Rates & Barrels - Closer ROI & 2023 Expectations, Projecting Risk & Jesse Winker is the Next Jesse Winker?

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Eno and DVR discuss the value provided (or lack thereof) from the top-end closers in the pool so far this season, and whether that might lead to a less aggressive draft market toward the saves category in 2023. Plus, they consider what would go into a calculation that better quantifies risk, expectations for a few pitchers making late-season returns from injury, and candidates to be the 'next Jesse Winker'.  Rundown -- Early Alternatives to Josh Hader and Liam Hendriks -- Are Relievers Valued Incorrectly? -- Overshopping the Bargain Bin -- Will Sanity Return to Closer ADPs Next Season? -- A Lot of Disappointment: Pick 100-200 Range -- Quantifying Risk -- Expectations for Late-Season SPs Returning From Injuries -- An Approach to Hitters -- Finding the Next Jesse Winker Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Related Reading 'Inter-Projection Volatility & The ATC Projections' by Ariel Cohen (@ATCNY): https://fantasy.fangraphs.com/inter-projection-volatility-the-atc-projections/ Subscribe to The Athletic at $1/month for the first six months: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Monday, August 8th. Derek Van Ryper, Eno Saris here with you on this episode. We've got a lot of big questions from the mailbag. One about our expectations for closers in 2023. Will sanity return to the ADP? We'll take a look at whether or not early closers have been a good investment so far this season and whether that might shape the market for next season. I'm going to dig into quantifying risk. Really good question about that. Injured pitchers still expected to come back this season. Our expectations for those players and a particular strategy approach with hitters that I

think actually is really good but did not work particularly well for one of our listeners. So we'll dig into that a little bit later on in the show as well. Eno, how's it going for you on this Monday? Touch and go, touch and go. I have an allergy to raw garlic, and I did not think that I had to think about it. Like when I go to Italian places, I basically ask the waitress. If I go to Middle places, I basically ask the waitress. If I go to Middle Eastern,

I ask somebody. I ask the waiter. I ask somebody the cook, what's the raw garlic in? I went and got ramen and I didn't know that there were a lot of places putting raw garlic in their ramen. Let me tell you, I was laid low. I was laid low. I was laid low. Sorry to hear that.

That seems like a thing that's very hard to avoid, even with the effort to try and figure out what's going on in any particular kitchen when you go out to eat. Those unpleasant surprises you can stumble into. Well, I mean, garlic isn't everything, but cooked garlic I can handle. It's raw, the tapenades of the world. No tapenades here on rates and barrels let's get to the closer adp question for 2023 it's a more a question about the current season because the current season influences what happens in the future will sanity return to

closer adps i looked at the adps from April of the Roto-Wire Online Championship, the 12-team NFBC leagues, the 350 entries. The reason why I looked at those is because it's a higher volume of those leagues, and I think that gives you a broader sense of what people were doing right before the season started. Now, you might remember Josh Hader, Liam Hendricks inside the top 30 ADP-wise. Josh Hader finished with an ADP of 23.95 in 12-team Roto-Wire Online Championship Leagues from April 1st to April 7th. I looked at this stuff right before opening day.

Liam Hendricks right there with him at 27.85. A little bit of a gap before you get down to Rice and Iglesias around pick 40. Manuel Clase also inside the top 50. So you had four in the top 50. Edwin Diaz wasn't far behind. Ryan Presley was right there in the mix as a top six closer as well with an ADP around 60. And if you start thinking about what these players have done this year, you're not actually all that happy with many

of them so far. I mean, the Hayter situation until about the first week of July, I think you were pretty happy with what he was doing and ratios have crumbled a bit in recent weeks. So maybe that could still correct itself over the course of what's left of the season. We know Hendricks has spent some time on the IL. You know, Rysa Leglesias is probably the biggest surprise of all, because to me, the skills looked really stable going into the season.

The angels mysteriously stopped generating save chances for a while, and then he got traded. So the chances of him getting saves late in the year are way, way down right now. So just looking at the very top of, of the closer list going into this season do you think that's going to get people to pull back a bit on the level of aggressiveness we saw with top end closers in 2022 well i i didn't get with that so uh it's kind of hard for me to

understand the entire reasoning just because you see that dollar sign earned and you compare it to the dollar signs earned or the players picked around them and it's just such a stark difference i mean how much has jordan alvarez earned this year right if you look at so the alternative picks by adp the players that were going just after hater jordan alvarez starling marte to oscar hernandez byron bu Buxton. I mean, that's a huge difference in terms of their value. And I'm looking right now. The value on Jordan Alvarez in a 12-team league, same format, $37. Second most valuable outfielder behind Aaron Judge, who's out on his own planet.

