Rates & Barrels - Balancing barrels and plate discipline, finding late-season upgrades, and a few Stuff+ risers

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss the balance between great barrel rates, and ample contact skills, and seek out difference-makers for redraft leagues and long-term formats. Plus, they look at a few pitchers with significantly improved Stuff+ numbers over the course of the season. 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 Subscribe to The Athletic for just $3.99/mo: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels presented by Topps. Check out Topps Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. It is Wednesday, August 11th. On this episode, we have some follow-up questions from our topic on Monday. One of our first topics was looking at the value of hard-hit balls, particularly hard-hit balls.

We'll get to some of those follow-up questions on this episode and talk about balancing the barrel rates of players with their play discipline skills because at a certain point, yes, you can barrel the ball a lot. But if you strike out too much, it is still problematic. It is a skills flaw that offsets the great skill that you show by barreling the ball as often as you do. We're also going to get into a few late season additions with potentially bright futures. And we'll talk about when you can buy a turnaround with stuff plus

numbers. A couple of players caught my eye recently. So I want to pick Eno's brain on what some of the changes we've seen from those players might mean going forward. But Eno, let's get right after it here. The camping chair tip that I shared on Monday, it's beginning to backfire now that it's Wednesday. Apparently the human body is not meant to sit in a camping chair all day long and do work. It is meant to sit in a camping chair for a little while and go to the beach and drink beer and come back and sit by the fire. We'll keep things rolling just for the sake of my long-term health. Your spine. Yeah. I think my spine would benefit from a tight 55-minute show today as opposed to a 90-minute longer marathon show.

We had a question come in about Jake Berger in particular, and I think this sort of fits into something that a lot of people are thinking about anyway. The question came from Frank on Twitter, and he writes, small sample, but Jake Berger

in 23 bad ball events has an average exit velocity of 98 miles per hour, which is number one for non-pitchers. He also has a 4.3% soft contact rate per Fangraph's bad ball data events has an average exit velocity of 98 miles per hour which is number one for non-pitchers he also has a 4.3 soft contact rate per fan graphs batted ball data which is second only behind andy young if you lower that to a minimum of 40 qualified events too small sample to do anything with or because those events have happened does it show potential even within a small sample frame

try to touch on what eno was saying where one batted ball event can make a difference and see if this falls in line with what was being talked about on Monday. Yeah, you know, first of all, a little small mea culpa. I may have described the baseballball Info Solutions hard hit incorrectly. There's actually an algorithm that converts hang time and landing distance into a hard hit percentage. So it's just a slightly different way of doing things than than stat cast but it is regimented and it is not necessarily just a stringer making the decision so i think that's a that's an important thing to say because there are stringer decisions about they have these they do have these distinctions like flyner liner liner fly whatever fly fly um and those are very

difficult and i i wonder how useful they are and especially now that we can be more specific but it's interesting to think that like you might get a different outcome just by looking at where it landed and how long it took to get there as opposed to like looking at um the launch angle and the exit velocity which is uh you'd think you'd get to the same result actually uh kind of doing those two things so i'm a little surprised they're so different um but then there's also just the question of what the threshold is what you call hard hit um that. So didn't get it completely right. Sorry about that to BIS. They do great work.

And then on top of that, just back to Mr. Berger. I mean, I would look at the max exit velocity in this sort of sample and be pretty excited. You know, he's got a 115 on the board. in this sort of sample and be pretty excited. He's got a 115 on the board, and the average exit velocity has just not been shown to be a useful stat. I don't know why that is. I think that people just go in and out a little bit with the average exit velocity i think that's a little bit of like a a hot streak sort of deal you know where uh remember when yenis uh when cesspit has came over and hit it was hitting 95 plus for like three months yeah and if you could

average 95 all the time you'd have really great outcomes. But he didn't come into the next year and just average 95. It was it was just it ended up being just a hot, hot few months. But here I'm trying to get the exit velocity sorted here. So Jake Berger has a 115 at a 22 degree launch angle that is according to the researcher glenn healy very predictive um and no matter what actually no matter what that launch angle is 115 is really impressive but not on on top of that he has a 112 and he has already five batted balls over that 108 threshold threshold of which all of them are in

the predictive range according to Glenn Healy's work so this is a guy who hits the ball hard and for what it's worth I don't know that his play discipline is is so terrible right I think this is a kind of another question that came in from Travis separately. He was asking if we could address how to handle batted ball stats with traditional play discipline stats. You've got to kind of marry the two together. The example is maybe a player has a high barrel rate but high strikeout rates. How do you work through that? Well, I think it really depends a lot on the context of who the player is,

how old the player is, how much experience the player has at the big league level. And I would say that Jake Berger would be one of the more extreme examples of a guy that because of injuries and because of the lost 2020 minor league season, he has lost a ton of development time. The last time Jake Berger had played in a professional game before his AAA debut in 2021 was A-Ball in 2017. So there's a three-year gap where he was rehabbing and not playing in competitive game settings. So if you look at Berger and say, well, he's striking out 35% of the time. Okay, first off, small sample, 42 plate appearances. So not necessarily a skill that we'd say he

absolutely has shown us that he does not have the ability to make contact he was at 25.3 percent at triple a even that you'd look at that and say that still might not be a great indicator of who he is given that layoff so how this is a particularly challenging question but just how much would you say you you need to see from burger before you could start to feel good about even forecasting his K rate? I mean, he's not going to be a low K percentage guy, but I don't think he's going to be necessarily an outlier in a bad way based on what we've seen so far. He has a fairly wide spread in the projections. You can see that the bat has him around 26%. The steamer has him at 32%.

