Rates & Barrels - Alex Bregman to the Red Sox, Nick Pivetta to the Padres & The Neverending Search for an Edge

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Eno, Trevor, and DVR discuss Alex Bregman's decision to sign with the Red Sox -- how the pieces might fit in Boston without another move -- and the structure of the deal. Plus, they discuss Nick Pivetta to San Diego, where the Padres have quickly turned around a very quiet offseason. They also dig into the current use of pitch models like Stuff+ around the game, and wonder where teams are finding edges within those models, and beyond Rundown 1:30 Alex Bregman to the Red Sox (Three-Year, $120M Deal w/two opt-outs) 14:06 Nick Pivetta Lands with the Padres (Four-Year, $55M Deal w/two opt-outs) 22:10 Anthony Rendon to Undergo Hip Surgery; Out for 2025 33:34 How is Stuff+ Used Around Baseball? 40:24 Applications of Pitching Models & Finding an Edge 46:55 Solvability in Sports...Basketball Might Be Broken 52:12 Rule Changes in Baseball by Decade 58:32 Where Are Teams Looking for an Edge? Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social Follow DVR on Bluesky: @dvr.bsky.social Follow Trevor on Bluesky: @[e-mail] e-mail: [e-mail] Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Hosts: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris With: Trevor May Producer: Brian Smith Executive Producer: Derek VanRip Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's free and easy to use, and you can get cash back deposited into your PayPal account or sent to you as a check. It's the smartest way to shop, plain and simple. Start your shopping at rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what

they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online and sign up only takes a few minutes. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, it's Thursday, February 13th, Derek the Ripper, Enosaris, Trevor May all here with you on this episode. We have a few late signings as spring training gets underway. Alex Bregman has a new home. He heads to Boston. Nick Pavetta heads to San Diego.

Sounds like Anthony Rendon is done for 2025 and probably beyond that. So we'll dig into that. Some big picture stuff, too. You know, had a stuff plus update that was released last week. We're digging into the implications of that. And we're going to talk about where teams can try to find differentiation points in strategy as things like stuff plus models become more prevalent in the game Trevor. How you doing? Good to see ya I am good. Thanks for asking everything is great over here. It's good to be back

I'm excited to get back rolling with rates and barrels every single week I'm excited. I'd have you back again this season and you know, what's going on with you man. Nothing got to come up with my speech for Moneyball tonight. I'm introducing Moneyball on campus on Stanford campus tonight if there's any Stanford listeners so it will be a green library at seven o'clock. Gotta do a little speech. That's awesome man. Well let's get started with the news. Alex Bregman signs a three year, $120 million deal with the Red Sox. Nice big AAV. Two opt-outs built in. So this could turn into a 1 year deal.

I think Eno made his feelings known about it pretty quickly on Blue Sky last night. The weird thing for me here, Trevor, Alex Bregman is going to play second base potentially for the Red Sox and so much of his value comes from the defense he brings at third. And when you think about the way the Red Sox are built, Rafael Devers is not a good defensive third baseman. They have some prospects coming up. Christian Campbell being a guy we could probably see a lot of throughout 2025. It seems like an odd fit if they actually go through with the second

base plan. So how do you think the pieces are actually going to fit once we move through spring training and get to the point where we reach opening day? I think the big sticking point here is Yoshida. He's in that DH spot. They don't really know where to put them or what to do with them at this moment. They're kind of stuck with three more years in the contract. So I think that's probably an active conversation happening. That's something that they're like, hey, if we could just, if we move this guy, we can put Bregman at third, we can put Devers DH in there, we can bring up Campbell

or whoever it is to play second base. And now we have people where they're supposed to be with Tristan Cass is being able to hold down first. I think even lineup wise, that's a solid choice. And I think that's probably the long-term plan. That would be my guess. In terms of like when you're kind of stuck with, yeah, Devers is not a great defensive third baseman, but he's most likely worse than every other position besides hitting

only, but they can't do that right now. So it's kind of like, uh, it's kind of like take the best guy available right now, and then we'll figure it out as we go. And I think Bregman will be a great second baseman right out the gate. I think that even his, uh, his skillset, right. Uh, lines up to be pretty good for that. He was a shortstop in college. You know, anyone who has coached him or played with him for any length of time would not be surprised if you could play every place in the field.

He's just a pretty good natural defender. So I don't think he's going to be a liability over there, especially if, if stories healthy, that's not a bad one, two punch there up the middle. Oh, with some veteran guys who can, who can do some things with their gloves. So it's not the worst thing that could possibly happen, but it does seem weird that you're going to give a guy $40 million a year for three years to switch positions that is usually a no-no, but it looks like the Red Sox are kind of stuck

between a rock and a hard place a little bit with these decisions. And it's just like, where do you wanna take the risk at? And I think that at the end of the day, Yoshida is the spinach stuck in the Red Sox teeth. Yeah, that's a good way to describe Yoshida right now. How about Bregman as a hitter? I think you have some concerns about the bat.

He did land in another very hitter-friendly environment. I wonder if some of the home run power we've seen in the past has turned to doubles off the monster. That could be one sort of tweak to some of the output we get from Bregman, but you noticed that pitchers were challenging him more in the zone last year too. So what do you think the Red Sox are getting at the plate? I do think this is a good situation for him, you know, in terms of being a right-hander

in Fenway. It is not actually a place that creates homers necessarily, a 98 part-factor varieties, but it is the best place in baseball to hit doubles and triples because of that big ol' wall. I think defensively, second and third basemen are thought statistically to be kind of interchangeable. Now, I don't know if that's necessarily true when you're playing on the diamond, and I'd be interested to hear from Trevor if he thinks of second basemen and third basemen as physically different. We've seen third basemen bigger. I don't know, second basemen as like physically different. You know, we've seen sort of third baseman bigger. I don't know, second baseman signed with smaller guys. The arm obviously is a difference,

but if you're going from third to second, do you think of anything where a third baseman might not be able to play second? Sometimes some of them are kind of like stocky and can't move as much. Does that like? It's just range. It just comes down to like,

you gotta be able to go get that soft bouncer up the middle, go get the thing deep in the four hole. You don't have a line helping you anymore. Yeah, you don't have a line helping you. And third base generally, I mean, it's called the hot corner on purpose. It's generally like pure glove, your ability to control your glove

and knock balls down and get it in the web and stuff. Those are the things that third baseman do really well. And then I think the arm usually plays into that, but I'm not worried about it. He's got a, his arms fine. Well, he's also going to the closer place and he's going to the closer place. So it comes down to like, how's his range going to translate? How much side lateral movement does he, you know, still have, you know, he's been playing for a while now.

So that's what it comes down to. But even then, even with the shading and stuff, like a lot of those deep up the middle stuff, stuff a lot of those deep up the middle stuff, stuff is kind of the short stops play anyway. So they'll cross over the bag, even with the rules. Exactly. Exactly. So I, but that's the biggest thing.

