Rates & Barrels - Another promotion, August Stuff+ leaders, and what happened to 2021 workload concerns?

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss the promotion of Edward Cabrera, and set expectations for the Miami rookie for the stretch run before taking a look at the August Stuff+ Leaderboard. Is Logan Webb’s 2021 breakout sustainable? Is Madison Bumgarner good again? Plus, are we on the brink of seeing a lot of pitchers get shut down because of workload concerns? Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels presented by Topps. Check out Topps.com and Topps Project. 70 awesome cards launching each and every weekday. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. It is Monday, August 23rd. I made it through the weekend, Eno. I had a long battle with, it's kind of like a portable kitchen island, I guess you'd call it,

because you can do food prep on the top and you can cram a bunch of stuff on the shelves inside and get a little spice rack on the side. Is this an Ikea thing? Sort of like one. It was ordered online. I think it was a Wayfair order. But when I opened the box,

the box wasn't that big, but it was pretty heavy. And as soon as I opened the box, I saw, I think, 50 or so individual pieces plus the hardware. And I just thought, every single part of this needs to be assembled. There's nothing

hinged together there are no screws attached to anything every single part of me wants nothing to do with this that was definitely my first thought and then i was told it's really hard to actually return things to wayfair so i said well let's just uh let's get the tools out do it let's just we need some more counter. Let's make some more counter space. So just the fact that I lasted through the weekend despite the frustrations and cursing, rampant cursing. Are there any local ordinances about swearing with your windows open here that I should be aware of? I hope not. We'd be in serious trouble around here.

Just giving away $50 every so often, just cursing while assembling furniture. But it's going pretty well overall. And we had a chance to grab a couple pints this weekend too. So that was nice and probably kept me from actually throwing the aforementioned island off of the balcony at some point in a moment of frustration. So I appreciate your contributions. You did not be around it anymore. Yeah. I needed a little time away to finish the

project. Woke up the next day with a fresh set of eyes and a really rejuvenated spirit and got it done. So that's my advice. If you're building furniture, take a break because you will inevitably find something that's not drilled properly or you're missing a piece or whatever, and it drives you absolutely crazy. But on this episode, we have a lot of ground to cover. Edward Cabrera gets the call from the Marlins. We'll talk about some expectations for him. I was taking a look at the Stuff Plus leaderboard for August because I love leaderboards. board for August because I love leaderboards. I love arbitrary endpoints, mostly because you'll just find some surprises when you make a leaderboard of just about anything over any period

of time. And the Stuff Plus August leaderboard does not disappoint. We had a follow-up question about Kevin Gossman. We talked a bit about him at the end of last week. And are the starting pitchers shutdowns coming? Of course, coming into this season, we were worried about workloads. We're going to talk about what we think is going to happen over the final six weeks of the season as teams try to manage the workload of their pitchers. But we begin today with Edward Cabrera, the Marlins prospect coming up for his debut. He'll be up on Wednesday. That is going to be a start against the Nationals.

And it's not the same Nationals team that we saw, of course, at the beginning of the season with all the trades they made at the deadline. Cabrera probably would have been up by June or July had his season started on time, and the minor league season, of course, was delayed as well. But he started pitching this year in June, and he looks like he's going to be a very good big league starter. It's just kind of a question of when. Is it going to be immediate success, or is it going to be a case where Edward Cabrera is the kind of guy that you have to spot in sort of carefully based on matchups at the beginning of his big league career?

I don't get the sense from him that he's a consensus, a very top prospect I mean for example Fangraus has him as a 50 future value guy and ranked him last ranked him you know in the back end of the top 50 and then just generally

I try to I like to acquire a guy like this and then have him on my bench for his first start because I love to get the stuff numbers, so I want to get that stuff number, and I don't want to get it in the course of three innings and five runs. I'd rather have that damage be on my bench so um i wouldn't mind putting him on my bench but i would rather watch the first start from the bench um and uh

one thing that i would say is that like you know i know he's got these like insane strikeout rates and he kind of just numerically reminds me of Ian Anderson. But we've seen some struggles from Ian Anderson himself. And then within Edward Cabrera's line, you see these just weird pop-up things like the five walks or six walks per nine this year in AAA or the nearly one and a half homers per nine in AA in 2019. So these are just these weird little pockets of statistical outliers kind of within it, but they could be, I guess, what you call harbingers of doom or whatever.

So I want to see what he does, what his stuff looks like, so that I can have some sort of idea what his home run rate will look like and what his walk rate will look like in the in the major leagues harbingers of doom might be the next podcast that we do that might be the next title if we ever lose hold of rates and barrels as a title harbingers of doom I like the sound of that so with Cabrera for me the thing that kind of stands out is we're talking about a guy that has at least two average pitches. The fastball is above average. There was a high probability he was going to be a late inning reliever initially.

But I think the question comes down to his third pitch. He does have a changeup. If he's throwing that even 10% of the time, that gives me a lot of hope that he can be a guy that gets through the lineup a third time sooner rather than later. What's interesting to me with some of the future value 50 guys, especially pitchers because of the lost season, Shane McClanahan was a future value 50. Stuff was clearly really good. Command was below average.