That's pretty wide because 26 is closer to league average. 32 is someone who would have a poor batting average. And yet, amazingly, Steamer has him projected for a 239 batting average, and so does the bat. How does that happen? It happens because of power. I do feel comfortable saying he has good power. I'm a little surprised the bat has projected him for less power than Steamer.

But I think that we can comfortably say he has power. And the strikeout rate is really interesting. And I think it comes back to, there's a philosophical question here, like, miss time like that. What is his baseball age you know what i mean yes is he really just like 22 in terms of baseball because that's the like he was 21 the last time he was playing professionally does he lose an extra year and a half because his body aged i mean like there there is a clear difference and we talk about this with players who are multi-sport athletes further into their professional career or deep into college.

And you say, okay, now this guy is focusing full-time on baseball. Or now this guy is a pitcher full-time. The Jacob deGrom example, right? He was a college shortstop early in his career. Started pitching late. Had Tommy John surgery. He's not as old as the age on the back of his baseball card would suggest. There's not as much mileage on his body as a pitcher. I would say the

same is mostly true of Berger. It just kind of depends on the nature of those injuries and how much wear and tear long-term is kind of done as a result of the time missed. I wouldn't look at him and say he's on the same level as a typical 25-year-old right now. I would say split the difference. He's probably more like a 23-year-old in terms of his baseball age right now. And if you think of him that way, what he's done in that very limited sample and even what he did at AAA before he got promoted is a bit more impressive. Yeah, there was that result, that aging curve of hitters that went off to war and

came back, um, and missed two years, uh, that aged more than the players who played, but that's a complicated one because, uh, they went off and were in war.

Yeah. Maybe the impacts of war, uh, might've been injured in war. And we're definitely not like hitting off of this the the slider machine for a year no the long-term psychological toll of fighting in a war probably impact you in your ability to hit baseballs or throw baseballs the way you did prior to going to war yeah so i don't know how useful that is but yeah with the lorenzo

kane thing about like thing about coming to baseball late and then having a later peak, I don't think we've fully digested that or proven it with other examples. I mean, there's just a couple guys that peaked late that got to baseball late, and we're kind of like, oh, maybe that's a thing. I don't think the sample's that big, because most of the baseball players that play to baseball late and we were kind of like, oh, maybe that's a thing. I don't think the sample's that big because most of the baseball players that play in baseball have been playing since they were like six years old.

So it's kind of hard to find the more Lorenzo Canes to compare them to. But yeah, and then you have a guy who physically was having trouble, right? To take two years off the body is now two years old but then you think of also god it's one of those things where you're just like

thinking so many different directions but like Buster Posey Buster Posey is old but took a year off and now looks so much better physically he just hit a homer. He had a tank to deep center in San Francisco last night.

And he's going to hit, you know, 20 or so homers this year. It's going to be one of his best power outputs ever after a year off. So I would just say that I think his strikeout rate will come down. I think it won't ever be a total asset, but that he's a guy who can hit 250 with power, and the power looks really real. So that's sort of how I'd assess him. And I think by doing that, I mostly be looking um at the max exavilo with a little bit

of an eye for which angles those max exavilos came in yeah and i think there are other players that are similar just in the sense that they may have played a lot in the big leagues yet but they're showing some flashes they maybe do have either plate discipline that could improve or good enough plate discipline with a really good barrel rate that should get us excited about the future. But if you take a custom leaderboard and you start looking at

guys who thrive in barrel rate but struggle in K rate, you don't have to go very far. If you just sort by barrels per batted ball event, Mike Zanino, who leads all players with at least 100 plate appearances a season at 25.8%, he has struck out 37.8% of the time, right? And it's kind of like, well, is that good? It's like, well, he probably wouldn't get to that much power without swinging and missing as much as he does.

So you have to take the good with the bad in a profile like that. But if you're talking offensive value, like, yes, it's great that he can hit the ball really hard and that he takes some walks, but at a 40% K rate, he's tanking his offensive value in real life baseball and in fantasy baseball.

And so you can't just say, sort for barrels and be like, ah, Mike Zanino is going to be my catcher next year i mean i i did a 50 uh plate appearance minimum andy young the the second baseman for uh the for the diamond backs hits the ball really hard has a 116 max ev 28 barrel rate huzzah 49 strikeout rate and i think one category i wanted to throw in there 27 years old so him and zanino not very likely at least according to aging curves uh zanino is actually likely to strike out more in the future uh and andy young is past the peak in terms of improving your strikeout right now he might improve it just because he gets more time in the big leagues. So maybe he can do a little better going forward. But I don't think

that I would anoint him a sleeper just based on the barrel rate. Right. I think we would be looking for guys who are probably closer to 24 or 25 younger, obviously better, but a lot of players right now are not getting that opportunity at the big league level if they're younger than that age, or if they are, they're highly regarded prospects who don't have the extreme swing and miss issues some of the other names that that kind of stand out i mean great players are on the barrel rate leader board of course otani tatis buxton acuna rsd de sequino i think he's kind of more in the the ship has probably already sailed group 36.8 k rate so this season. We've seen a lot of swing and miss from him, even when it was running real hot two years ago at the end of the season for

the Reds. It's almost like there's a cutoff somewhere around 32%, which again, this would take a more rigorous study to say, this is where the line is, but just kind of looking and eyeballing this list of guys who barrel the ball really well, guys who strike out

a lot but not too much and are still productive that's where it seems to be friend meal reyes is like right at that line he's seventh in barrel rate 31.9 k rate it just barely works uh you like calvin o'neill brandon belt yeah mike trout trout surprisingly high up there 28.1 k rate but top 10 in terms of the barrel rate. You see some guys on the fail side like Bobby Bradley, right? 35.6% K rate. It's probably not coming down at this point, so you're not necessarily looking at him as a sleeper.