It's like, you know, here's a prime example. We had Louis Arias, uh, in, in Minnesota for a while that that just was never seen as a long-term option just because his range was he is bad knees then run really well and his arm was fine because it was not a problem he just couldn't get side to side to knock balls down it was just kid they were getting the outfield and diving wasn't his thing so it's like if you can't do either one of those things you just got to be able to knock more balls down in a wider range and he wasn't able to do that so that's why I wasn't an option but I think that Bregman has much more skill in that area.

We'll translate. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if it's, he's like, not only does he have fine range, it's like good range. Like he's, he's got up there. He becomes one of the better second baseman options. I think like overall it'll be fine, but you're right. The concern for me is the batted ball velocities

and just the, the, the umph with the bat. And you tease this a little bit, but just from a barrel standpoint, career 5.7, he's never really been a barreler. His max CV, which is tied to bat speed, 109 for his career, it was 109 last year, so at least he's maintaining that bat speed, but that's not top end bat speed. That's mediocre actually. And what he's done a lot of, and we talked about on the show, is pull fly balls into the Crawford boxes. Now he has the green monster, so it might still be fine

for him in terms of fitting his approach to the park. But one thing that goes beyond what we see from his results is how pitchers are pitching him. And so I had this tidbit a little while back that, you know, he saw a big increase in zone percentage and his zone percentage year over year, uh, from 23 to 24 went from 49.9% to 53.6%. 53.6 is the most since his rookie year and rookies, what do pitchers normally do to rookies?

Kind of fill up the zone and show me you could do something, you know. Especially for a guy that might, has a reputation coming up of not reaching, not chasing, of walking, you know. So, oh, you like to walk? Well, let me see if you can actually hit for power. And he hit for power and the zone rate went down and this is something that we've seen from this angle is that He hit for power and the zone rate went down. And this is something that we've seen from this angle is that if you look at the distance that a pitch goes from the heart of the zone on average for a player, you can predict breakouts.

Because pitchers know before the results are almost always there. They know from scouting reports, they know from like, oh, he smoked that ball last week. They know, okay, I'm gonna need to be a little bit more careful with this guy. I saw this highlight or that my coach told me he's been hitting for power, right? Like, and so as they kind of get away from the heart of the zone, you start to see, like Chris Davis did

not have great, a great sense of the zone. Chris Davis was a C. And he didn't have a great sense of the zone. What we did was he smacked the crap out of the ball to the point where pitchers were like, oh man, I need to live in the shadow zone. Like I cannot throw him down the middle. And so he walked for a while and then he stopped hitting for power and his walk rate disappeared. And so what I'm worried about with Bregman

is that they're filling up the zone again. Why are they filling up the zone again? They don't fear him. And I looked at this and I saw that there were 33 regulars that were older than 30 that saw as big of a zone increase as Bregman saw. Of that 30, you know, six never played again. Like never were a regular again.

Take six of those guys and the league had figured them out. They were done. They were over the hill. They were done. So six are gone. The other 27 that still played saw a three-point drop in their WRC+, and eight of them dropped more than 20 points. So basically for almost half of the sample, they were done as regular big contributors after they saw this kind of an increase in zone percentage. Now, of course some of the guys that saw this and shrugged it off were like Manny Machado.

They fill up the zone when he's hurt. And then he came back and he's like, yo, I'm not hurt anymore. And they were like, okay. You know, so maybe Bregman has played through injury before and you know, he had this gross thing on his hand that he had to take, that he had to like, that was gross that we talked about.

Laughing, cause you bring that up all the time. That would make hitting more difficult. But he played through that, so maybe there was something he was playing through and he's gonna be fine next year and we'll see that zone percentage go the other direction. Maybe we'll get on a Manny Machado type trajectory, but my bet is that he never opts out of this deal. My bet is he stays there, that he is kind

of like a three win guy for the next three years, which is above average, but not someone that would opt out of a $40 million deal. For what it's worth, if he's about a three win player over the life of the deal, maybe gets up to 10 wins over three years they kind of break even a win cost about 12 million dollars now in free agency anyway and there's a chance that he's not looking at it it's 11. It's 11. Close. And if you think he's a four win player next year and some of the projections say that then they pay about 11 million per win for three over these three years. Some of the projections say

he's a 3.443 and a half win player. Then you're paying 13 million per win. That's my point is that either he's paid okay for what he's doing and he's not necessarily going to get more by opting out or he's overpaid and he sticks into it. So, overpaid, recording to the market. But I think for the Red Sox, this is fine. It's a three-year deal. It's not going to block Campbell long-term.

It's not going to block Roman Anthony. Roman Anthony can push Williard Abreu out of the way or maybe they trade Yoshida. I don't think they trade Casas because he's pretty exciting as a young player, but maybe they make a trade. But Roman Anthony can push his way to the big leagues in this situation. And Christian Campbell, the big thing is Trevor Story is not going to be short for a long time. I don't think Christian Campbell can play short, but then they're gonna have to move things around. Maybe Marcelo Meyer comes up, maybe David Handel planes over there, whatever it is,

there's still room for the big prospects to make it. It's just, they're not depending on it. I think the injury history of Trevor Story also is something that has to come into the equation as far as looking at this group of prospects and saying, hey, Christian Campbell's not that blocked. They have some options as far as moving other guys around. It's all more fluid than it looks beyond the Yoshida problem. I like this move for the Red Sox more than Eno does. I think Bregman is still a four to five win player. I think

I would look at the first half versus the second half and wonder if he was playing through an injury last year. You just don't always get the report. Sometimes guys don't talk about it and you're just left to look at the numbers and make an assumption like that. He's still going to be just 31 at the end of this month. I think this ends up being just fine for Boston. I don't think it's an Anthony Rendon situation. We'll get to Rendon here in just a couple of minutes. Nick Pivetta on the move. He lands with the Padres. You know, you suggested this was a possibility during our NLS team previews. The shape of the contract, highly unusual given the financial constraints the Padres

are facing right now. Nick Paveda is going to pitch for a $1 million salary in 2025, getting a bit more money in the following three years of the deal. Add it all up. It's going to be 4 for 55 if he stays on that deal the entire time. Two opt-outs, 26 and 27. So a lot on the detail side of this one, but definitely a move that makes that Padres rotation necessarily better, right? We talked about the Joe Busgrove injury and they hadn't really done anything throughout

the entire offseason to backfill for that. So Trevor, from your perspective, Nick Pivetta for the first time gets to call a pitcher friendly ballpark home. Are we going to see the absolute best versions of him that we've seen at this point in his big league career in San Diego? Yeah, I like this a lot. I think he's got one of those, one of the best riding fastballs in the league. He's got great breaking ball. He fits into that rotation.

