Rates & Barrels - Battling the injury bug, early-season adjustments, and the traits of the 2021 baseball

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss the early increase in injuries around the league, churning the bottom of rosters in the opening weeks of the season, balancing tough matchups against rapidly improving skills, and more. Rundown 2:40 Injuries Are Up; How Are We Coping? 5:36 Brandon Marsh vs. Jo Adell in Short Term 10:13 Churning the Bottom of the Roster 17:46 Tough Matchups vs. Improving Skills 23:46 Early K-BB% Leaders 29:49 Some Insight on the 2021 Baseball 32:46 Early Surprises on the Max Exit Velo Leaderboard 44:00 The Thin Margin Between Waiver Players & Bench Players 48:23 Opposite-Field Barrels? 52:48 Buying Very Early Swinging-Strike Rates? Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Monday, April 12th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. Eno is back and we've got a lot to talk about. We've got an interesting report from Derek Rhodes looking at early season injuries. They are up. So how are we dealing with that across all of our leagues aside from just being generally frustrated by players not being able to play in the early parts of the season? We'll talk about a few players we might actually be worried about as we move into the fourth series of the season for most teams. And, of course, the temptation to make moves is real, but we want to be aware of what's going on and patient, thinking about the factors that led us to these players in the first place, kind of weighing those appropriately against the new information.

So we'll talk about how to do that. Got a lot of great mailbag questions to get to on this episode as well. Got a lot of great mailbag questions to get to on this episode as well. Welcome back, Eno. Some good news. Britt did not replace you as the human soundboard for the show. She attempted to do the breaking news thing, and I give her a 10 out of 10 for trying, but it was not the most successful attempt to replicate one of your skills. The word skills there is doing a lot of work a lot of work

but it is good to be back i've been literally to the grand canyon and back uh it was a poorly timed vacation but uh the kids man uh my mom has been vaccinated she hasn't seen the kids in a year and uh we just jumped in the car and tried to take as few risks as we could and it was all outdoors we saw painted desert we saw petrified forest joshua tree and got all the ranger badges along the way lake havasu for a little 95 degree desert watering hole kind of situation there at the end. And I guess I'm back. I'm back.

I'm back. I'm back. He's rested, folks. He is rested and ready to go. Glad to have you back and glad you got a little time to relax over the last week. I hate to quibble, but when you put your kids in the same hotel room as you,

rested. It's a small space. If you go to a smaller space than where you live with children, apparently it's not the most relaxing thing. I mentioned it in the intro. Derek Rhodes, who works on injury data and visualizations over at Baseball Perspectives, does a lot of good stuff on Twitter at DRHOA3, if you want to give him a follow. I had a tweet that just came out, I believe it was over the weekend, and he was more players in the IL compared to the same day in 2019 and almost 20 more on the IL compared to the same day in 2018.

So injuries up early on, not necessarily a complete surprise given that we were coming out of the shortened season and there were some concerns about pitchers especially and how they might be handled. So how is this impacting you so far? How are you working around this? Because a lot of leagues either have limited IL spots or no IL spots. So I feel like more injuries means more quick hooks, more fast decisions that you have to make on your roster without having a lot of information. Yeah, I mean, it just adds to the regrets.

No, but I think we had a conversation, you and I, about how much we might invest in Chris Sale, Noah Syndergaard, Luis Severino, and that sort of deal. And I'm staring at at least one of those guys in a league where I don't have an IL and I need to make moves. And I'm like, I already want to drop you. Like it's one weekend and I'm already need that spot because everyone's hurt. It's lovely. Yeah. I think I'm having that feeling with prospects too. I mean, aside from the pitchers expected to miss a good chunk of the season, which absolutely describes Severino sale, Cinder guard, and like knowing those guys are going to be out until at least June and

possibly longer. In some cases, I'm a little more comfortable cutting one of those guys. If I have to, whereas wander or even Kellnick, I think Kellnick's coming up pretty soon. We're getting to that point. The number of days have elapsed

to where teams have preserved that extra year of service time and they can start bringing up the players they want to bring up. I think by this time next week, we're going to have a much better feel for whether or not we should keep waiting on some of those players.

I think there's other tricky guys in the pool too, though. The guys that are at the alternate site right now who played in the big leagues last year, kind of wondering how long are teams really going to wait? How long are the D-backs going to wait before they bring back Dalton Varshow? Are they going to wait until he plays at AAA for a few weeks, in which case we're talking about mid to late May before we see him?

Or are they going to say, we've got a lot of injuries on the big league roster right now. We want to give him this valuable experience as soon as possible. So let's call him up right now. So I think you do have a few different player groups that you're kind of stuck to guess on right now. I mean, we are staring a hole into Joe Adele and Dalton Varshow right now,

I feel like, because they should be up. Their teams need help where those guys play. You know, Dexter Fowler tore his ACL, and they're talking about Lagaris and Jose Rojas, which Jose Rojas, by the way, did come up from Kyle Glazer as a possible tie France. did come up from Kyle Glazer as a possible tie France.

So I'm not saying run to your waiver wire to pick him up, because I do think that Dell comes up eventually. I mean, it's just too obvious of a like, hey, this is an asset we have and here's the need. What are we waiting for? Is there like a 10-day waiting period? Yeah, I think it's the 11. And like, what are we waiting for? There is like a, is there like a 10 day waiting period? Yeah, I think it's the 11th day of the season is the first day where you can't accrue a full year of service time.