But I feel a little better about him. Maybe Bradley and Dahlbeck, we were about to put them away because they're 25 and 26. They strike out so much, 36%, 38%, but at least they're 25 and 26. You know what I mean? Like there is a little bit of a chance there and at least they hit the ball really hard. So I'm not saying that I would focus on getting Bradley or Dahlbeck in dynasty or, or,

or, or trying to acquire them. But if there was a, a stash situation where I could put them on my, on my, the back end of my bench or a throw in situation in a trade where you're trying to get somebody else. It is interesting because some people will think that Dahlbeck is the future right some people still

like him a lot yeah but at 26 i think mostly in your dynasty leagues at 26 for him and 25 for bradley there are some people ready to jump ship and i'm willing to take a share if you're a jumping ship yeah but i think in in those leagues we're talking 20 plus team leagues like dynasty keeper really deep leagues with nobody on the wire or al only league yeah it's hard like in my 12 teamer i like i'm gonna put i'm gonna put one of these guys on my bench in a 12 teamer i don't know i need that spot to to play yeah i saw i mean a couple other names that i wouldn't be that excited about patrick wisdom i know he's put up some good numbers so far, but 38% K-rate age isn't there. If you are looking for some younger guys who are somewhat interesting,

I think Ryan Jeffers kind of caught our eye. He's a catcher, so they take a little longer anyway, but the barrel rate's good. 34.6% K-rate so far. We don't have a long track record of elevated swing and miss from him in the minors, at least not at an alarming rate. So I could see Jeffers kind of emerging to be a good long-term sort of pickup. He's at the point in his career, he's probably not going to spend a lot more time in the minors. He's at least in some kind of share with Mitch Garver when they're both healthy and perhaps the twins end

up making Jeffers the starter going in the next season. So I think he'd be among the players that I'd be pretty interested in who probably have a brighter future with plate discipline and already are showing the ability to barrel the ball consistently. Yeah. You know, Jeffers is to me like a really interesting, I think I even did it this year,

but I think I'd do it again where he's a really interesting guy to put a dollar or two on in a two catcher AL only because, you know, Garver could get hurt and also he could just play well in limited sample, um, you know, in, in a two or 300 plate appearance type season, um, or one of them gets, gets shipped out and he could go into the role, but like, he seems like a Garver clone, actually. I don't know if that's true in every regard. There are minute strengths and weaknesses. I know Garver has had some issues with Fastball Slider. I forget which one it is he couldn't hit, but he couldn't hit one of them.

But I do think that Jeffers could do what Garver does. And so the Minnesota Twins might say, hey, we've got a guy who can do what Garver does. Why don't we just, you know, give Garver to someone, um, for pitching, you know, that could be totally something that happens, but any case, he's a guy that I've put there, put my eye on. And then the other one, uh, that, uh, I mean, Kyle Lewis,is uh also stands out on this list for me uh he doesn't have the third like 35 strikeout rate where you're worried about him but at a 25 strikeout rate with this kind of a top 50 barrel rate and then 25 years old there is another level for him and that level

would be you know a 23 22 strikeout rate uh and really tapping into all that power so that was that was a name i wanted to highlight and then uh old friend of the program keston hero just wanted to point out great barrel rate 24 years old. I didn't bring him up. I want to believe. And I think the, in the several times the Keston here has been described on this pod, on the athletic baseball show, I think the consensus between all of us who've talked about him is he needs an off season to revamp his swing.

Period. Like you're not fixing that swing in a season. is he needs an offseason to revamp his swing, period. You're not fixing that swing in a season. It gets rebuilt over an entire winter and hopefully comes back and just makes more contact and still has the power. I think it all feels power. It always has been. It's still there, 51st in barrel rate,

so I get it, and age is the key there too. The other thing that Lewis does, by the way, and Jeffers does this too that is really important, he walks. It matters for real-life outcomes. It matters for overall value. Getting on base gives you a chance to score a run in fantasy. There's plenty of reason to still look at that column as well. If you're going to go after someone who barrels the ball and needs to grow a bit in the K- percentage find the guy that actually shows the ability to draw some walks to you because i think

at least in my mind even if the numbers don't bear it out it gives me that glimmer of hope that there's some pitch recognition in there and with that there's that possibility of cutting down a little bit on the k rate over time yeah i mean it's interesting to put those guys up against like brent rooker uh who clicks a lot of these boxes 26 years old 30 strikeout rate uh you know top 75 barrel rate uh it's five percent walk rate i just have a random comp that just came to mind because a 5% walk rate is also what Adelise Garcia has right now. Without the speed or the defense.

His last six weeks have been pretty brutal. But the speed and the defense have kept him out there. Yeah, he keeps playing. Is Adelise Garcia actually another Adam Duvall? The current version of Duvall strikes out about the same, walks at a similar rate, barrels the ball at a similar rate. Is that sort of the trajectory of Garcia?