They need a guy with veteran status, like some veteran experience. Also, this contract's really interesting too, because it's very clear that at some point the negotiation probably wasn't going to move forward unless that front part happened because there's so much going on in San Diego with trying to shed payroll or figure out, you know, if they want to, how they want to go and compete and with the ownership and their, their old legal things going on that he's like, okay, let's just kick the can. Let's just kick the ball down the road a little bit.

We'll deal with that process bridge when we get to it and we'll, we'll make all the big payouts or the majority of this money paid out after those opt outs. So that way there's still a way to make an adjustment if things work out for him or vice versa. So it is a team friendly situation. Taking a $1 million salary is crazy. That first paycheck he's going to look and it's going to be jarring.

But, uh, I'm interested to know if he gets to 3 million before the season, or if he's getting it after the season. Cause then you're like, ah, I don't get paid paid for this until next off season that would stink. I would, I wouldn't like that, but at the same time, like it's just all kind of. No, no. So, but in terms of grabbing a guy with what was left on the, you know, out there in terms of starting pitching, he was one of those guys, the top list still was left going and

they were able to go snag him. And I think that they may make some a little bit better and maybe they feel a little bit better about being fans of that team where they, where they did a couple things in order to keep them competitive as opposed to just like packing it in and, and just going, you know, full Mariners and trying to gaslight you and tell you that we're good still, even though we didn't do anything. I think if you're a Nick Pavetta, you'd fire your agent. He didn't have worse, did he?

He's like the only guy in the whole for CAA. It's CAA. I don't know who the head honcho is at CAA, but I think I would fire them because he had a $20 million qualifying offer and he went from 20 to 4 million for this year. I think he'll get the three first, probably when he's at home somewhere so he doesn't have to pay California taxes. And he does get up to kind of a close to a $20 million salary the rest of the way. So maybe he wanted that long-term commitment and he got that.

So that's good for him in that way. He's a guy who got hurt in the model because when we put in arm slot, like his arm slot, 56 degrees is pretty high. And what you see is that hitters kind of expect that. He's got like 19 inch, 20 inch ride on his fastball. But if you look at pitchers that have his arm slot, you'd expect actually sort of like 17 to 18 inches of ride.

So ride over expected, ride over expected versus his arm slot is only two inches. So you would look at, oh, league averages, IVB is 16 inches. He has four, five inches of ride on most guys. Yeah, but most guys aren't throwing from where he is. And as soon as the hitter sees, oh, he's an up top guy, they start, you know, their mental math,

like their machines start being like, okay, ride, you know, gotta hit the top of this ball. And so what we found in the remake of the model, it still has good stuff, it's still two inches over average, but it's two inches over average versus like sort of four inches over average. Another thing we found when we looked at like expected outcomes is that he does have a Homer problem. You know, and you can look at just as his history and understand that. And he gives up Homer's to lefties and righties. So I wanted to say, oh, well, the stack has park factors for Padres say that like, you know, against left-handed hitters, he's, he's going to really suppress

homers and just repress offense in general, but he's given up homers to righties. So it's amazing. The Padres park factor for home runs against righties is seventh best, like for hitters over the last three years. So I think he'll still probably have a bit of a home run problem. Maybe it'll be a little bit better than usual. I mean, he gave up almost two homers per nine last year.

He's given out 1.5 for his career. I think the big thing for him is just to limit the walk rate. And that's what he did last year. If he can limit the walk rate and he can do that with his hard slider that he's been throwing more than his curve. If he can limit the walk rates, then the home runs are solo jobs. You know, beyond this, just for the Padres, I think they're going to keep Dylan Cease and Michael King because, you know, Preller has been a very much a, let's make the team better for this year guy. And I think he probably looked around and

saw the trades that were being offered to him for Cease and King and couldn't figure out how to make his team better by trading Cease and King. Instead, he goes out and for a combined $5 million in salary this year, he finds a way to paper over left field, paper over the fourth starter and the fifth starter. Kyle Hart is coming back for a million dollars from the KBO to be their fifth starter.

I think he might be able to be like a little bit like an Eric Fetty type because he learned a sweeper. He has a sinker and he started throwing his change up a lot more in Korea. So I think, you know, Eric Fetty type who doesn't throw the fastball that much, throws a sweeper a ton, and is okay given the fact that he doesn't have a great fastball. I think that's what Kyle Hart can be. So you know, you go get Nick Pavetta, who's gonna strike everybody out, maybe give up some homers.

You get an Eric Fetty type for your fifth starter. You get Connor Joe and Jason Hayward in the outfield. And all these guys are playing for you for $5 million combined salary this season. Why do you have to trade season King now? I think he did a really good job. I don't like him as a, as a leader. I think he, you know, he's gotten into some trouble with, uh, the

rules in multiple places. He's kind of a maverick, but I think this is pretty good roster building. You know, you talk about roster spackle, like he went and found all the little, he spackled all the holes that his roster had and he did it for pretty cheap. Yeah, you got to give him credit because I didn't think there was going to be a solution like this much more creative deal and he found someone willing to take it and Nick Pavetta right I mean 55 million guaranteed even if it's oddly shaped is still $65 million guaranteed. And because Pavetta hasn't had like workhorse durability and he hasn't shown a great walk rate prior to 2024 and you factor in all the homers you know,

was talking about, there are enough skills and physical questions there where I think that was probably a limiting factor in what his market looked like looking around in free agency this off season. It's the season to shop new styles, electronics, and definitely a holiday trip. And what if each time you made a purchase, you got a little something back? With Rakuten, you can earn cash back on just about anything you buy from over 750 stores.

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It's the smartest way to shop, plain and simple. Start your shopping at rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments? Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. The credit card that rewards your good

financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply. One more news item to get to. It's probably the end for Anthony Rendon. He's going to have hip surgery. Out for 2025, Sam Blum wrote about this for the athletic. And I mean, you're going to look at this, this deal for years, seven years, 245

million, and it's going to come up as maybe the worst contract in baseball history. Like I think that is the way people are going to remember Anthony Rendon. I don't think he's done himself a lot of favors in recent years with the way he's gone about this. Like being hurt sucks. Like there's no way around that. Right. And I think when you are honest, the way he's gone about this. Being hurt sucks, there's no way around that, right? And I think when you are honest, the way Anthony Rendon has been,

you will also piss people off. The truth will upset people when it's not what they want to hear. So you look at the full scope of this and you say, oh, this is a disaster, and it is. It's another reminder though that the salary structure in baseball is awful. And until you have a system where players It's another reminder, though, that the salary structure in baseball is awful.

And until you have a system where players reach free agency faster and get into arbitration faster, you're always going to look at the mega deals that don't work out. Like the fan lens is going to be like, oh, this is awful. Instead of looking back at the years he spent in Washington saying, well, he was underpaid. He earned the contract that he got from the Angels while he was with the Nationals, right? If the money was just flipped, we'd have no problem with anything that happened with Anthony Rendon with the Angels. Yeah, because he'd be getting 700,000 or whatever this year.

