Rates & Barrels - Another Sticky Stuff Suspension, Deviating From the Pack & Playing for Now

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Eno and DVR discuss the sticky stuff suspension for Domingo Germán, a new source of saves for the Yankees, a few surprisingly valuable pitchers, the actual benefit of LODEM, treating Jacob deGrom like an elite reliever, Emmanuel Clase's low strikeout rate, and more.  Rundown 0:56 Domingo Germán's Sticky Stuff Suspension 12:43 Wandy Peralta is Getting Saves 17:22 Surprising Pitchers: Earned Auction Values 22:54 The Actual Case for LODEM 27:51 Alek Thomas Demoted to Triple-A 33:24 Lance Lynn's Gradual Decline 38:05 The Importance of Updating & Adjusting Models 48:16 Matthew Liberatore is Back 52:13 Concerned About Emmanuel Clase's Strikeout Rate? 55:28 Should We Value Jacob deGrom Like an Elite Reliever? 59:06 Shallow League Decisions & Gunnar Henderson Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at $2/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/rates and get on your way to being your best self. Right now, you can try LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get a sixty-day free trial at LinkedIn.com/rates23 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's Wednesday, May 17th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we will discuss another ejection due to foreign substances.

Domingo Hermann tossed from a game on Tuesday. We'll talk about some of my reasoning for the anti-model Lodum approach. I'll explain it. It's not just a harebrained thing that I said in passing. There's actually some reason to consider looking at things that way. We're also going to talk about a few surprising pitchers who have really popped in terms of earned value so far. A bunch of mailbag questions to get to,

a variety of topics covered there, but a lot of good questions, so I want to make sure we load it up the rundown with those today. So midweek mailbag instead of Monday mailbag this week. You know, let's start with Domingo Herman. An automatic 10 game suspension is coming. I had a check a few starts ago against the twins and wasn't ejected much to the chagrin of twins manager Rocco Baldelli.

I was watching twins Dodgers last night when they started talking about it again. Like, hey, what was different? And the only thing that was really different from a situational perspective is where the game was being played. A few weeks ago, it was at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night. It was on the road in Toronto. But I want to ask you, did anything abnormal come up in the game log recently? Anything in terms of spin rates or anything that would be suspicious if you go back as far as that 11 strikeout performance against cleveland in april

and everyone's gonna have some suspicion that hermod may have had something extra going on this entire time but are you seeing anything the numbers that actually supports that not really you know in particular the last start he was up 50 rpm and that is just nothing that is a total nothing burger in terms of um like game to game variation one standard deviation of game to game variation is 150 rpm and he wasn't even one standard deviation not one standard deviation they can say well this is a little bit weirder than normal but that's still not even two or three like three is when you'd be like whoa that guy went from not doing anything at all to totally cheating you know i mean that's three that's what the definition of the bell curve is you're gonna have this bell curve within one standard deviation is the bulk of things.

Within two, you get like 90%. And then the little, little tails on the end of the bell curve, that's the third standard deviation. And so half of one standard deviation is right in the middle. It's 50 RPM from game to game is completely normal. I think it points to a problem, though, over a second, which is that what is the baseline? When people talk about, oh, well, let's use RPM or RPM divided by VLO, whatever,

to spot these cheaters when when are they clean it's like the steroid thing it's like when were they clean what what are we comparing to what's the baseline uh there was nothing weird about this season compared to last season in terms of game-to-game variation um uh you know except that that he was on the higher end of his spin for the year. But in terms of if your baseline is the average for the year, then he was fine. He was within it. If you go back to 2021, the beginning of 2020,

or you go back all the way to 2019, there's been an increase, I guess, in terms of his spin rate, in terms of, you know, if you just use a seasonal baseline. He's up in 2019. He was down to 2440 on the four-seam fastball, and this year he's been around 2530. That's still only 100.

It's not even 100, you know? Right. You could make adjustments, legitimate changes. This year he's been around 25, 30. That's still only 100. It's not even 100, you know? Right, you could make adjustments, legitimate changes. I did ask a pitching coach about that because there was this idea at some point that the only way to change your spin rate was sticky stuff. And I have had a couple of pitching coaches say, no, they think there are ways. And there is some more advanced research now

going into uh finger pressure with alex fast has a has a new way to measure finger pressure on the ball and uh so i do think that there are things about finger pressure cues you can use mechanical changes that can affect your spin rate um but uh yeah even, even if you used his very bottom of, even if he used the very bottom of his spin rate yearly, year to year, sort of his yearly average of the 2019 one, this year is fine.

It's within average. And in terms of last year, 2539 on the fastball, 2530 this year, know 2021 24 82 none of like the year to year the baseline for him should be around 2500 and uh if you look at his game to game uh he was at 25 91 yesterday so i I just don't see evidence within the spin rates. Now, yeah, they touched him. And they said they were super sticky. But I don't like subjective. One of the reasons I sort of broke the story is i don't like selective enforcement

and another way of saying selective enforcement is subjective enforcement am i wrong i mean i think i think subjective and selective they're not they're not synonyms but they kind of go hand in hand using the hand again, but you know, uh, you know what? I don't like this. I don't like, uh,

leaving this up to, you know, how quote unquote sticky the umpire thinks the hand is. So, uh, I'm going to try and develop some sort of test, uh, for this.

That's more objective. Yeah. We need a swab. I think we need a swab of the substance. I mean, the substance to return as something that is a banned thing. In this case, for Domingo German, they had good tight shots of his uniform where he had little clumps of pine tar. So it was kind of easy to see what was going on in this case. was going on in this case the most likely explanation is that if you look at the entire span of his career you think about when the sticky stuff crackdown started around what this time last year he's probably been using something the entire time and the subjective nature of how

they check guys how sticky are your hands which we can't quantify very effectively has just made it possible for him to just keep doing what he's always been doing to some degree the other complicating factor this came up when the max scherzer suspension happened was that if you use the alcohol substance to clean your hands you can still have some tackiness left over i don't i have no idea if that's actually what happened in this instance but it's another problem that goes into the how sticky are his hands thing, right? Well, maybe he was eating pancakes between innings and got his hands in the syrup. That's obviously not what happened here either,

but there's just all these other little variables that could actually increase the tackiness on a pitcher's hand. So yeah, we do need something better than what we've got right now. And every time we think it's the last time we're going to talk about sticky stuff we know it's not because there's always going to be someone else out there pushing something and another another ejection more suspicion coming down the road that's just the way this works down for what it's worth herman's uh spin rates never went down during and for the first enforcement yeah so there go. There's the other side of it too, right?