Oh, but there's also a 10 day thing where like if you're sent down to the minor leagues, unless, but the way they always get around it is you're just replacing somebody who's injured. Unless you're replacing somebody that's injured, but you could just make that move. Okay, Joe Adele, we sent you down only seven days ago, but Dexter replacing somebody who's injured. Unless you're replacing somebody that's injured. But you could just make that move. Okay, Joe Adele, we sent you down only seven days ago, but Dexter Fowler's hurt, so

boom, up you are. And Adele played last year, and Varsha played last year, so are they going to try and get to two, three, four weeks to claw back some of that time from last year? And are the Angels really going to do that? I mean, come on, Angels. You want to win every game

you're in your your game your every game counts for the angels this year it does and i think they're going to make a move but i think what's interesting is that with the dell having pronounced contact issues in the shortened season at the big league level the temptation to see if he's ironed that out at triple a is real you could bring him up today, and if he hasn't, send him down in a few weeks when there are games for him to play in, and then you did right by the player, and you actually tried your best. That's an option. Brandon Marsh, though, too, is the other guy.

Is Brandon Marsh actually the guy that gets the first opportunity to fill in for Fowler? Don't say it. I'll be so angry. Because I'm nursing that Joe. I'm nursing at least three Joe Adele shares right now. Brandon Marsh comes up. He's so angry. But there is an idea that mindset counts and you want the player to be at their most confident.

And I'm not even saying that's not real. It's probably real. And so I think that there is sometimes the teams want to call somebody up at the right time so that they succeed and don't fail. And that's like what that right time is is really difficult to nail down. And has that right time passed for Adele? Like maybe he just needs to come up and struggle a little bit and see Major League pitching rather than see AAA pitching because, you know, maybe that's how he's needs to come up and struggle a little bit and see Major League pitching rather than see AAA pitching because

maybe that's where his that's how he's going to iron his troubles out. Is he going to hit one homer and be like, oh yeah, I belong now. It's fixed. Solved it. It's all fixed. He's going to remember the strikeouts from before. Anyway,

I don't have any advice on this necessarily because I'm struggling along with the rest of you. I would just say that once again, I'm here apologizing for Alec Mills. But as much as I still think Alec Mills and Cal Quantrill are going to be viable later, I think they will be, I think that they're good pitchers. I think there are six starters on teams that will need them.

Uh, you can't, you can't hold that any longer. You, you gotta get, one of the things I recommend is the Ras ball, a weekly streamer. Uh,

it just, it does weekly projections and it's really good to like, just look at pictures and and be like okay who are the pitchers i want to roster this week and so i use it i don't always like use it like their number one is exactly my number one but it does allow me to be like okay this pitcher is not the top 100 this week i think i can drop him especially because jake arietta who's got two starts you know so i've been i've been using the streamer, their weekly projections, at least to just sort of gather the players that I want.

And I've been a little bit more aggressive with changing out my pitching staff. So the bottom three points of my pitching staff have some velocity to them. Just moving guys along. Jake Arrieta, thank you for your service. I'm moving on. I don't want to throw you in Milwaukee. No, and I think the next start even beyond that isn't a good one either. I've been looking a week ahead too,

because if I have a guy who's kind of fringy to stay on the roster, the last thing I want to do is drop him one week, I have to pick him up again the next week. And I have to pay for him back again. Especially if everyone's going to see that matchup. If I can afford to stash him, I would just hold him. Sometimes you can't. You can't hold everybody. That's kind of what the crux of this conversation is. You're going to have some tough choices to make. And another thing you can do when you do that week out analysis is, let's say the group of pitchers or the group of players that you're FAA being

isn't amazing and you don't want to overspend and you don group of players that you're FAA-being isn't amazing. And you don't want to overspend. You don't see anybody that you're like, oh, I'm going to 110% or I'm going to 20% out of these players. You don't see anybody like that. So what you do is you put in conservative bids for the guys you do like, and then you put some $1 bids on at the end just to make sure you do something useful with your time and your roster spot. And those $1 bids can be looking out in the future. So I was trying to stream some guys last week, and I think I missed out on them, and I ended up with Danny Duffy, who's a great streamer for this week.

So I would say that anytime you've decided that you can drop a player, it's a real asset. It's a real, sort of just cleans you up. You're like, that player is basically gone. He's no longer on my team i lost a luke weaver share uh that way this week because i was like he's my dropper and then i had to put it in while the game was on and i was like yeah he's still my dropper and then he like no hit for like seven innings or whatever but it still allowed me to like free it up and get a share of danny duffy for a week and,

and just move on. And maybe I can get Weaver back. It's all right. I'm just, I've budgeted mental time and actual money budget to just cycling through starters right now. And for what it's worth, I'm not opposed to leagues that have pretty tight benches.

I'm in one league this year. It's a 15 team mixed league. We only have five bench spots. We do have IL. So if guys actually get hurt, you're not forced to make the choice of letting them go. But I do think it leaves you in a position where you're not always churning when you have a short bench. And if you are churning, you have to have a lot of confidence to get away with it. But I think there's some interesting players that are popping up on my radar. You mentioned kind of looking ahead, those $1 bids, kind of bringing new players in and kind of seeing what happens. Think about what happens when a new closer emerges during the week.

And that was on my mind last night on Sunday night when we were making pickups. Kendall Graveman was a bottom of the list sort of pickup for me that I ended up with in a few places. And Rafael Montero converted a save opportunity on Sunday, sort of helping to right the ship a little bit, but he's been bumpy early on. I think if he had one more meltdown sort of outing in the next couple of days, then the door is still wide open for Graveman or Keenan Middleton or someone else to step in. So I do think at the bottom of those lists, even if it's someone that you're not necessarily going to put into your active lineup for this week, if you have that extra spot to play

with, choosing a dart that could actually hit for you at the end of the week is a really good use of a dollar or two at the bottom of your bid list yeah and i actually left i didn't know what the cory knable discourse would be when fab actually ran because there was like he's the closer oh he's not you know it's like i can't keep up so i actually left uh a couple like two dollar bids on cory knable in case and he ended up getting you know really bid up um so that didn't end up being uh useful but i did i i do the last two bids on any of my like if you you have to make like a chain of bids where you're like this is my number one guy and this is what happens afterwards my last two bids are almost always players that would be, I think could be useful somehow in the future.