If he just flipped it on its head. But it is the nature of the beef, like it's back pay. That's why a lot of these contracts sometimes are, also sometimes they're back back loaded as well for the option to make decisions later and avoid paying that money out with trades and things of that nature. That's how it's always been put together. That's the nature of our free agency.

That's why there's so much control over players for so long. But this is just what's going to happen. I understand as a fan of the team, I don't care what he did with the Nationals. And that makes sense. It's just there's no other way to divvy this stuff up with the way that things put together. Now if we want to go do a salary cap and all that kind of stuff, it does fix that problem a little bit but you got to get rid of some buy-buy arbitration. You're gonna see your guys,

your rookie guys, leaving three years instead of having them for six, seven, eight years. Yeah, that's the only way that players would ever give up a salary cap. The only way. Like massive change to how long you have them. And I hope Mr. Rubenstein's listening to the show right now. That's the only way which they would do it if they got like, you know, the NBA. You get like a pretty huge contract, you know, relative, you know, like your rookie contract is pretty big. It is. Yeah.

So that would that would be how that would be. Baseball would be too. It's like there's to be something where like you just immediately start earning money. There'd be issues in its own right but that yeah that's the way it works and yeah we're seeing you know Jacobi Ellsbury 2.0 like just go down to Florida or go down to Arizona and until the clock runs out and then you can go home. Like that's probably gonna be one of the thing, Anthony doesn't seem super worried about it. I am a little bit worried that LA is counting on

maybe the only other guy who gets hurt just as much in Yon Moncada to play third. So my guess is by May. There's gonna be some other guy. And other people have also wondered about his motor. You know? Yeah, so. People wondered about Moncada's motor

and it's like, okay, just replaced maybe another low motor guy with another low motor dude. Yeah. So wondered about Moncada's motor and it's like, okay, we just replaced maybe another low motor guy with another low motor guy. Good job. They're counting on on both. So, you know, I injury suck. Everyone's careers is their own. Yeah, but it stinks. I but in terms of the being one of the worst contracts ever, it's up there because there are 10 pitchers in the history of major league baseball have more home runs than he's had as an angel. With Charles Rembrandt, who's probably the most recent, 24. He's only got 22 total homers on the career.

But we can also look, if we're going to talk about injuries, Strasburg's got to be up there. Yeah, but it's a little bit more like expected with pitchers where you're like, oh yeah, you signed him. Something breaks and there's no coming back. Yeah. It's like with Rendon, I mean, maybe that's what it, I mean, this is another hip surgery. I think this is not his first. I think he's, I think he's, maybe he's just hips

have just been, maybe that's, maybe just kind of broke and that's what happened. But, you know, I do think there's a, there's a little bit of interesting thing here when it comes to how you kind of deal with the media. And like, I know that you, like, were already had one foot in the media. You were almost like Draymond Greening it,

where you were, you had like, the comp. You were like, I might too. Exactly like Draymond on the field too. Same one on the field temperament, yeah. But you had one foot in the media and we had podcasting and streaming,

so I don't know if your personal experience is exactly the right one, but I do think I wish that players understood how there's going to be a second career for them. And if they if they manage their interactions with the media and think about it and are intentional about it, that they have more opportunities waiting for them afterwards, if they do that. You know, because I think they see the media as the enemy and as someone who can do nothing for me. They can only screw me up. They can only take something I say and blow it up and make me look like an idiot or whatever it is.

And if they saw them as, and I don't like being transactional, but this is, you're like, everyone's working. If they saw them more as someone that they could be transactional with and be like, oh, I can get something out of them. I can get better coverage if I'm nicer to them. I can prove to people that I'm good on camera. They'll start putting me on the post game and the pregame more often.

If I'm the guy who speaks well and knows and says, it gives them something, gives them a well and knows and gives them something, gives them a little bit, gives them something. Because there's a lot of either the Derek Jeter, Mike Trout, which is just like, I'm gonna give you nothing. I'll be nice to you and smile to you and say some words and you will have nothing.

You'll go back and be like, God, what am I supposed to do with this? I think the best ones end up being the guys who, like a David Ortiz, you know, like it's no surprise to me at all that he's on the Fox pregame Because he would be honest with you and he would tell you things and he would he would see you as a human being he would tell you things that you knew you could use and You knew that you would he would treat you you would treat him better

Like why does David Ortiz get a pass for some of the things that happened in the testing and that, you know, why is he just in the hall? You know what I mean? Like probably some part of it was that he saw that, and I don't think he, he was necessarily transaction. He was just kind of a nice guy that like just did it because that's how he, that's how he was. But you know, A-Rod, he's even skirted some stuff and gotten on TV because he

was a little bit more intentional and gave people some little bits. So anyway, I would just say that I like that he was honest. If he'd taken that honesty and just put a little bit of thought into it, he might actually have gotten better coverage. Like literally, he could have said some of the same things with just a slight different bend to it if he'd thought about it.

Instead, I think there's other players that are gonna see what happened to him if you like see I don't want to talk to you look what you did to my boy Rendon I would argue that that honesty was that was self-inflicted right you can you can be honest without saying things that are bad for yourself I think that was the lesson Anthony Rendon just didn't learn it's like an extra word or two like if you just say sometimes it's hard to be out there as opposed to like, I don't care about, you know what I mean? Like even sometimes it's hard to care about baseball as opposed to I don't care

about baseball. You know what I mean? Like there's just like a few words and like just a, like thinking about how this would look in print, you know, and it can do wonders for you and writers can be your, can be an asset for you. I think we could pretty safely say this is likely the end of the road for Anthony Rendon as a player. Doesn't seem like we're gonna see him anywhere.

That contract runs out after 2026. This is not on a rundown, but this one, I feel like a little bit sad about. Avicel Garcia is having shoulder surgery and I think it might be a similar situation. I don't know if there'll be an opportunity waiting for him when he comes back, because of just how poorly it went in Florida.

But I just remember him as a beast. I don't know how many times you faced him, but he hit the ball super hard, ran super hard, had a big arm. Maybe didn't have like the very best sort of soft baseball skills in terms of running the best routes or like having the best approach at the play.

Did you like pitching to him or was he kind of scary? There was a time where he was a problem, but overall I had pretty good success. I could go get a strikeout, get him to chase, especially when it was like, I think with the Brewers. He was a freak athlete, like he was a monster of a human being, like the size of Megan Cabrera, but he ran, he was the fastest guy. I know that was the, that was kind of the comp because he came up at a Swalind guy, they have kind of the same kind of look like each other.