There wasn't a change then. This points to the when do you start? If you have a baseline, when do you start? So if you go back to enforcement, you say, well, he never went down. Does that mean he never thought what he was doing was cheating? Did he have a good system the entire time

for just having the stuff off his hands by the time they checked it? It's more questions than answers. I think so. I'm not going down the conspiracy theory road with sticky stuff at the present time. And I think it's unfortunate, the proximity to the Aaron Judge situation. Very bad timing. Just because both of these border closely on nothing burgers

and then just to have the two that thing where it's just like there's smoke, there's fire. It just leads to hot takes. I'm not willing to say the Yankees cheat any more than any other team.

Although they did get busted right before the Astros doing the sign stealing. But they got busted along with the Red Sox and ostensibly changed their ways. And where there's smoke department, there were other teams that had stuff going on that we didn't find out about. At least they didn't have publicly written stories that were widely consumed. But there is a constant effort within Major League Baseball and with all professional sports, I think, to find an edge and to push the boundaries of the rules and to cheat.

That is what happens. The stakes are incredibly high. In the case of Judge, for anyone who somehow hasn't heard the story by now, his eyes glanced over to the dugout before a pitch was thrown. Jay Jackson, a kind of fringy reliever, threw him a cement mixer over the heart of the plate and Judge crushed it out to center field. If the Yankees decoded on the field by either watching the catcher or watching Jay Jackson himself or figuring it out however they can, that's legal. Jay Jackson came out with Ken Rosenthal and said he was tipping. So if the pitcher's tipping

and the other team picks up on it and they tell each other what's going on. Is helping Judge timing it or had figured it out before Judge or whatever? It's still pretty weird. That seems within the rules. It seems within what people do in baseball. Right.

I don't have any outrage about that whole situation. The outrage I would have is if technology was back in the equation. They do have a guy for MOB that works for MOB that goes randomly into the dugout and checks. They do have a sniffer. They have a person who walks around. He looks at the video room and he does unannounced checks. I mean, it doesn't have to be he. Like they do unannounced checks and check in on the video person and they go down to the dugout and look around.

So like there's a person that's looking around for this sort of stuff. And so I think it's mostly out of the game. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm not getting all fired up about it. I know a lot of people are, especially if they're Blue Jays fans, Yankees fans. It's a rivalry. It makes the rivalry more intense, I guess.

I don't fault them for asking questions. And even when this stuff is cool on the field, it leads to hit-by-pitches and brawls, and people don't like it. I'm not saying you have to like it. I'm just saying it seems within the boundaries of normal gameplay and i would say the same of doing ormon until i really had better evidence you know i i think the one thing that i have a problem with the swab is that like a swab for a substance then you have

to have something that i guess a swab that turns color but then it have to it would have to be a test that like could happen on the field right away and it would have to be for a list of substances. And then you'd have an arms race for a substance that's not on the list. You know what I mean? So my thing is to sort of attack the stickiness and to have some sort of stickiness benchmark where you're like, this is too much stickiness. And I have a test here where I can test your stickiness. And there are some stickiness tests out there, industry stickiness tests that I've discovered on Twitter. Thanks to Twitter. I love it sometimes. I hate it a lot,

but I love it sometimes when you're like, oh, this person knows about a tackiness test that's used in printing processes. It's like, whoa, all right, that could be it. That could be the answer. Tackiness Twitter, the whole column of people I don't have a tweet deck yet publishing printing twitter what's up there is one other yankees thing i thought we should talk about wandy peralta is actually getting saves for them right now this is a 31 year old kind of journeyman reliever it seems like it's more of a mix and match thingmatch thing than a clear Peralta's the guy, and he's safely going to record every save opportunity for the Yankees going forward. But this is an unexpected twist within this bullpen,

because I think at one point it looked like Michael King, as their best reliever, could end up getting more save opportunities. It also looked like Ron Marinaccio could be a part of the equation, and both of those things could still be true, because when you look at Wandi Peralta's skills over the course of his career, he doesn't have an overwhelming strikeout rate. Right now he's at a 23.9%. That is a

career best, and he's having trouble with walks, which he's had trouble in the past with. 14.1%. So yeah, like, it's just barely good enough to get the job done. And yeah, maybe if they want to use the other guys and more specialist roles, he could end up getting more saves. But this seems like more of a committee at best situation for me and in one where I wouldn't want to, if he wasn't picked up already, I wouldn't want to be too aggressive fab wise based on what i'm seeing right now yeah i'm not i'm not in um you

know when we have looked at anything that has a whiff of predictive quality for role change it usually has to do with velo strikeout rate um you know it's velo is not bad but his strikeout rate is is like average for a reliever 23.9 you know and then the walk rate is not something that I've necessarily seen proven that it matters in terms of the closer roll but it just seems really intuitive that you do not like to have

a closer that walks people I mean you know what I mean like they're likely to put the tying run on base if they're walking people and I don't love that. So the combination of putting the guy on base, I guess he is a good sinker baller. He does have the good ground ball rate. He does suppress homers.

So the idea is maybe he puts the guy on base and then he races them with a double play. I think Michael King has not been the option because he's still doing multiple innings. I don't know if they're ever going to change that, but he's obviously settled into doing multiple innings. I don't know if they're ever gonna change that but he's obviously settled into their multiple innings role. I just want to point out though that I think the answer for them is the old answer and Clay Holmes has kept a clean sheet since the sixth and that is six straight appearances with zero runs one walk we've got something like seven innings over that time and he's given up six hits, no walks, no homers, tons of ground balls.

He's my guy. I know there's a little bit of a risk with lefties, but even then, Wandy Peralta's not a great platoon guy for him because Wandy Peralta's best pitch might be the changeup, and so it's a little bit weird to bring in a lefty to maybe get some lefties out with a changeup. So I kind of think Clay Holmes is going to take this job back. All right, so if we had to break it down,

it's Holmes 70% to 80% of the saves maybe, and then scraps and whatnot to Peralta and the others based on the current situation? That's where I'm going. The one guy that I'd like to maybe just run with it was Ian Hamilton, but he's hurt. And he's not necessarily, I mean,

he, he was working his way towards more high leverage situations, but like Clay Holmes has two, two holds in the last, in his last two appearances. And you have to go back to the 8th of May to get a hold for Ian Hamilton. And actual usage is perhaps the most predictive thing for closer changes.