We're not cherry-picking because all those names you named gave more than $7. Right. Starling Marte, because all those names you named gave more than seven bucks. Right. Starling Marte, $23. There you go. Teoscar Hernandez, even $17, right? And he hasn't had the best season so far. That would be a bad outcome

for a third round pick or whatever. And it's twice the value of the guy that people were taking at closer as people were taking in the end of the second. I think there were some parts that were maybe unforeseeable that kind of tanked them which i kind of think of maybe the fact that the run environment cratered and so perhaps it was harder for a reliever uh to provide the same kind of ratios help vis-a-vis the rest of the league

because the run environment went down and so that's partially what happened and it went down in a way that's really interesting is that yes strikeouts went down but they went down from like 22.6 to 22.4

or something like you know strikeout rate went down just a tiny bit, but homers went down big and the run environment went down big. Well, what do relievers give you? Ratios and strikeouts over average, right? But if the average strikeout rate didn't go down that much, maybe relievers were really struggling to separate themselves from the pack like they have in the past. If the average reliever strikes out, you know, one per inning and has a 3-8 ERA,

then Hayter, you know, with a 15-K-9 and a 1-5 ERA is really going to set himself apart and give you some value there. But maybe that's just not the same when the average reliever has a 3-2 ERA or a 3-4 ERA and strikes out, you know, still strikes out a batter per inning. So I think that might be some part that's like slightly unforeseeable. The other is just I understand that there's scarcity at the top, but, you know, when I look at the end of season um you know stuff and pitching plus ratings from last year you know liam hendricks was first uh and um at least in stuff plus and actually in pitching plus too ryan presley was second paul Seawald was third among potential closer candidates. And so this is what I was trying to do,

was get Presley later than everybody else and add Paul Seawald later. And it was largely successful. If you followed that, you would have gotten a lot of, if you would follow Pitching Plus, you would have gotten a lot of, if you would follow Pitching Plus, you'd have gotten a lot of Jordan Romano and Ryan Presley to start the season as your first two closers. And you wouldn't have had to spend a second round pick. I got free Tanner Scott everywhere just because his Pitching Plus was great.

So there's a couple different questions that come to mind. Presley is someone we've talked about a few times this year because we've been concerned about his health and he just hasn't been quite as sharp as we expected. But overall this year, a 309 ERA, a.97 whip, 38 Ks in 32 innings, and 21 saves. He's doing

the main thing you need. He's not hurting you in the ratios. He's just a little lighter in Ks than the elite relievers. And I wonder if the way we calculate value for closers is actually wrong, even though I think the formulas are right. It's almost like because there's such an odd commodity that the inflation, the tax you have to pay is in some ways necessary. I'm not trying to make the case for spending up at the level of people were spending up on Hayter and Hendricks again, but I'm just looking at this and saying, I wouldn't be unhappy with Ryan Presley's season so far where we drafted him. And yet here we are,

like he's coming up as like a, what, a six or $8 player in a lot of calculators. That's just kind of strange, isn't it? I do think that this actually has a parallel in real life baseball, which is that if you look at war, wins above replacement, and then you look at dollars per war or whatever, it looks like the market always overpays for relievers. And so you could come away with that saying,

I'll never pay for relievers, and then you'll never get a reliever on the open market. And there are certainly teams that have decided to act like that um but on the other hand um you could look at it and say perhaps there's something the free market understands better than this number and uh perhaps uh perhaps and this is what i have done when I've looked at dollars per war and tried to tease out how much a win costs on the open market for real-life players, one thing that I have decided to do is just remove relievers from the pool

and kind of judge them against themselves. And I think that makes some sense. You'll certainly get higher numbers that way. And you'll start to understand that there's sort of a dollars per win for relievers and a dollars per win for everybody else. And part of that also is that the relievers get shorter contracts. So that's a real life concern. It's not really necessarily one for us to consider too much in fantasy. life concern that's not really necessarily one for us to consider too much in fantasy but it's easier to give someone 10 million dollars a year if it's for three years than if it's for 10 you

know it's just an easy thing to say um but uh the corollary is still there where you know you run the numbers in fantasy and you find oh relievers just aren't worth it you could say uh you know give me paul seawald and tanner scott and anthony bender that that's what the the model would have told you to do if you weren't going to spend it all you were going to buy them super super late and you could have gotten right right but you could have also uh Tyler Rogers and Ryan Thompson and Andrew Kittredge. Also three relievers that did really well in Pitching Plus that you could argue yourself into. Into saying, oh yeah, they could be the closer. If you did the first three, you'd be like, sweet, I'm doing all right. Look at these three sweet closers I got. If you did the second three, you'd be like sweet I'm doing alright

look at these three sweet clothes I got if you did the second three you'd be like I have zero saves right I've lived that in a draft and hold where I ended up not bothering with first second or third tier relievers thought I could be really clever

and yeah I'd use the model and in draft and hold that means you have that means you had to buy like six relievers. You had to use more roster spots. I burned a lot of roster spots, which then, because of the attrition in the format, when you start to lose players that you can't replace to injury, which inevitably happens, then you're playing short or you have fewer choices when it comes to filling out your lineup every week.

So there's that kind of hidden cost of chasing saves that way. You're playing some middle relievers in your lineup just because you don't have anybody else. Yeah, so it's not great. But I think the way that I'm starting to approach closers is looking, especially in snake drafts, I mean, obviously if you're playing dollar for dollar, everything's totally different.

If you can just bid what you want for the player, then that sort of fixes the problem. But a snake draft those alternative picks the the opportunity cost that to me matters and i think when you get up into the pick 30 range i always like the hitters that go in that range more than i like the closers available in that range that's the jordan starling marty teoscar hernandez byron buxton you look at the guys around, Liam Hendricks, maybe a couple other banana peel mistakes, Mario Kart style errors you could make, but it's a good group overall. Tim Anderson's really solid across the board. Bieber's exceeded our expectations. Julio Rios has been good.

