Rates & Barrels - An attempt to fix MLB's broken hot stove and a pitcher stats draft

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Eno and DVR discuss a few ideas to fix MLB's broken hot stove as a flurry of NBA activity takes center stage, before holding their pitcher stats draft and discuss a few beer options for Thanksgiving.�� Rundown 2:26 Can MLB Speed Up Offseason Player Movement? 12:06 Some Interesting Difference in Top Salaries Between MLB and the NBA 17:10 How Long Should It Take to Develop a Big League Player? 23:42 The First Pick of the Pitcher Stats Draft 30:15 A Newer Metric Moving Up the Board 36:33 Round 2 Begins 40:16 A Great Complementary Metric 53:07 Final Round Selections 63:43 Beer of the Week -- Thanksgiving Edition Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic for just $1/week at theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access memberships separate. Terms apply. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Monday, November 23rd.

Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris on this episode. We'll get you caught up with all of the big news from the MLB hot stove. A lot of transactions on paper, not a lot of actual movement yet, but we'll get you caught up on that. We're going to dig into a question that kind of openly asks, why isn't Major League Baseball more like the NBA? The NBA has taken control of the sports calendar in the last couple of weeks with all the trades and big signings there. So we'll take a look at some interesting things as it pertains to why those things are so different. And then we're going to have our pitcher stats draft. It's kind of the sister episode to the hitter stats draft that we did last week. Eno, how's it going for you on this Monday? It is good. It is good. I'm ready to eat. got i got i prepped for eating uh last night by doing um

family recipe uh lamb chops it's actually pretty easy equal parts soy sauce rosemary uh fresh rosemary and dijon mustard and you just paint it on your lamb chops and broil them for 10 minutes boom that sounds pretty easy yeah just get a whole sheet pan going the you know family uh lamb chops made some of uh kenzie l lopez's great um crispy potatoes where you boil them in um baking soda so they get all kind of slushy and then you bake them real hot and they're really crunchy and i love those so some some bacon brussels sprouts so i'm ready man i'm ready i'm ready i also filled out my my rankings my side rankings for your your piece coming up yeah if you're into thanksgiving day football stuff or just you know side and pie rankings and some beer recommendations i'll have a piece coming out

i think tuesday morning will be the first time it's available so be sure to check that out or just side and pie rankings and some beer recommendations. I'll have a piece coming out. I think Tuesday morning will be the first time it's available, so be sure to check that out. Eno's a part of it. Britt's a part of it. Brandon Funston, Nando DeFino, perhaps some other friends will be checking in there as well. But let's start with the Major League Baseball news. The Rule 5 protection deadline passed since we last spoke

and a lot of prospects were added to rosters. A few players were cast off rosters to make room. And in all of that, I felt like there was really only one sort of prominent player who became available. There were maybe a couple other interesting ones along the way, but the most interesting player

is Hunter Renfro, DFA'd by the Rays. This is sort of their MO anyway. They didn't get the great season from Renfro before DFAing him, so maybe that's how this is a little bit different. But he's in DFA limbo for now. I think he'll probably end up being a free agent. I can't imagine a team would actually trade for him right now, knowing that they'll have a shot at him for an open market signing in the next couple of days. But as you look at the lack of movement so far, this isn't surprising, right? This is just what baseball does. It's a slower moving market than,

say, the NBA, where things are extra weird because of when the season ended and when the next one's going to start. But I still think we found that Major League Baseball has landed in this rut where the off-season activity takes too long to play out. And I'm not saying it all has to happen in three days. That would be completely ridiculous. But I still think there are these major structural problems with service time and just how the path the free agency works that really kind of steers teams into one simple consistent philosophy and that is ultimately why hunter renfro and renato nunez getting bumped off of 40-man rosters are the biggest headlines in baseball from the last 72 hours. And that's not really where you want to be in terms of drawing attention to the sport.

Yeah, I have a few thoughts about it. One is that I just feel like at some point someone did, and I feel like I even saw it on Fangraphs, did some research that suggested that people who sign later better deals for the teams. And so there's like this sort of de facto stance, which is like, we're just going to wait as long as possible. We're going to wait the agents out and eventually they'll, they'll, you know,

cave to our demands. So that I think has just generally pushed signings later and later um another thought that i have when it comes to like the nba is just that the hard cap does something really weird where uh it makes um it makes everything more like a puzzle you know where you're just like you know you have these exceptions and these this and there's that but with the hard cap you just have to fit everybody into this one number or there's a little bit of a range there but you you know like for example um right you know even beginning this before this free agency began there were only uh two or three teams that had

more than 10 million dollars to spend of cap space. The Hawks, the Hornets, and I believe the Pistons. Not teams that are really close either. And the Knicks. Yes, right. So the Hawks actually were the closest, so they took the most advantage and signed a bunch of, I think, pretty decent deals that have made them a better team.

And they were first at the trough because people, because there's this weird thing that happens with the, with the cap. Is it like the players have a little bit of more power? It seems sometimes to like, you know, land where they want to land. You know what I mean?

Even if they're already under contract and stuff, because I mean, that's just how it, that's how it works in the NBA. I don't know that it's necessarily just the cap. But if everybody's capped at a certain number, then everyone's just a max player or super max player. Right. So you can't just be like, you know, once you become a max player, you have to be able to fit on any team because every team has to have max players. So anyway, the Hawks got their pick of the litter, and now it's the Hornets and the Knicks and the Pistons being like,

who wants to take my money? But there is this weird thing where there's a deadline. There's like a thing where they're not allowed to announce anything before a certain moment, right? And you had things like Gordon Hayward opting out of a 30 million dollar deal and everyone thought oh my god that's crazy but it wasn't that crazy you know why because he already had a deal in place he just couldn't announce it right and then like a couple minutes after the the moratorium is up oh look gordon hayward signs with uh was it the was it

charlotte i think yep um and he's got got four years and $30 million a year or whatever. So I wonder if it would make sense in a weird way for baseball to create a longer window where no transactions were allowed. where no transactions were allowed. So like from the end of the World Series to after Thanksgiving or something, to December 1st, right? No transactions allowed. Like no signings allowed. That would at least create a sort of December 1st,

you know, signing date where all the deals that would have happened in that last month, you know, come to fruition. Right. It's a weird thing. You'd think that you'd have to have some sort of deadline on the other end to push things together. The problem with baseball is you're allowed to sign someone in April or May or June, you know, if you want to. So if we push that deadline up, I don't know what happens there. Like what happens if your starter gets injured in spring training?