Another question is, if Adam Duvall could run and play center field defense, would he be a good player? Yeah, that's a fair question to ask, too. I just think about Duvall as a guy that's been on and off several rosters and has had a pretty bumpy path to the the player that he's been really just throughout his career but even the last couple years when he's had some short-term value for us in miami and atlanta it's come with some oh yeah and he could lose his job at any moment sort of downside risk yeah i've mostly i've mostly uh been a proponent of uh letting him go trading him if you need to especially uh if you need pieces and you're a win now team it seems like he could uh he could get something for you and might not cost you that much long term it's weird this turned up

a couple catchers like louis terrens another guy that's i was just about to say william contraris and louise terrens both show up as having good play discipline being young having good barrels um yeah why did why are we showing up catchers and it and why aren't we showing up more fun names i mean kyle lewis is fun that was that was fun and then i i guess um jefferson and the catchers are somewhat fun but like is there somebody here that like chas mccormick or could be a little fun maybe that's part of why they were willing to move my straw noisy i think not walking all though yeah noisy noisy was in a better situation before the dodgers traded for him he was in a better path in oakland to possibly get playing time

because of the problems they had second base he gets traded to a depth chart and is an up and down guy all season like connor joe is a little too old to be interesting how about ramon urias in baltimore yes years in mexico. Also kind of boring, but interesting. He's one of these, yeah, nobody is excited to do it, but then gets great value from it. Right? 27 years old, could strike out a little bit less, given his minor league career.

So 23% strikeout rate. years old could strike out a little bit less given his minor league career career so 23 percent strikeout rate uh top top 100 barrel rate or top 75 barrel rate uh so and then you know applies his trade in baltimore uh walks a little bit probably won't steal any bases but my comp was freddie galvis i think i'm gonna look at galvis here. I'm talking about the Freddie Galvis that struck out. Let me see if he struck out too much to make this comp worthwhile. No, yeah, Freddie Galvis struck out 20% to 22% of the time and over a four-year stretch averaged something like 20 homers a year. Boom.

Although he did steal some bases. I'm not sure Urias will, but something like Freddie Galers a year. Boom. Although he did steal some bases. I'm not sure Urias will, but something like Freddie Galvis I could see. I have some auto new. I have like a dollar on an auction right now for Freddie Galvis and auto new just because middle infielders are hard to find and a guy who could do what he can do

could probably be worth that dollar. Flipping the leaderboard just for a moment, and we're not talking about under the radar, overlooked sorts of guys at this point, but I think when I see Josh Donaldson high on the barrel rate list, low in terms of K rate, high in terms of walk rate, even though he's old and he's hurt all the time, as that price continues to fall,

he's the old and boring type of player that I'll still keep taking chances on, even knowing that there's obviously a risk of more missed time in the future because of past missed time and soft tissue problems that he's been dealing with. But then there's also Matt Olson. And I thought when the first time I saw that his K rate had significantly improved, probably back in May, I said, let's see what happens in June and July and August, because I'm not sure I'm going to buy into this completely new version of Olsen. But we're sitting here in the second week of August. He's got a 16% K rate, a 12.1% walk rate,

and he's still bearing the ball a lot, still top 50 in barrel rate on this board. So how willing are you to say that Matt Olson has changed himself for the long term better with some of the changes that we've seen from him in 2021? There's some coaching aspect behind the scenes. He's choking up on the bat more. He's varying his distance from the plate more often and sort of changing that with regard to the pitcher's heat map to kind of take advantage of where his swing lines up with their heat maps. He's got

something called a little red machine that he got from Tommy LaStella that I think is some sort of slider throwing pitching machine. I don't know. He also told me that he's trying to chop down on the ball a little bit, which doesn't sound great, but is maybe a good idea. He kind of has the Cody Bellinger natural loft to his swing. And by focusing on chopping down to the ball,

he's being quicker to the ball and sort of mitigating that natural loft a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Well, honestly, that's kind of like a golf tip that is pretty common. You have to kind of chop down the ball to actually get the ball in the air more consistently, which is so counterintuitive. A golf club, obviously angled and different than a baseball bat. But if you have a loopy swing, I think it's a fair way of describe Bellinger and probably Matt Olson's old swing.

If you in your mind are chopping down, your mechanics are not just chopping straight down. You're not going to just top the ball and hit worm burners, but you're going to be closer to level. You're not trying to get completely level, but you're just trying to be less loopy than you were before. That's the corrective action you have to take to get there. I like that

that's the adjustment he made, given the problems we'd seen for him in the past. I think it's likely this is a career year, but the nice thing about having projections in front of you is that you can look at them and say, you know, what happens if he just, like, if I buy at this level, what happens if I just get the projections?

It's still pretty damn good. I mean, the projections right now would settle in around 260 with, honestly, like a 38 to 40 homer season. Right. Every projection system right now for the rest of the season on Matt Olson has a lower K rate

than what he gave us in 2017, 2018, or 2019. For his career. Yeah, the only one, Zips is the only one that's over his career number. Yeah. So that's a pretty significant improvement when you see that across the board with projections. Anything else in this corner that has caught your eye?

And you were talking sort of about the old and boring. I mean, I think JD Davis might have another gear to him because the plate discipline is good. He missed so much time. The strikeout rate is a little bit out of line for him. He's 28. I don't know. Maybe it's one of those things where he gets traded. He was in trade talks, or at least he was in trade rumors for the Mets. They're always looking for better defensive fits, and they're always moving pieces around. Or maybe he's just a Met at third base for all of next year and actually plays a full season so jd davis is definitely a name that keeps popping when you do these kinds of of searches and then we talk about old friend sam hilliard um has decent walk rate uh the strikeout

rate at 35 is not super manageable but at, if he could get it down to, you know, 31%, he might be in that sort of Tyler O'Neill territory. Yeah. And he's a little bit like Tyler O'Neill, right? Where he's a guy who's like prodigious tools,

fast hits the ball really hard, has problem making contact and hasn't had a regular job yet. Right. I would say you could put him maybe into the actual age conversation where, from a baseball perspective, maybe he's six months or a year actually younger than the true age just because of

the way they've jerked around the playing time with him. I thought he'd play more by now. Nothing's guaranteed in Colorado. We don't have to go down that road again, but I'm not writing him off completely for deeper leagues. It though I think it'll get more like there's more. It's more likely now, given the last year that he gets a full full season to a burn because the scouting director who the scouting director who who who signed him, I mean, who drafted him, is now the GM.