It's like, who's getting the holds is maybe the easiest way to find a closer. Yeah, I think that tends to be the order. Everyone seems to move up a chair. Yeah, you move up a chair, exactly. It's not very scientific, but it is somewhat effective. And Hamilton's, I think, hurt. Yeah, I do like Hamilton as more of a deep, deep keeper, dynasty, just extra pitcher on your roster sort of guy, though, just because Clay Holmes, 30 years old,

doesn't seem like a guy that's going to have the job for two or three more years. Just seems like the guy that has the job right now or the inside track to the bulk of the job for the time being. Best Western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze. And it felt a little like... Come on kids, back to the hotel room. Good night kids.

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Let's move on to some surprising pictures. I used the cutoff of $15. I was looking at the Rotowire Earn values for the season because it always, always in mid-May will turn up some names you don't expect it to. You get guys that have great ratios, attack a few extra

wins on that, makes a pretty big difference in something like this. Sometimes the relievers pop, right? Because there's just some guys who have a 0-5 ERA. Yeah, like Yenier Cano is a $16 pitcher right now because he's got an ERA of 0

and a.194 whip and over a strikeout branding. He's got a handful of saves. He's got three saves to win also, but ratios like that will definitely pop. Now, Eduardo Rodriguez, who we talked about earlier this week, is now a $31 pitcher

in here. This is a 10-team league. I'm going to switch it to a 15-team league. I'm going to use 65% spent on batters if anyone else has the tool open. It's $33 if you make those adjustments now for E-Rod. That makes him the third starter behind Zach Gallin and Joe Ryan, just the way we all drew it up.

A good reminder that a quarter of a season is not a whole season, and any one, any combination of players can be higher or lower on this list than they should be over eight or nine starts. It's not like a counting stat where you can only add dollars.

He can subtract dollars from you pretty quickly. Right. It'd be really cool to see a visualization of this month by month or week by week where you could just see guys rising and falling until they get to their eventual spot. I picked him up and then he was worth minus $5 over the next month. Yeah.

And I think at some point I'm going to have an exercise on the show where I just take a random season and I show everybody the results by month and you have to figure out, was this a good season? Was this a bad season? Was this an average season? Because we don't think in terms of, even if you look at weeks of fantasy baseball,

when I look at the NFBC and I start picking up players, I always have the weekly tab. When I start looking at the game log, I'm like, how much is he playing? I use weekly for that. How many at-bats is this guy getting on a week-to-week basis? But even when I see a home run, two runs, two RBIs, my brain's not really calibrated to go, is that really good? Or is that just kind of what I should be getting from this guy? Or is that even a little bit less? It's the same kind of thing. You're not trained to think about player values on a micro level. And it might be a problem to do it. It might lead you to make more mistakes. But I thought a couple of these pitchers were worth

bringing up. So Erod at 33, we talked about earlier in the week, just thought it was funny he was that high. Mitch Keller at 31, his number four right now on this list. Justin Steele, we haven't talked about him much at all this season, is a top 10 pitcher. $28 so far. I didn't see anything I was really excited about with Justin Steele. There were good results in the second half of last season, so there was some proof of concept that he had, something that was going to work. He's doing this in the face of a lower strikeout rate. This was a guy that didn't have an amazing strikeout rate to begin with.

It was just kind of solid, 24.6% last year, strikeout printing stuff. It's fine for a starter, but what he's done, he's actually lowered the walk rate. He's pitching to a 244 ERA, a 103 whip so far, six wins a big part of why he is popping so far. I look at him, I see the K rate down, I have immediate concerns. I also think he's the kind of guy that you wouldn't get a lot for in a trade anyway. So I think the question is, what should you reasonably expect from him going forward? It seems to me there's a very good chance the best quarter of Justin Steele's season has already happened. But what will the next three quarters of his season look like?

Well, both of these guys are locating the ball well, and they're enough into the season where there's some predictive quality to that location. You can see that even though Steele is striking fewer batters out, he's also walking fewer batters. And that location does show up in things like batting average on balls in play and home runs per nine, although not in a way that you would just say,

oh, look, he's got a, you know, what is it that Eduardo Rodriguez has? He has like a 209 BABIP and he's locating the ball well, so he's going to continue doing that. So like not in that way. But if you wanted to look through the different projections and say, hmm, ATC has him with a 295 BABIP going forward. I like that. He's locating the ball well this year.

This is going to be one of his best years when it comes to command and walk rate. So maybe he's going to also limit the balls in play a little bit and limit the homers and you take that 295 batter from atc and you take that uh 274 walk rate from uh the bat and you put it together and you get something like a three eight ish era going forward with the round of eight strikeouts per 9 that is going to be useful and you can do the same game with steel where you take the lower walk rates you take the lower home run rates

you put it all together and you come up with I would say like a 3-6, 3-8 kind of ERA going forward so both of these guys will be useful but the trick about 3-6, 3-8 kind of ERA going forward. Both these guys are going to be useful, but the trick about 3-8 is at 3-8, he's also going to give you some 4-4s and some 4-5s and some 5s. What I

would just say is both these guys are keeps. Both these guys are guys you want on your roster. Both these guys are guys I would not start every time out. I think Justin Steele would fit into the new lodum approach the anti-model uh air quotes the anti-model approach is not i'm not the person that's sitting here saying models are useless projections are useless i'm the person saying that if everyone in the room is using the model or the projections or both, and they're looking through players the same way, the advantage is to look at them through a different lens.

You can still make some catastrophic errors doing this, so you can't just go willy-nilly and have absolutely no reason whatsoever for going after certain players. for going after certain players. But when you look at the steal projections, the bat has him at 454 for the ERA and a 141 whip the rest of the way. So this would be the kind of pitcher that is probably easy to trade for, relatively speaking, compared to his performance. If we think he's going to exceed the projection,

he's a good target because many people won't believe. Many people will look at the flaw, the limited velo on the fastball, the low strikeout rate so far and say, I can't be there when this goes wrong. And as long as you can reasonably find something, either the home park, the team context, maybe an ability to avoid hard contact. Maybe that's a skill that Justin Steele actually has. We've seen it in the home run rate going back to last season, right? The home run issues really were never a problem for him in the minors. And other than his first foray into the big leagues back in 2021, he's done that at the big league level too. So there might be something here that models and

projections don't necessarily agree with, but they will eventually find and catch up to. So it's picking your spots, right? It's not, again, it's not, it's not like an anti-science or anti-numbers or anything like that. It's leverage. This game, fantasy baseball, is a game based on leverage and outliers and finding things before other people find them. That's the reasoning behind the Lodum idea and an anti-model sort of approach. I'm still using those tools. I'm just trying to figure out when those tools might be missing something or leading us astray, which is a fine line to walk.