You're not allowed to sign someone that's out there? That'd be weird, yeah, because at a certain point, if you add limited windows to make moves, you have what they have in soccer. You have transfer windows. You have multiple periods per year in which you can move players on and off the roster, and that's when your transactions happen.

I don't think you need to go quite that far. I do think if you had a moratorium from the end of the World Series until the winter meetings, which would be six to seven weeks, I think, is the time span that usually covers, you would have a flood of moves, even if it's not as significant as star signing extensions and all the big things we see in basketball kind of happening simultaneously. You would have the 30 or 40 small transactions that are one a day during that window all kind of rolling out on the first day that that's lifted. That would bring some sort of excitement.

bring some sort of excitement. But I still think the underlying problem here comes down to teams having extended periods of control where you're in the minor leagues and then a long period of six years once you reach the big leagues before you reach free agency. And it just keeps players in place for a very long time. And then by the time you reach free agency, most players are post-peak

and they're just not that exciting i think if you shorten that up and the list keeps getting worse and worse i feel like every year it gets every year gets worse but if you shorten up both of those windows a little bit if you say you got four years in the minor leagues before the 40 man deadline kicks in and team's got to make those decisions right speed? Speed that up a little bit and then cut the major league time to free agency down from six to five or even six to four. Then you're going to have those more

exciting waves of transactions as well because better players are going to be hitting the market at different points. I think it might be cool to just put a date after they signed, right? Just be like, you have a player for eight years after you've signed them.

Just a max of eight. And maybe even along the way, you've got to boost something with the pay after four or five years, too. You can't just hold them down in the minors for all that time. Oh, for like six years in the minors. Right, you can't do six and two in the minors and pay nothing. Maybe you can do like four and four or something, yeah. Something like that would in the minors. Right, you can't do six and two in the minors and pay nothing. Maybe you can do like four and four or something. Yeah, but something like that would make the list better. If we had had a moratorium until now,

and today was a big signing day, at least you would find out, you know, Gossman, Stroman, Smiley, Ray, Gurriel. You know, it wouldn't be like the NBA, but if you had another two weeks, I feel like you might have another name or two on there. And then it starts to feel like, oh, some stuff is happening, you know? I mean, it's not like the NBA had huge things happen.

I mean, it was like Gordon Hayward, you know? It's just the sheer volume of moves, though. Even if it's old guys like Carmelo re-signing with the blazers or paul milsap staying in denver right like you have those kinds of things and you have a gordon hayward on the move and you have these trades of mid-level players it all just adds up to be the kind of thing that gets people excited about the sport when ordinarily there'd be nothing to talk about and i think we got a really good email from Kyle. This is something I was thinking about this throughout the weekend as I kept seeing NBA transactions. And he wanted to know, what do you make of the fact that NBA

player salaries have skyrocketed across the board since 2015, especially at the top end, and MLB salaries have not capped up? There are more players making $30 million a season in the NBA than there are making $25 million a season in Major League Baseball, and there are more players making $25 plus in the NBA than there are making rosters are smaller. That is a factor in this. But the thing that really could have jumped out in the email is just looking at the percentage of players in the pool who make at least 15 million. Kyle had that in the email as well. 18% of the NBA's player pool, which is about 450 players, makes at least $15 million. 10% of the major league baseball player pool, which is 780 players, makes at least $15 million. So you're just in a better spot right now if you're in the NBA than if you're a major league player. And I think, as we said, there are a

number of reasons for this, but part of the popularity is being able to take over the headlines, to have your transactions, even your somewhat small transactions, kind of stand out as a big deal because they're part of this larger wave of activity. Yeah, and I think it's just a structure thing. I think it's what you're talking about. It's about the state of free agency in baseball and the fact that if you have a structure where for the first three years of your career, you make the minimum the nba minimal i mean the mlb minimum and then uh on top of that you have aging curves that suggest that players mostly enter the league as good as they're going to be um and that there's no sort

of up arrow anymore on aging curves they kind of plateau until they're 27 and then they drop off. Those two facts are just going to lead teams to incentivize to have as many major league minimum players as they can. You know, that's just how it's going to work. If you put that in front of somebody, that's the math problem they'll figure out. And they'll be like, oh, these 500k guys, that's what we need. We need a lot of those. So, you know, I think if I was thinking about this as a fan or as someone that worked on the Players Union, I think I would just argue for doubling the minimum salary and some sort of restructuring or arbitration. And, you know, obviously the owners love arbitration and they want to keep it that way. So I don't know that we'll get a radical restructuring.

But I would take doubling the minimum salary and everyone is super two as big steps forward. Everyone is super two. That means that nobody has seven years of control. Everyone's six. Cutting out that extra year is big. Yeah. There's a lot of relievers where that's a big deal. There's a lot of people where they get that seventh year and it's a lot of relievers where you know that's a big deal there's a lot of people

where they get that seventh year and it's a big deal um and then doubling the minimum salary what would happen then is oh now that guy costs a million dollars okay so for a million dollars i can have this untested reliever in my bullpen or i can go sign someone like jeremy jeffress how much do you think he's going to cost like Like 2 million or something, right? So I could go get Jeremy Jeffress for 2 million or this untested guy for 1 million. Now you're starting to say, well, you know what? Maybe I'll take Jeremy Jeffress, you know? And so I think it would help rebalance and create some free agency opportunities. Also, if you double the minimum salary, that will have reverberations all the way through arbitration. You may have more non-tenders in the third year, but we're going to have a lot of those this year, I think, anyway. And that would also create more

of a healthy free agency, hopefully. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that we could put out there that would be beneficial to the players that would also be beneficial to the game from just the broader interest standpoint but i do think getting those salaries up right away is going to move things along a little bit as well even if you can't completely shorten that timetable by a few years that seventh year thing drives people crazy they gotta find a way to get that out with the oh let's hold them down 10 days like that's that find a way to get that out with the, oh, let's hold them down 10 days. Like that's a horrible, horrible thing that needs to go away.

And that's why I like the idea of like, if it is possible to kind of do something where, you know, you just own them for a certain amount of time. And I hate the word own. I wish there was other ways to talk about this sort of stuff, but you own the rights to them. They're on your team for a certain amount of time that starts as soon as they enter your organization, because then teams would be incentivized to get that player to the major leagues as soon as possible in most cases. There might be, you're right to be worried about a reliever that they're

like, you know, just going to keep in the minor leagues for six years maybe you can attack that with some sort of pay structure or uh maybe some sort of split where it's like eight years but only four years in the minors or something you know what if you up the minor league basic pay also if you knock that up to 100k a year or something at that point teams aren't just going to hold on to players forever. But yeah, if your AAA guys cost like $100,000 a year, then after five years, they cost the same as a minimum guy for one year, you might be like, we're still...

