Rates & Barrels - Dylan Crews Gets the Call & Saber Conference Highlights

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Eno and DVR discuss the promotion Dylan Crews and one major change in his profile with the move from Double-A to Triple-A earlier this season. After a weekend at the 'Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball' conference in Chicago, Eno shares a highlights from a few of the many interesting presentations. Plus, they look at the surge of Jhonkensy Noel as an important power source in the Guardians' lineup, and Bowden Francis' move toward Top-50 Starting Pitcher status.  Rundown 1:02 Dylan Crews Promoted by Nationals 8:36 Xavier Edwards' Partial Season Breakout 13:14 Nolan Gorman's Demotion to Triple-A; What Went Wrong in 2024? 18:22 Eno in Chicago: Saber Conference Takeaways 43:39 Ongoing Studies About the Value of Adding Pitches 56:04 Where the Money Went This Weekend Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Join us on Thursday at 1p ET/10a PT for our next livestream episodes! Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Hosts: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does possible sound like for your business? It's more cash on hand to grow with up to 55 interest-free days. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit mx.ca slash Business Platinum. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, it's Monday August 26th. Derek Van Ryper, EnoSaris here with you on this episode. We've got some baseball news you should know, including another prospect promotion, Dylan

Cruz headed to DC. He'll debut on Monday against the Yankees. So we'll talk about some adjustments Dylan Cruz made during his brief time at AAA. We've got some other news we'll get to. Eno was on the road in Chicago for a Sabre Conference. We'll talk about a lot of the interesting presentations that you get to see over the course of the weekend.

And as we do every Monday, we'll look at where the money went with our fantasy baseball weekly pickups that happened on Sunday night, as well as a few interesting moves of our own. I think we'll just go. I know you had a great weekend. We're going to talk about the weekend later. Let's start with Dylan Cruz. You know, he's up another prospect up for the Nationals.

You had a few reservations a little earlier in the year. We talked about Cruz. I think in the sense that he wasn't really pulling the ball enough. And that led to some questions about how much game power he was going to get to. We saw five homers in 51 games at double a earlier this year was a 123 WRC plus, right? Good numbers like a 343 OBP, but just not the other worldly, right out of the box from LSU, maybe superstar level production,

some people were hoping for this time last year even. So what do we see change at AAA? And knowing the limitations of that level, and ABS and the things that make AAA different than AA right now. How excited are you now compared to where you stood previously with Cruz getting the bump to DC? Yeah, I mean, he still looks like a five-tooler, I think, that has an excellent future in the game. 22 years old.

Been mostly above average at every stop that he's been at. I think that if you take the 105 WRC plus the AAA this year, you'd adjust that upwards for his age. Not maybe not too much. I think maybe 23 is the average in AAA, but you'd still give him some credit for age. Nice, decent walk rates, really, you know, an improving strikeout rate as he's gone through the minor leagues for age. Nice decent walk rates really you know an improving strikeout rate as he's gone through the minor leagues for Cruz. Wheels, power. The one thing I will say is that I'm still a little concerned about how much his pull rate has oscillated and I know some of these are in small samples but he debuted in A-ball I mean he debuted debuted in complex ball, but I'm not looking at that

as three played appearances. So he debuted in A-ball, had a 29.5% pull rate, Dylan Cruz did, and then he goes into double A and he has a 54% pull rate, but in the 85 played appearances, then 2024 he starts in double A and he has a 27% pull rate? I mean just for context, 40% is average. So he's just not average, ever. And then he gets the AAA and it's 46.8. So it just looks to me like someone

who's really kind of toggling, go and get the ball, let it travel, and trying to figure out how, when to like maybe take those chances and go get that ball. One thing that figure out how, when to like, maybe take those chances and go get that ball. One thing that's a little concerned too is like when he pulls the ball, his ground ball rate goes up, which makes sense. There's a there's a correlation there between if you start pulling the ball,

the key is to pull in the air and the risk is you pull on the ground because pulling on the ground usually just leads to outs. So, you know, there is some kind of like up and down in his bad ball mix and his pull rate that makes me think that he may not just let the league on fire. And if he does, he may have a large adjustment period at some point, but also gives me the confidence that by year two or three, at least, he will have the opportunity to put it together. And so I have a name for you that's a weird comp. And we talk about a little bit. Colt Keith. Colt Keith is naturally a guy who wants to go the other way. And he comes up and he tells me in the Arizona fall league, I'm learning how to pull for power. I'm learning how to add that to to going the other way. He comes up to big leagues and he tells me I just got domed up and he just he he doesn't know what to do. Pull or push or whatever for the first bit. Then he gets back to pushing the ball. And I showed him a graph of his his rolling Wobba and his rolling opposite

