistent command coach that up And another one the way to sort of bellwether for you If you're evaluating your own organization is and this is something I heard from internally from somebody on Toronto was like I'm not sure that people come here and get better So that's a big one is like watch free agents that come to your organization. Do they get better? Like is Lancelin gonna be any better this year? Yeah, I hope so too. No, I don't I don't care but I don't think so

You can hope but that's that's the sort of thing is like, you know people go certain places and get coached up and get better and That's what if you have a good analytic system, a good player development system, that will filter all the way up to the major leagues. So I have a nine part question. So. Who would you drop?

I have, I have 10 keepers. Here are the 15 I'm looking at. Walks up with roster, hands it over. It's dollars and draft picks. So I'm a lifelong Marlans fan, right? Their opening day for Charlie Huff. There are like five of you. Exactly.

No one else here. You're like, anybody else? No. Who's booing the Marlins? Yeah. They're probably a Mets fan. They're like the most like bitter because we beat them last year. But alas. I think it's actually an underrated stadium just as a side. It's such a nice. It's kind of fun. It's like there's some good food there. It's okay. Well, I'm a vegetarian. So it's not. Oh, well, no, no, no. But it feels like a water park a little bit.

It does. Well, they used to have the Home Run sculpture. I'm not sure it's a good thing. Do you remember the Home Run sculpture? I know. We're going to bring that back. Where is it right now? Where is the Home Run sculpture? Derek Jeter, dude.

Bending. We got to get Bending's to bring it back. Well, Bending's is the, you know, Kim was a good GM, right? All right, so what was the question? So that wasn't even a question. We develop lefty pitchers really well, at least from someone who's in the US, who sees like, Lizzardo, right?

I know you hate Lizzardo. So Lizzardo, Puck, we develop lefty pitchers really well. And Ryan Weathers, let's talk about him for a second right and then the two things I know about the way that the Marlins work that's what my question the way that they sort of analyze and develop is that they're fascinated with unique fastball shapes they are the team and unique shapes in general so they are the team that had Alessia Hernandez I think that makes sense it's like that the way that had Alessio Hernandez. I think that makes sense. That's the weirdest, his breaking ball

is the weirdest pitch in baseball maybe, or one of them. But they like unique shapes. The other thing is they love power change-ups. I think the power change-up from Edward Cabrera and Sandy Alcantara and, is there another one? Those are the first two, Uries, sort of? Yeah,RIs. Yeah, I think those are similar power change-ups But they're similar in terms of like they go 90 they go brr You know like they're similar

Switches so I think those are those are things that could help you as a lefty Unique fastball shape and a power change-up are things that could help you as a lefty I wonder also there's probably some park factors that help lefties in that park. If you, one thing that sucks is if you're a Cincinnati pitcher, you just, when you get there, it's gonna suck. You're gonna be like, ah, I'm doing my best and every hit just seems to be a homer. You know what I mean? Whereas if you're a Marlins pitcher, you get up there and you're like, well, ball and play, I can shake it off,

it'll be all right, probably wasn't a homer. So the park factor, is that dramatic, you're saying? Well, Bill Petty did a study where he found that hitting friendly parks underperformed their projections hitting friendly parks underperformed their projections in terms of winning percentage as organizations and I don't know if they think that's just the Rockies like pulling the whole thing the Rockies over here banging in the wall over and over again like you know number 11 but you know what it what it is is I think you know I think it's actually a secondary effect of the psychological part of pitching.

If you're a young pitcher, you're trying to put all your pitches together, it is super stressful, and it's just better if not every mistake gets clobbered. Not every mistake turns into the worst outcome. So I think that's part of the pitching factor that is Marlins. I'm trying to give them some credit for other things I don't think it's just that but they they do some things well And then they also put their pitchers in a good park to make it work My

Jazz is going 3040 this year, so ah 3040 nice, so he's healthy all year. I guess I'm okay with that. Yeah I wanted to ask a question about Justin Steele. Justin Steele. Well done. No my question is like he is an extremely confusing pitcher. He's had a lot of success the last two years, but for various different reasons, he really only has two pitches. But like over the course of different parts of different seasons, he either avoids contact, pitches to it, strikes guys out or doesn't. He's just a guy that I really like, but I can't figure out.