Alec Manoa was like that too. It bakes in the risk. It's a numerical way of representing the baked-in risk that they were a reliever. Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that going on. So if we're taking more of the prospect stuffist approach, I'd put a little plus sign next to that 50 on Cabrera. Obviously, we'd like the park too. One thing that's nice is that it looks like a 60 fastball, 60 slider combo, where that just seems like a thing that can

work a little bit better in today's league. You have like Waskery Noah, who might be 60-60-30 when it comes to his third pitch. Tanner Houck. You've got a bunch of guys that are, I think, these are young guys, so they haven't shown they can succeed with just two pitches. But I think that if your basis is fastball slider, I think today's game is like, well, we can probably get four innings out of you, maybe five, and then we'll just get the bullpen in there. That does have something to say about his long-term upside,

his ability to give you wins, to turn the lineup over. So that's one of the things I'll be watching. I'll be watching his location ability, like how good he can locate his pitches, and then also just raw percentage. How many times does he throw that changeup? Yeah, definitely a guy I'll be watching closely for that debut on Wednesday. I think if you're like me, I have a few leagues

where I did not spend enough of my budget in free agent bidding earlier this season. I'll be a little more aggressive with Cabrera because at this point, who else are you going to spend it on? If you need a pitcher, I think you have the reasonably high ceiling, even from the jump, just based on how good the stuff is and the park as we've said many times before marlins park gives you a lot of cushion if you're a young pitcher trying to figure it out for the first time oh you know he reminds me uh reminds me of luis uh heel where you know you got a really good fastball slider combo um and uh terrible home park so anyway yeah let's look at that look at that stuff it's just the name that's look at that stuff leaderboard. It's just the name that popped up.

This stuff plus leaderboard is fascinating since August 1st. At the very top, Dylan Cease with a nice 119. Location plus sitting at 99.12, which I think is a good sign for Dylan Cease as you kind of look at his value going forward. You got Charlie Morton up there at number two. I don't think we've talked about Charlie Morton on this pod at all this season. He just goes out there and kind of does his job and doesn't get any sort of recognition for it.

There's a guy who's pretty much two pitch. I mean, he's fastball, a breaking ball, right? Yeah. Throws a few change-ups. It's working for him. 164Ks and 140 innings in his age 37 season. Remarkable, Charlie Morton, getting it done. I think he'll come back again, don't you?

As long as he's good, as long as any player is good, the game is probably fun, right? If you're still effective, why wouldn't you come back? Why wouldn't you get 10 million plus? And if he's going to come back for one year again, I feel like he can almost pick wherever he wants to play, so he'll probably end up being in Atlanta again. Yeah, unless the Rays want him back.

Atlanta or Tampa, yeah. He wants to play near his home, so there's only a few teams down there that would pay for a guy like that on a one-year contract. But I think he can pick where he wants to go. It's really nice to see him staying healthy at this stage of his career too, given how much injury has really shaped the first part of Charlie Morton's career. The name that I really wanted to get into is Logan Webb

because we have talked a lot about the Giants bats. Webb's up here at number three in Stuff Plus in August. Location Plus is as good, actually it's better than everybody else in the top 10 at 106.2. The thing that I like about Webb, aside from missing some bats, keeping the walks in check, he's getting a ton of ground balls right now, you know, a 61.8% ground ball rate this season. And that's with a really effective defense behind him. I said this before we started recording, but I'm wondering if Logan Webb with this profile can emerge to be kind of a sneaky, short-term, almost like future Cy Young candidate in the mold of a Dallas Keuchel where you miss bats, you get a ton of grounders, and this also being still a pitcher-friendly park, that kind of works in his favor too. I feel like Logan Webb is still underrated in a lot of places,

and I certainly didn't expect to see him this high on the Stuff Plus list. Yeah, I don't know. One thing that Keichel has that I don't know that everybody realizes is he's like an elite command guy. And I know that Webb's command numbers have been pretty good.

I'm not sure if it's elite. I think that is kind of important for just getting and staying at that 65%, 60% ground ball rate. I think you actually have to have elite command because if you leak over the middle of the plate at all, especially if you're being at all predictable in your placement, which you might have to be to have like a 65 ground ball rate means you're living in the bottom of the zone a lot right that's where ground balls live so if you're going to be predictable down there you really need to hit your spots down there i think um and so that's that's that's only i don't really have anything

negative to say about web but i do think that he represents something very interesting which is that the way the reason for the stuff thing is not that his velo is up or he's changed the shapes on any of his pitches, really. It's a very simple reason. He's throwing his better pitches more. And it's a little bit like, remember when Sandy Alcantara was trying to throw the foreseam when he first came up? He was trying to do more fore seam, you know, and change up and stuff.

And, like, he was okay, but somewhere near the end of the season, he went back to the sinker as his primary pitch and kind of turfed mostly the four seam, and he took off. That's what happened with Webb. Webb's best pitches by Stuff Plus are the slider, the change up, and the sinker. In fact, the difference between the sinker at 102 and the four-seam fastball at 86 is remarkable and if you're just gonna replace a lot of 86s 102s uh your stuff number is going to go up but also i think you're just you're like that's the supposition here is that the rest of your stuff

will go on but here's what's what's really interesting to me. There was a prominent analyst who once said, give me league average stuff and I would be an ace. And I think he's wrong. But one of the reasons I think he's wrong is that the same analyst said that you can't just necessarily, like, throw your best pitches better. That won't necessarily work.