Story's missed some time on the IL, but I don't think he's hurt you in that spot. Giolito's been the one true, that's like the blue turtle shell for keeping with the Mario Kart. It's a bad scenario if you took Giolito up there. But then there was Aaron Judge up in that range too. So when you think about the hitters from those two groups that were going just after Hayter and just after Hendricks, you were probably a lot better off going hitter just based on expectations for those players. And we know closers are volatile. Even good closers can be extremely volatile.

Josh Hader might reel off a stretch for two months where he gives up one earned run the rest of the way and fixes the ratios and turns back into a $15 reliever before the end of the season. But he also might just be this for the rest of the season too. And this might be what you get. And that's pretty disappointing. Yeah, yeah I mean you just look at aging curves and for starting pitchers they're softer they have more pitches you know as their velocity goes they have more commands you know there's all these things they can do they have more tricks in their bag they age softly relievers

are more tied to their velocity so So as their velocity starts to go, their just overall ability starts to decline very fast. And so you have this class of players that you're judging off of small samples every year that age really fast. It's just an awful place to be spending a lot of money in my opinion. And I think the best way that I can think of it with relievers is the way I think about trying to get star players in an auction. Now, if you run your auction calculator, a lot of times it'll say the most expensive player should be worth $38, $39, maybe 40, right? And then you get into the auction room and Mike Trout goes for 45. And you say, oh, wow, another one of these, you know? And,

you know, the first couple of times I ran out there with my values, I was like, well, I'm going to stick to my values and I didn't get a first round player. And guess what? I had more money than anybody else at the very end. And whoop-dee-doo, I got a lot of $1 players for $2 because I could. Wasn't that exciting. Didn't win me in the league. Wasn't the greatest way to go.

What I try to do now is try to get somebody at the very top at the lowest premium. So I say, okay, 45. That's plus five for me on Trout. Let's see what the next one goes for. Oh, alright. Here's another first rounder. That was plus 3. Alright. So, now it gets to someone where I can buy them at plus 2. Maybe I can get Jose Ramirez for $2 over my number. 37 over a 35. Boom. He's mine. I want him.

That $2 is actually not going to net me that much later on. And I'd rather have a first round talent. And I think that's the same thing for closers. It's just trying to figure out which closer I'm paying the least premium on. Which closer am I doing a plus one on or a plus two on instead of a plus five? And so this year was Presley and Romano and to some lesser extent in the second group like sort of the Bednar Barlow types and

you know it did it can cost me but I would have to say to you right now I am not hurting in saves in any of my leagues I think it ended up being a really strong way to go. And along with the steals strategy where I got a handful of steals

from all my power guys, those two strategies work pretty well hand in hand because I did not pay a huge premium on my steals and I did not pay a huge premium on my saves. And those two, you have to have, if I tell anybody that they're going into a draft, you have to have a saves and steal strategy. That's the one thing I think everyone has to think about.

Because they're awful stats. They're very scarce. They're attached to some of the worst players in the game. And so, it's not like you can just be like i'm gonna take only good players of this draft well congratulations you're last in saves and you're last in steals all right so the question originally came in from robert and i think many top end closers have underperformed so far. I think that's fair to say. But I think whether or not they've kept their jobs and are still getting you saves ultimately determines whether or not they've truly busted.

Like, yeah, OK, fine. The ratios came out a little high in the environment you described, you know, where the run environment's been cooler than expected, you probably aren't feeling that quite as much as if it were a source where you were really hoping that that 150 or two ERA was going to help you. It probably didn't make as much of a difference this year not having that as it might have in past years. That's the other part of all this i mean i think the sweet spot the the great picks right now if you invested early if you have class a or edwin diaz where they went even though the opportunity cost was pretty high there were some really good players going around pick 50 especially among just hitters those two have been great so if you had them yeah you missed out on good hitters but you probably are crushing everything you wanted from the relievers that's about where i want i wanted to take my picks

that's the earliest you wanted yeah so i i started to pay attention in the fifth i started to group the closers in the fifth and and you know actually fourth is 60 huh yeah 15 15 yeah i'd start grouping them in the fourth and i basically waited to see who would drop me in the fifth so i did get screwed a couple times uh with gallegos instead of romano because those those were the last two of that top group i would usually have presley romano and gallegos as a threesome. And I really didn't want Gallegos, but I put him in my threesome, and I said, which one of these gets to me in the fifth, I'll take. And most of the leagues I ended up still getting Romano or Presley.

But, yeah, in some of the leagues I got Gallegos. I guess in those leagues I'm not doing that great by saves, but I still got some saves on him before he lost the job. Yeah, it's, I mean, Gallegos basically ended up in a share and is it helsley's job now like if we're we're doing this exercise drafting for for next year and we're assuming this is what the cardinals have in their bullpen again is helsley the guy that goes in the eight to ten range among closers that people are excited about maybe even a little higher if he finishes the year with sole possession of the job yeah i mean uh i will i will definitely um you know go through the pitching plus model again uh but helsley uh 122 stuff plus not not great command uh so he

suffers a little bit by pitching plus but by stuff plus he's right there with Jordan Romano Joe Barlow Edwin Diaz they're all pretty close to me going into next year I'm going to take the same

philosophy because I just think that Hayter is a little diminished and we're beginning to see the fall so is there somebody like Diaz and Classe, are you, you're going to take them ahead of Hader now? I think that's what's going to happen. I don't think if, to answer the other part of Robert's question, I don't think sanity will return here. I think this is a thing that we're going to see for a little while because the NFBC has the overall components especially. So maybe in that universe, the new era is to keep doing this. Maybe in other places, it's not going to be as prevalent. I think you could take Diaz and Classe