And, and, you know, $1 relievers and $1 starters are awesome. But I think that, you know, you could do the same thing by trying to jump into the Minnesota pen. Maybe Rogers isn't there,

but I saw some Robles pickups that seemed to make sense to me. I think that Yumi Garcia is the closer there in Miami now. Bass seems to really have pooped the bed, but Dylan Floro has closer-like stuff. I mean, people, I think maybe think of the failed starter. And I'm still here. I'm still here talking about Josh Stomont. And Stomont's another one of those, like, roster spot situations where I just keep staring at him and be like, how much longer can I hold you? But Greg Holland just keeps pooping the bed.

Jesse Hahn pooped the bed last time. So there's a lot of poop in these beds. It's messy for the closers to say the least. But I think the Hansel Robles thing is pretty interesting because Taylor Rodgers is on a bunch of rosters already. And he's good. He's a good pitcher. And we could easily see someone else share save opportunities with him. And I think that's the kind of bullpen where you do want to take a chance because the team's good enough. If you're going to get a partial closer, kind of bullpen where you do want to take a chance because the team's good enough.

If you're going to get a partial closer, pick a partial closer on a good team, a team that can win its division or at least a playoff caliber team because they're going to generate more of those opportunities. Corey Knabel, even if you set the over-under around eight saves for him for the rest of the season, with his strikeout rate and his ratios and the handful of wins he'll probably get working the seventh and eighth of the Dodgers, that actually plays. That's probably just good enough to be on the roster in a good number of mixed leagues. Yeah, it's just hard sometimes when you have that player to know when to start him. And so then he ends up on your bench or sometimes using him when you just don't have a good streamer or whatever. Or sometimes using him when you just don't have a good streamer or whatever.

I just know that because I have Stomont and Jordan Hicks on one bench in NFBC. Where it's like a seven-man bench. And I just know I have to move on. But I'm like, I still think they're going to be closers. So I'm telling you one thing. I don't always do it. i don't i don't blame you if you uh if you have you hold on to your precious i'm holding on to a precious wanda franco holding on to precious jordan hicks uh trying to hold on but uh i have let go uh you

know my starting pitchers that uh i thought would be useful because they're just gonna keep going in and out and i guess so you're telling me i should i should you think i should drop hicks and stoneman or one of them at least probably both but at least one i think the royals i mean they showed us a little bit of this last year they might not commit to any one closer and that that's a mess because that's not a good team and you might not be splitting it two ways even 80 20 90 10 split where you know who the two people splitting the role are that's manageable but the four or five guys all getting saves occasionally that's kind of a mess and with stoneman i'm just worried about the control as good as the stuff is he could do some damage to your ratios too you don't have that that multi-year

skills floor that we've seen from a guy like Knable in the past. And Hicks would be a fine sort of one-week use, except he never had the strikeout rate commensurate with his velocity. So, you know, you might get two or three clean innings with like two Ks, which is kind of like, is that a good use of my roster slot for that week? Yeah, it's a fair question to ask another early season thing that i'm struggling with a little bit trevor rogers who pitched really well over the weekend against the mets in weekly leagues catches the braves on the road and i'm looking for that spot where skills and matchup intersect in just the right way and i'm not quite sure that Trevor Rodgers is there yet.

I want to trust him. I want to be the kind of guy that I leave in there all the time, but I was looking for reasons not to play Trevor Rodgers in a lot of leagues where I had other available pitchers with better matchups, even if I was giving up something in terms of ceiling. The Braves are dangerous, top to bottom in the NL, one of the better lineups that Trevor Rodgers is going to face on a regular basis so what criteria are you

using now that we've seen a little bit of action this season how have you adjusted your expectations for like who actually gets into a tough matchup like that has Rodgers shown you enough to where you would trust them in that spot I mean velo and strikeout minus walk rate are probably the number one things that I look at. But I have to say that even with those two things going for you, there's a lot of just trying to figure it out and just feeling it out. And a lot of people, I was very excited to see JT Brubaker's start against the Cubs. And he did what I expected him to do. I would have to say that Jake Arrieta and JT Brubaker did use their early schedules to be useful. Zach Davies did not.

Um, Zach Davies did not. I, I, I like using schedule, but you know, I think that using schedule in March when you're drafting can kind of be tough. Uh, cause we don't even really know how a team's going to play. Teams can play better or worse than you think they're going to play. Right. Um, but, um, I will say that as much as I've liked what Jerry, what J.G. Brubaker did, I'm going to keep him on the bench, even if there's a possibility Christian is on the bench and Shaw. They're dealing with some minor injuries right now. Not like that start is like Wednesday or Thursday. What if tomorrow they're like, oh, yeah, just back in the lineup.

Shaw's back in the lineup and it's in Milwaukee and Brubaker's like, ah, I don't want that. So, uh, but what I am trying to do with Brubaker and Rogers is not drop them. So,

you know, that's why you have to be able to drop the Alec Mills and anybody you're nursing along. And that's why you're staring at Chris sale right now, because you want to drop and you want to drop guys who wouldn't start for you for the next week or two you got to get rid of them because because you need to put people like Trevor Rodgers in there who you're just like I want him on my bench for one week because I don't like this matchup but if he deals in this matchup he's one step away from just being in my lineup every week. If Brubaker deals against Milwaukee,

he's pretty close. Rodgers is a little bit closer because there's more Velo and maybe there's slightly more stuff there. Those two pitchers are kind of on the cusp of one more dealing. I'm like, I think you're just in my roster now.

You're just in my starting roster. The alternative, just to add a little color to the decision, this is what I was wrestling with. Adrian Hauser, home against the Pirates. Really nice matchup. Lower skills ceiling, I think, than Rodgers by a decent margin. Rich Hill, home against the Rangers. And Matt Shoemaker, road against the Angels.