And I don't think he's completely right or wrong on that one because I understand what he's saying. What he's saying is that, like that if I had a really good slider and then I went from throwing it 30% of the time to 100% of the time, then people would sit on it and it would get a lot worse. Right. Right? And Chris Bassett. I just talked to Chris Bassett. He's doing good.

But before that, I talked to him about his curveball. He's doing good. But before that, I talked to him about his curveball. His curveball goes 72 miles an hour or something, but by stuff, it's his best pitch, but he doesn't throw it very often. I asked him about that, and he said, well, yeah, I think people would sit on it. The idea behind stuff, though, is that it would still be good, even if you threw it more.

And so I talked to Logan Webb's assistant pitching coach, JP. What is JP's last name? Martinez. I talked to JP Martinez. He's the assistant pitching coach in San Francisco about this idea that we're just talking about and about Webb in particular um and he said i think of it like stocks you know if you have higher performing stocks wouldn't you invest more money in those higher performing stocks yeah of course um listen when pitchers come to the giants i talked to gossman about this too when pitchers come to the giantsants, and I talked to Gossman about this too, when pitchers come to the Giants, they say, throw your best pitches more often. It's one thing they told Gossman. It's something they told Webb.

It's something they told Discofani. And it seems to work. So I know that there's some game theory stuff about sitting on stuff and anticipation, and there's still some research that i'd like to do with stuff like does a pitcher stuff plus on a pitch go down over time or does the does a pitch with high stuff become less effective does the link between that and outcomes become less robust after if they throw it more um so there's i would like to research that uh in particular but i will say that there are teams acting as if they figured it out and that you can just take your best pitches and throw them more often i'm just wanted to point out that it's not settled science really well no and i think

matt whistler is probably one of the more extreme examples of a guy that just almost did what you described and went from throwing a slider something like 30 35 percent of the time to throwing it like 90 of the time that might be too far but you you could find where those upper limits are if you see a pitch consistently less effective than it was because you pushed the usage up too much you can just dial it back a little right and just make another adjustment like try and find where those upper bounds are keep pushing it until you see those diminishing returns because you might find a completely different level that you didn't even think was possible along the way before you go too far yeah a lot of and some of these into absurd absurdity examples even i mean whistler is absurd uh but like sometimes when you reduce something to absurdity you actually take the power out of the argument for me because yes whistler exists and

yes mariana rivera exists but actually what we're talking about with logan webb is three pitches you know instead of five so we're not saying hey logan webb your sinker is awesome it's your best pitch by stuff plus you should throw it 100% of the time. No, we're saying, hey, you know, these three pitches are above average by Stuff Plus. These other two are not. Why don't you use the ones that get you better returns? You still have three.

So you still have like the element of surprise. You can still play with different locations and different timing. And when does this pitch you know like you still have you're not just mariano rivera all of a sudden so um i think that we can still use things like stuff plus and location plus and like quality of pitch uh to inform our decisions so that we don't have somebody like blake snell throwing theup, which is not a good pitch. He can't command. It doesn't do well by stuff.

And he's just chewing up. He's just walking guys left and right because he's using it too much. That seems like a poor decision based on what we know of his pitches. So just to contrast two different processes and two different pitchers that have had different outcomes that we could maybe have seen coming so i guess you know it'd be kind of fun to maybe do a piece where um i i try to find some pitchers that are not that are using and not using their high stuff pitches enough uh that might have like a have a change in them in the future but there's so much science in baseball i'd'd be surprised if I found more than two or three guys.

Yeah, I think the example as you described it would be just imagine a guy that throws a two-seamer and a four-seamer, and let's say the two-seamer is the better of the two pitches, but he throws them both 20-ish percent of the time. That I might be able to find. Yeah. That I might be able to find

because there are enough people, not pitching coaches, not front offices, that are just like, four-seam, high in the zone. You need to do it. Like coaches, enough front offices, that are just like forcing you behind the zone. You need to do it. Like all my young pitchers, forcing you behind the zone, do it. And then some of those guys come up, but their sinker is just a better pitch.

Isn't that just grasping on to someone else's conclusion and not thinking about why you're doing it? It's kind of like the three L screens thing. 100% happens. Where it's like, I see you doing this. I'm just going to do it. Do it with a reason. Have an understanding for why this is part of why we're telling players to do this.

Yeah, I've told this. Maybe it's even on here before. But I've told this story before. I was talking to a team that didn't have much of a budget. A guy that worked for a team that didn't have much of a budget compared to the Astros. And I was like, well, the Astros have edutronics everywhere. They have data everywhere. They have data everywhere. They have paid everything.

And they have so much money invested in player development. You guys have none of that. So what do you guys do? And they say, well, we watch the Astros. He said all their hitters, when they line up, when they get ready, they all touch the bat to their back shoulder and then set their hands right after that. So we just told all our hitters to do that.

But you didn't say why you just told them to do it. Like, okay, the Astros do it, but it is how like a certain, it is how things go through the league. I mean, it's,

you know, there's an innovation. I think the best teams are like, no, you know, the answer is not to like guard our secrets. Like nobody has any secrets. I mean, yeah are like, no, you know, the answer is not to guard our secrets like nobody has any secrets. I mean, yeah, sure, we don't need to give them all away.