Yeah. But he was just like, athletically, you were just like, dude, like he's running. It doesn't look like he's running that fast, but he's just safe. And you're like, oh, he's a monster. I just think he got hit by the, he had a couple of seasons that were just thrown away because of some, some nagging injuries that he just couldn't kind of stay on the field for. And it was a little bit sad to see, but, uh, yeah, we never got the vibe that he

like pulled the shoot, right? It was never a shoot pole. It was just like unfortunate, like he kept trying to get thing, you know, he's just so big, like it's like a trout like it's like. Yeah, it all makes sense. I'm like you're a six five dude that runs like a deer like your joints are going to take some pounding and you're going to steal a lot and you just can't be that dynamic in baseball.

So see also, you know, Iron Bucks like almost too athletic for your own good on a baseball field. There's too many things to run into it or even times where he was playing center field. I remember seeing that in Milwaukee. He was like, this guy can play center? Like, he had a cannon. Yeah, a cannon.

Pretty fun guy. It's one of those sad things because he's never gonna be, he's never gonna, like I don't even think he'll get on the ballot for the Hall of Fame. Maybe he will because of 10 years, but I don't think he'll make it past one. I mean, he had eight wins for his career, 140 homers. Was below average with the bat,

which surprises me. But he's one of those ones that I will remember. This is a prime, remember some guys guy. Definitely a guy who played and made his space on the field and people know who he was. But, you know. A tooled up high variance player is just like, he's the epitome of that, but yeah, bummer.

Almost like in fantasy, almost like a every other year sleeper on everybody's list, you know? Yeah, yeah, because some of the process stuff under the low line numbers, the quality of contact was there at times, double digit barrel rates, the ability to run a little bit, you know, it would show up in fits and spurts and just couldn't do it year over year over year.

That was the frustrating thing about Abissel Garcia. Let's talk about the new Stuff Plus model and I want to just pull back because we have new listeners that join the show all the time and just to throw this out there. What is Stuff Plus? What is your 60 second explanation for Stuff Plus for anyone who's never heard of it before? Why should people care about a pitching model? Well, I mean the easiest thing is it's just grading pitches based on their physical characteristics.

So you use release point, spin, spin direction, now acceleration instead of movement. So just think about the ball moving through space. You judge pitches based on just their physical characteristics and what we call stuff. So I think it's named appropriately and it's actually, when I say it that way, I think it makes a lot of sense. When you start getting into how the model works and stuff, yes, it is maybe an advanced,

quote unquote, advanced analytic. But I think it's like something that's born of scouts and born of picture questions. The first question that ever spawned Stuff Plus for Drive Line was Brandon Bailey, the Astros told him, you have to throw either your curve ball with more movement or your slider harder or something. It was like he had a choice. He's like, which one? Which one will make me better? And so Drive Line was like, we're going to create Stuff Plus so we can answer that question

for you. And so I think it's a great player development tool, a great scouting tool. It can be used to assess pitchers performance because you're looking at just how good their stuff is without any reaction to how it actually plays on the field. Trevor, one kind of follow-up question I have for you is from the introduction of these models came out, kind of tail end of your career,

just from the last few years of your career when this was new versus today, how prevalent has this become? Like how many guys care about this on a player level? A lot of players, I think, care about a lot of the elements that go into stuff plus with maybe not seeing it as using the term stuff plus. I think that's still a little bit more of a

in the weeds kind of situation for them. And and honestly it might be too much to factor in but there's tons of players vast majority of players now are paying attention to how their stuff moves the terminology I use a lot when I'm referring to a pitch with the game context removes in a vacuum it's X, Y or Z like in a vacuum this is great pitch. And I think of this as an evaluation tool, almost like the little hands on a compass that points you in a direction, whether or not someone should stop throwing this thing, or maybe there's development to happen in that thing.

Or how to make it better. Or how to make it better. Or maybe there's a different pitch that might be naturally better. Yeah, how do you make your curveball better if you don't know what a good curveball is? Exactly. By itself, you know? Like then you, all you can do is be like, uh,

Kershaw throws his like this. So I'm gonna try and throw like Kershaw, but you may not look like anything like Kershaw You may not have the same release or anything. So exactly. Yeah, this is part of the framework That's mostly adopted by everybody, right? And it's comparative to you can then see other guys with theirs their things and then start to break down what they do and how you can mimic it. It points you in directions for making yourself better. And it also, as an evaluator, and I just kind of thought about this as well,

the whole idea of you're evaluating a D2 college guy or like a smaller D1 school, and you're trying to determine how good they are based on who they're playing against. Or a high school kid, you're like, these kids can't hit him, like he throws hard. You don't know what's being up. But if you stop plus it like, oh, it moves this way. We know like he's been on track man before we can do these things. Perfect game has everyone on track man's now. Right. So

you can actually get everyone's metrics and come up with a stuff plus number for 18 year old kids where now that project ability or like projecting that they have a good pitch. Like you can see metrically it's already at a big league level it's already moving this much or it already is this hard and that's gonna translate in a vacuum now learning to pitch is how you then layer in the context but the way I always I try to explain why it's important and I fortunately I just did a try to explain this and on my own Mayday show too is just like what the hell is stuff plus you want to point yourself in the direction to this pitch has the most context in

which it might give you the result you want. And the higher the number, the more context in which it works. So that way you can then layer in the context and you're more confident in that pitch being successful and like teams like the Rays and teams like the Astros and the the Astros prime example, Kikuchi, hey throw your riding force in, throw your slider. That was your best pitches yeah. Just throw your two best pitches and he became a two pitch pitcher and was nails. But they also had a little bit you know that's funny the Kikuchi one is they also

had a little bit of what you were talking about the sort of added context was throw that slider outside to righties as opposed to inside because of how that kind of shape functions there. So there, you know, if you could put an 89 mile an hour poo poo sinker with poor shape, if you could put it just on that like tiny little outside corner, just like, if you could do what Leo Mazzoni said that they should do in Atlanta and you could do it just on that like tiny little outside corner, just like if you could do it, Leo Mizoni said that they should do in Atlanta and

you could do it over and over again, you could be great. Great bad. You think about the Maddox down and away fastballs. And he knew exactly how to do it. He knew how to do it every time. And that's what made him. But the problem is a lot of those leak out and then aren't our balls. A lot of those leak over the middle of the plate, you know?

And so that's why you're sort of talking about it. It's like if you had a high stuff pitch when you miss and you don't have that other contextual stuff in the correct place, you do better. Or chances it works out for you are higher. If Felix Bautista misses middle middle, it's going to be very different outcome than if Eric Fetty misses middle middle. Right. We've talked about this with Spencer Strider. Leaning heavily on those two pitches. I think at one point we looked it up and he was among the league leaders in pitches in the middle middle part of the zone.

But guess what? That fastball and that slider can get away with that because it's like elite closer stuff from a starter. That's just how good those pitches are. So the interesting thing I saw, so you have a write up on the athletic about some of the changes that were made to the model and the league is almost saturated with stuff plus. 28 out of 30 teams is the estimate number of teams using it. But what's really interesting to me is like,

yeah, okay. So everyone has a model. They're kind of similar in terms of what they're looking at, of course. So you get similar results, but you still have different interpretations of how to apply it so I don't think we've moved so far down the road where teams have a kind of a consistent agreement and we haven't completely hit this point of the model being No longer being an advantage, right? It's less of an advantage than it was previously But there are still ways to get more out of it than some of the other teams that are using this information. Yeah, there's still some subtleties to how you did it.