I think of those three, the one I was least confident in was actually Matt Shoemaker because I think the Angels are an offense to be reckoned with. I think that's a tough spot for just about any pitcher, especially somebody that I would say is probably pretty safely outside my top 75 among starting pitchers. Definitely not someone I'm using always. So it came down to Shoemaker versus Rodgers for me. And team context probably broke the tie where I could just see the Twins getting a win, even if Shoemaker hurts the ratios a bit. You played Shoe. That's what I got right now. I guess I got a little time to click it out if I want to switch it, but that's where I'm at. But Logan Webb, I couldn't play Logan Webb over Rodgers in a different league.

Couldn't bring myself to do it there's just too much too much downside with Webb even though the setup is is pretty good he's at he's at Miami but the skills don't seem as good yeah definitely giving up too much on that front early strikeout minus walk rate uh standouts um anybody here that crosses jose de leon um kind of get like a real high walk rate too though and you know the low command high stuff thing can just be a wild ride sometimes um let's see here Kikuchi is really standing out as having a really great strikeout minus walk rate and looking like he was a good investment. Do you think Kikuchi is in every down back now?

See, he's the guy that I had the same problem that I'm having with Rodgers right now. I had this problem with him last week because the matchup for Kikuchi was at Minnesota. I know they're a little bit banged up. No Donaldson was in that matchup. No Donaldson in the lineup because the matchup for Kikuchi was at Minnesota. I know they're a little bit banged up. No Donaldson was in that matchup or no Donaldson in the lineup for that matchup. But I looked at that one and said, I got to see it. I got to see Kikuchi against the good lineup, make sure he doesn't fall on his face. If that happens, I'll have a little more confidence. I realize we're dealing in limited samples. We're working on something that is pretty flimsy, but I think the reason I was interested in Kikuchi in the first place was the underlying skills growth he

showed last year, right? The skills were better than the results a year ago. So I'm just looking for that last little nudge sort of verifying what we thought during draft season was actually real. And it absolutely appears to be at this point for kikuchi yeah i think i think so i you know i think what happened what we might thought might happen happened where he just has better command of the new arsenal now um you just see that that that shows in the strikeout minus walk rate right the nice six percent walk rate that's good for him uh he had the worst command in baseball last year according to clan plus and i think that was mostly because he was like they were like hey here's an entirely new arsenal it's nothing like the one you threw before

um ian anderson uh showing up here is is kind of interesting um he's been a little up and down early on so some people might have been nervous but i think uh if you go back to the solid strike out minus walk rate you can feel good. I know that I've already been getting some crap about Jose Urquidy, but he's in the top 25 for strikeout minus walk rate. And like you minus one or two hits and he'd be fine, I think. Having a 24% walk rate and a 5% walk rate, 24% strikeout rate. I think that's good for his pitcher. I'm happy with that. I still believe in Urquidy. I wouldn't

drop him. If you want to play the matchups game with him, that's fine, but put him on your bench at least. I wouldn't drop him. Rich Hill has been a great, was a big pickup for me this last week. It's just a good matchup for him. I don't even know what it is. He's got the

Rangers. Yeah, I think that's a good matchup for him. They're brutal. They're one of the worst lineups in the league. Also, they have a particular problem, it seems, with breaking balls, it seems, just from watching a few games. Hill is getting pretty good movement on his curveball against the Yankees. He got knocked around a little bit. Got a cheap win because the Rays' offense came through. So I'll take it. This early in the year, a little bit of a hit to the ratios

in exchange for an early win. Can kind of figure out how to tweak later. Might also drop him if I don't like the, you know, he's definitely on that sort of streaming level. But he's in the top 30 for Strikeout Mouse walk rate, so that's interesting. Otherwise, it's all people you know and love.y lynn one surprise is jake junis who also has i believe a corresponding pitch mix change yep he has changed up a little bit so re-evaluating junis at this point is

absolutely worth doing and he's the kind of guy that you know the 15 team crowd, especially the high-stakes crowd, they've already picked him up. But I think in a lot of 12s, he's someone that would often go ignored. So I would actually take what we're seeing from him and be a little bit more confident in that, given that there was a change to that pitch mix. No sinkers, new cutter, way huge strikeout rate with a corresponding whiff rate increase. Yeah, I think I missed the boat on that one.

Sorry. I had him at 125 or something. I guess that's a miss. If he is out there for you, I'd pick him up. Yeah, and that's the kind of stuff you are looking for this early. A tangible change to the pitch mix, a big jump in Velo. I mean, like Carlos Rodon, I would say I missed on Carlos Rodon in terms of where I had him ranked, but because he's been

so injured and the stuff had fallen off so much, I needed to see it. I needed to see it in games. I needed to see 95 again on the fastball before I could even consider the possibility that he was within the top 100 among starting pitchers yeah i mean i wasn't i think that as much as maybe you miss on rodone because of that um it's solid process because we've we've seen some other pitchers oft injured pitchers that are already injured like uh chris archer you know already down I forget there was a couple pitchers that was like

I had been oh Paxton you know like I was excited you know but I kept telling myself don't push him up

too high he's still what's an innings projection for him and there's still very high injury risk you know you know

we haven't seen Denilson Lemaitre yet. He's pitching an alternate site, so he's coming back. But it wouldn't surprise me if he came back for a while and then had an injury. It definitely turned out that injury was... What do you think of Tyler Anderson? He came up in an email question that we got. And the question came in because his swinging strike rate was up in his first outing against the Cubs.