Good point. And the whole, the group that they left behind, like the GM and everybody that wanted to win now, obviously we're trying to make win now decisions and we're bringing in all these old guys that kept Sam Hilliard out of jobs. They're all gone, or at least that idea is gone. I was just talking to Brett Phillips today, and he's 27. And I'm not saying he's performing amazingly,

but with league average offense and I think some of the best defense in the game, some of the best base running in the game, he's going to end up somewhere around a league average player. And in, in less time, I mean, in like something like 400 plate appearances, he's might get two wins.

And one of the things he just said was like, you know, one of the things they did here was believe in me and give me a shot to be in the lineup in a regular way, in a regular bay in a regular way and he's got the best barrel rate of his career right now um and he's improved uh you know in a lot of aspects of the game so uh i'm not saying pick up red phillips i'm saying sam hilliard has that chance that at some point someone says hey we're going to give you this shot

yeah i think the interesting name that popped into my head or once interesting name, Sam Fold. I mean, the Rays had got a lot of mileage out of Sam Fold back in the day. I wonder if that's kind of how they saw it. I bet you that's the Brett Phillips mold. Yeah, I did ask somebody over there.

I was like, you know, I was a little surprised. Like, Brett Phillips? And he's like, you know, it's the whole package, you know. And in terms of like, you know, a fan interaction, which is why I was talking to him, but teammate interaction. And then just like kind of peak fourth outfielder skills, right? Like, what do you want from your fourth outfielder other than like excellent, excellent defense bats from the left side and can take a walk and hit a homer?

Right. Yeah. Cannon arm. Yeah. I mean, that's that's it's not someone that you pick up expecting to turn into your starting center fielder. It's someone you pick up expecting to be a really, really great fourth outf great fourth out and you have that player on your roster as long as you need them if your team gets better because you called up a few young guys eventually then you trade them away because someone else will find plenty of value in that skill set too so yeah a better real life player than a fantasy player

and obviously the clubhouse presence matters too if you've ever watched a raise game you can it's not always easy to see who the good clubhouse guys are when we're watching on TV. You can see that Brett Phillips is a good clubhouse guy from miles away. One thing I talk about, too, is that I think one of the major skills of being a good clubhouse guy is the ability to cross cultural and language gaps. ability to cross cultural and language gaps and do you remember that one um that one clip of them doing a dance-off i do it wasn't it brett phillips against randy rosarena yeah after one of the world series games after that after they won the alcs i think is when they had the i think they had more than one dance-off but yes i do remember. That's primo clubhouse chemistry right there. I mean, those are guys across a language barrier.

Those are guys that hung out in different crews after the game. You know what I mean? To do something like that really builds camaraderie across the clubhouse. And if anybody cares about that sort of thing, I've got a piece going up next week and it's, uh, going to be an a one about, uh, it's about fan interaction, but the, the Phillips quotes, um, I might be the deepest in there. Like I didn't quite expect that.

I thought I was going to go to Phillips and get just a couple of funny stories. Cause that's, that's, I've interacted with him since the Arizona Fall League and we always end up laughing um while we're talking but uh I he he really brought it this time uh with some really interesting things and then a little factoid you said uh people like that are always in demand uh he had a really interesting I don't want to give it all away, but he, he said that there was a, another trade offer on the table. He did. The rays were not the only team that wanted them literally when he went.

And I think to some people, I might be surprising for a guy that was hitting like one 50 at the time with the, with the with the, the Royals at the time. And, and the Royals like seem to be like a team that would need anybody that was going to be that could maybe be good you know yeah that's strange decision

there but you know maybe they're looking at something well yeah right exactly like he's like he's probably like a really good fourth outfielder we don't really need a really good fourth outfielder right now we need a we need a starting outfielder we need to find a guy that could be a starter if the right development happens like we think he's a good role guy but a role guy doesn't help you when you're rebuilding that explains some of the edward olivares thing i know people are really mad about this have you noticed this people are really mad about it and edward to background is edward ol. Uh, people like him because what his projections are. Okay. He's got power and speed 25.

The Royal seemed to need an outfielder. If you just plugged him in, you could probably get, uh, if you plugged him in for a full season, you could probably get something like two 50, 18 and 10 or something. And that's the kind of,

you know, that's a, that's a fantasy profile that, uh, that's a, that's a fantasy profile that, uh, that could be very useful in a lot of leagues. Yeah. He's, he's destroyed Omaha in 52 games.

AAA this year, he's got 13 homers, 12 steals. He's got a sub 20% K rate. He's got a one 55 WRC plus the three 22, three 95, five 72 slash line. So it's kind of the Royals refuse to give him a job.

It's, it's weird. And then you look at the Royals refuse to give him a job. It's, it's weird. And then you look at the big league results and there's a big difference, but it takes time, right? If he has nothing left to prove in the upper levels of the minor leagues, like you are the Royals, you are in a position to look at the future.

He looks like he should be at least some part of your future. So I think that's why people are frustrated, but it's a results based game. A lot of times 283 OBP so far this year. Even if you're giving power, that's not really enough to stick in the lineup. So it's weird that he's in this spot in Kansas City. I would expect this more if he were on a roster where there was a team that still had a chance to make the playoffs. And they couldn't afford to give him a lot of playing time.