The answer is just to keep innovating. And we just need to keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing so that, oh yeah, everyone else figured out this one thing? Well, that was two years ago for us, and now we're already onto this new thing. By the way, if you're watching us on YouTube, thank you for being among our first 1,000 YouTube subscribers.

Here's to the next 1,000. I threw a graphic up on the screen, which I should say I threw a screenshot up on the screen from my rundown for today's show. And you can see the top 10 in Stuff Plus since August 22nd. One thing I like about this, too is that uh it's about a five uh innings sample you know a five start sample yep it's a sort of four to five start sample so this is a good uh sample for this is not just like who had good stuff in his last start i mean if you look at c so you can see the spin rates coming back up uh and how that links to his stuff uh playing up um i think with patino the the thing that really excites me is that 101 location actually because he's had the the stuff

numbers but i think by simplifying his arsenal and kind of focusing mostly on uh four seam slider he's managed to improve his location numbers yeah to see patino there with a location number in the neighborhood of zach gallon should get people really excited about patino uh nick pavetta up here i mean i i wasn't even somebody who's been burned by nick pavetta a hundred times before i just didn't have any interest in him in boston and it's not like you're missing out that much a 443 era 129 whip it's it's fine like there's basically out that much. A 443 ERA, a 129 whip, it's fine. There's basically just cheap Ks there and a decent number of wins, but even the wins. He's got nine wins and 24 starts.

It's not like you got 14 or something from him. That to me is just kind of puzzling because I feel like there should be better results to go along with it. Even if you look at the last 30 days, you don't see a great era or anything to go along there's something there i i even had a uh an analyst from the phillies when he was at the phillies uh asked me why uh nick pavetta didn't uh have better results because you know he pops when you look at these these sort of numbers i'm trying to right now look at his game log and be like,

could you have made some judicious game log decisions, like sort of start him, don't start him decisions, and kept his ERA down? I'm seeing a four-earned run start at Baltimore. I probably wouldn't have started him at. But then he also went back the next week or two and was fine at baltimore at toronto a five run outing i would have actually not started him at that um and then toronto at

home i wouldn't have started him and that was six runs um and then yeah if you would actually if you just avoided toronto he had one good start against Toronto just recently. But in the five starts against Toronto, he's given up 11, 15, 19 runs. So, I mean, that would have been more impressive if he hadn't just shut him out. But I think you could have avoided some of the blowups. Oh, but Royals at home, six runs. Yeah, it's not just a schedule thing for him. He remains a bit of a mystery,

but the two old guys at the bottom of the list, Adam Wainwright and Madison Bumgarner. Wainwright's pitched pretty well all season long. I don't have him anywhere, and I don't have Madison Bumgarner anywhere either. I'm curious, more with Bumgarner than Wainwright, because I think Wainwright could just call it a career in any offseason at this stage. Do you see something different about Bumgarner now compared to what we saw earlier this season

and even what we saw last season in 2020 for him? Because he was brutal a year ago. Yeah, you know, i was looking at this recently and i think it's just i think it's a partially matchups you know partially getting healthy and having you know uh it's not there is no like thing that pops you know there's no like, Oh my God, he, he did this, you know what I mean? Like, uh, he's, uh, he's using his pitches at all about the same rate, uh, maybe a few change-ups, but I don't always trust the change-up percentages on him. Um, and, uh, sometimes i think they're like sinkers um and then uh you know a lot of a lot of breaking balls but i mean not i guess the career high breaking balls but you could say oh he's

using career high breaking balls well he's using 23 last year he was 22 percent career high um i yeah i don't nothing really pops for me on on bum garner just a little bit of uh matchup situation here it's one thing that like when i look at cal quantrill for example uh his stuff numbers are not popping and his results have been amazing and i think that's uh partially because if you look at his matchups he he's had the Tigers and the A's for three straight starts. Here's Bumgarner's last starts. Phillies at home, Padres at home, but this is not like early season Padres. Giants at home, Rangers, Pirates, Cubs after the decimation.

Actually, that was before the trade deadline. He's been different since coming off the IL. Maybe it is just simply health for him, but I get the sense no one's really going to believe in him going into next season, and obviously younger than you'd think for as long as he's been in the big leagues. We say that almost every time we talk about Bumgarner.

But I think the other part of this is that Arizona is a pitcher-friendly environment. Ever since they put the humidor in a chase field, his situation for his home start is probably just better than people realize. Yeah, yeah. I would actually think of him. And then he's got some road situations that are also helpful. At least he liked going to San Francisco a lot. So I would say that I would love to have him as like a backup,

a back end of the rotation pitcher in my fantasy lineups next year. And I think that some of this is just who he is as a person in terms of he's a bit of a red ass. I mean, we can all see that. And so he's always doing the most that he can to get back to being competitive. He's really, really competitive. And so he's not someone who's just going to be like, well, I guess that's it, you know, and be done with it so um that's that's something that i told somebody with arizona when when we were talking about uh bombarner before he signed and um i stick i stick to that i think

that this is a little bit predictable that he would have been really bad to begin with and then uh started finding some stuff again he's still got three really good pitches. He's still got a really funky arm slot. He's still got enough there to be a decent pitcher. And I'd love to be able to just sit him in Colorado and sit him maybe in LA and use him maybe three quarters of the time. And that works. That plays at least in 15 team leagues and off the wire, I think, in leagues that are more shallow where available. So yeah, just one of those guys that I kind of wrote off coming into the season who has exceeded expectations. A few interesting names nearby the top 10. This is basically opening up to the top 20. Names you'd expect like Wheeler, Scherzer, Nola, Shane McClanahan, who's done well, I think, at Stuff Plus all year.