I'm wondering what you think about him for 2024. I'm wondering what you think about him for the future. Just any thoughts about Justin Steele? And I don't want to do a nine-part question but a bonus question in there is completely off-topic. What do you think about Juan Soto with the Yankees this year in terms of projections? You've said some interesting things about Steele. I think you might be right. So one of our Cubs writers, Sahad of Sharma, wrote a story about Justin Steel and what he does with his fastball and his slider, he manipulates the shape of those two pitches to basically have four or five or six pitches. And I think his ability to limit damage is

actually a result of that. It's like a fine command point basically. So his two-pitch arsenal gets downgraded in the eyes of a lot of analysts because it's, oh it looks so simple, how is this gonna keep working? Especially without premium Velo. But it's a feel thing. And the only thing that I thought was kind of interesting that countered that was well on a Friday live stream of Trevor May, Trevor said if you lose feel, that goes away really quickly. So this elevated ability to sustain a sub-3 ERA and really good results could be gone Trevor said if you lose feel that goes away really quickly. So this elevated ability to sustain a sub-3 ERA and really good results could be gone in a

second. If you lose the feel for one pitch you're actually losing the feel for three because you manipulate one to make three if that makes any sense. So I've come around to find this. Just think about the difference. Like just think about you're like oh I have a slider but it's three sliders and you're like okay tell me about it. He's like well one goes like this and one goes like this and one goes like this You're like, oh and you can do that all the time I remember talking to Shane Green about his like eight sliders and I was like, can you really keep them separate? He's like, oh, yeah, and then years later. We're like not really

Yeah, you know, so so I think it's one of those years that can lead to a pop-up great year I think in other years you'll see the contact rates go up. You'll see the dab If go up you see the home run rates go up. You'll see some of the more of those bad stretches I I don't think he's a bad pitcher. I Someone who has that feel can in any given year give you near Cy Young But I don't actually think he'll win a Cy Young because you'll always have those moments where he loses one of those sliders, loses a little bit of touch. And I would be very fascinated to have him come out with a pitch that's very different. I like this idea of difference between pitches. I haven't been able to prove it, but I do

think that the distance between the centers of your clusters of your pitches matters to some extent. That if you have like this one big blob and then he kind of has a slider blob with different movements that That is too fine of a thing to ask someone to do and it's a little bit easier to ask someone to be like I have a thing that does you know, I'm doing movement plots here I have a thing that does this and then I have a thing that does this and I have a thing That does that you know like that's that's like okay. Those are very different if you lose one It's like it does this instead of this you know that's okay But if you have three over here, and you're like oh crap. They're all

You know kind of the flip side though is Max Scherzer says his work every day every Between every start is making sure his breaking balls are separate so Justin Steele can listen to Max Scherzer and be like I have a power slider I have a regular slider and I have a sweeper and I keep them separate all the time and I work every start maybe that maybe that the Scherzer-esque outcome is there. Scherzer does have a curve and a change up that are very different so if he loses one of those breaking balls, he still has somewhere else to go. So I think he's a good pitcher. I'm, he's one of the more interesting ones to watch this year.

I think that's an interesting one. I then Soto, you know, Soto, uh, I looked at this of the balls that Soto pulls, 75% are on the ground. Um, that was last year, I guess. I don't know if that's every year. that Soto pulls 75% are on the ground. That was last year, I guess. I don't know if that's every year. That's a real flaw. Like it's a weird group he's in. And so if you're taking him to this new stadium,

you're saying, hey, look at that nice porch over there. Can he be like, oh, just sort of intrinsically like, oh yeah, I wanna go for that porch. Or is this like 75 percent pull ground ball rate like going to be a real limiting factor? So I tend to think he's going to be about the same. It's like these things are going in different directions. Some of the he's going to have a great lineup.

It's got a lot of RBI and runs. I don't know that he'll hit a lot more homers. Hey, as a Padres fan, I can say that Soto, he's kind of got something special. You know, we had a lot of guys who were on off last year, but Soto just dinger after dinger after dinger. Kind of get the feeling he might just pop off this year. Ironically, my question was also about Justin Steele. And I'm curious, does stuff plus underrate or overrate Justin Steele and I'm curious does Stuff Plus underrate or overrate Justin Steele because of his multiple shapes and then I guess in

contrast to Max Scherzer who has very different shapes on his breaking balls I wonder do you think they Stuff Plus overrates or underrates him? Well you know Stuff Plus is agnostic of pitch type, as long as we're talking about secondary pitches, it doesn't care. It loves all secondary pitches and defines them all the fastball. It doesn't care if one's called a slider curve or whatever. So I don't think that is why he might be underrated. It's possible that cut ride fastballs, the type of fastball he throws, are underrated