field for Colt Keith. And most of the time people's power and Wobba go up as they pull more but for him the more he went oppo the better his woe did. So that's like that's what Colt Keith is at his core. He's a guy who's gonna hit you an opposite field single right. But he says when I am hitting the opposite field single I might sometimes out in front. That's opposite field single on the fastball. I might be out front on the slider and take you take it deep. So that's your sort of 15 to 18 homers a year. Now the difference, the reason that Dylan Cruz is better than Colt Keith is A, like you mentioned, you know, even if it is Colt Keith, it's Colt Keith with wheels.

And then B, Colt Keith, he's topped out about 110. We already have 112.6 from Dylan Cruz. So it's, um, it's plus bat speed plus exit velocity with just a slight whiff of, you know, concerning opposite field. Like he really have to, um, like Stanton has a really good opposite field approach, right? He maxed out one hundred and twenty. It's just different for Stanton. Yeah. Yeah. Things are different.

So I just I guess as long story short, I don't know what Dylan Cruz's power upside is. His demonstrated power in the minor leagues is actually not amazing. 172 ISO, 190 ISO. It's a little bit less than people expected. Yeah, I think I think there's above average in game power there for Dylan Cruz. Eventually, it might not be there immediately, and that's fine. And he has so many ways to be valuable from a fantasy perspective in the short term that you can you can bet on him early and it's fine if it's not there.

It's probably a good average. It's like really likely to be a good LBP and it's likely to have stolen bases. So like that's a pretty good package and non-zero power. So it's more just a quibble of like is he a 20 homer hitter or is there more in there? Right. And it's also like if he's getting on base at a three 40 clip, eventually not immediately is he's running as often as he did in the minor. She's 25 for 30 this year in a hundred games slip between double A and triple A. So we're looking at a 15 to 20 homer guy with 30 plus steals. Like that's a really nice player high up in a lineup. That's getting a lot better pretty quickly on a team that's running like crazy.

Yep. Yeah. So I mean, I think, uh, if you need steel, like if it's like a short-term thing, like I think you, you buy them basically if you need steels and playing time, that's what you're looking for. Um, you know, if you need power, you may, you may do it. You know, I mean, it's a, it's a decent park for power. So maybe he has a little bit of a park aided power.

It is funny though. You said that 40% pull rate. This is about league average. And last year when he got to double a 53% for Dylan Cruz. So 13 percentage points above normal. And then this year he's at 27, 13 points below. So he is a 40% pull rate guy at double A. If you just mash it together.

But he did it in the most bizarre way possible. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when you look at something like this, you might also just be looking at, you know, this is what we're working on, you know, and then he gets the big leagues and he's just like, well, this is what my core identity is, you know? And so maybe maybe it'll be more oppo in the in the major leagues. Yeah. So excited to watch it. And I think there is some even shadow league appeal.

If you start five outfielders in your league, there's a good enough chance Dylan Cruz is good enough to be rostered Maybe not used right away in a 10 teamer, but probably better than your worst outfielder in formats like that Xavier Edwards is going on the IL with a back injury. I just wanted an excuse to talk about him I don't know if his season is over based on the initial descriptions It doesn't seem like it's necessarily the case. It could be a relatively minor back injury. And I think Xavier Edwards is more in the group of players where if you can get him back this year

and continue to give him big league reps, you would want to do that if you're the Marlins because he's only got, you know, 286 career plate appearances in the big leagues. And what he's done so far this year has been excellent, right? It's sort of this hit tool and good strike zone judgment, very little power, excellent speed. He's 22 for 24 as a base dealer in 47 games.

So I kind of think this is like an answer to the question about Asturias Ruiz from a couple of draft seasons ago. Like what if Asturias Ruiz's plate skills and low strikeout rates, and what if that poured it over to the question about Asturias Ruiz from a couple of draft seasons ago. If like, what if Asturias Ruiz's plate skills and low strikeout rates, and what if that poured it over to the big leagues? Like that's kind of what Edwards has done in about a third of a big league season. And Ryan Bloomfield stepped in while you're out on Friday. We were talking about how in the early rounds of drafts, I've got this newer tendency to push power a little more than speed because I