Yeah, you're making an argument against yourself, though. Well, yeah. I'm totally making an argument against myself. It's like a philosophy class nightmare where I'm just, I'm like spinning circles over here. It's like, wait, all the things I believe are the things everyone else believes about players. Therefore, what I believe about players is not as helpful as it should be. It's not wrong, but it's not necessarily optimal. That's the hard part. yeah um i mean i i think it's also not an argument against us it's in a way like you know what we try to do is uh give you certain ways to look at players um and uh just even like putting your own shade on that is is we would like that you know we're not trying to create a robot army of people that just see it the way we see it. So if you think location plus, Tango went out and Tom Tango went out and he's the chief data architect for baseball

and he didn't find much predictive quality for location and so he doesn't love it. When we put it into our ERA projections, though, we found usefulness. And even when Baseball Perspectives looked at it, they found usefulness for Location Plus. And so if you just sort this year's leaderboard of pitchers that have thrown 20 innings

and do it by Location Plus instead of Stuff Plus, you will be looking at it from a different angle than a lot of people, right? Who will be mostly starting by stuff plus. And then there's some interesting names that come to the top because Lance Lynn, 10th in location plus among these pitchers. And his game has always been mix around an assorted group of okay fastballs. They're worse this year than ever before. But, you know, I don't think, you know, I think he can still make it work.

I have, I've been out on him, but because I look at that stuff and I think it's a 90 stuff plus, he's just too far gone. But Marco Gonzalez, 88 stuff plus 109 location plus a 90 stuff plus he's just too far gone but Marco Gonzalez 88 stuff plus 109 location plus third best location plus in baseball like there's still some usefulness there and this is part of why Martin Perez makes it work despite a 78 stuff plus Bailey Falter at 80 has a unique sort of arm angle and a type of a type of movement that peach pitch that people don't see that often a little bit sort of drew smiley ask you know so there you know there are different ways to look at what we're doing and then you know there's also just sort of reading the tea leaves beyond it so we've been

talking about Alec Thomas. We have breaking news, breaking news. Alec Thomas has been sent down. You could tell it was coming. Dominic Fletcher was doing good things with that playing time. You brought it up with Dominic Fletcher and mentioned that

he might make things difficult for Alec Thomas, I think, just yesterday on the cast when we were talking about it. But you can still look at things through the way that we were looking at it and looking at, like, well, this is okay, the strikeout rate's okay, the barrel rate's okay. But also, you know, zoom out and say, well well the diamondbacks are trying to win and i think that they're gonna play dominic fletcher because he's coming up and he's gonna give him a better chance to win tomorrow rather than two years from now um so you know there's all sorts of

different ways to kind of parse the different uh you know stats that we talk about on our different ways we look at things on the show. Yeah, it's so hard because the past, I think, gets overrated by some people. Like, oh, it used to be so much better. Players used to be this way. Like, the people do that. Usually they're older folks.

You don't have a lot of young people saying the past was amazing because they weren't there. They still lived at home. They still lived at home. I think the future can be a little overrated sometimes, right? We look at players' potential in the long run and we dream too much on that. And then somehow the present gets a little bit underrated, like what's happening right now. But what I think is hard about the present is the exact decision that the Diamondbacks were

faced with. Dominic Fletcher comes up and he's doing more than Alec Thomas is. You can't, in the face of a player playing that well go back to the guy that you think is the better long-term player at least if you do it's a really hard decision to make i think it's hard to justify it in in the clubhouse when you're trying to win right now the clubhouse dynamics is really interesting that's why i talk about like the order of young prospects having to come up why mike my matt mclean may have come up before uh ellie del cruz you know like there's clubhouse dynamics where people are like no matt's been here for years he deserves it and well why is alec thomas still up here he's hitting 195 and we can say well we don't think 195 is predictive

you know but like that might not matter if you're trying to win games. And the other times it's like, he's hitting 195, he's hitting 395. Why is that guy starting today? Well, we can look at a player and look at the core skills and say, this is what he should do over a full season. But sometimes they just don't get the full season for reasons out of our control. Injury, demotion, someone else playing better. Those are all things that you can't always account for.

But teams have to make that decision. Just like we have to make decisions in season about what to do. I think this comes up in every league, but I think it's hardest in a 10-team mixed league. I don't play in any 10-team mixed leagues right now. The last time I played in one, I think it was maybe last year, the Listener League, it was their 10 or 12 teams.

And that was tough because you had to be like, I got to drop this good player right now. All the time, you're stuck with this choice between the really good established players you drafted who were in prolonged slumps, the Jose Abreu types. You have to decide on those players

and they're cuts first in a 10-team league before they start getting cut and more like the leagues we play in. And you you have to decide are the young rookies that come up has been cutting those leagues like oh you've never drafted in those leagues yeah but then you have to decide on prospects how long do you wait on prospects to figure it out ezekiel tovar was probably cut six weeks ago after the first week or first two weeks he was probably dropped in those leagues but that was still a 12 team dynasty where've got a 12-team dynasty where I've been nursing Alec Thomas along on the bench because I'm like, yeah, this is good for the future. And now I'm like, oh, God.

Now he's probably a drop in a 12-team dynasty league. Terrible. I hope he doesn't become good on someone else's team, though. Gar! So here's the reason why I think you're not dropping him because you don't believe in him as a result of the diamondback sending him down you're dropping him because you need that roster spot to help you right now and the time it's going to take for Thomas to come back earn the role you think he's going to earn and play at the level you need him to play at to be relevant to 12 team league that could be two years you should see my IL in that league.

I've got O'Neal Cruz, Reese Hoskins. Oh, my God. It's so good. It's right here. O'Neal Cruz, Reese Hoskins, Tyler O'Neal, and Jacob DeGrom, Drew Rasmussen, Brandon Woodruff, Edwin Diaz. And I've already dropped Luis Garcia and Tyler Miley because I just didn't have enough I.L. slots. So I think Alex Thomas has just got to go, dude.

I got to somehow win today's game, just like the D-backs. You have to play for the present on some level. Even if you're in a keeper league, even if you're in a dynasty league, you're playing for now sometimes. So you have to think like a team playing for right now and teams in the middle in baseball,

especially this time of year are really asking those tough questions. Okay. We're not where we want to be, but we're better than we thought, or we're as good as we thought. What's our next move? Ready? It gets a little better.