I always thought Tyler Anderson was just a guy. And that's a dangerous trap to fall into because, especially for someone who's changed orgs, they could go with a completely different sort of approach. I mean, the control early on has been good. Homers have been an issue for him. They shouldn't be a major issue for him in Pittsburgh all the time. It's a pitcher-friendly sort of park. So I'm cautiously optimistic that he'll have some utility as more of a spot starter. We're still talking about low velo, tons of cutters, right? Big, big jump in terms of how

much he's throwing that cutter. he's almost a 30 30 30 guy he's never done this before where he's he's closer to 30 30 30 fastball cutter changed than he's ever been in his career um so that that could just have people guessing in terms of you know if he can throw all three of those in every count um it's a viable way to be good. He's had small glimpses of a good strikeout right before. But is he going to be a permanent roster guy in most

mixed leagues? Probably not. I'm looking at him for matchups. Right. I think instead of going Tyler Anderson two starts this week, who cares? Now it's kind of like, tell me who the two starts are against. I might actually use him for a two start week week, or who does he catch at home in a week where I'm scrambling to get that ninth pitcher? I think he's at least in that conversation now, whereas two weeks ago, he wasn't, and that matters. We want that pool to be as fresh as it can possibly

be. But yeah, that's the stuff we're wrestling with here early in this season. A lot of that stems from injuries being up, having to dig into some different corners, trying to find viable options. All right, you know, it's not really the beginning of a new season if we don't talk about possible changes to the baseball. And you are currently working on a story,

which as you've been digging into it and explaining some things in the story to me, I have realized has an impact on some of these early season decisions we're trying to make because we have talked in the past about the importance of max exit velocity in a small sample. We don't have a lot to go off of. It's one of those things we can look at and at least identify a true sort of power ceiling. But you found some things with this piece. So what have you uncovered so far? Yeah, it's a really interesting

beginning of the season because it looks like given a certain exit velocity and launch angle, balls are not going as far. So there is some dampening effect where balls are not going as far. However, we're also seeing higher exit velocities across the board and it's on the level of kind of plus one to 1.5 and different it's a little bit different in different velocity bands but uh that was some work that was put out by uh connor kirkon about uh about uh you know seeing the differences in velocities you can just just look at league-wide barrel rate. League-wide barrel rate is right now at 8.6 per batted ball event.

It's never been above 7.3 or 7.4 before. So I doubt that every player just figured out how to barrel balls better. I doubt that everybody's hitting the ball harder, so I think there's a ball effect there. But as to how those two things go together,

you'll have to read the piece because it is kind of an interesting idea of ball construction and how they could have aimed to do one thing and end up doing another thing. So I still recommend reading the piece when it comes out, obviously. We're working on it uh but uh it does it is relevant right now to you as a fantasy player because if you look and just you know see someone oh improve barrel rate improve max legs to be low this guy's obviously good it's not necessarily true because if uh the barrel if you know, all this stuff is kind of relative to league average. So if they're just hitting the ball a mile or harder than like everybody else, just because the ball is going harder than there's no actual skills change or health change.

So I would basically kind of try to remember that one mile an hour. It's probably not true that it's one mile an hour everywhere, and it's probably more nuanced than that. It's always like that with baseball. But if you need something that you're kind of like, can I just look at their numbers and subtract something? Subtract a mile an hour, you know. And that'll help you kind of get a sense of, like,

how much truly better they are. That will help you kind of get a sense of how much truly better they are. So I did run max EV changers this year to last year. And I think the top of the leaderboard, I've got 15 in the article. We can talk about some of them here. The top of the leaderboard, the top 15, have all increased their max SUV leaderboard by more than two points, by two miles per hour. I think it's safe to say they have done something. They've shown us something that's meaningful. So, you know, Jermaine Mercedes, really small sample last year, 91, not really much to talk about there, but it is nice to see a 113

Max Exavilo. I think that would be about the same as having a 112 max exit velo in the past. And we've heard that 108 is the big number you want to cross. Zach McKinstry has a huge increase too, but his number is max exit velo is just 106. So I'm not sure that he has plus power. I think he's an interesting guy for really deep leaguers that just need some plate appearances and maybe some plate appearances they can move around uh that's all i i see in zach mckinstry i don't i'm not like in love with him but the third guy on the list carlos correa good sample last year 109 max exavilo you know

he's playing every day this year 116 max exavilo i think that's very substantive I think this is a This is a contract year for him, right? This is the year I think this will be a good year for Carlos Correa And I'm adding Yes, some soft analysis Of contract year, which has not always been Born out, but in contract years

Players stay on the field more That has been born out, that research has been done In contract years Players want to put up to plate appearances. That means sometimes they'll play through injury, and so the overall numbers don't look great, but they'll give you more samples. So if Kare is going to play every day or play a lot and has a 116 max exit below, I'm an early buy-in guy. Yeah, I think some of these early surgers are pretty interesting. Correa is a guy that I really liked at the price during draft season just because of the lineup he's in, the core skills he's shown.

I felt like risk for reward kind of made sense based on his injury history to draft him where he was going. So to see that extra lift on the max exit velo warms my heart since I've got them so many places i think it's interesting with a guy like yermin mercedes who you know while you were gone kind of took over the league for a week at least and it's still hitting quite a bit and given the needs like we talked about this last week brit and i were talking about it where it's like all he really has to do is just be a dh and that's he ever could do. So the perfect situation has emerged

for Jermaine Mercedes and this might not last all season, but if it just keeps the White Sox offense afloat for a little while until they can decide who they want to go get to get the upgrade maybe in left field and to possibly get Andrew Vaughn back into the first base DH mix and not have to do that position change with him. If he's just a stopgap, you mean Mercedes is doing more than enough right now to continue playing. When you see a max exit velo, I mean, you kind of know where it would go on a previous leaderboard. But if you have a guy like Mercedes, who's sitting at 113.3, that would be a top 30 max exit velo looking at last year's numbers. That's where Avi Garcia and Tatis and Juan Soto and Joey Gallo and those guys,

they're in that same range. So that's legit top-end sort of power from Mercedes, and I think everything about him is just so unusual with the lack of a position, age to level, the body type. It's all the reasons a player could be discounted and just sort of ignored in a system. He ticks pretty much all of those boxes. But then when you look at the scouting grades that are on him,

he's like the perfect DH. He's literally built for the role that he just happened to get, which was impossible. With Eloy Healthy... There's like 30 speed on there? 30 speed and 20 field. 20 field. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a 20 field before.