feel like I can find speed later. This would be a profile and more comfortable betting on than Ruiz's just because of the differences in getting on base. That's the big thing we've seen from Edwards that Ruiz has not done consistently yet at the big league level. There's a little bit also of defensive value. I don't know, you know, the defensive numbers are not all excellent for Xavier Edwards. But just being able to play him at shortstop for a team that's desperate for short stops is a little different than I think Ruiz playing centerfield for a team in Oakland that had

other options. Honestly, you know, they had Butler coming through, they had Bladay, they just traded for like. field for a team in Oakland that had other options, honestly. You know, they had Butler coming through, they had Bladay, they just traded for like, you could read the writing on the wall there a little bit. There's a little desperation in Miami for a shortstop. They're going to put another second baseman in that shortstop while Edwards is out in Vidal Brujjan. And to some extent, Brujjan has a similar set of skills but has just not

turned it into the kind of results that Edwards has. In terms of walking a lot, not striking out, speed and terrible batted ball stats. And so, you know, I think it, I don't. One thing is, I don't think there's enough room on this roster for Edwards and Brujjan. So, uh, you're betting on Edwards as it is, but it could be either of them. Honestly, they have very, don't you think there's similar players? They're pretty similar. Yeah.

I think Edwards has shown a bit more. Polish, but they both have sub 25% hard hit rates. That's a problem. I just I think in Miami, this can work for a little while. So it's the unusual speed first player that doesn't really offer much present power and probably not much long-term power that I think does enough in average and probably hits high enough in the order where the other categories fall into place just enough to make the profile I ordinarily wouldn't be interested in, just interesting enough to take a chance on.

But it's also a small enough sample. Like I just, I wanna see more. I wanna see more before the end of the season if possible. I mean, the flip side is he's doing all this stuff for 13 Babab. You know, I mean, if you and that is actually the biggest difference between the two, Brujahn is projected for a 280 Babab. And and Xavier Edwards is projected for a 330 a three thirty even three forty by zips.

So even if it's not four thirteen it's gonna it's it's gonna come back to a different mean he has some sort of line drive skill maybe that bruhon doesn't. You can turn a 280 average into like a 340 LVP, and then your slugging doesn't matter as much for a team that's while you're still playing a good defensive position. So that that is actually the difference between Brujhan and Edwards. It might be the difference between, you know, Edwards having a career and Brujhan being mostly a backup in his career. Yeah, that's that's the way I see them right now. There are similarities, but I think there's a clear preference for Edwards for me and

probably for the Marlins looking ahead at 2025 as well. From very little power to plenty of power, Nolan Gorman got sent down before the weekend. This has been a strange year for the Cardinals in so many ways. I thought a lot of what was going to make them a more dangerous team this year was growth from a player like Gorman, Jordan Walker. Now, both of these guys, and Walker has spent most of this year at AAA, both of these guys were demoted. If you said before the season, yeah, one's going to go down for a little while and one's going to be better than he was last year. That was probably the most likely outcome. And there was a chance both were just better than they were last year. And they were a big part of

how the Cardinals ended up winning the NL Central in 2024. But that's not the storyline of the season. The K-rate has been worse than ever for Nolan Gorman. 37.6%. It leads to a lot of questions like, is Nolan Gorman himself fixable? Can the Cardinals fix Nolan Gorman and do the Cardinals need to make some changes in the coaching staff within the group of hitting instructors? Like what, what changes need to take place here for Nolan Gorman to work as a big leaguer? And then does it even happen in St. Louis?

Yeah. So it's a tough one. And does it even happen in St. Louis? Yeah, so it's a tough one. He's very obviously a part of an archetype, which is he's a low ball hitter with a good sense of the zone and a huge hole at the top of the zone. You're looking at a Kyle Schwab type. Not quite the same max EVs, but really nice barrel rates.

Definitely a strong strikeout problem. This year, I'm seeing that his pitch type values for Nolan Gorman for the fastball have gone from a strong positive to a strong negative for the foreseen fastball. So hold the top of the zone, four seam fastball problem, it seems like

he won't fix it and it's impossible, but other players have fixed this exact problem and he kind of fits into an archetype that will never give you a good batting average, but probably should be'll never give you a good batting average, but probably should be able to give you decent OVP and slugging. So I think it's an okay time to

pick him up in an OVP league, try to try to try to trade for him if he's still got trade time. Even in like a 12 team OVP, like if you're rebuilding and you've got like a little spot, 12 team OBP, like if you're rebuilding and you've got like a little spot, I'm struggling. I have an auto new team where he's on my five by five and he's five by five and he's $4 going to $6 next year. I think he's on my cut list. I would agree. 12 team league. Yeah. With, with that, like, you know, or if we have, am I, you just get them back. You just, you say, maybe I get them back for the same price, but at least I had

the roster spot and flexibility to try, try something else too, if I wanted it. Yeah. And batting average, he's never, I just think I think he's a going to be a career like two 20 to 30 at most, um, guy. Yeah. What do you think Kyle Schwab's career averages like two 15, two 29. Yeah. career averages? Like 215? 229. Yeah, Kaushwara. But what's Kaushwara's career OVP? 344. He needs to, Gorman needs to figure that bit out. He needs to figure out how to get on base.