We're not ready to sell yet. Like let's, let's, let's put our best team on the field for another month. And if we're still not really in the mix, then we can start bringing Alec Thomas back up or bringing these guys back up. And that easily describes a half dozen teams,

if not more, at this point in time. There was a Lance Lynn question that came in, though, that I thought was relevant since he came up. Pitched really well on Tuesday night, which maybe opens the door. If you're in a situation where you're holding and waiting and hoping for a turnaround, you bank this really good start.

Maybe it opens the eyes of a few other folks in the league. So there's kind of a, do you hold them? Do you move them? The question came from Andrew. Andrew said, some are pointing to Lynn's track record swinging strike rate, K rate and BABF saying the results he's had so far are just bad luck. I pulled these numbers off fan graphs.

It looks like a real skills degradation to me, and there's a reason he's been getting hit harder. Is that how you would see the situation? Also, how much does the Stuff Plus model change from season to season? With the tweaks being made, can it be misleading to compare stuff numbers between seasons for a single player, and is it just better to use it to compare pitches within the same season? So there was a screenshot of Lin's stuff numbers going back to 2020.

And Stuff Plus overall, I think, went from 106 to 104 to 97 to 90 this season. So just a progressive decline, which given his age and what he does, it kind of makes sense that it would track out that way. And Fastball Stuff Plus in particular. And he mostly throws fastballs. So it's a pretty big hit for a guy like Lind. I tried to look at just the last two weeks to capture that good start. And 18 innings in the last 14 days,

85 stuff plus on the fastball, 83 on the sinker, 100 on the cutter. So that's better than he's been doing. And it still does not leap off the page to me. And yes, 111 location plus. So he basically had a couple games where he located the ball really well. That has been part of what he's done in the past.

But he just, it's a little bit too marco gonzalez for me you know and yes i know the strikeout numbers aren't the same but in terms of like he's relying too much on command these days and so even if i think he's going to rebound some i think he's going to have the worst home run rate of his career. I think he's going to have one of the worst whips of his career. He did have a 1.53 in 2018. It's going to be maybe better than that. Otherwise, I think it's going to be one of his worst years. Going forward, I would just cherry pick the worst projection.

458 from the bat, 1.27 whip, 8.9 strikeouts per nine. Like, that feels about right to me, you know, if I'm kind of trying to wade between all the numbers. If you look at the rest of season projection for Lynn from the bat, 4.58 ERA, 1.27 whip. That's the worst of the Fangraphs projections. We've mentioned before, the bat has adjusted to the run environment some of the projection systems haven't justin steel is 454 and 141 so worse in the whip what i think is interesting is that you could

very easily in a league of trades we're selling steel for Lin. You could trade steel for Lin, but you'd also get more back with Lin, right? So I'm saying more as like, how much faith do you want to put in the projections? Because they should end up at about the same place. You might get a better whip from Lin based on the projections. You might even get more strikeouts from Lin. Those strikeouts might be more reliable. So do you go with what the sheet says, knowing you can get a second player back

or if you make it a two for two, that by getting Lin, you're getting an upgrade in that second spot because you're giving up the guy that looks so much better in the results that have happened so far. How would you play it? I'm not doing it. I feel like I need game show music after a question like that. I'm not doing it.

It's a good one. It's a like that. I'm not doing it. It's a good one. It's a good idea. I'm not doing it. It's out there. I want to see if anyone does it. Screenshot it if you pull it off because I want to know. And then you got to set a reminder for October 1st to circle back around and be like, hey, my whole season, my whole life turned around after I did that. You can dance in my face if you got it right. I don't have a clear answer on that.

As far as the model changing from season to season, does that make it a little bit harder? Because you retrained the model. Does that make it harder to make the comparisons, as Andrew asked? Or does it retroactively go back and adjust the past seasons based on how it's been retrained so you can make those year-to-year comparisons on a fair basis? Anytime you're looking at numbers on there,

whatever the model is, it's consistent across the years. Yeah, it's retroactively applied, so you don't have to worry about it being different. If anybody's interested in sort of under-the-table stuff, I think Christian Javier was something that we were talking about on Twitter today. His Stuff Plus number is down a lot, even though his ride is only down,

you know, on the order of a half inch or so is Velo is down, uh, you know, less than a tick. Um, and his release point is up, uh,

you know, on the order of an inch or two or three. So, um, you know, all these things seem like small, and I think Lance Brozdowski, who does really good work on Twitter,

pointed out that he thinks it's an overcorrection and that the driveline model still has Javier's fastball as a plus, and obviously the results are there. This also feeds into the Yenier Cano thing that we've been talking about. Why do people who have really unique skill sets or movement profiles do so poorly in the model? So here are the things that we are considering doing right now. We just had a meeting. Pitching Plus just had a meeting.

And the priorities are this. Altitude adjusting. That would do a better job of predicting Carlos Estevez away from home. Look now, he has a 120 plus stuff plus. And in Colorado, he didn't. So that's because altitude affects movement so does weather and pressure so like that's a big thing where we want to we're not trying to adjust the results as part of it we're just trying to say hey let's create a baseline for movement like if you were

pitching at that c level what would everybody's stuff plus look like you know just so that um it ports better from from park to park and so um that's what we're looking at there one other thing we're looking at is platoon adjusting stuff plus there you'll notice that a sweeper has a huge stuff plus and a mediocre pitching plus that's because it's of the platoon split issue so that's a known issue uh we're thinking about doing that the third is a little bit wonky but i think people can hang with me for a second. When a new pitch comes in and it has a unique profile, the model is looking for comps and it doesn't find any.

And so it'll look for a nearest comp and just be like, eh, it's like this other poo-poo pitch, so it's poo-poo. But that's not the right answer. And what we can do, Bayesian statistics has this idea that like you, you can find priors, you can find, you can find semi comps, you can find, you can find whiffs of comps. You can be like, oh, you know what? Yenir Cano's pitch is not like like anybody else's but it's a little bit like this oh and and these types of movements have been good in the past and this sync is generally and fade is generally good so let's even though we can't find a specific comp we can say the things

it's doing are a little bit like things that have been done in the past a little bit and so let's give it a little bit of credit for those other things it's a little bit like you know um and so that's uh you know that's somewhat in there due to the mechanics of machine learning but we want to see if we can increase that ability so that when a new pitch enters the stratosphere, we don't have to wait for a retraining. So I think those three things will improve stuff. Plus, this is another thing that I think is interesting about your anti-model or this model idea is that, you know, my dad has been betting for years and he always is like,

oh, I made a tweak to the model. I'm like, oh, it's good. It's going good now. And my first reaction is, you don't actually have a model if you're tweaking it all the time. So part of me wants to be like, no, let's just leave Stuff Plus as it is a whole year. Let's do it.