and just put them into the Hayter-Hendrick spots. Pick 25, pick 30 by the end of next draft season. You want to get a little discount on them? Draft early. You might get them a little bit cheaper before you get to the later part of draft season. I could see hater falling into the pick 40 ish range where iglesias was going i almost it almost just seems like a big game of musical chairs to me where everybody just grabs a slightly different seat so long as they still have a job and you know you just hope that

you're not a year too early on someone falling apart you hope you're not the one that had aroldis chapman this season because that that would be an early disaster pick based on what happened lost the job and hurt you before he lost the job and that can happen if you decide that hater in the fifth is where you want to end up um but i i'm not sure that i think that uh uh hater is uh is done yet. I'll end up with some shares of Hader. I would hope that the Boston situation gives us some clarity because I like Tanner Houck and I like Garrett Whitlock but I need one of them to take a hold of that job. That's somewhere I would look. I think Presley for me falls out of

the circle of trust a little bit, uh, based on his knee problems this year. Um, I think he would be more in the Gallegos group than in the Romano group for me. So I think it would kind of go something like Diaz, class or class ideas. Diaz,

class, a, um, Hendricks? Hader. Hendricks and Hader are still up there. Hendricks and Hader. And who joins them above the Ryan Presley line? Clay Holmes getting up there?

Maybe. The command is kind of going a little bit. Helsley could jump up for me. Actually, I think Helsley. Devin Williams. Helsley. Devin Williams needs to right ship a little bit. And I'm also more worried about his health

than most other relievers. But I think the sneaky play for me next year, if I'm just sort of trying to read between the lines and guess what it'll look like next year, might actually be Helsley. Where I take Helsley in the fifth, and it seems aggressive, but I'm getting a young guy on the way up

that the model loves. See, part of the reason why I think we want to stick with trying to get one relatively early, even if we're not second, third rounding a lot of closers, the middle ended up being, I think, worse than expected, at least it has been to this point. And that includes Gallegos, kind of a fringe top 100 guy, only because he's ended up sharing the job. But Corey Knable, who I liked, lost the job. Taylor Rodgers was very good. And I must look at that one and say, you pretty much got in the first four months of the job. Taylor Rodgers was very good. I must look at that one and say, you pretty much got in the first four months of the season, you got a season's worth of value out of Taylor Rodgers

at that price. Even though he lost his job and then got traded and probably won't get many more saves again in Milwaukee, you could have done worse with that pick. Scott Barlow has been quietly really good all year, so maybe he creeps up a little bit but mark melanson bad gregory soto actually one of the few good picks from this range kittredge had tommy john surgery and was pacing out for about 15 saves sharing that role would have been probably a slight disappointment overall given the price jake mcgee's been dfa'd twice he was going at pick 155. Matt Barnes, disaster. Camilo Duval, I think, is maybe a slightly better long-term version of

Gregory Soto. What has he actually earned? I bet you he hasn't earned that much. Three bucks. Bednar's been a great value pick. If he gets off the IL, he ends up moving up a lot. I have so many shares of Bednar and Soto thanks to pitching plus. Then, of course, the value that just popped up out of nowhere.

I mean, Helsley, Jorge Lopez had a 350 ADP. Clay Holmes was undrafted. Daniel Bard, because no one wants Rocky's closers. He's been worth nine bucks so far, had a 350 ADP. Seawald, 14 saves after a delayed start. Seems like that's a committee, but he might be the chair of the committee. If I can get him as a second closer next year i'm gonna do it yeah he'll probably cost more though at 250 he was a

bargain this year probably go more like 150 but i think if i if i if i got a closer at you know 50 to 60 and then my second closer could go at 150 you know yeah so if i went helsley seawald and then wherever my model spits out for the bottom i think i i think i can just repeat what i did this year uh david robertson too was a good value in al labor i drafted jordan romano uh for 19 bucks i think that was like six bucks less than hendrix um i drafted jorge lopez for one dollar and tanner scott for $1 and Tanner Scott for $1 and Tyler Wells for $1. It's all because of the model. I like how Wells, especially in that format, because I had him in a mixed league,

and when he wasn't the closer, I said, there's no way he's going to be good with a larger role. What are the Orioles doing? How are the Orioles so stupid? So I cut him. AL only, you're not going to cut him. You're going to say, oh, let's just see what happens. See what happens, yeah.

Oh, this is fantastic. This is like $10 worth of value. I leapt off to such a lead, I wanted to protect my ERA and whip, and I dropped Tanner Scott. I mean, I got like, you know, 10 saves from him or something, or five saves from him, but this team was so good, I dropped Tanner Scott. I guess if, is there anybody i think bednar uh becomes a two you know bednar is kind of like the new romano i think he creeps up to that range

back in the top 75 i think people are going to be totally comfortable with him the only thing that might keep his price from getting to that level, I don't think the concerns about the Pirates being willing to trade him in the right deal mid-season, I don't think those go completely away, and sometimes that's one thing that can hold a closer's value down a round or two compared to where

it should be. But he's also his second year, so I guess he would be inexpensive in arbitration maybe in 2024. They could think about trading him. That's possible. But I guess that's our order. It's Classe, Hendricks, Hader, Romano, Bednar, Helsley, Presley.