If it's just spitting on every high pitch, I'm just not sure you can do that in today's league. Everyone's got a four seam now. It's hard to believe a 117 WRC plus last year because he was getting to that power. 27 homers and 464 plate appearances. 328 OBP. Like it was there. Like he did it. Like he had it figured out. I can't believe it's this much worse. That just gives you a sense of how hard hitting big league pitching is right now. He's still 24. I think he's got another shot I mean I do think there there's a chance for some post hype here who if you were trading only for one

right now would you target out of Gorman or Walker do you believe in more long term I'm gonna go with Walker I think think that, you know, he was already in trade rumors this year. He's 22. So he's younger. His strikeout rate problem is not as as pronounced. And he hits the same high end of the VELOs. And I'm not sure that we can really hold an 8% barrel rate in 544 played appearances against Jordan Walker yet. So I would trade for Jordan Walker over him, yeah. Especially for how young Walker is at the time of those plate appearances. I mean, I stunned that both of these guys have had the seasons they've had, but I imagine there will be some changes in St. Louis as a result of this and a few other things that have transpired over the course of this year. If you're an F1 fan, you'll know that this season has evolved into one of the most

exciting and unpredictable of recent times, with an incredible seven different winners from four different teams. It's impossible to predict what will happen in the second half of 2024, but one thing you can be sure of is that the Race F1 podcast will be with you every step of the way, with myself, Ed Straw, and some of the best F1 reporters in the world on the ground at every race to bring you the inside track on the stories that matter. Just search for the Race F1 podcast on your podcast app of choice and join us twice a week, every week, for your regular F1 Fits. All right, you know, you were on the move this weekend.

The segment's called Where the Eno Went. You were in Chicago for a Saber conference. So thanks to everybody who came out to the meetup at the Beer Temple. That was fun. I always had a good time there. And then, yeah, Saber seminar started. If you are on the fence, I hope that me sort of running down some of the stuff that we learned about this weekend puts you closer to coming next year because it was a lot of

fun. We had just a really diverse set of presenters and topics. One that I really enjoyed was Adam Neville from Auburn University with Gretchen Oliver from their movement lab. So this is, you know, Auburn is a little bit like Wake Forest and that they have a movement lab that they're doing, you know, kind of biomechanical research in. And they're doing that in concert with the school. And so it's like, you know, doctors and, and professors and players coming together to learn more, there's a lot of knowledge that's coming out of places like this. And, and in the past, what we found is a lot of this knowledge is

coming out of the lab portion. So Wake Forest, they've definitely found things about the way our body moves that are ideal, and that's helped permeate the baseball. And so some of the things we do, we do now because they figured it out at Wake Forest. You know? And so at Auburn, they asked this question, which is like, you know, we're finding these things out in the lab. How much do they actually correlated those same things that we think are correlated in the lab environment? How much are they correlated in the practice environment?

And that's something we talk about Trevor May and other players in the past. And Joe Ryan was, was very sort of vocal about the fact that he was throwing a splitter in his bullpens that at 80% effort that looked totally different at a hundred percent effort, um, on the mound. And, um, so what, what Adam found was that we have this relationship between trunk velocity, you know, and how quick your core moves and and and and pitch velocity. And so that's led a lot of people like, how can we make people's core move faster? And like, let's focus on trunk velocity and all this.

Well, he used markerless motion capture cameras during games to find out that that link is stronger in the practice environment than it is in the game environment. And, you know, it's hard to know exactly what that means. It could mean, for example, that in the practice environment, we are mechanically

sound and we're pitching at 80% and everything is nice. And then we get out there and our butt cheeks tighten and there are people yelling at us and we got to get the out and we just use more parts of our body. Yeah, sure. Like adrenaline fuels some different things. Yeah. But it also has implications for like, hey, we should really test a lot of these assertions that we have from the lab environment. We should be testing these in game environments and making sure that these they're actually the same. You know, so I thought that was good.