When we redid our model, we broke it up. It used to be one model, which is amazing. It's kind of crazy. It used to be able to put in pitch, shape, and velocity, and it would predict swings, takes, called strikes, balls, homers, and that's a crazy idea, if you think about it, because there's balls, you know, homers. And that's a crazy idea if you think about it because there's a swing take decision,

there's a, you know, the ball and play, you know. So what we did was we made a swing model. We made a take model. The take model is an up model, right? Once you take the ball, then it's an up. It's like an up and catcher framing model, right? So we split it up into different things. That made it a lot better.

There's also, you know, we get more, there's still like more stats we can throw in. So teams will be able to identify biomechanical markers that they can put in. And they can start to put in where your elbow is when it's coming through, how much lay back you have on your forearm when you're coming through, stuff like that that we don't have access to.

For example, in this new model, we put in arm slot because Savant came out with an arm slot metric. Before we just had a release point, but a release point, there are a million different ways to get to one release point. There's different ways you could be tall and sidearm. You could be short and over the top and have the same release point. There's different ways you could be tall and sidearm. You could be short and over the top and have the same release point. And so arm slot is an angle, a shoulder angle, and that improved our model. So there are still ways to improve the model going forward. And then there are,

I think one of the biggest ways is just how you implement it. And can you put it into a good projection system so you can project pictures better and acquire the best pictures? Because could you do something where you're like, this is his current stuff plus, but we have a projected stuff plus, given the changes we might make to his mechanics or his pitches.

And given his projected stuff plus, this is his stuff plus if he joins the Dodgers. You know, I know people are doing that. Then you can also do things where you're like, this is his stuff plus if he's facing a guy with a scoopy swing. And this is his stuff plus if he's facing a guy with a flat swing. You start doing interactions between batters and pitchers. So you can be like, hey, build a better bullpen.

We have a bunch of guys who can get the flat swings, a bunch of guys who get the scoopy swings, that sort of deal. Or you want to acquire a pitcher who can do both. You know, you can get the flat guys out with this and you get the scoopy guy out with this. Scoopy swings, that sort of deal. Or you want to acquire a pitcher who can do both. You can get the flat guys out with this and you get the scoopy guy out with this. Especially if you're signing a 10 year deal, you want to be like, no, I don't want to find out

that you can't get anybody out that has a flat swing. And then all of baseball starts to do a flat swing and then you're screwed. So there's different things you can do with it. And then lastly, I think one of the hugest ways that this is important is implementing, like Kyle Bodie is in my piece about Stuff Plus saying, we made it important for us as an organization.

We told our coaches that you're going to be graded on if the stuff grades improve on your pitchers pitches. And we discovered that there were coaches that moved the needle. And those coaches are now pitching directors for different teams because they were obviously good but we had a way of measuring our coaches now. You know that's different than like oh your guys struck a bunch of guys out well were they high picks were they facing bad guys you know what what do you mean instead we can be like oh no you took this guy's fastball and made it this much better. That's what a coach is supposed to do.

So the teams that are really good with Stuff Plus are like actually just really good at running organizations. They know how to judge their own people. They know how to hire good people. They know what they're looking for. They know how to implement an ethos up and down the organization. So like, I think there's still a lot of

ways that you can take a stuff plus and say, Oh, yeah, there could be there are probably 10 teams that have a stuff plus and nobody looks at nobody cares about it, you know, and nobody in the front office consultant when they're trying to sign a reliever and you know, that sort of deal, like the angels probably have stuff plus does it inform their decisions? Do they care about it? Is anyone looking at it? Do they use it in the minor leagues? Or if you have a team of analysts

that think it's important, but you have a group of coaches that are not on the same page, then it doesn't matter. It just, it falls flat. Troy Percival saying, nobody, why do they have these laptops out? Why are their iPads out?

Okay. Why are their laptops on iPads? I won't say Stuff Plus in front of Troy. Right, and then you have the challenge of having having to have other people in the organization that can bridge the gap. And that's almost impossible in some cases, if you don't have a large staff. So then you just end up spending a bunch of money on people that aren't being listened to and acquiring players that are not even reaching their full potential because

your coaches can't get them there. You can figure out what the model's good at and what it's bad at and start coaching to what it's bad at because you know other teams, for example, the Mets who have former driveline employees up and down and they know stuff plus, I'm sure they use it at least in their making their plans. And that's a lot of times, so maybe the pitcher,

maybe if I'm talking to Trevor May, I'm not gonna tell him about a stuff plus, I'm gonna say, I think your curveball would be better if it was more sideways, or if it was more vertical, if you killed the sideways on it. I'm doing that because I looked at the stuff plus, and it would be a higher stuff plus if it was more vertical and less sideways, right?

That's what I, but I don't have to tell him that's what it's from. But they also discovered that, Hey, some stuff models really struggle with multiple fastballs. What do the Mets have? The most pitchers in baseball with multiple fastballs. They teach the relievers, multiple fastballs. Everybody in the Mets organization has like multiple fastballs.

And so, you know, there are ways to kind of see what the state of the art is and poke holes into it. And even before you fix those holes, coach, you know, find an edge, you know, in those holes. I think that gets to the big question for the end of this episode. You know, in what places are teams looking for edges within models and even beyond that? Right. I mean, I think we're getting ready for this show.

Trevor pointed out a massive change. Trevor, there's a problem in basketball, I think we were getting ready for this show, Trevor pointed out a massive change. Trevor, there's a problem in basketball that I think is really interesting here. Explain why basketball might be broken. Well, someone coined it like the solved game problem, and it's something that's almost always existed with why different types of games get popular and then kind of phase out.

Human beings tend to, this is really common in video games actually, but human beings tend to find the min-max, they find the most efficient way to play a game and be the best at it. And basketball has a limited way of scoring. So you see here in the top, this is from a game, I think it was from the 99-2000 season, these are the most commonly made shots, or maybe, I think it might be the 99 2000 season. These are the most commonly made shots,

or maybe, I think it might be for the whole season. These are like the most commonly made 100 or so shots. And then below is from a 22, 23 season, and these are the most commonly taken shots. I don't know if you noticed a difference, but there is nothing outside the paint or inside a three point line, and they got rid of the baseline,

which makes a lot of sense. No backboard. I mean, if you just look at the look at it, but this is a prime example of advanced analytics and basketball saying it is not worth taking a shot that isn't these two types of shots and that's boring. That's what the three outcome thing for baseball was, and I think we've made some meaningful rule changes. I don't know how you do it in basketball.