Yeah, then Diaz at the top. Edwin Diaz, closer one. Yeah, Diaz or Klaas there. Let's see what the model says. Model loves Klaas. I mean, you can see it when you watch him for sure. It's pure filth. Yeah, Klaas.

Most of these guys at the top are that good. Fishing Plus says Klaas. Well, I think it'll be like an A-B thing. He's got a slightly better command. We can't forget Edwin Diaz's bad seasons when the command got the best of him. People will forget. They tend to forget, right? It's the function of, hey, the Mets aren't the Mets anymore.

They're good. And, wow, 91 Ks and 45 in a third innings? He could strike out 120 guys in a full season. People will forget the bad versions of Edwin Diaz, and he will be right there in that Hader Hendricks 2022 price range, I think, going into next season. Thanks a lot for that email, Robert. Try Tim's new Sweet Chili Chicken loaded wraps and bowls today.

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and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces. A message from the Government of Canada. Let's get to another email. This is about quantifying risk in the broader sense. Email came in from Adam.

Adam writes, Ariel Cohen was speaking on this, I believe, as a guest on someone's podcast, explaining that quantifying risk is the next stepping stone in fantasy baseball analysis. Could this be as simple as forming a mathematical model weighing factors such as missed games, production variance, age, body type, things like that? Would love to hear a conversation about it. So I guess the question I have for you, Eno, is what would you want to have in a model like this? And I know we talked about the Jeff Zimmerman IL days calculation that he was putting together. That was a very manual process that he was doing for pitchers going into this season. So what all would you want to take into consideration as you try and quantify

risk with greater accuracy going forward? Well, there's some sort of a streakiness risk, volatility that we've talked about on this podcast before related to strikeout rate. But sometimes a volatility, like in head to head leagues, volatility is not a terrible thing you know you could have someone just win you the season uh by getting hot at the right time but uh that's one type of risk i see of course there's injury risk um and then um remember when jessamine found that uh projections are less reliable for pitchers and pitchers over 32?

So I'd want some sort of age-related decline risk. So I guess those are kind of the three main sources of risk for me. Health, age-related decline coming surprisingly early or whatever, and just the risk of getting a bad streak see for example fran milreis i think tells you a little bit about the risk of volatility on a seasonal level you think oh the risk with fran milreis is he stinks at one part of the season and kills my whole season no the risk is that he hits one of those stretches where it's a whole season of bad, the risk is that he hits one of those stretches where it's a whole season of bad.

And I think that's what he's hit. I don't think Franco Reyes is done. I think he'll be back in the major leagues. But when you strike out as much as he does, there's still the risk of this sort of season-long funk sent down. You're really just in bad waters when you're striking out that much. So I would have some sort of performance-based risk. I think that maybe the other one is maybe not striking out people as a pitcher, right?

There are pitchers that make it through the season. If Tyler Wells made it through this whole season with the strikeout rate really low, it's starting to come back up. But if he made it through this whole season with strikeout rate really low, and the pitching plus model still likes him I still would put a higher than normal risk number on him next year because he doesn't strikeout people

and I think that Cal Quantrill, other types people that either beat the model or don't I don't have to step up for the model all the time but I would say if they don't strikeout people they're riskier to me and if they have batters they strike out a ton they're riskier to me so i would have that as a as something i would like to quantify health is something i like to quantify and then just

something with with age i think you can do a lot of this um with the bp uh auction calculator because what you can do there that you can't do in other places is move the slider on the player to a percentile. So you can move somebody up to the 75th percentile outcome and get a dollar projection value on that. So I think what you could do is, I guess it would just be by hand, kind of go through your players and be like, oh man, this guy has a ton of strikeouts. From Mill, I'm going to push him down to his 40th percentile. This guy is 33 and coming, Josh Donaldson, whatever he is,

coming off a bad season, I'm going to push him down to 40th percentile. And kind of try and push the slider up and down based on risk and maybe get your own sort of set of custom values. There's next level stuff that you can do around this too. I know Ariel started to do some calculations looking at the interprojection standard deviations,

interprojection skewness, trying to dig into very specific profiles. There's a whole post that he wrote about it, but frankly, I'm going to put a link to that in the show description because- It's pretty good. It's better for you to read it in Ariel's words than for me to try and retell what he's doing over there. But it gives you some really good ideas as to just how much a player profile can actually swing in one direction or another.

Yeah, and I think the strikeout rate you'll find is, if you go back to the preseason projections on some of these guys with big strikeout rates, you'll find fairly large discrepancies between the projection systems. And that's what Ariel Cohen was getting at, was this idea that a player with a wide skew between the projection systems is riskier than one that is more projectable quote unquote that the projection systems widely agree on yeah um so i did uh i did have that in my values this year for al labor because i do work with ariel cohen um and he's uh he's really he's

really good at that and uh he'll get a major shout-out if I finally win this year. He deserves one regardless, just for all the great work that he does. It's funny. It's just like his day job, he's an actuary. So this is the sweet spot for the things that he does exceptionally well. Yeah, what I think you can do is, and this is what I did, is the inner inner was it called inner skew or whatever there's the inner skew yep yeah just have inner skew open and color-coded right and that just makes it easier when you're looking at the players you've

selected how much red and how much green you've put together right like if you've just you've just put a team together with a ton of inter-skew, like, maybe you're going for an overall title, you know? And you're just like, I'm leaning into the risk. I want this risk. It's like with, what did Mike Potterser do? Oh, we have to revisit this. Early Billy Hamilton, right? No, but didn't he buy, like, eight straight injured pitchers?