We've we've talked a little bit about Rob Main's ongoing work at baseball for baseballpectus with Braves financial documents. And he went and showed one thing that really stood out was A, that their operating profit is on the level of $50-$60 million a year. Yes, they are a successful team, But that does suggest that they're making money on a yearly basis, most of these teams. And then the other thing he showed was that the ends like that when they bought it, what Libre bought it to what it's worth now. You'd

call that sort of like 12% growth per year. And he went and sort of showed what that would be, like how good the best sort of, like, you know, like retirement packages or the S&P 500, or like if you'd, you know, like what you could expect from other ways of investing are like 30%, like you'd be happy to get like what you could expect from other ways of investing are like 30%, like you'd be happy to get four or 5% a year.

You know what I mean? Like you'd just be happy to outpace inflation and these guys are making 12% a year on their investment on when they buy teams. So it seems to be for me, like just a really solid investment that everybody who has the amount of money to do wants to do it. You never you always hear about people wanting to buy teams.

You don't really hear about people not wanting to buy teams when they're talking about the rich people, right? Right. Oh, yeah. No, thanks. I don't want to make 12% your yeah, exactly on something that is like, you know, also fun to own and like I get to sit in the front seat and stuff. So, um, uh, good, good friend, Nick one, uh, who is the head of R and D for the, the Reds, um, I, he got on stage and he made stuff plus in 15 minutes.

So pull back the curtain a little bit more. Like, what do you mean? Like, he wrote the code for it in front of everybody. He live coded. And then he even checked his work and was like, well, see, look at the correlations. It's about the same as theirs. And that's like, because he's checking against ours.

And that made me mad, but it is a reflective of the industry right now. I would say that every team save one. And if you had to guess which one doesn't have a stuff model, you'd be right. I'd say that every team save one has a stuff model. And in the public sphere sphere we're seeing obviously competing stuff models and kind of an explosion there. So it is, I think, our plan to make our next version of Stuff Plus open source so that people can play along and there can be more findings and people can know exactly how we

do ours because Nick Juan just did it in 15 minutes on the screen for everyone to see. There are no secrets anymore. You know, Anthony Mooy did a cool presentation about file balls. And what he did was he made he looked at like, you know, which pitches, you know, would you expect to do damage on and which pitches would you would expect to be a called strike or a ball? And so he modeled like expected damage, expected called strike or, you know, or call ball on each pitch.

And then he looked at, you know, what happens when you get a foul ball and what happens afterwards. And what he found was that like, if you foul off a ball that has low X damage. So if you fall off a ball outside the zone that you can't drive. The result is you get more pitches outside the zone. It's a win for the pitcher. Think about it like you swung at a ball and you didn't do anything that hurt them with it. So yeah, you're going to go back to that again. Ball into a strike. So yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. So, uh,

it also, I think that the hardest thing here is teasing out the natural selectivity of the player. Cause when I hear that, I see Pablo Sandoval, that extreme, you know, you're like that dude swung at everything and he had great hit tool. And so he did fall off a lot of those balls, but falling off those balls only led to getting more of those pitches because as a pitcher, you're, I'm not that worried about you there, you know, this is going to be a foul ball or, or like a weak pop up or something. So, um, the, on the other hand, if you foul off balls down in the zone,

which sounds like a win for the pitcher, it's not necessarily because that was just a sort of a miss hit by the hitter. And if you gave him a ball there again, he's more likely to hit it or be out of the league. You know what I mean? If you keep throwing me high X damage pitches and I keep fouling them off, that is not a good sign, but it's probably not something that's going to continue if I'm a major league quality player. But this is something you can see when you're watching a game. You can almost see the reactions on hitters a lot of times when there's a pitch they should have done damage

on and they follow, you know, meatball, fastball, they follow it back and you could see it like, oh, they know they might not get another one like that to hit for a while, especially in that same sequence. But you could tell it's a missed opportunity. Yeah. So some people were talking afterwards about this idea that, oh, actually, this was Nick Pollock in the craft last week. He was talking about the gambit in rock paper scissors. Apparently what we all do because there are rock paper scissors championships.

Sure. Of course there are. Why are you surprised by that? He was saying that like, uh, your, your idea, like your subconscious idea is that, um, to use the thing that you just got beat on. Yeah. That seems like basic, like a psychological principle that holds up in that game. Sure. Yeah. So, um, I think that actually sort of applies here a little bit where the pitcher is

like, oh, I beat you on that. Yeah. I have an advantage. That worked. I won. I got a small win. I'm gonna go back and do that again. Yeah, because I can't get hurt out there. I think as a pitcher,

the way to work against it is to be aware of this tendency, and say, okay, I know he just fouled off a slider in the zone and that's a strike for me, but I should not consider that so much a win and just throw off a slider in the zone and that's a strike for me, but I should not consider that so much a win and just throw him another slider in the zone. Right. Because he's probably not going to do it again. I think on the extremes, especially that's clearly understood.