We should just bring him up. If there's a difference between $100,000 and $500,000, he can actually help us. There's one other thought here, and thank you to Kyle for this email. This is a bit different, but how long do you think it should take to develop a big league player? I know everybody This is a bit different, but how long do you think it should take to develop a big league player? I know everybody's a little bit different,

but is a path of six years just leaving way too much wiggle room for teams anyway? Should we reasonably expect a team to be able to turn a high school kid into a big league player in three years, four years? How much time should that actually take? I i mean i think that different organizations have different answers because

you know you see the cardinals kind of have later debut ages and longer times in the minor leagues and um certain organizations seem to really want to like bring a guy up right around their peak ages and have them in the majors from like 24 to 28, 29, that sort of deal. Other teams are like, no, man, this guy's ready to go. I don't care. He's 19 and they bring him up. I personally think that the time that they need in the minor leagues is smaller now than it's been in the past, because if you can just look at how where pitching coaches are coming from, how college programs are being handled now, what the average independent lab looks like, pitching lab or hitting lab looks like now, what the average independent hitting instructor looks like. I think that the instruction that players get before they get to the major leagues is at an all-time best.

And I know that there's obviously idiots everywhere, but there's idiots in Major League Baseball too. So it's like, I'm sure there are people teaching people wrong things within Major League Baseball and without. But I think that just in terms of the average amount of good you can do with the player before he gets to baseball is at its best. I talked to Bryce Jarvis before he went into the draft this year, and he was talking about the spin efficiency on his pitches and how they mix together and the mirroring and the banana peel

and talking about all the movements on his pitches and what he was trying to do with this and that and all the cues he'd run through. And I was like, dude, you sound like you've been coached. I could be talking to you as a major leaguer right now. I could be talking to you about what your pitching coaches are doing with you. That's what you sound like. And he just pitched to Duke. So I would think that we're going to see shorter and shorter times, especially for teams that are competitive and need that player right away. stuck Gavin Lux in any other lineup this year and just let him play you know so it's a complicated question because it has to do with the pay structure you know how competitive your team is

how crowded the major league roster is and all that but if you're just asking me how long does it take to get a player to be good I think a couple years in the minors is enough that's what I was drilling into really is just how long should it take for you to be a great player in high school and then become a viable big league player? So you're 18 when you finish high school. You're the best player in your area. You get into a major league org. When are you really ready to go in and be competitive against big league competition? My brain says it's more like three to four years

i think with an 18 year old it's probably three to four and with college is probably two or so you know what i mean and i think we plus one or plus two the timetable for both of those groups because of cost and all those other factors right right but the the high school uh player you know needs at least a year or two to catch up physically, I think. So there's a portion of that. You see it a lot with like, have you seen Jason Dominguez? He's not normal. He doesn't look like a teenager at all, right?

So you're always going to have exceptions. But he looks a lot bigger than he was, is my point. It's like there's a year of sort of like better eating, better workout, There's a year of better eating, better workout that took Jason Dominguez from, that guy looks strong to, whew. I mean, I think you could eat Miguel Sano at this point. I just think it's fun to look at players like that too because you can dream on how fast the exceptions can get to the big leagues. He might be in the big leagues in two years.

That might actually happen for Dominguez. We're talking about like a 17-year-old signing, right? Yeah, and that's kind of an extreme, of course. One of the fastest paths to the big leagues for someone that age, but it does happen on occasion. I think that norm is, like you said, probably three to four years for a typical 18-year-old or 17-year-old coming out of high school. And then you're looking at probably one to two years for college players, especially coming out of more prominent programs

where you have that advanced tech and that higher quality coaching as well. I feel like that should erase most of the development time you would have needed coming out of high school. It should not take you almost as long if you went to college and played in a prominent program to then make your way to the upper levels of the minors and get the opportunity at the big league level. If I could put a cap on it, I would put a cap on like four years. I think four years for everybody should be enough. Imagine being someone that's drafted into an organization that's not forward thinking in terms of pitching and you think they're not coaching you're right and you've been there for three years or stagnating as a pitcher like do you really want to hang on for more like

be better for you and maybe even the organization for you to be a minor league free agent earlier you know just so you can pick where you want to go pick your who you're going to develop with pick the organization that fits you best so yeah i i think even even like you know tapping it four years would be would be a good way to make sure that you know something something split like an eight-year thing you have you for eight years and four years in the minors max however you use that yep i totally agree with you i think four by four would be a good new way to go they need to have like an asterisk for college players i guess maybe it's six and three for college players, I guess. Maybe it's 6-3 for college players or something.

Because they're older. I mean, if you had a college player for eight years... So 3-3 if you draft a player out of college. 4-4 if you draft them out of high school. Or if you sign them as an international free agent. Yeah, that's my plan. Up to a certain age. If you sign...

Please poke holes in and figure out what awful evil the front offices would do with that plan, how they would use it to make baseball even worse. They'll still find a way to break it, I'm sure, but at least it'll be a new problem for them to work on for a little while. And maybe, maybe, just maybe it'll kick up some more interest in transactions and speed up decision making throughout the offseason as well. So let's be clear. When it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents electronically? Mm-hmm. The answer is FedEx. Okay, but what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments?

How do I find all the... Also FedEx. Impressive. Is there a regulatory specialist I can ask about? FedEx. Oh, but let's say that... FedEx. What?

FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. Let's get to our pitcher stats draft. You were kind enough to give me the first pick in the hitter stats draft last week. I will be very courteous and return the favor and give you the first pick. Everything, of course, is available. We're going

to talk about why we like these stats and what we expect to learn and some of the shortcomings of these metrics as well. And since you are the king of pitching analysis with stats, I imagine your first pick would be one that most people are going to get behind. So I'm really curious of all the pitching stats out there, what goes 1-1 for you? Well, I kind of want to cheat. Well, you tried taking all carbs in the sides draft well i don't know if it's cheating but my favorite is strikeout minus walk rate that cheating it's not cheating it was at the top of my list okay all right you could for if you force me into choosing i'm gonna choose strikeout rate because walk rate actually uh is not super sticky

year to year uh and takes a little bit longer to stabilize. But strikeouts become more powerful when you subtract walks. So strikeout minus walk rate is the stickiest. Well, I'll have other stickier things, but it's one of the stickiest year to year stats. It stabilizes the fastest. It's been shown to be the best in season projector so it's better like if you were looking at FIP or Sierra it's it beats that K-BB beats FIP beats Sierra

beats you know every most things that I've seen and it's it's it's just disarmingly simple and I think it gets at the things that that pitchers control the most and it's a really easy way uh to sort and um it isn't always the easiest to know what is good uh but a top 10 percent uh thing let me just do um like 60 innings to get more in here like 60 innings to get more in here. No, that's not enough. 40 innings? Okay, 111 pitchers, so a top 10 strikeout minus walk rate is a top 10% one. Over 25%.