So they wanted him to play a lot more at AAA because this is his first season at the AAA level it's not like he destroyed AAA two years ago pre-pandemic and is doing it again now right so I understand the frustration but Nikki Lopez is getting playing time yeah instead of him I think Olivares is more interesting than Nicky Lopez, but that's just me. Thanks a lot for that question, Travis. That definitely did a lot of heavy lifting for today's rundown. Yes. Thank you for helping us out with the show. My children are home from school for the last three days, and Derek is living in a closet.

I am with camping furniture and a very upset dog. If you saw us on YouTube at the beginning of the show, you could see in the reflection Hazel was not having the back-to-back shows on Wednesday. She's looking outside. She goes, hey, it's 75 and sunny outside. We're not playing and you're just sitting there staring at your computer like an idiot. The dog's got to love the

move to California though. She overall does, yeah. It's just a matter of us being freed up to spend more time with her outside. We'll get there as soon as things get settled in. I wanted to talk to you about some players that could be good late-season additions with bright futures. We really drove this point home on the Athletic Fantasy Baseball podcast. That episode will go up today as well. But this is a time of year,

and it does not matter what type of league you play in. You need to continue hustling on the wire. It's a redraft league. There are still opportunities to get extra standings points, to close the gap, to protect the lead. If you're in a keeper league or a dynasty league, I think this is one of the absolute best times of the year to start improving your roster

just with simple waiver wire pickups. And one guy that Ian brought up who I have not seen this season, but I do remember seeing him as a reliever late last year, Carlos Hernandez. I think you wrote about him last week while I was traveling. By the eye test, Ian goes by eye test before numbers. He's like, this guy looks amazing. I looked at the stuff plus numbers. Those look amazing too. And it got me wondering, what if he's just better than Jackson Coar and Daniel Lynch?

Doesn't mean those guys aren't good also, but I just wonder if Hernandez was kind of in this perfect situation to be completely overshadowed by the better pedigree guys in the organization when we're looking at stuff plus numbers that show multiple pitches that are above average with command too yeah there's a there's a lot going on with him and um i would just one note of caution because i am uh totally in the tank for carlos hernandez just the the command isn't great um and so that's i think very hard to see when you're watching because you see him hit 99 in the seventh inning you're like oh that's easier to see uh but if you look at the location plus for example on a slider it's 90 uh the location plus on his four-seam fastball is 90.

His overall location plus is 96, is below average. And that does undo some of the good that is done by his stuff. But I love the park. I love the stuff. Curveball, slider, changeup, and sinker all above average. Even the four-seam is basically right at average. And I am a big fan. One of the reasons that the command may even improve, I think, going forward

is that he was kind of rushed. If you look at his history, he didn't have a lot of innings. He's been in the system since 2017 or before. When did they sign him? His first rookie ball season was 2017. Yeah, I forget. I don't see where they signed him. But he didn't have a lot of innings down there.

See where they signed him. But he didn't have a lot of innings down there. But he did run into a bit of, as I understand it, a bit of a kind of a 40-man roster crunch where he was getting somehow to the end of his time being protected. And so they had to decide what to do with him. And that's kind of the reason why he's in the big leagues, where maybe his command could take a benefit from more time in the big leagues where you know maybe his command could take a benefit from uh more time in the minor leagues but they weren't a lot they basically ran out of time to do that

um i don't know if there's maybe some injury uh in there because there's not a lot of innings uh but uh i'm i'm all over him i've got him wherever I can get him. I think the command for me, it's not problematic in the below average way. It's not in the 80s, right? When we see guys in the 80s, we look and go, oh, that's probably a reliever for sure. I think with Hernandez, it's a little bit like we were talking about

with some of the barrel rate guys with some decent underlying plate skills. It's just good enough and he's just young enough where you can say maybe there is that path there. And the lack of innings, I mean, that's true for so many pitchers coming off the season we just had. But yeah, the shape of his minor league career is pretty unusual.

So with all of those weapons, I think there's actually a better chance than not that he's going to be a quality starter in Kansas City. I think it's also, yeah, I think it's really interesting that you bring up the number of weapons. better chance than not that he's going to be a quality starter in Kansas City. I think it's also, yeah, I think it's really interesting that you bring up the number of weapons. So Carlos Hernandez has a 91 overall command plus. Luis Patino has a 91 overall command plus. So that's, you might say, oh, here are two high stuff, low command, right there at the cusp 90 is often what i call the reliever shelf it does matter if you have more pitches you know it does matter because

i think maybe on any given day you might have better command of one you know and then it's you have more chances of having a pitch you can command better than the others the distribution of the command right you know what i'm saying like um there's a difference between a guy who can pitch who can command two pitches 91 at a 91 level right or a guy who passed five pitches some of which are 100 102 104 and then some of which are like 80 and 70, right? It's just a totally different thing. So with Patino, the pressure is to command the only pitches you're throwing. Whereas with Hernandez, it's like, well, what can I command today

and what can I get away with in these counts and those counts? So I'm not saying that Carlos Hernandez is better than Luis Patino, but I would say I'm maybe a little bit more nervous about Luis Patino's 91 command plus than I am about Carlos Hernandez's 91 command plus. Yeah, I think there's a lot to dig into here, and I think the related question I had for you is, when you start to see any pitcher go through some changes in season, when are you comfortable buying a turnaround with Stuff Plus or even Location

Plus? I saw Tristan McKenzie's chart recently in part because the results were good. I think of his last six appearances, five have been average or better in terms of his stuff plus number, which seems pretty significant, right? Because he was pretty consistently below average in all of his starts up until about the middle of June. So do you look at McKenzie as a guy who maybe is starting to show us some of the things that I was hoping to see at least back at the beginning of the season? back at the beginning of the season yeah he has a definite sort of you know before demotion and after motion uh curve and it's pretty trackable in velocity where he was struggling uh to sit 92 or so uh before and has kept that velo so um i noticed the velo right away when he came back, and two starts in, I was ready to change his ranking and be more interested in Tristan McKenzie.