Just to show the three outcomes has gone from, you know, 15% in 1900 to 35% in 2020. According to a piece by Mario on Medium, this is a pretty cool, I think this is the same, we're looking at the same chart. You know, it's like the same, it's the same thing. But I think a lot of that stuff, actually, if this extended all the way to 2025, I bet you there's a slight dip. It probably hasn't dipped in a huge way, but I bet you would stop that exponential growth. Strikeouts are plateauing. Yeah. Yeah.

Strikeouts are plateauing, which is a good thing. And there's more than you add in. There's more stolen bases and all this kind of stuff. There's more ways to score though. It's never going to fully go away because they are still the highest value, just how much more value they create other than other options as that gap has changed. So like in basketball,

they have to figure out different ways to score or different ways to penalize doing things or something, or it's just gonna keep getting like, there's no reason to defend, right? That's why defense has gone away. The athleticism of the league is big too, but you can't defend those two shots either. It's really hard.

So not only did often say, Hey, let's only take these, the guys who are defensive, like what's the point of even trying to defend them? Because it's, it's the, you're, you're wasting more energy and not really getting any benefit. So let's just stop playing defense really. And that's why there's no defensive specialists outside of like one guy on a team. Uh, there's no teams that are like, or they defense. Or they have what's called a three and D, which is the guy who camps out a three point line

offensively, doesn't use any energy offensively, is just sitting there waiting for the ball to hit threes and then uses all his energy defensively. That's born of this, that shot chart. It's like, oh, you can still give me offensive value by standing over here. And then being a good defender. But yeah, I think if you're basketball, you need to look at rules about fouling, rules about charge taking, rules about, you know, one John Hollinger up on our

side has this idea of like, you actually don't get three foul shots for if you're fouled on a three point shot. You only get two. And, you know, that would make people more aggressive defensively on three-point shots. Now, would it lead to more injuries with ankles and landing on people? Like, you know, so there's but when you're making a game, I was fascinated. You brought up video gaming. My kids are always talking about who's OP and who's overpowered. So they play a lot of Smash Brothers. They play a little bit of Tekken,

and my wife just yesterday was talking about how she didn't like how someone was yelling at my son because he used Pikachu. And my younger son was like, "'Yeah, because that Pikachu's OP, "'I would yell at him too.'" You know? So like there's this idea that like there are characters

that have powers, you know, that make it less fun. And that's why Smash Brothers has to do re releases and add new characters and rebalance. And any character select character, if some characters being used too much, they'll track it too. Everyone's using Pikachu. Okay, we need to, we need to make Pikachu. Oh, there's advanced analytics to there's win rates each each guy they have all this stuff's public knowledge websites, guys like this picking this character has the highest win rate, then then the developers make adjustments based on the the

team. Like there's a guy who wins 70% of the games he's in like a character. He's probably way too strong. And they need to get the balance. They want everyone within like 55 to 45 so that you so everything's viable in different situations. They're constantly rebalanced. It's easier to do maybe in video gaming. Every year, very easy. You come out with a new game, you know, and you're just like, hey,

but we have we follow these sports that have been playing for hundreds of years. We have another thing here that I think is pretty interesting. These sports used to have different rules changes more often. And in basketball, like, oh, the three point line? Like, you know, or in baseball, like, forward passing? So Sam Miller wrote a great piece about, he called it Baseball's Meant to Change. His sub-stack is called Pebble Hunting.

And he just pointed out here on this chart that he had, you know, we used to have rule changes like crazy in the 1880s and 1890s. I mean, 20 rule changes a year, you know, or 20 rule changes in the 1880s as a decade. And then we had in the 1910s had zero in the 1940s had zero in the 80s and 90s, we had zero. And that's a lot of the growing up for that's a growing up time for a lot of the fans now, right? Is the eighties and nineties is how they remember the game and they didn't change and so it's not supposed to change.

But we're back now to changing a little bit more and that's been, you know, been annoying to people. But I just wanted to remind people. So baseball started in like the 1830s. So 50 years into the existence of baseball as a sport that was played, these were the rules that started to be that in this is from Sam Miller as well. In 1880, drop third strike rule implemented. Okay, well that's a big deal, but that's not that big a deal.

1882, pitchers allowed to throw sidearm. Wait, they weren't allowed to throw sidearm? 1883, balls required for a walk lowered to six? 1884, pitchers allowed to throw overhand. Okay, overhand, well that's, good they allowed that. 1885, one side of the bat could be flat. Love that one. 1886, stolen bases made official.

1887, batters could no longer tell pitchers where to throw the ball. Hit by pitch rule implemented. Strike zone established. 50 years in the baseball, they established the strike zone. So they didn't have a bench until 1889. So you could say well there's still a nation sport now we're more of a mature sport but I think that and there might be people listening to be like I don't want baseball to be like a video game

that changes all the time but the soft sport problem is a real one. Like if we have board games that the family no longer plays because there was one way of winning it and whoever got that piece or rolled that die at that thing, you know what I mean? That's why I kind of like games with dice rolling because it just throws in an element of chance and even if you're using the right strategy, you can lose. I think that's important. I've always really liked backgammon because, you know, it's a dice game, you know.

So I think that on some level baseball is doing the right thing in trying these different ones. One rule that I wanna get your reaction to Trevor made that I thought was fun, a person in a front office told me that, so one way now that you could use, be on the front edge of Stuff Plus research is to do more seam-shifted wake.

And it's a little surprising that the teams that are doing the most seam-shifted wake are not the teams that you'd expect, but they are the teams that need it the most. So I looked at the biggest, the number of pitches that had the large seam-shifted wake, like axis deviation, there's no way of saying it. And it was Colorado, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and the Mets and the twins and

the Yankees. So these are teams that are doing, that are acquiring players at least, maybe not developing it, but acquiring players that benefit from seamstriped wake. And I think that it makes a lot of sense for like Colorado to do something like that because they want weak contact, you know, and they need to do something different. They like sinkers and change ups, you know, so it's like, yeah, of course they like seam shifted wake.

So the leading edge of seam shifted wake is like using the seams to get certain effects that are hard for the batter to see. The batter sees a slot and he gets a different movement. So my friend in the front office said, what if we paint the ball? Paint the ball with, remember that you have a dot that you were trying to get to spin a certain way to get your sweeper to work. Was it your sweeper? Sometimes it's like a, this is the

Yeah, GPC. Wurly. Yeah. GPC thing. Do you have a dot on the ball? He was trying to make the dot so you could see the dot. I had Ed Kyle, Big Duller? Kyle. Lefty.