Oh my God. I've never seen that. Yeah. Who else has that? I remember they were trying him at third and the first game they were like, hmm, yeah, I don't think so. Nope. Nope.

Nope. Nope. So, you know, it's just one of these things where he fits what they need right now perfectly. And how long it lasts, I mean, if you use history and logic, you're going to come up with an answer that throws cold water on the story. If you want to use your imagination and have a little fun with it, you could see this lasting several months, maybe even all season. I don't know if we're still going to be talking about Ji mercedes in our fantasy leagues two or three years from now but i think especially in some shallow leagues there are some sites espns among them where he has catcher eligibility by default so even if you're talking about a 10 team mixed league where he's got catcher eligibility he's

gonna hit enough to make an impact to play as a catcher in leagues like that because of just how thin the position gets and kind of how clustered everything is after the first five or six players at the position. Yeah. There's some other names on this list. I think that I would consider

someone to buy low if they had a good max exit below that had improved off of last year and not great overall numbers. So Willie Castro is a buy low for me. And I hate to say this, dude, I'm looking at miles straw. You're interested.

I'm a little interested, man. If he's going to hit the ball harder. And here's another thing. He's walking so much that he's that his WRC Plus is only 75. That's not great. That's not great. However, given the fact that he doesn't have a hit yet,

or he has a hit, but given the fact that how few hits he has, let me see how many hits he has. He has seven singles. Given the fact that he has so few hits and he has hit a ball decently hard, I could see him stringing some hits together and having like a 260 average or something.

I don't know. And being like 20% worse than the average with a stick and being a good defender. I don't know. There's, there's something there, but almost everybody else is a buy high. And I I'm cool with it.

I'm buying high on Thai France. I'm buying high on Tommy Edmond, Tommy Edmond with a one 13 max X below is kind of exciting. You know, I think he's got a regular job. He's going to steal you 15 bags and with the 113 max ex of you though he might hit you 18 homers yeah tommy edmund i thought it was possible that we saw his best possible season in his debut i've said that before on this show an increase in power

does change things a bit especially if the speed doesn't go away if he goes from a guy that tops out in the mid-teens and home runs to getting into the low 20s possibly, and you add maybe 20 steal speed to that, where he was going, he ends up being a pretty big difference maker instead of a break-even sort of player. So that's one of the names that I'm definitely more surprised by than some of the others on there because I didn't really see another notch of power coming from him,

and I want to see what the next couple of weeks bring. I mean, the scouting reports never liked Tommy Edmonds power. So, uh, hit tools been good pretty much everywhere. He's been, we've never really had problems with strikeouts.

So I guess I could see it, but I'm still looking at Edmond and saying, I see more 1515 than 2020 plus. Yeah, it could be true. But at least there's that underpinning, right? You know, at least he's not with a zero. I saw it starts at zero and his max exit below is 106 or something. Like there's at least a chance that the power is better.

And even if you're buying a two 80, 15, 15 guy, uh, at least you're, you're buying a decent floor. So, um,

David dolls on this list, but he's interesting because his max legs of below his new one is one Oh eight, which one Oh eight is basically last year's one Oh seven. So he's really borderline in terms of one Oh eight was the number we were looking for as a benchmark. Um, so that power looks kind really borderline in terms of 108 was the number we were looking for as a benchmark. So that power looks kind of borderline. It kind of looks like, you know, and he's like, this is what I thought Edmund would be doing.

A.070 ISO, a Max Exavilo around 107. It's an improvement over last year, but you not only want an improvement, you want an improvement to something good. And I'm not sure a doll is doing that here. Yeah, that's, I don't think he's necessarily going to max out on playing time either, which is frustrating for me because I thought at the time that they signed him, I thought,

Oh, the Rangers can afford to give him a lot of playing time. If they don't, it becomes difficult to roster him in at least 12 team leagues for sure, but maybe even in 15s at some point if they're really platooning him heavily and not giving him those shots against lefties and occasionally even pulling him against righties. So definitely a frustrating player for me because I thought the skills were real. Tyler Naquin's on this list too. He's come up in a few recent pod conversations.

I didn't make anything of him going to the Reds because I never thought he was going to play in that outfield. And here he is atop leaderboards early in the 2021 season. Why is he playing? He's playing because Winker got a little dinged up and Senzel missed a couple of days, and then he just hit, so they keep penciling him in. But also Shogo's hurt.

And Shogo's hurt too. Long-term hurt. So he's the fourth outfielder that's playing his way. But I don't think he's going to play past Winker, and I don't think he's going to play past Senzel. He shouldn't. He could push Castellanos to DH when they got a DH. Yeah.