I think there's probably some stuff like around the shadow zone, for example, where it's a little less clear like, Hey, did I, did I actually win on that foul ball or was that actually a possible trouble spot? I wonder if there are certain instances that are very hard to discern whether or not it's a good idea to go back to that spot. And if that's where some pretty interesting home runs are hit, you're like, oh, wow. If we played that out 100 times, would that have gone that way every time or was that just the combination of circumstances that led to

a really unique outcome? Yeah. Yeah. And, um, you know, other than that, like, you know, if you want a job in baseball, this is one of the better ones because it's, um, it's a little bit, uh, smaller than some of the other conferences. Like Sloan is huge. It's every sport. It's a little bit smaller than some of the other conferences like Sloan is huge. It's every sport It's really expensive

You know and yes people might get jobs there, but it's a tougher one, and I'm not even sure it's worth. I haven't gone in years So I'm not sure about Sloan saber analytics is pretty good, but it also is a more There's a more of a historical bent because of Savor's, you know, tendencies as an organization in the past is SABR, you know, Society of American Baseball Research, like a lot of it's like some of it's in the past and then it's a little bit bigger. This one is like a little bit smaller. It's like just one auditorium, know and they teams are outside interviewing.

They are literally outside interviewing people are getting jobs at these conferences and so you know if you can get yourself on the docket at Sabre seminar they will be guaranteed at least 10 directors of r&d in the crowd. in the crowd that are interviewing that day. And you could do something as simple as present at Saber Seminar and get an interview on spot. I mean, that's kind of things that happen. I don't know that I have a name for you, but I was watching it happen. I was watching people who were just presenting, interviewing with different teams, you know?

So that's a cool part of it. But they also have aspects of it that are a little bit like Sabre where they're researching like the Braves money. That's not necessarily what we think of as sort of analytics in the same way. But another one, oh, it was just a really fascinating study by Rob Arthur.

Rob Arthur has given us things like the value of a small change in fastball velocity and how that's predictive of future success for a pitcher. And so the hot hand in pitching, he's done a lot of great things. He was one of the first people that found that the ball was juiced in 2019.

And he's given us the idea that exit velocity is four parts or five parts bad or one part pitcher. You know in terms of who has control over that so he's a lot of great research not with this is a little bit of new angle for him he did a piece at a presentation about racial bias in baseball and his data set went to twenty nineteen so. It's not gone. And he talked about racial bias in the minor leagues and he defined it a couple of different ways and he kept proving it was still there. One way that he showed it was player black player war share in the major leagues is bigger than the player share. Which is not what you'd expect if things were merit a meritocracy right you'd expect them to have more players to meet the war share you know so. You know why would it be that only really excellent black players are more excellent black players come up and why not so many replacement level black

players? Like, what does that mean? So he had, I, I'm sorry, I don't have the book in front of me, but he had a book that, uh, where they, they talked to play black players and they talked about like, what were the different ways that you saw systematic bias? And one of them was called stacking. And so what you see in the minor leagues is black players play the outfield way more than any other position. They do not play catcher.

I mean, if you think that there's not been a black catcher in a while, you're right. You know, and it's like, it's very rare to have a black catcher. And he showed us very obviously that there's just more black outfielders than you'd expect. And also that when they make position changes in the minor leagues, what they do all the time, when like, oh, you're not a shortstop anymore, you're going to second or whatever, that all of them just go to outfield.

Like there's, you know, they showed, he showed like white players, like the map of like where they switch positions. And it was like all over the place. It was like, oh, second and third, you know, like all these different, and for the black people, it was like, there were some like, oh, some of them started at second, outfield.

You know? It was like, there's more questions being asked for like white play. Oh, we could try you here, here, here for a black place. You're an outfielder. You're not this, you're an outfielder. Outfield. Outfield, go.

And the most amazing out of all of this, I thought was, so he was, like, if someone's listening to me, like, how do they even know the race? That was, that's an interesting part. And he talked about that, you know, in terms of what we're talking about here, it doesn't actually matter what their race is. It matters what their perceived races, because we're talking about biases, perceived, you know, we're talking about the perception of the people in charge or like the perception of the organizations, right? So that, you know, that matters almost more what their perception is.