Jorge Lopez pulling you right back in. Just after like a year ago, you finally quit your Jorge Lopez habit and here he is popping on the August Stuff Plus leaderboard. Every time I just, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what it is, man. I don't know what it is. I watch him and I'm like, he doesn't look that good.

And you look at his numbers, like his actual results, they're horrid. It's like a Pavetta situation pre-2021. In Kansas, like it's for some of that time he's in Kansas City in a good pitcher's park. But he has like a 6-plus ERA for his career, dude. So I don't think that he invalidates the whole model, but he definitely is somewhat like,

what the hell is going on here? So he must just show the ball really well. And then right now he's hurt. I mean, I was watching the game where he's hurt. And I was like, why is he still pitching? It was so obvious. The trainer came out to check on him. He's like, no, I'm fine.

No, you're not. He was doing this thing with his shoulder. It was like his shoulder hurt. I'm like, your shoulder hurts. I'm yelling at it at the TV. Your shoulder hurts. And his velo went from 95 to 88 in one inning. Leave him out there anyway.

He says he's fine. He says he's fine. It was crazy. I thought I was nuts i thought i was thought i'd lost it oh man barrios also nearby i think at 16th on that list that's nice to see too you know the what name is kind of occurring to me a little bit uh gallant and barrios are linked to me a little bit they the models love them. They always have. All my iterations of stuff

in command and location and all that stuff, the models have loved Gallant and they've loved Barrios. And people have said that Barrios' results haven't been that exciting and now Gallant's hitting that sort of rough patch. And I just have to

say, I think this is a good time to buy Zach Gallin in keeper leagues. A lot of weapons, good control. It should work out for him, especially in that pitcher-friendly environment. Tukey Toussaint the other day, but I thought was pretty interesting. Just a different guy than we've seen in the past, really encouraging what he's done really since coming back

and joining the Atlanta rotation. The model really likes the split finger. I mean, he can't locate it, but I think that the key for him is being ahead in the count more and just not falling behind, because if he falls behind, he can't use the split finger. And so then he becomes a more predictable two-pitch pitcher guy. Yeah, which if he's in the zone more early in the count,

hitters will probably spot that. They'll probably try and jump on him early, so the cat-and-mouse game continues. A related question that came in from Steve, we talked about Kevin Gossman kind of looking ahead to the top pitchers for next season. He's not in the top 20 for August stuff. Plus, as a follow-up to the discussion last week,

what do you make of Gossmanman struggles over the last month or so? The eye test says the splitter is being laid off of much more frequently in his overall control and command just haven't been as good with any of his pitches lately. What do the numbers say here for Gossman more recently? Yeah, he, he lost,

I think a little ride on his fastball and it's really important because he is like a tyler glass now but with a change up he lives only vertically he does not uh he does not really live side to side and so he needs to have what he needs to have is a high riding fast ball at the top of the zone that zooms out of the zone because he'll pay that with a change up that comes in looking like the fastball and then drops into the zone for a called strike. So if you are swinging, he'll throw the high fastball. If he thinks you're starting to take that, he'll throw the change up to drop into the zone. The problem is what we've seen recently is a bunch of fouls at the top of the zone. The Mets

came in and had like 14 foul balls at the top of the zone. And that to me is the a little bit of lost ride on the foreseam, making the foreseam a little bit more hittable. His changeup in splitter still have amazing numbers, still do really well. But the foreseam has lost a little bit of stuff. And that's where he gets into a little trouble because you just imagine if you lost even a half inch of ride or an inch of ride at the top of the zone, you're talking about half the barrel. You're talking about being sort of above the zone comfortably with area or maybe falling into that place where people can launch it. Yeah, definitely a concern, a small concern with Kevin Gossman here more recently. Thanks a lot for that question, Steve.

Let's talk about Dalton Varshow for just a moment because I'm not sure unless you have him on your teams, unless you watch a lot of Diamondbacks games, which if you have access to other teams right now, you're probably not choosing to watch them. So this is sort of... Why would you be doing that? Yeah, I mean, like I've watched bad baseball for long periods of time in my life,

but that was also before I had access to MLB TV, right? So I didn't have a choice. It was bad Brewers teams, and that was it. Dalton Varshow, since the All-Star break, is hitting.342 with a.444 OBP, .724 slugging percentage, seven homers. He's three for three as a base dealer, driven in 17 runs during that span. We're talking about 27 games, so only 90 played appearances. How about a 14 to 19 walk to strikeout ratio?

The two, though, he's doing everything good that he can do as an offensive player right now. Of course, they're going to have catcher eligibility, I think, going into next year. Enough athleticism to play elsewhere, so you don't have to worry about the Carson Kelly catches a lot of games problem because they can move Varshow around quite a bit. How in can we possibly be in 2022 before we're overpaying on Dalton Varshow?

I think there's another level. I mean, just looking at the different aspects of his game that I pay attention to in small samples, he's got a 10%, nearly 10% barrel rate. He's got a 111 max exit velocity, over 40% hard hit, and under 30% reach rate. So all those things. Oh, and then the last thing I like to, I peek at a lot is swinging strike rate.