So playing time might dry up for him a little bit. I think as soon as the bat cools off, they'll stop giving Winker and Senzel more than the occasional day off because those guys are the future, and Tyler Daquin, I would argue, is not. And I'm looking at their schedule. Interleague games, they don't have... They have Interleague coming up this weekend, but they're home against Cleveland,

so they're not picking up the DH there. They're home against the White Sox in early May, road against Cleveland in early May. So they have one American League series, a three-gamer in early May, but not a lot of opportunities there. I think they're going to lean heavily on Winker, Senzel, and Castellanos as they should. There were a few

places where I threw low, low bids on Naquin, but I was definitely not going to push him up to the top of my list or spend 8-10% of my budget on him just because I don't see a long-term path for him unless one of the other outfielders goes down with an injury. Which, I mean, it's possible, but it's a little bit like that sixth starter, you know, where it's like, I'm holding this person for better days in the future,

like for more opportunities in the future. And sometimes you just don't have the bench to do that. Yeah. And I think there's a similar situation that's happening right now in Arizona. Tim Lacastro is playing a bit more because Quetel Marte is hurt. And eventually, when Quetel Marte is healthy again, Lacastro goes back to his typical fourth outfield role. And you're going to see the speed, especially, and a pretty good batting average, decent OPP. And you're not going to want to cut Tim Lacastro because speed is so hard to come by, but as soon as he's not playing every day or nearly every day, he goes from glue guy that is almost good enough to be on a 12-team roster to someone that you wouldn't even necessarily hold

on your bench in a 15-teamer. It's a pretty big swing, and I think a larger portion of the player pool is fungible compared to our expectations and i think early in the season some people get really stuck on like rowdy telez was a guy that people were frustrated with this weekend still just off to a brutal start telez versus colin moran to me like that was a decision on draft day like i would take telez because there's a little more ceiling seeing his early struggles and thinking about how the playing time could be affected by those Colin Moran doesn't have anyone pushing him for his job right now Rowdy constantly does because the Jays are just better right so you can make a swap like that and I don't think you're necessarily giving up on Rowdy as much as you're just fortifying playing time and role on your

roster because skills there are not as different as we'd like them to be, even though Rowdy might be a slightly more exciting player. Yeah, and maybe I made a mistake, but I held on to two shares of Rowdy just for one more week. But the evidence is fairly stark. Since the sixth, he's had one start. It's almost a week. So I think maybe if I hadn't been on vacation last week, I might have dropped Rowdy. Well, you got 24 more weeks to make up for it.

Yeah, maybe you'll just back into it. You never know. You make me look like a genius. Yeah, sometimes I think the playing time is one of the biggest things that you can tell right now. Yeah, teams are tipping their hand a little bit as far as how they see situations. And just as we have close calls to make on our rosters, there are thin margins separating players on big league rosters too. So teams are going to go with the hot hand. They're going to play matchups.

They're going to do things that aren't rooted in years and years of data. They're just rooted in this guy's playing a little better than this guy right now so we're going to keep going with this until it stops working sometimes that's all it takes to break a tie when everything else is you know pretty close to equal but it's not right now with springer out like it's not telez against biggio or something where it's obvious it's telez the reason i i told i maybe i was just you know convincing myself but it's telez versus jonathan davis yeah the way things are set up now and uh i'm taking telez you Jonathan Davis right now is 140% worse than league average. That's a lot worse than league average.

I've never actually seen a minus 40 before. That's just fun with early season samples. But even beyond that, he's projected to be 30% worse. He's basically a fourth outfielder defensive replacement type, and he's 28 years old. If I was running the team, I'd still be throwing Rowdy out there. Yeah, I think you'd be right to stick with him a little longer for sure, but definitely frustrating to see what they have done with him so far,

especially with a few guys missing as a result of early injuries in Toronto. But it's still a good idea to drop him because when Springer comes back, if they're already taking Jonathan Davis over him, when Spr springer comes back then he's not going to see the lineup because they were going to choose gritchick over over tell us every time but t oscar still hurt too so we'll see how this week goes man let's see how this week goes the rowdy you know showed real gains last year and he's a max EV god. And so I'll go down in burning flames with him, I guess. That's a heck of a player to plant the flag with. It's a fun way.

Fun way to go down. My Jermaine Mercedes, I guess. Yeah, everybody's got to have somebody like that. Everybody's got to have somebody. All right, you know, we've got a couple more items to get to here before we go. Had a question come in from Michael, and he was writing after Bryce Harper hit an opposite field home run. I think it was on Sunday Night Baseball. He's looking for opposite field barrels, and he wants to know how common those actually are,

field barrels. He wants to know how common those actually are, if there's only a select few hitters who are even capable of hitting a ball that hard at the optimal launch angles going the other way. Yeah, it's a weird thing where balls opposite field barrels perform worse than pulled field barrels because I think there's more side to side spin. We haven't yet started to, well, they're recording batted ball spin. They're not giving us batted ball spin in the components that we would need to kind of tease this out. But the idea is that when you pull a ball, you hit it more flush. There's not as much side spin and so all of the energy you put into the ball goes out to outfield but if you kind of hit an oppo you put more slice on it it's got more sideways spin so it's going to take it sideways and it's going to take away distance in the field so opposite field

barrels not as good as pulled field barrels however if you can show opposite field power, it is really good for you as a player. Like, it's one of those weird things where it just means that you're a more complete player. You can cover more of the plate. You can go, you can take outside balls to right field out, and you can take inside balls. Like, that would be the ideal player. Somewhere, it's probably Juan Soto.

Let's talk about how Juan soto can take the pitch to the you know on the outside part of the plate out to the opposite field and he can also turn on pitches on the inside part of the plate to hit them but if you're just talking about opposite field barrels versus pull barrels pull barrels perform better so it's one of those things and and what's really interesting too is if this ball kind of goes back and forth, like if they deaden the ball further or change some of their process to deaden the ball more effective next year, then opposite field homers, opposite field barrels will feel the most pain. People who depend on opposite field power will lose homers at a greater rate

because those balls just don't go as far to the opposite field. And so if you take a foot or two away, they'll end up in an outfielder's mitt. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, thinking about the side spin on the ball, I guess a lot of stuff hit the opposite way. It just can't be squared up quite as much as it would be if it were pulled looking here i ran a quick search on stat cast for opposite field barrels going back to 2019 they are seemingly pretty rare because the leader is javier baez

he's got 25 of them since 2019 but that's legit power right when he hits the ball he hits the ball hard so i guess it's not it's not? When he hits the ball, he hits the ball hard. So I guess it's not stunning that he's on the list. Maybe a little surprising he's there. Bryce Harper, second with 24. Freddie Freeman, third with 23. A couple guys with 22. Acuna, Eloy, Juan Soto, not surprisingly.