And so he trained a model on their screenshots, which he has going back, you know, decades, you know, for all these players. And he trained the model to just basically break everybody up into RGB. You know, and just get color and some some sort of facial recognition stuff and sort of so his model was 94 percent correct on predicting, you know, what people that sort of just looked at it would have guessed the race was right. So decent model for predicting what this these races are. And so that model now can break all these facial these pictures into RGB, right?

And so he just looked at the RGB, like he just looked at the color of these people's skin for outfielders and catchers. And even within the sort of perceived racial categories, so black as in black is defined by his model, right? The skin was lighter on the catchers that did remain then the outfielders and Even for for Latino people the outfield skin color was darker Than it was for the infield and for catchers

And it's like kind of how do you explain that like if you're like, oh, there's all sorts of other biases cultural or whatever Like all these different things that couldn't happen. We don sorts of other biases, cultural or whatever, all these different things that couldn't happen. We don't know the reason for all these. Well, that's kind of weird and damning that just by skin color they were lighter. It's kind of amazing. And the data set goes to 2024 and he did break it. There might have been a slight difference between more recent and

before, but not really. All these things that I've said were true of the miners five years ago. So I thought that was pretty eye opening. And there was another presentation that talked about that in terms of media and, you know, it's something that we think about, obviously, as an organization. And baseball does have RBI and does talk about how it wants to be more inclusive in terms of what players train and make it to baseball. But that's a very sort of, hey, we want more people to come in. But then what happens when they're in?

Are there still systematic biases in place? And it seems like there are. So that one was a pretty eye-opening presentation by Rob Arthur. The talk of the whole Saber seminar though was a presentation by Jack Lambert and Merrick Ramillo from DriveLine. And they debuted something they called Arsenal Plus, which is I think actually something I've done before, but you know, not like this. So in Arsenal Plus, you've got,

so I'm sorry that I don't have headers on this, I stole it from his Twitter account. His Twitter account is Jack, what is Jack, Jack Lambert underscore and he's the baseball operations coordinator driveline. The first one is mix plus and mix plus was, you know, so they took, they took a pitch and they, they modeled it over time. And then they, they, and then they found where the hitter has to make his decision. And they took a pitch pair and they said fastball curve ball. And then they said, how much of the movement differential between that fastball

and curve ball happened after the, the point at which the hitter had to make a decision? Do I still got you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then they combine that all and they basically said, so they said, the thing that was controversial about this is in stuff plus we do something similar, we have the fastballs and anchor and all of these sort

of things are off of the fastball. And so fastball, so on some level stuff less is capturing some of this. But the problem is we're always using the fastball and so fast but so on some level stuff was capturing some of this but the problem is we're always using the fastballs and anchor pitch. And we know from hey how people are facing drive red sox pitchers this year that sometimes people sit slider. people try to anticipate in different counts. So what he did was fastball, curveball, fastball, change, curveball, change, and like kind of try all the different pairings within a person's arsenal. Add up all the sort of movement differentials that they that the hitter is trying to, you know,

trying to figure out that's mixed plus, you know. But what's controversial was no fastball is an anchor pitch, really sort of, but like only as an anchor pitch within certain pairings, not as an anchor pitch for everything. You know, it's more like pairings, looking at things in pairings. It makes a lot more sense to count intuitively, like just how pitching and arsenals interact with each other to quantify it that way. I'm not sure, though, because like if you do curveball changeup pairing,

like, do you do you think a hitter is ever sitting curveball and then whiffs on the change? Well, they'd better just follow it off, wouldn't they? And also just like just like mentally. It would be like I think that is still a bit rare to sit curve or sit change. Now, there are situations where we know people sit curve curve like some people like to do the first pitch curve and somebody will just be waiting on it and you know to hit a home or nearly go like that person sitting curve, so There's a lot to learn out of this one and and match plus was interesting too

Match plus was just basically so the the dorky thing is Euclidean distance. But think about this, like think about a graph of the movements of all the pitches. We've seen these before, you know, the fastball, the slider, all the, you know, that graph. He basically just measured the area created by that graph. So basically the space, the distance between all your pitches, the space created by the distance, your pitches. Like if you were fastball cutter, right, you, you not, there's not much around it. No, it's a tighter cluster.