Oh, yeah, yeah. That was another thing that he did yeah how did i wonder how that worked out i know rodone was on there it can't have been all bad no and i'm thinking back to i had a team it wasn't at all as extreme as is what uh would my do you remember that grid doll that you mentioned for Mike. I had one where I took Verlander and Kershaw in the same draft and Cinderguard. And that's worked out pretty good. Okay, yeah. Because there were pretty steep discounts initially.

The discounts fade. The problem with the injured pitchers is that if you draft in November, December, January, well ahead of the season, it's not spring training. We don't know how hard guys are throwing. We don't have results. Yeah. We don't have any of those things.

It's a total unknown. There's a pretty good discount on players like that. How many of those players you should take and which ones you want to take a chance on, that's the matter of debate that comes around every single draft season. But I think my argument, at least for Verlander, was pretty stupid. It was just, he's Verlander. Why wouldn't he come back and be fine? It's like a Scherzer defense. There's not even reason behind it other than, no, Scherzer, he's fine. He'll be fine. He's Scherzer.

And that's not a very satisfactory answer to something like that. But I do think the earlier you draft, the more you're going to get a discount on injured pitchers in particular, and that's a really good time. If you like taking on that risk, if you believe in those pitchers, you think the timetable makes sense, you think the way they've maybe handled injuries in the past or their organizations have handled injured pitchers in the past, that gives you more confidence, that's when you'd want to get in.

And we do have a question about injured pitchers, so I think we should probably just put that out there next. This question is really interesting in the face of Jacob deGrom being ridiculous yesterday. I know Dansby Swanson hit a two-run homer off him. That was the last batter he faced, but the slider was basically untouchable, and he was perfect for most of that outing.

It was just absurd how well Jacob deGrom was pitching. We had a question about expectations for a few more injured pitchers that have not returned yet. Lance McCullers, Dustin May, Tyler Glasnell could get back before the end of the season. Mike Soroka, who we hear a bit less about, maybe could get back by the end of this season. So what do you do in season looking at players coming off of these major injuries and how do you set expectations for them that are at least reasonable given that they might not immediately be the players they were before they got hurt i mean there's pretty good research out there that shows that you lose fastball command in your first year back from tommy john so with the tommy john returners i would want to know what their fastball command

was like before uh and so in the case of Tyler Glass now, I'm not super into him for this year because he didn't have great fastball command before. And he comes back to a team that could use him for any amount of innings. We have no idea. They might be a one-inning pitcher for them for the end of the season. And he comes back to an uncertain amount of fastball command given they didn't have much great one before a great

amount of fastball command before i'm not that super into him um but they're not all tommy john returners lance with colors is a flexor tendon surgery and soroka is achilles double double second achilles yeah and who else did we have on that list may was on there may i don't think had great fastball command either so he's he's an interesting case may uh my gut is is getting all bubbly and excited for him because he pitched like four innings in his last start. He had Tommy John earlier than Glassnow. It's been longer since he had it. And four innings is pretty good for a minor league rehab start.

That means he could come up in a week or two and be pitching five, six innings at a time. Like, why not? Yeah, I mean, I think the Kershaw injury. I'm a little excited about May. Yeah, I think May might just come up to replace Kershaw. The Kershaw injury leaves the door open for a bit, and I also wonder,

was May turning a corner in that brief time in 2021 before he got hurt it was only five starts it was 23 innings but a 35 to 6 strikeout to walk ratio that season it seemed like that was even the best version of dustin may we'd seen yet and it was in such a small sample that it's just hard to know if it's safe to even buy into it. Yeah, I mean, it was a big lurch forward in Stuff Plus. And there were some shape changes that I thought I was very excited about for his arsenal. And he had above average location plus, which is a little bit surprising, given he did also have reports of poor fastball command. I wouldn't say that he has amazing command.

So he tests my sort of internal calculation when it comes to guys where I'd rather get them in year two after Tommy John than year one. But at this point, you know, he's mostly owned. I was looking around for him just in case, maybe in a 12-teamer he was unowned. But people have been waiting on him for a while. So at this point, you've made your bed.

And if you feel bad when you're watching Dustin May pitch and you say, I should have gotten on him earlier or spent more money or blah, blah, blah, blah, just remember all the other pitches you've had pitch in between while the other person had to have Dustin May sitting on their bench. So it's not always super easy to see that, and it's easy to remember, oh, Dustin May got away. Oh, I had him, and then I had to drop him because I had an injury crunch.

Well, who else pitched for you in between? So I think generally I want to be cautious on pitchers returning from injury. Remember Soroka. Oh, it's Achilles. It's not his arm. And then it goes again. I'd rather they came back and demonstrated health before I do a large investment. I can't remember, and maybe my memory is just bad,

I can't remember any of the pitchers having multiple Achilles injuries like this before. That's a pretty tough road back for Soroka. So my expectations initially are really low. But if he comes back and pitches well, I think I can end up being the high-ranker on Soroka going into next season. I've always liked him from a pure talent perspective. The lack of Kays hasn't bothered me because he's been so young for the level. Everywhere he's pitched, it seems like he's got a good plan for just getting hitters out.