Kyle Muller. They had Kyle Muller go home with it. The same ball to try to get the, cause he had a really loose spinning slider and they wanted more of the sideways. So he uses this JP made of a ball and then he took it home with him to learn it. He was saying like, if you put that on the ball that you play with. So hitters can see it. Hitters can see the spinning dot and be like,

oh, this is a sweeper, you know, or whatever, react to it. It is one of those things where if people are getting a bunch of strikeouts from, you know, sweepers, like this could be a way to counteract that. I don't know, it's, I'm okay with that. I mean, it's, what is it? It's, you're drawing a line on a ball. It's not, you know, not saying that batters

could no longer tell pitchers where to throw the ball. You know, like it's on the scale of one to 10, putting a dot on the ball is, I feel like almost a one. Because it boosts offense. It's not something that was entirely popular with Trevor from like, hey, I'm a pitcher, this sucks. But the disengagement rules and the bigger bags and the things that increase steals, It's not something that was entirely popular with Trevor from like, hey, I'm a pitcher. This sucks. But the disengagement rules and the bigger bags and the things that increase steals,

I think, are huge wins for baseball because it created some strategic benefits to running more and being more athletic, right? Different ways to win. Different ways to win, right? And yes, I think that's really important because one other kind of shift we've noticed in recent years is the value of slugging over O.B.P. Right. Coming out of the moneyball era relevant again, because Eno is going to introduce moneyball tonight. I'm going to talk about this.

But like slugging sort of replaced O.B.P. in terms of what you're optimizing for now. Like that's that's sort of a prevalent belief. Makes sense. Damage is very important. I think there's still other wrinkles that we're seeing. Like the speed aspect beyond stolen bases is going to be really interesting, which teams are most aggressively taking extra bases, first, third, different things like that. And then there's still defensive things you can do even with shift restrictions, you could still set your defense the way you want, right? And I think we see pretty big differences in how much teams like to shade. This is a really big table that looks kind of small on YouTube. You can check it out at Baseball Savant if you want to see just the full scope of the leaderboard. But, you know, you pulled this up just looking for the teams that shade the most often versus the teams

that shade the least often. And it's not like there's this consensus on how to play defense in the big leagues. There's nothing close to that right now. This is what I like about this. It doesn't have is the top of the list is not just the best teams in baseball. You're like, oh yeah, like Yankees and Dodgers are the top and the Rockies are the bottom.

You know, it's actually, no, there are different approaches. The teams that have shaded the most of the Rays, Angels, Blues, A's, Astros and Mariners, you know, Rangers, Twins, you know, okay, there's some good teams and bad teams. The teams that have shaded the least are not the dum-dums. Not all of them. I mean, the Phillies and Brewers have shaded the least in baseball and you got the Pirates, Giants, Nationals, Royals and Cubs down there.

So there's a real difference. Here's another way of looking at it. Here's a picture of the Rays positioning as a team in the Phillies. The Phillies positioned the least. Where you'll see the most is the Rays third Baseman if you can look at the Rays third baseman He plays in four or five different really distinct spots the Phillies third baseman plays in one Maybe two the Rays first baseman plays like all over the bag there and the Phillies first baseman plays in one place And so if you look at the outfield dots the Rays outfield dots are just like bigger

They just take more steps in each direction than the Phillies. So This is a real difference and I think it's you may have something to do with pitching You know the Phillies found that their pitchers during shifts would actually pitch differently when the shift was on So maybe by shifting less they're putting more an emphasis on getting good that their pitchers during shifts would actually pitch differently when the shift was on. So maybe by shifting less, they're putting more emphasis on getting good defenders who are actually, and that's something they've been trying to improve, is getting Brandon Marsh and getting Johan Rojas into center field and getting Cal Schwarber off the field. Some of this was about just improving the personnel. Whereas the Rays go get Christian Morrell,

who doesn't have a home. And they have Jonathan Aranda, and they have Brandon Lau. They have guys who aren't great defenders, and they try to position them as well as possible to do well with them. So, you know, even though shifting is dead, shifting is still alive.

And I think there's an edge to be had in how you build your defense, and that still exists today. I agree. I like that a lot, especially on that first chart again. I mean, I think about the Brewers a lot, watch them a ton, because they always seem like they have three center fielders on the field

when Yelich isn't out there. They've really prioritized personnel, right? Yeah. Like in the terrain. Terrain, a phenomenal defender at second that could play short. Joey Ortiz, phenomenal defender at second that could play short. Joey Ortiz, a third baseman that could play short. I think when you have guys that are that rangy,

who have great arms, that much athleticism, you don't have to move them as much. You can play a little more straight up. You don't have to take those gambles. It's almost a gamble to shade, right? You have data, you have reason to do it, so you take those shots as best you can. But I think ideally, if the guys can also hit well enough to be good players

on the other side, I think you'd rather have players that are so athletic that you don't have to shade them that much because it's the ideal anyway, if there is an ideal. But I like there's different ways to do it. I like that we had good teams and bad teams on both ends of that list. So I think as far as the solvability of baseball, I don't think baseball has quite the extreme problem like basketball.

I do think slugging is a bit of a problem. And I just think that slugging for surpassing OVP means that here's the way of thinking about it. The Braves, when they had their quote unquote dynasty, they're up the middle for a lot of the time was Rafael Belyard and Mark Lemke. And Rafael Belyard one year had a WRC plus, I need to get this, I can't just guess.

I need to get this right. It was in the 60s, wasn't it? The 60s or something? I mean that was his career, but one year he had a WRC plus of five, another year he had a WRC plus of minus seven. But even when he was the starter for the Atlanta Braves in 1992, did they win it all in 1992?

I think they did. No, not that year. They did win in 92. In 91 maybe. Anyway, in 91 he had a 61 WRC plus, in 92 he had a 33. And mostly because his ISOs started with a.03. He had two homers for his whole career.

And that was old school baseball. And you're like, no, he's a defender and he run and you know, like now because slugging is so tightly, tightly related to success, every team wants to slug everywhere. And maybe the Brewers are tweaking that a little bit. Maybe the Guardians are tweaking that a little bit, you know, but there's a little bit of a problem there. And so I'm I'm receptive to pushing the fences out, deadening the ball. You know, there's there's always a little push and pull where you can change a little things and make the make the make the game better.

I think I hope we see a little more action on the long term. The rule changes by decade. I hope we see a few more bars like we're seeing in this decade, because I think that's better for the long term, the rule changes by decade. I hope we see a few more bars like we're seeing in this decade because I think that's better for the long term health of the game even though people are going to get mad and fight about it. That's pretty much a guarantee anytime you have rule changes. But we're going to make our way out. It's been a great hour hanging with you guys. You've got all of us around Blue Sky. You can find Trevor. I am Trevor May. Be Scott at social. You know, you know, Sarah's got be Scott at social and DVR dot be Scott at Sky. You can find Trevor. I am trevormay.bscot.social. Enos enoseris.bscot.social.

I'm dvr.bscot.social. You can join our Discord with the link in the show description. We'll get the graphics from this show up in there. That hoops one, as I mentioned before, it is fascinating. Thanks to Brian Smith for producing this episode for us today. That's gonna do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Friday.

Thanks for listening. Too cold, too cold.