But it is funny to remember back to his rookie year where he kind of had that good velo in the first two starts and then just basically lost it over time. And that was part of the story. But then in this one, in this, this time, Tristan McKenzie came up and he was quoted as saying, I have to let it all air out. I have to throw as hard as I can in the zone. And that's, that's how I'm, that's how I'm going to be my best. And that lines, lines up with his velo. So you're kind of like, well, we've got this quote, we've got the velo um i think that can accelerate how quickly you would believe in someone as you kind of have

a story to believe and and kind of it fits some of the peripheral numbers but if we did actually do some validation for for stuff plus and i've been looking at it um and the the big number in season when um stuff plus starts beating uh in season projections is 400 pitches so it's a bit of a concrete answer for you now uh that would suggest that 400 pitches in you know as much as you're going to know about the whole season which isn't true you you gain more information over time. But also, I think it does suggest that if you see a big change, three or four starts is a good enough number. You see a big change in Stuff Plus. And I think for me, I think you had on the rundown another name

where the change has been pretty drastic um and it's funny because i i was being i was being taken to task uh i think in my last q a session and uh everyone was throwing this name around as an example that stuff plus doesn't work um but uh jameson tyon cares not uh he uh he actually had seen his stuff plus diminish over time uh but i think there's a fairly clear uh demarcation between his last six starts and the and the starts before um his very last start wasn't great by stuff plus but if you just look as a group the last six starts were probably his best six starts uh in the course of the season uh by stuff plus and that range is also three best of the season too yeah so um i do one start there is uh you

know and we're working on on getting this out to the public, but there, if you look at these graphs or you ask me for them on Twitter, you'll see there's a variation from start to start. It's not the smoothest of lines. I think that makes sense. You know, there's a saying different day, different arm. You know, you get out there and maybe the conditions are different. It's hot, it's cold and you know, obviously hot has something to do with Luis Castillo's ups and downs,

how loose you can get that day, that sort of thing. Stuff Plus is not something that becomes a straight line really quickly, but the hope is that it tells you a lot. From our early validation work, 400 pitches is a big number. Yeah, the tie-on chart kind of reminds me of the scene in Billy Madison when Veronica Vaughn asks him to write a cursive Z, and he's just scribbling all over the place. That's kind of what the tie-on stuff plus number chart looks like

on a start-by-start basis. But it is definitely nice to see that cluster of average or better starts together more recently. I don't know if we're ever going to see a ton of Ks from Tyon, especially in the AL, right? Look at that game log. I know he had a couple starts that popped recently, but if he ends up being a top 30 to 40 starting pitcher

on a more consistent basis i think i could buy that maybe it'll be a tick better than that because the team context the ratios stay good but i i don't i don't want to look at this last like two months from him and say that's who he is now too it's like he's both he's the guy we saw in the first two months and he's the guy we've seen over the last two months but probably the better version of like the average of those two guys is the most you could hope for the overall line um yeah the over like the overall line is what you're saying like the overall line looks pretty good yeah nice turnaround that 3-8 era we thought he's had a history of having low whips so one two whip i think is is doable um even just a projection

sense taking away the stuff in command numbers just looking at the at what he's done ever since he's had the slider he's had double digit swinging strike rates and strikeout rates of eight over eight per nine uh he's always demonstrated great command and the ability to keep the ball in the park now obviously it's the first year he's in yankee stadium so his home run rate has gone up but i think a 135 home run per nine for a yankee starter is actually pretty good uh it's a really really tough part so i i think uh i think tyon has done just about what i expected um and uh is is a good but not great starter i don't know why it's working out but We're talking mostly L player today. So my

apology to those of you who listen or an NL only leagues, but the other player that I thought was kind of interesting is Logan Gilbert, because when he came up, the stuff plus numbers, I think were pretty good on at least two of his pitches that still are good now to this point in his rookie season. But he really turned things around after a bumpy first few outings. It's not to say that it's anything abnormal that was happening to him those first few times out. But as you've had a chance to look at the bigger picture with Logan Gilbert, and you see his chart tracking up in a very good way more recently, do you think the ceiling is that of maybe a legitimate frontline sort of starter?

Because that's the vibe I'm starting to get looking at some of the underlying numbers on Gilbert. Yeah, one of the nice things is that this upward trajectory in Stuff Plus just tracks right with his fastball. His fastball has just been improving. And the changeup is up and down and erratic. But I think that might be the last key to unlocking the curve. He's mostly put away because he's had one start this year. It's been above average by Stuff Plus. It's kind of ironic because I think in a lot of scouting reports,

the curve was supposed to be his best foot forward. But he's a fastball slider guy with a seam shifted wake changeup. And there's some evidence that he found a new grip or found some, something with that changeup halfway through his major league season so far. And so I think that is what I'd watch if I wanted to really believe in him as a frontline starter. But I think he's shown us enough in terms of being able to locate the four seam and slider. He's both of those are above average by stuff and location.