And with the 10% swinging strike rate, he's actually, that's good. So what I'm seeing is there's an outside chance that the strikeout rate comes down. And you've got someone who could capably hit 280 next year. I mean, that's a little bit of faith casting, where I'm looking at the swinging strike rate, looking at the eye at the plate, looking at the barrel rate, and saying, okay, what if he sort of puts it all together next year? If he puts it all together, for me, next year,

he hits 280 with 25 homers and 15 stolen bases. And he might do that from a catcher spot. Now, the projections will say he hits 240 with what you know 12 homers 15 homers they're going to be light and playing time projections for him might come out light too because of the way those things work because of the presence of kelly i don't think they're trading away kelly and making varsha the regular catcher i think they're going to have this realization, or they're probably having it right now, they just need Dalton Varsha to play.

He's an everyday guy. Play him in left, move him to center when you need to. Whatever it is, he needs to play. And now I'm not going to make the mistake that I did with the Mets. Apologies to the people who listened to our bit about the Mets and were yelling at the TV about the fact that Thor and Conforto were not under contract. So I'm going to get the contracts up for Arizona so I can say Cole Calhoun has a $9 million club option next year.

Yeah, that will not be exercised. He will be a free agent. No, I don't think so either. Yeah, right? That will not be exercised. Peralta has $7.5 million. And Quetel Marte, of course, I'm not saying his contract number because it's not really – I'm just saying he's another outfielder

that will be there. But he might actually be used on the infield. I think Marte might be headed for third because they have a couple guys that could come up and try second base in the organization. But in any case, I think Marte will be more valuable to them as an infielder and they'll be able to fill in because they also have Alec Thomas, who we talked about

on the last podcast, coming up. And maybe they can play Pavin Smith. Pavin? Pavin. Pavin Smith out there in the outfield too. So between Smith, Thomas, Peralta, I think you actually have room to put Varsha in that outfield and probably just stick him in center. Yeah.

I'm over the rest of season projections for his 2022 projection for sure i'm also curious to see how much those change based on what's happening here in the second half of the season but as noted on the youtube graphic adding solar panels to the dalton varcho hype train i don't know how they power trains It's not an area of expertise for me. I assume it's not solar panels, but it'd be amazing if it was. I've never seen a solar panel train myself.

The one thing that's also cool is when you look at Varshow's different projections, the different projection suites, you've got the highest ISO from the bat which i think is the most reactive to to stack cast that so the bad X so you know you might look at a nine point three percent barrel rate and say it's not amazing but there's something about what he's doing with

batted balls it's saying the bad X's something about what he's doing with battered balls it's saying the bad x is saying that he can have a 204 iso he can basically the bad x says he can almost do what he's doing right now is that's totally sustainable yeah so that's fun we're both in and i assume the adp probably doesn't crack the top 100 at least initially during draft season i could see him being an actual hype guy that moves up a bit more as we move into february and march but i think you can probably get him just outside the top 100 if you're doing early early drafts for the 2022 season thanks a lot for uh well that was a question from me actually so i'll thank myself for putting dalton varsho on the rundown.

Next question here comes from Daniel. He was wondering, are the starting pitcher shutdowns coming? Before the season started, a big part of starting pitcher analysis and ranking was trying to predict how workloads might be managed following the shortened season last year. I always assumed that a large group of pitchers would essentially be shut down for the last month of the season, frequently skipped or otherwise treated with kid gloves, but I haven't seen that happen as widely as I was expecting. Do you guys think this is coming down the pike or are teams handling workloads more liberally than we initially thought? Have you heard anything specifically from clubhouses or from anyone you've talked to about workload management for the end of the season? No, And I think there's two reasons for that. There's an ongoing thing that we've talked about on the show a lot that workload management is now

sort of done on a, how do you say it? It's like minute level. It's almost like a day-to-day question. Workload management is a day-to-day question you know workload management is a day-to-day question now it's a it's a thing that's tracked all the way through your sleeping patterns and stuff like that so i was talking to a coach uh here recently about how what they'll do is set baselines in spring by wearing because you can't wear the catapult catapult is like a like a kind of almost like a t-shirt that collects data on your body in terms of blood pressure and different things like that. Catapult. Modus is a sleeve you wear that can get that. Aura is a ring that tells you about sleep and other things.

You can wear this suite of things in spring training a lot more easily while you're doing things than you can during the season because of just how the day-to-day works during the season, and you're on the road. Just setting up these systems is a lot harder. But in spring, you're in one place for a month, and what they do is they do baselines on this and they'll they'll do something like okay um we noticed uh when you're like because you're wearing all this stuff and because we're doing motion capture and we're

you're capturing your limbs and stuff we notice that when you're fatigued um and we know that you're fatigued either from the aura the catapult or something we notice that when you're fatigued you step in the bucket a little bit more with your swing. You fly open a little bit. And that means you're fatigued and you're already changing your movement patterns to address that fatigue. And that's the next thing that happens is injury. So that's how you blow out an oblique, right? Like you're tired somewhere,

so you step in the bucket a little bit more to load up, to get that fastball, and you pull the oblique, and boom, then you're down for a month. So what they then do is, now we don't have to look for your fatigue anymore. We can just say, you know what? You were stepping in the bucket a lot yesterday. How about you take the day off?