If you're over 25%, you're elite. The guys last year that were elite were Shane Bieber, DeGrom, Bauer, Glasnow, Maeda, Lamette, Cole, Burns, Darvish, Gossman, Nola, Woodruff. So that's a big gainer was Zach Pleszak. Although I would note that a lot of that comes from a minuscule walk rate, which may or may not be repeatable. So, you know, if you want to poke holes in it, Nate Eovaldi is a year-to-year K-BB champion. Zach Eflin was up there. And I don't know. Who would you consider?

I mean, it's really pretty much devoid of misses. Jordan Montgomery was a top 30 guy, but the missing thing is always home runs, but home runs are super noisy. And so you just kind of want to avoid putting home runs too deep into whatever metric you're looking at for pitchers. I was trying to think of some misses for K-BB because it does just track

really well overall. I think the type of pitcher that I fear it would miss on occasion is the high K, high walk guy. And 2017 Robbie Ray is one of those guys. I mean, Danny Salazar back in 2017, of those guys. I mean, Danny Salazar back in 2017, you're getting 22, 23% K minus BB percentages from guys that bring considerable risk because of the walk rate being elevated. And the K minus BB number looks so good that if you were only looking at that, fortunately, we obviously put it next to other things, then you could end up with a few surprisingly risky guys. But generally, nine times out of 10, if not more, you're coming away with a good or very good pitcher if the K minus BB percentage is good. Yeah, it becomes less powerful the more sample you have. So I think the biggest miss looking at 2019 guys going into 2020 is somebody like Matt Boyd, who was 11th in

baseball in K-BB among pitchers with more than 80 innings in 90 innings in 2019. And the easy thing that you can spot is that he had the highest home run per nine rate out of anybody. But right below him is Hugh Darvish, who you would call that a win, and he had a 1.66 home run per nine in 2019. Boyd had a 1.89. The problem is that we had a long track record with Hugh Darvish, and so we could say that one's a bit of an outlier when it comes to home run rates. He's not really this home run prone guy. But with Matthew Boyd, we could start to drill down and be like, well, you know what, he's mostly a two-pitch guy. He's had the home run rate problem his whole career. This may not go away. Maybe he's not such a great choice here.

Andrew Haney had very similar K-BB and home run rates to Matt Boyd, but I don't think he had the sort of two-pitch problem or the sort of track record with home run rates. So home run rates, command, those are the things that can start to chip away at the effectiveness of K-B-B. But if you're talking about, you know, you're three weeks into the season and you start by K-B-B,

there's very few things that are going to help you as much as that. Yeah, I just flipped that leaderboard upside down from 2019, set the minimum to 100 innings. So we're looking at starters i mean you would have missed on sandy alcantara and zach plisak but most of the pitchers you're seeing at the bottom of that leaderboard and that laggard section they're guys you want nothing to do with right so just as you can occasionally step into the high K, high walk, Robbie Ray, Danny Salazar type that I described at the other end, you'll occasionally step into a good pitcher who either doesn't strike guys out yet or has a walk rate problem that they're able to fix. Again, nine times out of ten, you're right to avoid the guys on the bottom of this list.

avoid the guys on the bottom of this list. Yeah, I think Alcantara is just a big pitch mix change guy, and I'm sure I'll have something on this list that will approach being able to sort of figure out that problem in the future. All right. Well, I'll go ahead and make my first pick. I'm actually going

to go with CSW, called strikes and whiffs divided by total pitches. It's the Alex Fast metric we've started talking about on this show a bit more in the last couple of months. He sums it up perfectly. There's a great intro article about the metric from two years ago now over at Pitcher List. And right at the top, more predictive than swinging strike percentage, more descriptive than whip percentage. It's a good mix of things you're looking at here. You'll see in that piece how it tracks with ERA, how it tracks with K percentage, how it tracks with an ERA indicator like Sierra. Just a lot of good indicators all rolled into one.

And that's the thing about pitching stats compared to hitting stats. I feel like you find more Frankensteins when it comes to pitching metrics that can tell you a little bit more. It just seems like they're a little further along in terms of evolution. If you look at the actual breakdown from the shortened season in 2020, I think numbers above 30 are generally what you're looking for. You get into the low to mid 30 range. That's where your leaders are going to be. Jacob DeGrom had a 34.6 CSW in the shortened season. Bieber's up there at 33.8. Darvish, 33.7. Denelson Lemaitre, 33.4.

Aaron Nola, Kenta Maeda, above 32. So it's good at finding guys that can get whiffs and called strikes. Both good skills, right? You want guys to swing and miss when they're going to take a swing. And you want to be able to freeze guys, too, with pitches that they don't think are going to be strikes or pitches they don't think they can hit. I just think this is a good overall individual skill metric for pitchers that Alex did a great job putting together. I think this is one that I wish I'd come up with it because if I had been ahead of the curve on it, I probably would have been doing a better job finding undervalued pitchers had i come up with this a few years ago yeah my one of my only problems with it is do you have a good place to to track it is there a good leaderboard i i

have like a savant search uh that i do where uh i just add called strikes to swing strikes in the pitch result field um and uh and sort by pitch percentage, then you can play around with the number of results to try and toggle the minimum number of results to toggle reliever starter. But with 200 as the minimum results, Shane Bieber was number one, right? Is that 35.7? Is that track with what you've got? I think I've got them a little different, but I thought I used the same method you did where I used the Savant search to get it because that is the one drawback right now.

I don't think there's an easily accessible leaderboard. At least it's not available. Fangraph's not available on the Savant leaderboards yet. I bet that's going to change though. I wouldn't be surprised if when we get to the start of 2021, we'll see it. You see it in Savant in certain places. So it's in there and they may add it to a leaderboard somewhere. I could see it being on a couple of different leaderboards. I couldn't find it.

But elite in this case would be, I think, over 33%, maybe over 32%. Does that track with what you've got? Yeah, that does. Okay. So, you know, 33% is elite. I think I've read before that the average is under 30%, just under 30%. And, you know, there's some interesting names at the top here, perhaps for next year. Tajay Antone was also one of the biggest spin rate increasers in baseball and a pitch mix change guy. Maybe he will be more interesting

next year if Trevor Bauer doesn't sign there. I think TJ Anton is definitely somebody to keep on your name board. I've got a name board. I had one too. I took a picture of it last year.