The command seems really good. So I'm a little more wait-and-see on him only because it's so unusual to come back from this combination of injuries by comparison i would have more confidence in may and mccullers in the short term nice to see jesus lizardo pitching pretty well in his first couple starts back to 11k is only one walk so far in 12 innings it's coming off that shoulder injury that put him on the il way back in may yeah it's interesting he said he's coming back focusing more on command um and i saw that big drop off in velo which is meaningful pretty quickly um jessamine found three starts into a return off the il um you're you're starting to get almost all signal uh in terms of predicting

the rest of your fastball velocity so So I was kind of out on Lizardo based on that early velocity report, but he's a guy that could benefit from better command. So if he's sort of, and for better health results. So if he's going to step off of his max max velo and get enough location out of it, then maybe he can be a guy that has only about 100, 101 stuff plus, slightly above average actually for a starting pitcher, but improves his locations and improves his health outcomes.

And we know he has a great home park. So I may have been a little premature in saying that he wasn't a pitcher I wanted right now coming back based on those early VLO readings. Yeah, I think he had plenty of VLO to give a little up, though, too. He averaged 96 on your fastball. He can lose a tick or two, and maybe that's a tradeoff worth making in Lazardo's case.

We'll see. He still has poor fastball shape. Maybe just locating it better, maybe mixing up the pitches more i mean there's the the the breaking ball is pretty good the fastballs are not we had a question here about a approach to hitters that i think is actually a very good approach in this particular instance it did not work this is from listener charles charles writes when considering obp leagues i've always favored hitters with excellent contact ability because plate skills can be one of the more reliable skills and if the batting order position is secure then you always have a chance for a power spike with power often being a late developing tool this year my approach has kicked

me in the teeth with soto bregman turner and winker do you think my strategy is overly flawed or is this just a run of bad luck? And I don't think the OBP league versus just a normal five by five league, I don't think it makes a big difference here. I think this is generally a good approach with hitters. I think this is a group of players that I would typically want to bet on over a longer period of time. But I do think there are a couple of questions to be answered. I mean, Winker leaving Cincinnati was a big blow. He went from a guy that I thought was a sneaky NL MVP candidate because average OBP and power would play up in Cincinnati to someone that I was pretty nervous

about switching leagues and being in a much more pitcher-friendly environment, at least one that was going to depress homers. But I also think Winker has an approach as a hitter that would be penalized a bit more than most in this run environment too, right? Because Winker is not just a pull-everything sort of hitter. So I wonder if we got a little bit of a an extra push in the wrong direction from winker for things that are out of his control yeah and i think uh you know psychologically you know if this sort of thing exists um you know handker's injury

came at a weird time because it left winker as the guy, you know, on a new team who was struggling. And I think that just leads to more pressing. And, you know, I think that there was a little bit of a spiral. You see, as the team has gotten better, Winker has gotten better, you know. And I don't think, it's hard to know chicken and egg in that situation, but Winker has been better recently and i think generally this is a great approach i was looking at so i've got the leaderboard here qualified hitters sorted by wrc plus on fan graphs and you've got a top 30 here do you want to wager a guess as to how many hitters in the top 30 by WRC Plus have a below average strikeout rate.

How many of the top 30 hitters by WRC Plus have a below average strikeout rate in a good way? No, I have like a worse than average strikeout rate. Okay, a worse than average. Then I will say that's a small number. I'm going to say five out of 30. Dang, you're pretty good. It's four.

Yeah, strikeouts are a big deal yeah you look at the top you see aaron judge with 25 you say oh take that and then you look at the next the next one is austin riley at seven um and then you have to go all the way down to the 26th no the 23rd ranked player to find another one above with a worse than average strikeout rate. So yes, one and seven out of the top 30 have below average strikeout rates, but then the next one is at 23. So between one and 23, 21 guys have better than average strikeout rates so it's definitely something uh to look for not all of them have uh above average walk rates but it's almost the same thing where let's see here one two three four five six six have below average walk rates

but we're still talking about 30 here so if you if you looked for above average strikeout rates and above average walk and better than average walk rates uh you would probably get you know the other 15 to 20 of the top 30 you know the other thing about this too is that winker was hitting the ball pretty hard for the better part of the last two seasons combined. The shortened season, 49% hard hit rate by StatCast. He was at 47.1% in 2021, his final season with the Reds. He's down at 32.6%. That's a massive drop in hard contact.

That has to be, among qualified hitters, one of the biggest drops in hard hit rate that we've seen so far this season yeah i i think that's related to pressing i think it was i think he was swinging at bad bad pitches i would say um but uh what i'm trying to do really real quickly here is K percentage less than 22, walk percentage greater than 0.085. Okay, that's going to be 0.9. I'm applying it. Oh, I said equal to. That's no good. Equal to will not help. No, less than. Here we go. I'm applying it. Why?

How come there's nobody? This, folks, is how sausage is made. Yes. It's beautiful. Okay, this ain't working. Never mind. I was trying to use the filters. You can use these filters.

Oh, there we go. All right, I got it. So strikeout rate less than league average and walk rate above league average. And then sorted by ISO, but I'm going to do it backwards. Here are possible Jesse Winkers of the future. Steven Kwan. Cabrian Hayes. gavin lux oh jesse winker jesse winker still still there could be the jesse winker of the future um who is young on this list jake cronenworth could that's you remember jake cronenworth did did have that power breakout one year.