JD Martinez, Kyle Schwarber, Paul Goldschmidt, and Jose Abreu rounding out the top 10. Manny Machado up there. High average hitters who can cover the whole plate. There's some brilliance there for sure. Yeah. There's really not a bad player anywhere near the top of this list. I mean, Trey Mancini, without even playing in the shortened season, 18. So probably a more complete player than people were giving him credit for early in his career. More complete hitter, at least. A couple surprises if you go further down. J.D. Davis has 15, but he's there to hit. He's not there for any other reason. He's not there for his defense. He's not there because of those contributions. So yeah, I would say this is a legitimate skill that a select number of players

have. One guy who I thought would be higher on this list was DJ LeMay. He's got 13, so he does it, which is tied for 30th on the list. Not totally buried or anything like that, but good question. Fun question. I guess LeMay doesn't lift it that much, so he doesn't always get the barrels. He has a lot of

line drive approach. Yep. I think that's probably why that number is a bit lower than I expected. I mentioned this question when we were talking about Tyler Anderson earlier. Chuck in Maine wanted to know early swinging strike rates. Do you believe the newfound swinging strike rates you see over the course of a start or two early in the season? He was talking about Anderson against the Cubs having a 24% swinging strike rate and

Jeff Hoffman had a really good swinging strike rate in his first start against St. Louis. Is it too early to tell if someone has found something by looking at the swinging strike rate in a small sample like this? You know, there's a really interesting difference between, so if you're looking, let's say you have a decent sample of a bunch of pitchers, you're trying to predict next year's strikeout rate. If you use swinging strike rate or called strike rate, there's no difference. Those are just strikes and you can put them together and they help predict next year's strikeout rate. Good. But there's no difference.

So you'd say, oh, well, why would I care about swinging strikes? Why don't I just look at CSW, which is a great stat on pitchers list, which combines called strikes and swinging strikes. And here's the difference. Swinging strike rate stabilizes much faster than called strike rate. I posit that has something to do with umpires changing.

You know, you've got a different umpire every game. You might have different catchers. I think that command, this is where i'm going on on them i think command might be a little bit more up in the air start to start like you know than stuff but that part is not proven by anybody that's just me sort of riffing off of it but but definitely the umpires and catchers change um and so uh that's why maybe swing strike rate has done better i'm trying right now furiously uh to pick up um uh the actual time when this becomes uh useful let's see here pitch all

swing strike rate. You kind of still want like 500 pitches. Okay. So, yeah, even right now we're still close to 75 or 80 for a lot of guys. So that's more like four starts. Yeah. Yeah, I think you'd want about four starts. But, I mean, like there's people going into a third start if it's a,

if it's really stand out. Uh, but I think you could see some up and down for like Luke Weaver, for example, uh, with his swing strike rate. It looks excellent. Now it didn't look so excellent a day ago. Um,

but, uh, yeah, four starts. You can start to believe it and you can believe it before you can believe, uh, the CSW or, uh, uh, four starts, you can start to believe it, and you can believe it before you can believe CSW or strikes overall. Yeah, I'm looking at the swinging strike rate leaderboard through the first couple turns. Bieber, DeGrom, of course, 1-2.

Trevor Rodgers, 3. Uh-oh, I have to get him in my lineup against the Braves. No, I don't want to overreact to that, but I just did Courage overall because I like Rodgers so much. Giolito, Cole, Corbin Burns is up there at 6. Tyler Anderson sitting up there 7th on the list. Scherzer, Ivaldi, Sandy Alcantara, Jose De Leon

also in the top 10, tied for 10th with Sandy, who looks fantastic by the way. He looks so good right now. I mean, if you like pitching, we talked about the Marlins on the teams that we're going to watch a lot this season. They've got it. Hopefully Sixto Sanchez is back relatively

soon. Eliezer, of course, hurt right now too, but excited to see what the future brings for a lot of those guys in Miami. The top guys there, hopefully Sixto heals up along with Eliezer. Yeah, absolutely. Great question,

Chuck. Really appreciate that. One more email to get to, just a contribution here from Blake, who suggests swing at this, spit on that, as our line that we use instead of eat this, not that. So swing or spit, would that work? I like it, but there's also kind of this idea that we're spinning on a player.

Yeah, a little weird, a little weird, but conceptually a step in the right direction. It's only weird because it accesses the big weird in fantasy where we're like, you know, talk about owning players and stuff like that. True. So that part, I would try to prefer something that didn't access that weirdness of language in fantasy baseball. We're close, though. This is a step in the right direction. We appreciate the email, Blake. And if anyone has the winning phrase.

I mean, eat this, not that suggests that we're eating them. So that's not great either. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not doing that. One thing I feel like we missed out on, by the way, was an all-oatmeal team going into the season. So maybe we can squeeze an all-oatmeal team in at some point this week. It's still early enough.

We should make that a staple of preseason, though. Yeah, the all-oatmeal team? Yeah, you and I, we should write a piece every year. We split the leagues or something. I'm in. Oh, the AL. Yeah, we'll do it for labor research. Yeah, exactly.

The AL all-oatmeal team. I mean, that's what you want. Oatmeal is great in deep leagues, the AL. Yeah, we'll do it for labor research. Yeah, exactly. The AL all oatmeal team. I mean, that's what you want. Oatmeal is great in deep leagues, yeah. It's a great roster spackle for the teams I like to build. Which otherwise, I don't know,

resemble breakfast meats. That doesn't make any sense. It breaks down so fast. Don't talk about sausage. I didn't say that out loud? You didn't have to do that. Whoops. I think on that note, it's time for us to go. If you'd like to drop us an email, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com.

Eno on Twitter, at Eno Saris. I am at Derek Van Ryper. We'll be back with you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.