Pinterest with picture names. You definitely find some guys a little further down in the ranks who surprise. Dylan Bundy comes up really high from the shortened season in 2020. Frankie Montaz, despite having a bad season, is right there tied with Kenta Maeda and CSW. Joe Musgrove, a favorite of a lot of people in the fantasy community, comes in pretty high. He's at like 33 in change. Drew Smiley at 34.

Caleb Smith at 33. You see kind of fine value options up and down the rankings. Brady Singer, I believe. I think I mentioned him when we talked about him a week or so ago. 32.3 CSW. That's really high for a guy outside the top 75 among starters in my rank.

So you can find guys all over that do this well. And again, I just think it's a measure of dominance. It's giving me enough information that I don't always have in front of me. If I'm only looking at

one or two numbers the only drawback as we said is having difficulty tracking it down the savant custom search is the best way to get that information yeah it's actually a little bit of brilliance because there was a piece a while back from Matt Swartz that on baseballpectus that pointed out that called strikes and swinging strikes impart the same amount of information on strikeout rates. And so he was basically intimating that one is not superior to the other between called strikes and swinging strikes. I've since seen a little bit of research that in a smaller sample,

swinging strikes can stabilize faster. So I think swinging strikes stabilize fast. That probably has to do with not having to use the umpire. The umpire is not a variable. The catcher and the framing is not a variable. Swinging strikes are a little bit more mono-e-mono type of situation. But by using call strikes plus whiffs, you're throwing those two things together.

And you're focusing on the things that create strikeouts. So in a way, you're pre strikeouting and strikeout rate is one of the best stats. We've already established that. And I basically chose strikeout rate by choosing strikeout minus walk rate. And then sometimes you want to go move faster and find people where they're doing something under the hood that doesn't work with their strikeout rate, might predict a better strikeout rate in the future. And I think that's called strikes versus whiffs. And with my next pick, I'm going to go even deeper

because sometimes you only have one or two games that you're looking at or a scouting report. And in those situations, I think velocity, just straight MPH is an important number. And I think it's really huge for DFS. Rob Arthur showed that there is a bit of a hot hand when it comes to pitching, that pitchers that were up in velocity outperformed their projections in the next games. So if you're just tracking, you know, small changes in fastball velocity, you might spot some really good pitchers to take in DFS.

You might spot some pitchers to trade for or pick up. Drew Smiley, you knowiley was a decent pickup in deeper leagues last year because his velocity was up to 2.8 miles per hour. It's a decent way to see how major league front offices work this way. I have a piece out about a few free agent pitchers, four free agent pitchers that caught my eye. And one of them is Matt Shoemaker.

And he was up 2.8 ticks. His fastball velocity was up 2.8 ticks in September compared to the season before. Here are the other guys that were below him. He's number one in fastball plus velocity in September. Here are the other guys that were below him. He's number one in fastball plus velocity in September. Here are the other guys that were on that list. Smiley, 2.7, signed. Robbie Ray, up 1.4, signed.

Kevin Gossman, up 1.1, signed. So I think you're going to see most of the guys on the plus. And then today, there's rumors that Michael Waka is supposedly in demand. He was up. He's on this up one plus list. So changes in fastball velocity, fastball velocity, fastball velocity is also like maximum exit velocity where it describes to you how good the player can be. You have to be able to touch 97 plus to get drafted in the first three rounds these days. It's like max exit velocity. If you can't touch 97, then we can't get you to sit 94.

And right now, average league velocity is around 93. And then just generally, velocity is good. We know that it's good. Every pitch does better when it has more velocity. In the same locations, the same movement, the pitch does better if it has velocity. So if you're looking at big velocity leaders in 2019 going into 2020, Syndergaard, I guess that's a miss, but that's injury. That's a different thing.

Cole, DeGrom, Montas, maybe a miss, but Wheeler, Buehler, Woodruff, Castillo, Gray, I guess that's a miss, but that's Colorado. And then here, Sandy sandy alcantara hmm we have a guy who just changed his pitching mix has great fastball velocity and didn't do well in k minus bb let's let's take a deeper look otherwise snell paxton you know that was a miss from injury clevenger scherzer it'szer. It's a good one number thing to look at fastball velocity. It's a good leaderboard that you just threw out there too, right? I mean, Velo gives you a lot more margin for error. That's why we talk a lot about aging starting pitchers when they start to lose Velo. How good are the secondaries? How good is the command,

right? Because your margin for error shrinks as your velo drops and being able to locate effectively or being able to mix and match three or four pitches goes a really long way toward kind of staving off the inevitable decline that comes from that lost velocity i think my next pick kind of falls in exactly with the sandy alcantara example and it's something that frankly i wouldn't have if it weren't for you putting this out there. Command plus. That's the thing I want to see. He's like, okay,

so why doesn't he strike more guys out? Does he have poor command? In this case, he's got average command, so that's not a red flag. It's not great to see just an average number there, but it's not a bad thing, right? We talked about guys in the 80s being particularly problematic,

the dreaded Josh James territory. You don't want to be there. But even there are good pitchers like Glasnow and Lemaitre who are in the mid-80 range in Command+. At the other end, of course, you have a few guys who are great in Command+, who didn't get great results. Chris Paddock is the trouble spot in that direction.

I would look at Michael Pineda maybe as a guy that I have probably overrated because of how good the Command Plus was in 2020 and how good the Command's been in the past. But all in all, I think this is one of those new sort of metrics that it gives you a better sense of something you used to have to just see with your eyes. You can look at a number now and have a better feel for whether or not the pitcher locates where he wants to locate instead of having to watch every single pitcher for multiple starts to really build your own scouting report. That's what they're doing.

Yes, like someone's doing that for you. That's extremely valuable because there's only so much time in the day. Yeah, I was talking to a team analyst that said that, you know, when he was trying to develop his stuff metric and he was working on, you know, stuff numbers that were based on velocity and movement of pitches and how well a player a player would do, uh, just based on his, on his movement and velocity. He found that almost every outlier that was unexplainable by stuff was explained by command plus, like, uh, he contacted me and asked for command plus numbers so that he could integrate that into his stuff metric to get a better way uh to build uh like a pitcher evaluation model and uh so i believe that it is something that uh teams are doing uh teams value um i i know that it it sounds a little bit janky to some, to be honest,

because what you're trying to do is get in the pitcher's head. And you're trying to anticipate using scouting reports of the pitcher, scouting reports of the hitter. Sometimes you look at the catcher's target, but not always, because catchers do weird things with their gloves. And you kind of look at the situation, and you're guessing where the pitcher wants to go. And so I can see how people would say

it's falsely precise, or it's just impossible to get in the pitcher's head. I understand that. But I think it's a worthwhile thing to ask, a worthwhile question to ask. And I think it's a very different way of doing it that captures some of this. I mean, if you look at it, a lot of the misses, quote-unquote misses, I think Pineda counts as this. Pineda, Tommy Malone is up there, and maybe Alec Mills. You might call those, or LeJay Newsome. Those are guys that are misses. However, I think that they actually do very well given their stuff.