Alejandro Kirk, interesting name on there. He hits the ball hard. Yeah, Alex Bregman again. See, some of these are the players he has on his team. It didn't work out for all of them. Why does it go wrong for some of these players who have this really good approach that we fundamentally didn't believe in? Like we, we want players that do this.

Why, why does it go wrong? I mean, Bregman, Bregman hasn't been right for a long time. And yet he's 25% better than league average. You shush your mouth. Right. But he hasn't been the player we've expected him to be from a fantasy perspective because all of those, those homers have pretty much disappeared. You look at the past, well, for this season, just for a moment, I'll look at the past year up too, but this is pretty illustrative, I think, of who he is.

Bregman's a.247,.353,.420 hitter this year. 13 homers. Doesn't steal bases. Bregman is jerks in proar right now and profar actually steals some bases run productions about the same profile is on this list yeah so how how does alex bregman turn into jerks and profar i have one idea and i did actually say this to breggan last time i saw him um i talked to marco scudero a long time ago when i was early on when i was in the in the park 2011 2010 something like that and i said uh i said you lead the league in in contact rate and he goes yeah i probably lead

the league in bad contact too um and he was. And he was saying that sometimes he wished he would swing over a pitch so that he could get another shot at it, because you make contact with the wrong pitch, and you're just putting a weak ball into play. I think that's a descriptor for, like, Stephen Kwan, man. That guy does not miss. It doesn't always lead to a homer. Because he can make contact on pitcher's pitches.

So sometimes you want these guys to be maybe more selective, swing a little bit less. Stephen Kwan has said that the Guardians have told him that they would like him to be more aggressive, use his A swing more often. talked to nico horner recently and i said how how have you you know sort of tapped into more power and and you're pulling more fly balls this year and he said the only thought i've had that's any different than the past is i want to be a little bit more aggressive this year so i think that's what you want to see out of some of these guys is more a

swings maybe a little bit more swing and miss um because they're using their a swings but more a swings where they're trying to drive the ball they are swinging with intention but at least they've got that sort of superstar like really superstar underlining you know like this is the only way to become a superstar almost the only way to become a superstar is to be really good at the plate and really powerful you know what i mean like really good at at patience really good at contact and really powerful you can have guys like aaron judge who have a little bit more swing and miss than usual um i guess i put it ronald acuna jr in that group um and that just i guess is just top top shelf athleticism but it's a little bit easier to find guys that pop up into that maybe second level of star if you start with really good plate skills.

And I still believe that. I'm just looking at the Stephen Kwan hard hit balls volume count and barrels volume count. Okay, you hit everything. We know the rate can be low. How many barrels do you think Stephen Kwan has this season? He has 317 batted ball events. How many barrels do you think he has? Oh, God. That's a great question because the percentage is low. He only has two homers.

381 slugging, though. I'm going to go with five. He's got three. Three! Three barrels. So when you start thinking about the future Winkers list, which, again, it's funny that Jesse Winker himself is on there, I think you do want to find hitters that barrel the ball some.

Like Kwon, Kwon is his own thing. He's a very odd player. And unless he starts stealing bases or doing something else that we get really excited about in fantasy, he's going to be pretty firmly in my much better real-life player than fantasy player group. And a lot of times those players don't end up on my rosters at all, even though there can be decent value there, right? If he ends up sticking high in the order, hits for a good average over a large volume of playing time,

scores a lot of runs, that's not a bad player, but it's not necessarily a profile that's going to get a lot better. Yeah, yeah. necessarily a profile that's going to get a lot better yeah yeah that's why i like uh i i know that um there's some debate about the usefulness of of max ev but i still like uh max exit velocity as a as a raw power number i've done some more filtering on this leaderboard where now i have everybody under the age of 27 with more than 250 plate appearances and i've added barrels and max ev uh to the uh the the leaderboard um and i still think brian hayes counts as a possible future winker because he's got these good plate skills uh he has the 113 max ev which is one of the best

on this list uh and he does have at least 12 barrels this year. Alejandro Kirk is 100% in this group because he has these great play skills. He has 12 homers this year. That's pretty good, but he has 110 max EV and a good barrel rate. Luis Urias looks okay in this. Will Smith, I think, might have another level in him when it comes to power. And then you start getting people

who are actually getting the results you'd expect. And Will Smith is pretty borderline because he's already got a 202 ISO, so he's had a pretty good year. But, you know, early on, I like Luis Urias, Cabrian Hayes, and Alejandro Kirk as the next Jesse Winkers. The never-ending pursuit of the next Jesse Winker. Even as the current Jesse Winker leaves us cold.

Yeah, he's just out there disappointing us. Like, let's get more guys like that. Just be real careful when they switch parks, I guess. Yeah, no, I think after, switch parks, I guess. Yeah, no, I think after, I mean,

I, I was in on winker before the trade backed off after the trade. I might be back in again going into the next season because the price is going to come down. So that's how it goes. As we've said, time and time again, thanks a lot for the many great questions that basically inspired the entire rundown today.

If you've got questions for a future episode, you can send those to rates and barrels at the athletic.com. Our Twitter handles work to at Derek and Riper at, you know, Sarah's also, you can leave questions under this video if you're watching us on YouTube. So be sure to do that. If you're tuning in there and be sure to subscribe to the rates and barrels

YouTube channel, really appreciate everybody who's done that. If you don't have a subscription to The Athletic, you can get one for a dollar a month for the first six months at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Thursday.

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