And just kind of do these proxies for fatigue and find these movement pattern proxies for for fatigue um so just like think about that in respect to us like sitting here blabbing about injuries about about innings you know it's like uh yeah we could talk about who has a lot of innings but it'll come down to like who whose release point dropped half an inch in the last start. And that might be true for Kevin, Kevin Gossman as much as it would be

for Sandy Alcantara, you know? Yeah, well, and I think a lot of the young pitchers who we were watching coming into the season who we were concerned about, like Sixto Sanchez hurt, just missed the time anyway

Casey Mize they've managed his innings pretty carefully I could see him possibly getting shut down at some point in September just based on all the comments they've made and some of the patterns they've used with him so far you have a handful of guys like that Luis Patino was going to be managed carefully he missed time with an injury just like Edward Cabrera did where now you look at those guys in August and and going into september you're not worried about them had they been healthier in april and may then we'd be concerned about that right now so it really starts to the list starts to get really short just because of things that have already happened like the the workload concerns for the guys we were most worried about they it took care of itself almost just by happenstance.

Either the team's managed it or, yeah, the injuries managed them for them. Yeah, when I look up and down this leaderboard, there's only like two or three names. I've got the top 50 in innings right now in front of me. And there's only a couple names that stand out to me. And the thing that actually stands out to me about the list is they're all old ass dudes. I mean, the top is Wheeler, Wainwright, Bueller, Bassett, Granke, Gilito, Marquez, Gossman, Stroman. So, like, I don't think any of those guys are going to get shut down.

You know, I just the one name that I admitted there was Sandy Alcantara. And the thing that, the kind of two things that I see coming together there are not only the age of the pitcher and how much he's done before, but the quality of the team. I think the worse the team is, the more likely that they just see it as there's nothing for them to gain. You know, they can only lose this guy to injury next year and they don't want to do that. So I think you'll see some early shutdowns, which is really kind of important for head to head, I guess, most of all, because they might just get shut down right when you need them most. head-to-head, I guess, most of all, because they might just get shut down right when you need them most. But in the case of

Sandy Alcantara, I say, what can you do about it? In the case, the other two names that popped for me were Cole Irvin and Dylan Cease. Cole Irvin, I don't think is that amazing of a pitcher, and I think you just bank what you get out of him and you're happy you know I don't think anyone's depending on Cole Irvin to get them through their uh head-to-head championships Dylan sees um I don't know what do you think do you think I mean it's 130 innings it just doesn't seem like that much of a worry for me I think he

he'll pitch 150 160 160 innings, and it'll be more than he's ever done before, but in 2019, he pitched 140 innings. I think the question with Cease would be, do they need to back off him a little or skip him once or twice between now and the postseason?

Clearly part of their plans for October. To get more of those innings in October, yeah. Maybe that happens a bit with some of the younger guys in the contending rotations. Is Buehler immune from that at this point? I mean, he's still younger. He had Tommy John not that long ago, but he's 27 now. I mean, it's not – I don't think he's in kid gloves territory.

Yeah, I don't think – I doubt they'd skip a whole start just for this. I think maybe give him extra rest or, you know, have a bullpen day and push him so that maybe he can get two extra days of rest. If you, oh, you have an off day the day after his start. Oh, let's just push him to the next one. He gets three days off. I just don't see him like skipping a whole stop in the rotation because you kind of want them to like, it's very regimented, right?

You want to keep them going on their schedule. So I would say that Buehler gets a couple of starts pushed, and then he doesn't make his last start of the season. I wonder if we're seeing this a little bit with Freddy Peralta. He suffered that shoulder injury. I think it came on a swing in his last outing. He's on the IL right now. They don't think it's serious.

He thinks he's back after the minimum or very soon after the minimum. But he's done the starter-reliever back-and-forth thing. That sort of capped his workloads. I wonder how much they would have been thinking about skipping him and being careful with him trying to keep him fresh for the playoffs too because I think he would fit into that group of players more like cease where you're not totally backing off him but you can't quite use him the way you'd use everybody else yeah it's uh it is interesting to to think about um how we're dealing with um reporting injury and in and putting guys on the aisle?

Are we, like, it's a 10-day aisle now, right? It's literally a 10-day aisle, so you're going to, like, you're putting guys on them faster, right? So would he have gone on it if it was a 15-day, you know? And would he, would the team have, you know, like 10 years ago, would the team have said, oh, don't throw your next bullpen and, you know, and see how you feel. And then he goes, oh, I feel fine. And then he throws his next start.