Right. They get more mileage out do very well given their stuff. Right. They get more mileage out of below average stuff. I mean, Alec Mills is out there throwing 80 poo, dude. You know what I mean? So I kind of think that Michael Pineda would be a reliever out of baseball if he didn't have excellent command. Look at Zach Davies, who was number one in command plus. He's exactly what I'm talking about like I think if he didn't have that command he wouldn't be in baseball it's really kind of interesting to

me because Davies in pinata in terms of their physical builds are probably the most polar opposite pitchers in the league and they're one and two on the command plus leaderboard it's really surprising to see that. Their underlying numbers in the shortened season actually look pretty similar in terms of strikeout rate and walk rate. Yeah, I know. It's helpful, too, to quantify something like this so that you don't have any biases, right?

You don't have like a, you know, oh, Michael Pena just throws real hard or whatever it is. You don't come to it with any biases and, you know, at zach davis and be like oh he must be a command guy well it turns out that he is but like you know just not only because he's the tiny dude you know not only because he's got greg maddox build or whatever uh but uh you know i think it's a helpful thing I think that it mostly is helping me realize how risky some guys can be and you talk about that mid-80s shelf that is where I start to just tap out on people so I just wanted to name some names that people are excited about that are sub 90. 90 showed up in my research as being a moment where you're much more likely to be a reliever.

And I'm picking out the starters here, but it's like reliever, reliever, reliever, reliever, starter, reliever, reliever. You know what I'm saying? So it's like reliever. It's Kyle Wright, reliever, reliever, reliever. Tony Gonsolin, reliever, reliever, reliever, reliever. Corbin Burns, reliever. Tarek Skubal, reliever, reliever.

Oh, that guy's in Japan, I think. Reliever, reliever. James Korinchak, reliever, reliever, reliever, reliever. I don't care about as much relievers, I'll be honest. I think it's just part of why relievers are kind of crazy year to year. I just generally fade relievers. Tyler Glasnow, 87. Josh James, 86. Luis Patino, 86. Denilson Mamet, 86. Dylan Cease, 85. It's starting to get really dicey

here. It's all relievers. Jordan Yamamoto, 83. I'm not betting on much from that. Yamamoto, 83. I'm not betting on much from that. I can't even see a starter anymore. You say Kikuchi's in there with a 77. Nate Pearson with an 81. I think the question people are going to have, and this is one where I would absolutely defer to you,

with someone like Pearson or Patino, we're talking about fewer than 20 innings, is that still such a small number of innings you'd look at and say, I'm concerned, but since these guys are relatively cheap in drafts, I mean, Patino might be outside the top 400 in ADP. I'll take this lottery ticket with poor command and a limited sample, but I'm less likely to go after Corbin Burns with an ADP in the top 70 overall. Yeah. There's still ways to

justify taking a chance on someone with well below average command. I think it's a little bit more about like, do you remember where Zach Gallin was going into 2020? You know, and you're like, oh, do I have the entire

package here? Is this worth spending money on? And I think when you see the great command thing and good stuff and good fastball velocity and good strikeout minus walk rate, then you can say, hey, everything's on board here. You know, there's nothing for me to worry about. But when you're, you know, when you're picking where Pearson goes, you know, there's a lot of he could take a step forward. He could he could he could throw a tick slower next year and be better at placing it. So and he would still be throwing 96 or whatever.

So, you know, I think that there yeah, there's definitely always a relationship between where a guy is. Also, I wouldn't freak out too much if a guy has a command plus between 95 and 105. I pretty much just lump all those guys together as having average command. It's a little bit more impressive when someone gets past 115 on the top end or 85 on the bottom end. That's when I really take notice. And so, you know, I think even with Patino, it's like, like Glassnow. Glassnow is an 87. He has two pitches and he's going to be a very expensive starter next year. I think I may not have that many shares. I just see that number and it gives me the gives me goosebumps

in a bad way and that's even before you think about injury risk which we've talked a lot about too that's elevated for glass now the last time i met are like the two that i worry about the most yeah it's reflected in the rankings for me definitely two guys that i'm not sure about and i think with someone like patino a reason i'd be more inclined to take that chance is we're looking at a guy that has three pitches right fastball change up slider it's not two needs a third it's has three hasn't commanded them well so far but there was a point not that long ago i think i recall you saying if you had your choice between patino and gore you actually preferred patino right yeah well that's been borne out by some sort of weird

velocity uh thing going on with gore and nobody knows where he's what he's sitting i i would if anybody here has seen a velocity number on gore please please let me know um but uh patino uh it's also interesting because you see patino like like my looks at Patino a lot of them were like at showcases like all-star games and stuff like that where I'm just like, wow, dude is like throwing 100 with these three awesome

pitches and then, you know, more extended looks you might say, well he's having a hard time placing it he runs up big pitch counts you know, he's out of the time placing it. He runs up big pitch counts. He's out of the game early. All things that can either lead to them saying, hey, you know what? You can't control your changeup.

Let's turn you into a closer, and you're our next closer just because you can't really control that changeup. That's one way that people take steps forward. Or like with Tyler Chatwood, hey, let's throw his cutter because you can control it better than you control, you know, whatever, the curveball or the changeup. way that people take steps forward or like with Tyler Chatwood hey let's throw his cutter because you can control it better than you control you know whatever the curveball or the change up so there are there can be ways to to improve your command plus by improving your pitch mix by changing your pitch mix throwing a pitch that you can control more often than another pitch that you

can't control so there are there are ways to change your command plus. I would never say that it's set in stone, the Patino has reliever level command, but it is a reason to be maybe a little bit more worried about a young pitcher. But like, you know, Tyler Mollet, for example, still has that elite command plus and always has. But this year he developed a really good slider that looks like an out pitch. Now you've got a real out pitch. You've got average velocity and you've got elite command. That's why Tyler Molley's on my name board.