Let's just go with it. On the other hand, if you have a growth mindset and somebody points out a flaw or somebody points out this, you want to grow and learn and you want to improve the model and so um that's why we do of course always backtrack and like you know reverse engineer like do everybody before too so that the model is consistent all the way through to the best of the knowledge we have but it's a thing that is a problem in general in baseball which is we know that we're going to be wrong about some of the stuff we think we're right about right now.

But we have to broadcast, especially within our organization, these are the things we know and we believe in them. We might know more later, but don't worry about that. This is the best we can do right now. But an anti-model approach might look at that and be like, well, the model is telling me what the best we know now. But I, in my brain, might be able to sort of poke some holes into it and find some ways through where I can even beat this model that's now on Fangraphs for everyone to see, right? Right. So if somebody comes up with an Ian Hamilton slider and there's nobody else that has an ian hamilton slider and

stuff says it's not good i can be like well i'm gonna go pick up ian hamilton you know what i mean so it's like you know uh that might have been all a bunch of gobbledygook but it's uh it's there's a struggle to sort of want to leave something in place that has value and then also to improve it you have to keep moving it though. I think that's fundamentally important because nothing's perfect. We're trying to predict the future. So you have to keep... The anti-model approach is basically just trying to find cracks that are going to be included later. Yeah, right. Exactly. I got there before the model did. Therefore, I got the good season for pennies on the dollar.

The model caught up and then you all paid full price later. So if I'm right about Matthew Libertor and he's a fraction of the price of other starting pitchers that come up this year, then that's a win for me. And if the model sees, Oh no, he did make some changes and this and that, this is all different.

Great. I hope, I hope that gets it right. That's, that's a better future for the collective. By the way, all of us, he's up and I'm out. He's up and you're out. Yes. That's, that's a better future for the collective. By the way, all of us, he's up and I'm out.

He's up and you're out. Yes. He has the base, the best comp I can find in triple A to his numbers are basically a David Peterson with slightly more command. Oh, well, that's going to be horrible,

but you know what? That's what I need. I need that. I need there to be something else there throw 300 uh dollars at him in fab uh also um very interesting was in the regards to that last conversation was brandon williamson's debut it's really well in colorado where i was like this guy he was a he was a lodum dude because he, he has like a 6.7 canine in the minor leagues and like awful ERA. And this stuff plus didn't like him.

I had like an 85 stuff plus or something in the minor leagues. And, uh, he came up and shoved against the Rockies in Colorado. And, you know, I'm, I'm looking at his his stuff plus, which is going to be wrong because he was in Colorado. Right? Yes. Another another important detail. And it looks like if I'm just going to mentally give him some stuff plus

because he's in Colorado, it looks like he has a good cutter and a good slider i don't know if that's enough man it was an 82 stuff plus in cores well how much you're gonna give him you're gonna give him 20 points of stuff uh and then you know despite him like having a new cutter in the minor leagues um you know it didn't it didn't show as great stuff plus, and then, you know, just the poor strikeout rates, and my only poor strikeout last walks, like I'm still out. So I'm really interested to see what kind of fab people will drop on Libertor and Williamson. Those are the Lodum guys this week.

Yeah, well, Williamson,son, even within Lodum, I'm not taking a guy that has a 12% walk rate above AA. That's a problem, in Cincinnati especially. You're going to put extra guys on the bases there, bad stuff is going to happen to you. So there's still some common sense. Now, I realize that the chapter meetings for Lodum,

which, by the way, the next one is at the Chuck's Donuts in the parking lot in Redwood City. Donuts we provided, bring your own cigarettes. They've got good ube donuts there. Yeah, you could smoke, but you've got to bring your own cigarettes. I'm not going to provide those for anybody. It's very analog. You still look back at different things, and you're like, okay, well, the walk rate's crap.

The home run rate's really bad. We know home run rates are noisy, but if you put both those things together, that's really bad. Oh, does he strike guys out? Nope, not really. He doesn't do that anymore. Okay. You got to have something. Even the low-dome has to have something

to put your hand and your hat on. Yeah, it's like our anti-hipsters, not also hipsters though. That's sort of what this is. We're just looking for our own little niche to be cool and using old tools sometimes to do it. I guess Libertor, good ground

ball right, good strikeout right, 30% strikeout right. Yeah, and I wonder too, when you look at the Cardinals, defensively they have not been the same team this year that they've been in recent years. Not all of that could possibly be attributed to changes in the catcher position.

I realize Nolan Gorman being in the field isn't necessarily a good thing for them. But if you had to predict it, wouldn't you predict that their defense going forward is probably better than it was for the first 40 games? So the team context is still probably pretty good for the Cardinals from a pitching perspective. The card context is still probably pretty good for the Cardinals from a pitching perspective. The park context is still pretty good. Yep. And when you look at Libertor, at least you get the big strikeout rate at AAA. And you get a walk rate you can live with and a home run rate that's not bad. Again, back to analog.

But by analog, there's stuff here. And he's trying to make the changes. This is the other part of our game it's a big mix i mean that's something that's always been tough for the model uh has been a big mix right yeah because there's different ways you can port port you know port it together you can sequence crazy you can uh just keep them on their heels uh the when i look at the per pitch numbers for him the slider is plus, but he uses a lot less than the curveball, which is also above average. And he locates the foreseam fastball well,

despite bad shape. And there are other pitchers who have just put the fastball in that skinny sliver that's in the strike zone, above the hitting zone, and below walks. It almost doesn't matter how good your fastball shape is if you can consistently hit that part. You know what I mean? And so the story you can tell for Libertor is he hits the top of the zone with the four-seam fastball. He throws the sinker to righties. He throws the four-seam fastball high and tight to lefties.

And he's got two different breaking balls that are plus. So there is a story you can tell, and that's actually a better story than I would say that I can tell for David Peterson, who people are also asking me about. So I'll just run him down. He's got the plus slider. His fastball shape is worse worse none of his location numbers are good so you can't even be like he's going to hit that sliver with the fastball so uh so i guess it it might sound like damning with fate praise to say david peterson with command but if you did give david peterson command he would have a much better chance than he does now whoa what are you listening to this for wait who's talking you know you're driving a 2024 Ford Escape with available Alexa built-in, so you can change the music.