by Stuff Plus. What's happening is that the Cubs... So Stuff Plus looks at pitches and takes the pitches out of their context and looks at just their results based on movement, release point, all these things. So what happens is we're chasing the high. If somebody's doing something good, the sweeper. Stuff plus is like, ooh, sweepers, you should do this. And then everyone throws a sweeper, and there's worse sweepers, and the batters are like,

what do I do with the sweeper? And they start hitting the sweeper. So what happens is every year, batters are getting better at the sweeper. They swing less at pitch sweepers outside the zone, hit swing more at sweepers inside the zone, they're getting better at sweepers. You see this with with vertical break. What used to be a good enough vertical break, batters are hitting that better. So Stoepple says, oh this is good, but then you have to retrain the model every year because

hitters are like, oh I know what to do with vertical break oh, I know what to do with vertical break. Oh, I know what to do with a sweeper. And so the Cubs or the Marlins coming up with this like, I like unique pitches, that's interesting because the model will lag a year or two or three, whatever it is, the model will be behind. And so the Yankees and Mariners taught all their pitcher sweepers like two three years ago. And now there are teams being like, well, should we teach our birdies sweepers? And you're like, no, dude, you're too late. Find something else, do something else. And so I think that's a little bit of an interesting thing is that the Cubs player development is not thought of as like one of the best but they did do something unique the cut ride thing is kind of a Cubs thing

and To some extent maybe the model is behind on his fastball more than his breaking balls And I don't know we read we redid the model. I Don't think that he's a big jumper Cubs pitchers never pop in that model Yeah, which never do which kind of like might tell you something, you know, it's like maybe they're doing something. But let me see here, I have a new stuff here for Steel. Oh, Justin Steel, Four Seam Fastball, 99.7% stuff plus. That's a little bit up. It's a little bit above average, but's maybe maybe it's still not capturing the whole thing.

Alright one more. Hey I'm a Mets fan and I feel like, thank you, and I feel like there's not too much to look forward to this year but I was wondering if there are any like rookies or minor league players that maybe I can feel optimistic about having an impact in the short term. That's what we're optimistic about. Do you have somebody? I like Christian Scott once he gets a chance. Oh! Good stash. I think the Severino bounce back can happen.

You know what? I'm going to give some love to Mark Vantos, man. Like, I know he doesn't have the glove and I know the strikeout rate is a little bad, but dude hits the snot out of the ball and I think he's going to find like a 28 to 30% strikeout rate at like a sort of 240, 35 homer package. I think he might be the first baseman if Alonso leaves and I don't want you to think about that. Sorry, sorry, sorry, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah can do and he hits the ball super super hard so I think Vientos and I think we're gonna learn a lot of that baby this year I would love to see can he lifted at all or can he can he just embrace who he is hit the ball on the

ground too much and find a way to make more contact and just be a guy like a Yandy Diaz or like a guy with a high batting average a high OBP who doesn't hit as many homers as you want him to. That's fine too, but I want him to find who he is. Vientos knows who he is. And so to some extent he's ahead of Beatty, that he's just like, I'm here to hit the ball hard. You know, that's all I'm going to do. So to some extent I'm a little bit more sure that Vientos will show us who he is this year.

Beatty may meander through the darkness for a while, like a Cabrera and Hayes, you know, trying to find his way. I think the good news is, Beaty has a pretty clear level of awareness of what the problem is. There was a really good breakdown on SNY that he did with Todd Zilk, and explaining where he gets pitched,

why he's not driving those pitches. That he already hits the ball hard is a great foundation. Like, give me that to start for a guy that doesn't strike out. And a better glove than Viento. He's a better glove than Viento so he's going to play. Like the Ronnie Mauricio injury, as much as that sucks, probably stabilizes Beatty's playing time a lot. So I actually think this is a good breakout opportunity for Beatty and he's someone I really like where he's going for fantasy purposes. 66% ground ball rate this spring. It takes time for the adjustments to kick in. It doesn't just happen in the in-one off season.

We're gonna be talking about Beatty two years from now, the way we were just talking about Cabrion Hayes. Yes we will. This is the year. This is the year. If you were kind enough to ask a question during the show, come up when we're done, we actually have some merch for you,

so we really appreciate everybody who did that. I wanna give another shout out to the awesome staff here at Other Half. Yeah. Bring some beer home with you. You can buy some to-go beers. The sandwich was fantastic. The chef Ryan made.

Thank you, Chef Ryan. We really appreciate everybody for coming out, especially people that came out both nights. This was a tremendous experience for us and that's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you next week. Thanks for watching!