There's also an element of pairing this with something like CSW too, where I'm looking and saying, okay, I got green ink in Command Plus and I've got green ink with called strikes and whiffs. And that's exactly what describes Tyler Molle. There's your guy, your mid and late round pitching target. If he ticks both of those boxes, to me, that's a very good target. A 30.9% called strikes and whiffs and a 115 command plus for Molle. Gra top of that one of course it's a reds organization

that's getting a lot out of its pitching staff right now too you could do a simple pairing too with velocity and command plus if you do that a lot of these uh if you say like who has 94 plus velocity uh then a lot of these iffy names drop out and if you if you do that filter and look at elite command plus plus uh above average velocity you get gallon nola um molly uh ryu no not anymore ryu degrom um gossman uh let's see who else does the velocity gets padded to velocity barrio still woodruff wheeler luis castillo uh mike myers possibly the the closer for the angels next year pablo lopez max scherzer so it's shane bieber so it's a good it's a i think that is um you know or your your stuff metric you know whatever stuff metric you've got or if you just

want to based on velocity if you could that's that's that's been my my holy grail has always been like let's combine command and stuff and and look under the hood yeah i think it's a good approach and it again it gives us a little more insight into something that's always been harder to quantify until recently and i think it just pairs so well with other things that we're often looking at uh let's go ahead and have you make your third and final pick here obviously plenty more stats you could use but if you only had one more tool to put in the bag what would it be this is a weird one um there's a lot of good research out right now um that people are looking at how a pitcher can control exit velocity or balls in play. When you look at K-BB, what you're saying is,

I'm going to just look at strikeouts and walks and balls in play are just all noise. That's been sort of what you got from a defense independent pitching standpoint. That's a really cool metric. That's a really good metric that was developed by Boris McCracken. Back in the day. It's a solid way to think about things. However, I think we're starting to shave away. At what pitchers can control.

Just from some great work from Alex Chamberlain and Connor. I think Connor. Did I kill your name last time? Connor Kirkon? Kirkon. K-U-R-C-O-N. You should follow him. He's good. The two of those guys have been looking into what a pitcher can control,

and it kind of falls in line with what I've always thought, which is they can control launch angle by where they throw in the zone which is they can control launch angle by where they throw in the zone. And they can control exit velocity by where they throw in the zone. It's just that controlling exit velocity is really hard because that has to do with the hitter's good zones. And you have to come in the strike zone. And the exit velocity is better in the strike zone than out. and it has to do you have to come in the strike zone and the exit velocity is better in the strike zone than out but controlling launch angle is just do you throw high in the zone or do you throw low in the zone you know um and so a lot of these fancier metrics that are trying to get at how

much the pitcher can command i'm not sure how good they are year to year and how predictive they are and i haven't bought into any of them that hardcore but it has helped me appreciate a really old school metric that I want to pick here can you guess oh after that preamble is it is it iso against no but you're getting there ground ball rates ground ball right okay i'm surprised but but you want to know a lot about what happens when this guy does get hit and that does tell you quite a bit and i want to have fewer homers in the in the time of homers, I want to have fewer homers. And so I just opened up my tableau and did an analysis of ground ball rate and home run rate by pitcher in the last 10 years. And ground ball rate predicts about 21% of your home run rate. So it's actually not as strong as you might expect.

it's actually not as strong as you might expect however if you only look at pitchers with a ground ball rate above 50 percent um that changes it's really obvious when you're looking at uh the map but i'm going to do a filter real here real quick i'm only looking at ground ball rates above 50 and i want to know the relationship between these two metrics now. It's super strong. And it describes now, oh, about the same. That's weird because there's fewer dots. But anyway, it's definitely, if you look at the graph, it's more obvious. Over 50% is when things become meaningful. And this is also backed up by research on Sierra and some other metrics. You want over 50%. If it's like 40 to 45% or something, you're not really getting a lot of information from that. But over 50%, you get an actual reduction in home run rates. That's Randy

Dobnak, Cranber Valdez, Lance McCullers, Adrian Hauser, Luis Castillo, Sixto Sanchez, Brett Anderson, Dakota Hudson, Zach Wheeler. Always has really low home run rates, especially this year. Patrick Sandoval, interestingly. Dustin May, that's going to be part of his brilliance. I think he will start to suppress home runs. Brady Singer could get out of his brilliance. I think he will start to suppress home runs. Brady Singer could get out of his left. He has a fastball slider mix, but if he's going to get 53% ground balls, maybe he won't give up a ton of homers to lefties.

Max Freed, Clayton Kershaw, Brad Keller. There's a bit of a type in Kansas City, it looks like. Dallas Keuchel always seems to be okay, even though nobody wants to spend any money on him. Ian Anderson, Pablo Lopez. It's a pretty good list, man. It's a good list where I think the floor is higher than people realize. You keep that home run rate over 50%, you're likely going to have, I mean, that grand ball rate under over 50%, you're likely going to have, I mean, that ground ball rate under over 50%,

you're likely going to have home run rates that are closer to one than like, you know, three or whatever. I was trying to come up with something that looked at batted balls that wasn't old school like ground ball rate that definitely incorporated some of the exit velocity things that we care about for hitters.

And I was trying to decide if I actually want barrels per plate appearance allowed as something that tells me a lot about the picture. And I wonder how different it would be than the ground ball rate leaderboard because I'm looking at the 2019 barrels per plate appearance leaderboard over at Savant and I set it up to be 200 and I be 200 batted ball events to get most of the relievers out. The leaders there, in a good way, Marcus Walden, reliever, Tyler Chatwood, that's kind of interesting,

Michael Lorenzen, reliever, Frankie Montes, Brandon Woodruff, Blake Snell, Julio Urias, Marcus Stroman, Charlie Morton, Max Freed, Luis Perdomo, there's a surprise, gets a lot of ground Freed, Luis Perdomo. There's a surprise. Gets a lot of ground balls, though, right? Wade Miley, Jacob deGrom, Luis Castillo, Garrett Cole, right?

So there are the aces we're accustomed to. 2019 surprise, Adrian Hauser, Frambois Valdez, Francisco Liriana, who was a reliever at the time, Noah Sindergaard, Chris Bassett, who I think we've seen is a little bit underrated. Mike Clevenger, Hyunjin Ryu, Walker Bueller, Kenta Maeda, rounding out the top 25. That's a pretty good group overall. A few strange pitchers mixed in there. I mean, yeah, if you look only at this, you might trick yourself into drafting Wade Miley,

but fortunately you don't have to use barrels per plate appearance as a standalone metric for evaluating pitchers. Yeah, I just, I don't know. I get really nervous about balls and play stats for pitchers. I was raised in dips, you know, and I just, I see, you know, so there's a cool piece by Alexander Chase on Pitcher List today. And he's making the argument for a stat called hard hit per nine. And it's basically how many hard hits per nine innings a pitcher would give up.