You know, like, are we just being super, like, hyper vigilant now? And is that, it's also interesting to think about that with regards to, like, researching injury, right? You could be like, oh, my God, everyone's so injured. regards to like researching injury right you could be like oh my god everyone's so injured well how many of these are preventative injury stints you know what i mean like how many of these il stints now are just to keep doing the do the 10 so you don't do the 40 right it's kind of the the next step after what you were describing with the tech and hitting those little granular spots where you get a day off it's probably worth your while to give a player 7 to 15 days off depending on how many they need scattered throughout the season compared to running the risk of that four

to six week sprained knee or oblique strain or bad hamstring strain all those things that hopefully you can catch a little earlier and this is i'm saying this in the year where we've had, I think, as many injuries as we've ever seen. But yes, I think part of that has to be the 10-day IL because it's a little more convenient to a team now to say, let's just take the extra couple of days compared to four or five days off. Let's have the extra player up on the roster. Let's make sure you're good to go. Maybe teams are just being a little bit smarter about their expectations for pushing injured players right now because of the way those rules have changed yeah and it's uh it's hard in fantasy because

especially with these weekly things you know jeff zimmerman preaches the fact that you just want innings and plate appearances uh almost most of all in those leagues. And what we're going to see is the same way that the number of qualified pitchers that are qualified for the ERA title has just gone down precipitously over the last 10 years. I think we're going to see the same thing for hitters where load management becomes so pervasive that it'll be hard to find hitters where uh load management becomes so pervasive that uh it'll be hard to find hitters that you know remember the marcus simeon 700 plate appearance season i think the 700 plate appearance season is gonna go the way of the dodo and at some point 650 will kind of be like like not really you know what do you do when when you do you ever okay do when you are looking at dalton barshow stats like right now he's got 187 plate appearances and you kind of want to do like

some simple math in your head to on pace for him i know you're not supposed to admit to doing this and i and like i know it's not a statistically rigorous thing to just take the numbers and but but us as fancy players we want to say oh what is dalton varsho like you know what is he writ large right and so if you look at dalton varsho stats you can be like okay he has 187 played appearances so i would uh i would triple that right oh 24 homers and 12 stolen bases well is he ever like, would he play that? I guess triple is okay, but is it more than triple? Probably not. What number do you use as, like, as a full season pace for plate appearances when you do that game in your head?

I'm closer to 600 now. Yeah, and it used to be 650. Yeah, it used to be 650. For me, I've gone from 650 to 600. And for a few guys that you knew were everyday guys, you could push 700 at them. You felt kind of weird about it because all it took was one IL stint for them to not get there.

But, yeah, 600 is now kind of the projectable hitter playing time ceiling. And I think for pitchers, what's the innings cap number? Like do you project 180 even for guys that you think could do 200? Oh, look at that. Marcus S simeon leading in plate appearances again 543 what are you saying oh yeah i used to do 200 but i don't anymore i do 180 and in fact uh i kind of just assume 150 uh i kind of group some players in the 180 spot and and then most and most pitchers are in the 150. Yeah, it's safer that way for sure to have those expectations much closer to reality. Last thing before we go, the Padres dismissed pitching coach Larry Rothschild this morning.

Is this with cause realistically? Do you look at this and say this is all larry rothschild's fault like i certainly don't i think injuries are obviously a big part of it we did talk about teams that were over and under achieving based on location plus which could be a function of strategy so do you think there is a little bit of that going on with some of the Padres struggling starters. Well, some of that would be a failure of the rest of the coaching staff or the front office, even if the wrong information is getting down to him.

So he doesn't make the whole game plan himself. Like that's not how this works. Yeah. So it is, I think the timing is a little strange because at this point in the season, unless you think he's doing something to hurt them, he's probably not doing much. Even if you think he's not doing much to help them,

what's this next person going to do? And you're only really doing an interim Ben Fritz in the meantime, so it's like you're not going to be able to go out and get... I did look at my list of 2019 pitching coaches. Some of them are still available. I think Steve Carse, who is the bullpen coach in Milwaukee, is still a really interesting name. Max Wiener is the pitching coordinator in Seattle.

He's an interesting name. And then Hobbs, I think Matt Hobbs is the pitching coach at Arkansas. Uh, so there's definitely some, uh, you know, data and tech friendly, uh,

college pitching coaches that haven't been, uh, lured away from college yet. College for, uh, just for people, uh, you might not know this,

um, pays okay. And then the travel and fan, like sort of time requirements are drastically different. So some coaches prefer to stay in college, even when a major league team calls. But those would be three names that I think would be near the top of any list that I look.

But you can't get them now. Nope. So what are you doing? I don't get it. I think you can wonder if another pitching coach could have gotten more out of Chris Paddock and maybe more out of Ryan Weathers. I think that watching how kind of long it took

to get Blake Snell on track is a double-edged sword because A, well, he did kind of get Blake Snell back on track. Right? So kudos to Larry Ross out of that. But B, did it take too long? Yeah. Again, is that solely his job? What else goes into that? I felt like this was a

scapegoat situation. The Padres a little bit of panic right now. We've talked a lot about them in the recent weeks. I still think they get to the playoffs despite all the turmoil. I think they're going to find their way in. And hopefully, if we get a Padres playoff appearance, we get Padres-Dodgers in the wildcard game. Just think that'd be all kinds of fun if that happens.

The timing certainly is weird. Maybe there's more to that story. We'll keep an eye out to see if there's anything that we don't know currently about that decision to let Larry Rothschothschild go here on august 23rd before we go i should let you know you can get a subscription to the athletic 33 off for the first year at the athletic.com slash rates and barrels that gets you everything written on the site all of ito's stuff all of our coverage league wide all the all the team-by-team coverage, plus it's fantasy football season for people that do that. So get the draft kit, get all the customized rankings

that Jake Seeley puts together, all the great articles that we have there as well. On Twitter, he's at Eno Saris. I am at Derek Van Ryper. And you can email us, ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com. That's going to wrap up this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.