So that's a really good one to pitch in today's game. It's it's one to combo. There's a lot less pressure on on you if you can do those two things well i'm trying to think of uh somebody that just slimmed it to that tie on didn't he uh no also oh man who was it just uh slimmed and just tried to be more forcing blake snell blake snell just not only turfed the changeup, which never looked good by Stuff Plus, but in his last few starts, he has turfed the curveball

and become more of a fastball slider guy. And I think just with the – there's less pressure on you to turn the lineup over a bunch of times. And I think that, you know, just going with your two best pitches and mixing in the third pitch to get five innings deep is a good enough approach for a lot of people. And I would wonder too,

if you have three or four pitches that you'd like to use and maybe your mechanics are out of whack and getting down to two pitches might help you get those mechanics back. For a while, you give them up. Eventually, you get the mechanics cleaned up, and you go back to throwing that third and fourth pitch again once everything is back in sync or where you want it to be. Yeah, so for Snell now, he's had three starts in a row with his best – well, three starts in a row of above-average well, three starts in a row of above average stuff,

which he hadn't done since May. And so I would say there's a bit of a turnaround there. Also, his he basically the three best consecutive starts of location. So I think I think that speaks to what you're talking about. I will say that I don't know that i'm going to put blake snell like in my top 20 next year i don't know what's your sort of off the cuff uh you know feeling about blake snell i think he's taken enough of a ding um to me that i i know the strikeouts are still there but the command is inconsistent the stuff numbers aren't amazing. I don't know. Is he a top 20 pitcher for you going into next season? No. I expect Lake Snell's ADP

when we get to next March, barring some unforeseen amazing turnaround if he finishes the season on a crazy high note and stops walking guys. I expect him to be probably in the 150 range in terms of his NFBC ADP. I think that usually puts you about 35th to 40th among starting pitchers,

if I'm remembering correctly and counting correctly. I might actually be interested at that price point, though, because the strikeouts have been there all the way through. I think the thing that I'm also wondering about with Snell is, I've talked about this draft all the time. I have this team, my co-manager Todd Zola. We start drafting the last week of the regular season for the following year. The earlier you draft, if you're doing something like that, or you're doing draft champions, the earlier you go, the better the discount's probably going to be. It applies to guys who've

had disappointing 2021s like Blake Snell. Because people like us have less time to talk them up as sleepers. Well, I think everybody, yeah, everyone has no time to talk them up as sleepers. Well, I think everybody, yeah, everyone has no time to find the silver linings and to find the reasons to buy in. They don't have the stories about drive. It's just Blake's now sucks.

Right. The recency bias is stronger coming right off the season like that. But I also think for someone like Logan Gilbert, the same holds true where all the reasons he's getting, all the good things he's doing that are going to lead him into i don't even think they're sleeper columns but the the my guys sorts of columns the i think the the bold predictions columns right you're going to get bold predictions someone someone somewhere i guarantee this yes the the bold prediction is logan gilbert will finish

top three in the al cy young award voting in 2022. That will be a bold prediction. Somebody, maybe even someone we know actually writes and publishes. And this is not me mocking them. This is just me saying before that happens, you're going to get a better price on Logan Gilbert than you will when that sort of thought

is bouncing around. I think I would take Blake Snell over Logan Gilbert next year. Really? Especially if I got a round of price or whatever. If the prices were even think I would take Blake Snell over Logan Gilbert next year. Really? Especially if I got a round of price or whatever. If the prices were even, I would take Gilbert. But I think Gilbert is going to have an ADP in the 75

to 100 range. I think it's going to be about a 50 pick difference early and it's going to be like a 75 pick difference. Give me those picks, I'll take Snell, I think. I think it's going to be a big gap. I think Gilbert does all the things that people in the fantasy baseball community want to see in a young pitcher, and they're going to push him very aggressively. Yeah. Yeah, it could be true.

The one thing that we don't know yet that makes what you're doing pretty tough, actually, is will there be a DH in the National national league that would also be a pretty big factor right hurt snell i would say 75 25 there will be yeah i'd even yeah maybe higher i'd probably even go a little higher but i think we're splitting hairs at this point i'm expecting it to happen yeah and yes i'm expecting baseball in 2022 i'm expecting the cba to be an ugly negotiation but one that does get rectified because yes 2020 still happening teams in the playoffs baby something yeah it's going to be some concessions that we can't even fully grasp right now but it's going to happen everyone i think is too much dude i watch basketball and

it seems like half the teams make the playoffs. The 14 is almost half. And then the basketball playoffs take forever, and the first-round matchups a lot of times are not compelling. I think it'd be better in a sport like basketball and hockey, and maybe baseball is already sort of closer to this. But instead of 16 teams getting into the postseason, if 10 or 12 got in, and those last two to four teams that got in had to play a quick series, I actually think baseball's wildcard approach has been something that at first a lot of us, at least I was on the side, I was like, oh, this isn't good.

This is not the tradition. It's like screw tradition. In baseball, a lot of times the tradition needs to be questioned. In baseball, a lot of times the tradition needs to be questioned. I suppose it could further cement, it could give a better advantage to division winners, right? Yes, you should let teams that do better in the regular season rest a little bit and get healthy and get right. That's worth something.

And not have to face someone in the first round. Right. I think that's a good way to do it. But obviously revenue and getting as many teams as possible. Because you still revenue and getting some pressure on teams to want to be good because you don't want everyone to be like hey we all have a first round that matchup you know no i just need to be better than 16 teams yeah we're getting a couple home playoff games so yay we did it yeah we did it yeah we did it we just have to win 84 games we don't want that no no we really don't we are going to go because as i mentioned up top this camping chair it's a good camping chair it's not a great broadcasting chair but uh if you'd

like to support the show and more broadly the site you can do that by going to theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. $3.99 a month gets you in the door to start. Thank you to the many of you who have done that already. And if you'd like to find us on Twitter, he's at Eno Saris. I am at Derek Van Ryper. As always, you can drop us an email, ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com. If you're enjoying this podcast, take a moment to leave us a nice rating and review. If you're watching us on YouTube,

be sure to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel to get all the new episodes as they become available. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.