And it's better than their hard hit. It's more useful as a stat than their hard hit percentage for for reasons that he uh doesn't quite explain i don't think but uh he shows anyway by showing in the numbers so it looks like one of the best ones uh but a lot of times it still gets outperformed by strikeout minus walks if you if you look carefully at the uh at the stats um and and even in his summation at the end i was kind of like well strikeout minus walks feel pretty powerful on this list you know uh but he does make a good uh he does make a good argument for a hard hit per nine i would recommend reading it uh the barrels do okay with describing this year's uh era but uh barrels allowed are pretty bad at describing next year's ERA, but barrels allowed are pretty bad

at describing next year's ERA. There's your major limitation. Yeah, I wonder if just hard hit on a per swing basis would be better. I'm looking at that leaderboard. Urias, DeGrom, Snell, Verlander, Cole, Woodruff, Flaherty, Maeda, fewer blips on that list.

Erod's in there at 10 from 2019. Scherzer, Clevenger, Paddock, Giolito, Castillo, Morton, again filtering out a couple of relievers. That's pretty good. And it is actually better than any of the barrel stats. Hard hit per TBF, that's a little

bit closer to hard hit per swing. That performs better than any of the barrel stats when predicting Season 2 ERA. But the best stat for predicting Season 2 ERA is strikeout rate.

So... And the stickiest stat year-to-year is strikeout rate. And even hard hit per nine, which he's arguing for, is pretty good, but it's less sticky than walk rate year over year. So there's some work out there. It's getting better, and we can define it better now that we have the StatCast numbers.

But I prefer, if there's anything that I haven't said today in the draft, I would say something like vertical movement on the fastball and the curveball or the breaking balls, that's something I look at a lot. It's basically a stuff variant. I'm looking for ways to predict strikeout rate because strikeout rate is the best thing. It's basically how I approach it. When it comes to suppressing, the only nod I'll give is sort of a look for ground ball rates. The reason I like ground ball rate is it gives you an idea of who's throwing low in the zone, who might avoid homers in the future. Yeah, I think that's solid reasoning for ground ball rate.

If I was going to use one of those batted ball numbers instead, my lean would be the hard hit on percentage of swings. So you can get that from the baseball savant leaderboard i feel like that's just got a slightly more accurate feel to like who's legitimately keeping guys from squaring them up the most like that's what i'm looking for there but i think ground ball right as you said it kind of gets you to a very similar place and and i think get at and you understand the direct benefits of it really easily. The skill that I think is being measured is command.

Yeah, probably. All that to get back to the one number, which again, we didn't used to have that. That's why ground ball rate was so important 10 years ago, but still has quite a bit of value today. Before we go, how about a beer of the week in honor of Thanksgiving? What do you got lined up for Thursday?

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. What have I got? What do I got? I've got a box coming to me from North Dakota slash Minnesota. I haven't opened it up yet, so I don't know exactly what's in there. I haven't opened it up yet, so I don't know exactly what's in there. I got a box coming to me from Baltimore with some Dan's Jams in it.

And I've been... It's the Skittles Sour. And he's sending me a Skittles Sour. And he's recommended that I actually throw some tequila in it and enjoy my jamarita. Huh. So I might try that because I've already tried putting Coca-Cola in my supplication and people were yelling at me for that. I'm a crazy person. I'm willing to just mix and match. They gave us these things so we can have fun with them.

to just mix and match. They gave us these things so we can have fun with them. I like the idea of trying something different with Thanksgiving Day beers especially. Man, actual tequila in beer. I don't know if I'm going quite that far. I was thinking about different adjuncts and different kinds of flavors. I was thinking more like blackberry sours

because those would go well with turkey. We always talk about wanting to have some stuff that other people you might be sharing that meal with would be willing to drink. It does change things. Having smaller Thanksgiving this year, you can't bring as much stuff to share. Instead of bringing those nice bombers that come out a couple times a year, it is more choosing my spots. I think the Southern Grist beers I've been getting from Nashville are excellent. I have been blown away at the

different things they try. The last one I just tried is a sour called Batita, which I believe is just based on the Brazilian cocktail. You've got some lime and orange peel and a little bit of a coconut flavor. They also get some, they have a little bit of lactose in there for mouthfeel purposes.

So I would highly recommend that. It's in the wild ale family with lots of nice adjuncts in it. Very tropical and makes you feel like you're on vacation, even if you're not. But the beer I tried from there before that was another sour. It was almost like a deep purple color. And it was, frankly, one of the most complex, fruity, sour beers I've ever had. Wow. Southern Grist, huh? Every time I see Southern Grist at my local spot now, I'm going to pick some up. I'm going to keep trying stuff until I have one I don't like. They've been crushing it. And I mean, I think the generic advice is drink as locally as you can at this time because you want to support the most local breweries. But if you're not supporting the neighborhood brewery around the corner,

support the neighborhood brewery in someone else's neighborhood. And I think that's in line with Southern Grist and some of the other places too And I think that's in line with Southern Grist and some of their places too. I think that's an East Nashville special. One of my favorite places to go actually lately has been Nashville. And by lately, I mean like the last couple of years. I have not been obviously since the pandemic started.

So if you see Southern Grist, you want that. If you see something a little heavier that you want, I would say like Omegang 3 Philosopher's is always a go-to for me on special occasions. You can get it pretty much anywhere. It's a quad that doesn't taste like bananas. I know you pretty much hate bananas across the board.

I dropped some real nasty words about banana cream pie on your rankings. You really did. Can't wait to see the banana enthusiast start fighting back in the comments on that one. Britt took a shot at lemons

in that piece too. I just had a flash to my dad coming over and telling me that all my beers are too sweet. So I think I'll also have some Saison DuPont on file for him. Hopefully, he can handle that. Also, the food is so thick.

I don't think I'm really going to break out. Maybe afterwards when we're all half asleep, I'll have a stout. During the meal, Saison DuPont might be the thing. Yeah, I think the stouts are for after 6 p.m. on a day like Thanksgiving. There's a ton for us to be thankful for. Among those things, you, our listeners, we're very thankful that you've been with us throughout the last year plus. If you have already supported The Athletic

with a subscription, we really appreciate that. If you're looking to get in, you can get in for a dollar a week at theathletic.com slash ratesinbarrels. You can follow Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. I am at Derek Benriper. We are off for the next few days. Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

We are back with you next Monday. Thanks for listening.