Oh yeah. Alexa, change station to 99.2. See? Purchase a 2024 Escape ST-Line all-wheel drive with Tech Pack at 3.49% APR for 72 months with down payment. That's just $267 bi-weekly. Cash value of $40,294. Plus, eligible Ford owners get a $1,000 bonus. For details, visit your local Ford store or Ford.ca. So I've got a fastball heat map on the screen. It's from this season. And I'm curious to know, would that fit in that sliver?

Is that good enough as far as locating the fastball in a place that's... Who is that? Who do you think it is? Peterson? It's not Peterson. It's someone we've talked about today. He doesn't throw very hard and he really only throws one other pitch. The fastball slider

guy that has exceeded expectations. Justin Steele. Oh, Justin Steele. Is that good? I think that's pretty good. Middle middle's not really there. I'm a little bit... Is this for left lefties or righties it's for everybody that's just where he throws them overall so i we should split them probably by handedness but i'm guessing that's in on the hands of lefties that should be in on the hands of righties based on the view oh on righties it's high enough though You're okay with that? That's consistently elevated enough?

I think it would be better if it was up higher. Yeah, especially at like 92, 93, where he tends to live. Yeah. I think that little arm that's higher, I like that better. Yeah, the edge of the egg? Yeah. Yeah, you want to be at the top of the griddle. I think there is something to heat maps that does not get captured by models very well because models have to parse those

heat maps into boxes and so they're just like it's very like i've got to enforce my will on this heat map right and then we as people will look at that like sometimes i do heat map things where i'm like oh give me percentage of sliders in this middle zone or something, right? And then it doesn't actually parse right. And I'm like, that doesn't... It's not making any sense. But if you, for example, when we looked at Josh Lowe earlier, there's a real difference

to his contact rates high in the zone. If you look at the heat maps, it sort of pops. So I do think there's some value into heat maps. I mean, I know that like Advanced Scouts, for example, the way that baseball is played, advanced scouts are looking at heatmaps. It makes sense. You want to know tendencies. You want to know

where guys are locating and if you can do something about that. Sometimes tendencies don't have hard boundaries. Sometimes it's not just like, oh, this box. The people pitching aren't like, oh, I can hit that little box. No, it's like up, in, down, whatever. It's more like D-pad directions.

Don't let it leak that way. Don't let it leak that way. Yeah, it's more like that. We've got a few mailbag questions. We'll try to squeeze in as many as we can. One from Robert. Is anything wrong with Emmanuel Class A? His strikeouts have bottomed out.

14.8% strikeout rate so far this season for Class A. Yareh approaching three. He is on pace for another 40 save season so far. He's allowed 20 hits, though, in 21 and a third inning so far. He allowed just 43 in 72 and two thirds last season. So do you see something actually wrong? Or is this a case of, yeah, it's been about a quarter of a season, but for a reliever, that's still a really limited amount of work. Yeah, I don't see anything wrong.

I guess the only thing that's quote-unquote wrong about him is that given his level of stuff, he's always allowed a few more balls in play than you expect. And this year, it's a little bit worse, but in terms of underlying numbers or anything, I don't really see anything wrong with what he's doing. I would assume that some tiny part of it is the shift rules, and the other part of it is noise,

and then the other part of it is some sort of long-term tendencies of allowing balls in play so that he's always open to this possibility right there's always the chance that because he does not strike out like 45 of the people like a lot of other top closers that something like this would happen yeah i mean it's filthy it's it's nearly 100 with movement he's down a mile and a half per hour on the fastballs this season but he's at 98.1 we're gonna going to worry about that? Like, no. Yeah. So, yeah, it's strange for sure,

but I do think the shift rules might be something I didn't really think a lot about with Class A in particular, but he does allow more balls in play than you'd expect. So, if you had to project it going forward, I mean, are you comfortable buying into a return close to a strikeout per inning? Another part of this with Class Aas Seba, by the way, he's always been good at keeping the ball in the park,

still doing that, and he's always had really good control. A lot of closers that have electric stuff don't come into the league as young as he did with a low walk rate, and he's maintained that. Yeah, I'd expect the ERA to go down. I know the projections are for him to continue about this, but they're never going to really

project a guy to have a really low BABF. They're all saying, oh, $289, but his career BABF is $252. So, here, oops, I didn't mean to

do that. Just close the tab I wanted to look at. No, and then I just reopen all of them? Oh, my God. I just want to reopen last close. Oh, good Lord. This is all falling apart. I just wanted to find the PPERA projection.

Here it is. It's a little bit old. But Klasse had a 252 actually. I don't see anything wrong. He's got a clear grip on that job. It's not exactly what you wanted, but it's also not terrible.

I think he's more likely to go to the 8-9 Ks per 9 range again the rest of the season than to stay down like this. Really, really tough guy to hit. Just seems like a smaller sample problem to me thanks a lot for that question let's get to one from josh josh wonders if we should start to value jacob degrom like an elite reliever i've managed to avoid the headache that is jacob degrom for the last several years but he is endlessly

fascinating to me it got me thinking his elite results but low innings totals sound a lot like a reliever. Sure enough, over the last couple of years, his numbers are remarkably similar to some of the top relievers in the league with no end in sight to DeGrom's injury issues should we start valuing him the same way we value elite relievers. Now, what I did is I took the 2022

Fangraphs auction calculator and just ran it to see where DeGrom turned up. And he was just under 10 bucks, like right around that range. And he was right next to Paul Seawald, who was a committee leading closer. And I think he was within reach of Evan Phillips, who really didn't get a lot of saves last year. It was just kind of like the reliever that got wins, which kind of says, okay, nine, 10 bucks. If DeGrom ever gets treated like that in drafts then it's a no-brainer because he still has within his range of outcomes the

stays healthier than a reliever and even if it's a hundred innings that's more than any of those short levers would throw there's a higher win probability every time he takes the ball because of the way wins work so you still have that and then of course there's other ceiling beyond that oh 140 150 if if those things can happen i mean he throws he almost throws like a reliever i mean he throws like a reliever max max max effort yeah and then and kind of fastball slider these days yeah it's kind of a it's kind of a smart way to think about it. I think that we looked at, like, you know, fan graph depth charts, you know, and, like, we said, well, you know, even if he only throws 120 or 140 innings,

he's going to be a top 10 starter, right? And so we figured, well, that seems like a number he can make. It's not a number he has made in the last three years. Really, we should have projected just looking at innings pitch without any knowledge of anything else, we probably should have projected him this year for 80 innings. He could still get there, but if he gets to 80 innings, he will be more grouped with the elite relievers.

You know what's hard about that, though, is that 2020 is misleading because he made 12 starts that year. He couldn't really make more, so it looks like another year where he was short. So you really would have to project him on two years of injuries, not three years of short workloads. Yeah, but most projections, they go three years back and they weight the last year heaviest. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm guilty of it. I definitely saw more of the what would go right

volume-wise for him, and it's still possible, even though it seems less likely with him on the IL right now, but if he comes back and he's healthy the rest of the season, then it ends up being the highest total he's had since 2019. That's right. And then we went right back down the rabbit hole again. Still in the range of possibilities. He threw a light bullpen session. Oh, that's great. He's an elite reliever with

catnip, surrounded by catnip. If the market ever treats him like that, then that's probably a phenomenal time to have Jacob deGrom on all your rosters. The market probably won't treat him like that for like two more years. It's an argument against buying him in the first three rounds. Yes. I think Josh is on point. Josh, be smart. Don't look pie in the sky with deGrom. Look where you're looking right now. You're closer to right than I am with deGrom at this point. Thanks a lot for that email.

We had a shallow league decisions question from David, kind of mentioning some of the names from earlier. You get these shallow leagues where you have to choose between the hot starter, the rookies that are up, all these things. You got to make these quick decisions because people are changing players constantly. But at what point do you actually start to confidently make decisions in a league that shallow? Is it different than a 12-team league and a 15-team league? What do you need to see

to believe in a player, and what do you need to see in a 10-team league to no longer believe in a player? Because the thresholds, to me, seem different, but it's hard to quantify. Yeah, I think you have to be faster. Because you know that the replacement level is higher. You can afford to be wrong. If mistake you can just go get somebody that's like let's say you have someone that

you know is you think that he's going to be worth 100 of this value but he comes out and he's giving you 20 of the value right it's better to not keep nursing that along and keep putting in numbers into your into your league that are at 20 or 40 percent of that when you can go to the wire and get 80 percent of that right now right and then let's say you're you're wrong and that guy goes back to 100 you missed that but you've been getting 80s instead of the 20s while that you know while that guy was slumping and then even if your 80 guy falls off you can probably go and get another 80. So at some point, getting a string of 80 percenters instead of your 100% guy is worth it rather than put in a whole month of 20%. Right. I think this is the type of league where

prospect clutching can be even more costly. I think the toughest player right now for me in a league like this is gunner henderson i think henderson was mentioned in one of david's emails like how long do you wait on gunner henderson in a league that shallow where you could get so much more from that spot so easily we're at 37 games in right now four homers one steal a 184 340 351 line so bad slash line the underlying numbers the minors that could come up he could even be sent down we just learned this from alec thomas again it's even more important gunner henderson's ceiling is so much higher than than alec thomas's i think people can see it as truth a little easier with henderson if they send him down for two weeks or two months or whatever

they send him down for it doesn't mean that gunner Gunnar Henderson won't be the player that you think he can be in the long run. Jared Kelnick, good example of things taking a little while, having a meandering sort of path to maybe reach the eventual baseline that you're looking for. The underlying numbers for Henderson are still very encouraging. He's not chasing pitches outside the zone. He's near a 10% barrel rate again. I think this is still a very good player in the long run, even though it's been a very tough start to the season. How many 180s do you want to put up? Yeah, how long do you want to deal with that?

I think the other way to think about it is if you haven't made this decision already, how far back would you have needed to see a turnaround to justify holding him if you look back at the last two weeks and he was better would that be enough or would one week be enough i think that's the that's the type of question people are often wrestling has he turned around at all or is any of his splits good no you go back like 10 days it's still a 30 k rate i mean it's a little more power in terms of extra base hits during that span but i think i think in a shallow redraft league i think you can justify it in may

i think you can justify the drop on henderson in those leagues even though the long game is still very encouraging you're playing a shorter game than that right now yeah and i mean that's yeah that's that's that's sort of my point too it's like okay well you look at his projections and that's 100 gunner henderson right now is you know 250 15 homers and seven steals are you telling me you can't get anybody that gives you most of that on the wire right now right you know you just need to find somebody with a little power and a little bit of speed that's out on the wire so yeah i do think you you want to be more aggressive it makes it harder like in my 12 team dynasty it makes a little bit hard because you know it's a shallow league but it's also a dynasty so last year i

nursed o'neill cruz along all year and i kept getting offers but i was like i think this is gonna be worth it and before the injury it looked like really this was worth it but i also have nursed alec thomas along all year and now it's looking like it may not have been worth it so uh you know and i guess the cap the only caveat i'd have is like if you can put them on your bench and do something else and leave them on your bench for a while like that's that's my process in in shallower leagues is like before i i want to drop the guy i put him on my bench i wait two weeks if i still want to drop the guy i dropped a guy yeah and i think that that period is probably elapsed now with henderson but i think yeah you could definitely look at the the component skills across the board and just say, okay, this is actually what a bench is for.

If you want to hold a guy you can't use, you want a lot of reasons to believe in that player. We've seen power. We've seen speed. We've seen patience. We're not seeing it right now. This is a lineup on the rise. Those are all good things. So that might be the best case scenario.

He might be good enough to hold, whereas a lot of other players in that format fall off the roster. And it's not about what you paid back on draft day as much as it's about what you're still seeing in the underlying numbers. That would be your reason for still buying into a better second half or a better next four months coming from Henderson. But the demotion does seem like it's very possible at this point because they've got plenty of alternatives and they're playing for now one last shout out on the way out uh i mentioned my kids uh uh playoff

run in all house uh they won 14 to 1 uh to get to the championship game it's double elimination though so they got to beat the champions twice nice format but i mentioned them because last time i mentioned them uh i've had a bunch of people reach out so uh one was a cool story a person working for a team right now uh was uh was in all house uh and he has one of his teammates is on that team is working for this major league team with him now too uh so we got two two all house listeners potentially uh former all house listeners and then some other people reached out to other parents in the league saying, I think Eno's kid is on your kid's team. So it's led to a bunch of fun conversations.

And the all-house benefactor really enjoyed the stories. I told the member of the All House family that has funded this team for many many years about the story and she really enjoyed it they get to play again Thursday night and if they win they get to play for all of the marbles

so that is your weekly or daily All House Little League, Palo Alto Little League update we'll get the results next your weekly or daily all-house Little League, Palo Alto Little League update. We'll get to the results next Monday on that episode. If you've got questions for a future episode, be sure to send those our way. Ratesandbarrels at gmail.com is the best email address to use for those.

On Twitter, enos at enosaras. I am at Derek Van Ryper. If you want a subscription to The Athletic, it's $2 a month for the first year at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.