Tighter. So, so Garrett crochet is going to have a bad match plus score. Cause he's just got these two pitches and nothing around it to make it a bigger situation as a hitter. You're like, I can just really focus in on this velocity band and these movements and that's it, you know. And so what if I think Greg Crochet next year should throw a curveball and it doesn't have to be the best curveball. But what would happen is that really expands the distance that the headers have to think about and what ends up happening they said is that if you add something that adds a lot of euclidean distance or that is very different from the rest of your pitches. What you end up doing is not getting swings on that pitch that's still valuable so if you think about it gar crochet could throw a seventy nine an hour curve. That's not that amazing. I always want to 100 green to do this.

Seventy nine mile an hour curve. That's not amazing that he lands in the zone. Can you land this in the zone? Because they're not going to swing at it because they're still going to be want to be fastball cutter on you. You know, yeah. So you'll see Max Fried is at the top because also in terms of matches,

he's got the big curveball and the four seam in the slider. So he's obviously got a good match plus his mix plus is really good because we know that he throws like a four seam sinker and cutter, you know. And so he throws all these different pitches that, you know, it'd be hard to kind of sit one pitch against them. And they're all kind of maybe maybe they're late movement Skeens is at the top. I think it's a well-designed arsenal for the stuff. He's got Chris Bassett is near the top. This is the type of player that we'd expect to be on here Spencer

Schwellenbach is near the top. We'd also expect him to be on there you Darvish Large Arsenal guys are gonna be up here You know even Cole Irvin, Seth Lugo's on here as he should be. You know, so Chris Sale is interesting because he has a high mix score. So it's really hard when you're facing Chris Sale to maybe tell the difference between his fastball and a slider. And yet they have a large amount of movement differential after, you know, you decided as a hitter which one you've got.

But the difference between his pitch movements is not as huge as you, as other pitchers. Like he does not, Chris Hale does not have a big curve. He goes to a lot, you know, everything's a little bit kind of sideways, you know, in that Chris Sale band of pitches. So this is definitely interesting. It inspired a lot of talk at the conference about the value of having an anchor pitch, what to do with getting away from an anchor pitch, how to model these effects. Arsenal effects have something that people refer to. There was another study there about the value of adding a pitch. And it's something that's, there's a lot of work going on in this space right

now, and we haven't all figured it out. It is a way I I think, to make something like Stuff Plus more effective in your analysis package. I think some of it's gonna help explain things that we previously looked at with Stuff Plus and said, okay, Max Fried never popped in that model, but there's gotta be something Max Fried is doing really well that enables him to outpace the results you'd expect from that model by

the margin that he does it. This, this is one of the ways to explain that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think the easiest way in the mean in the short term, um, is to, uh, basically just consider the size of an arsenal when you're evaluating a young pitcher with a small sample. If they have a bunch of pitches and seem to have good command of them and their stuff plus is mediocre. You don't need to necessarily Write them off. I think

You know, I guess one guy I sort of think of when I when I think of it this way is maybe like is Debbie Matthews he doesn't have the largest of arsenals, but You know, he does throw four pitches You know, he throws five pitches three three pitches regularly. And in terms of stuff plus, it's what is it? He's all right. 98 stuff plus, but he seems to locate everything. And so I wouldn't I wouldn't count them out. Is there sort of any young pitcher that that comes to mind when you think of like, you know,

you like him a little bit better than what his stuff says? Like better than stuff says? I mean, I think the models like Schwalbembach so he isn't quite fit for this example, but Aguiar's got pretty good stuff. I was thinking about Julian Aguiar because I picked him up in a league or two this weekend. Oh, does he? He's the new Reds? Yeah, I think he had good model numbers though.

I don't think he was a complete DVR special. I think there was reason beyond the analog things that draw me to players to get interested in. I think a decent example might be Gavin Stone. Stone's a good example. It's only 99 stuff plus, it's okay, but I think he's better than that. I mean, you know, somebody might say he has below average stuff plus A, that's not below average for a starter, and B, I think he does a lot of the other things we're talking about here. Large arsenal

with different kinds of movement patterns and decent command of it all. Aguiar does count. He's an 88 stuff plus. So that would fit. Yeah, you're right. I mean, Gavin Stone, 99. Like, I we looked at Gavin Stone, I think, back in April. I wondered, like, because he's the one, the slider, the 132 slider. Like, how is that not a better overall number? Like, it just didn't quite sit right looking at how good that pitch was relative to everything else for me.

So that's a good example. I'm watching Cater Montero a little bit. Yeah. I thought he was kind of interesting when the Tigers called him up and it's been a bumpy ride so far, but you know, it, it's just a young pitcher finding his way if young hitters can come up and struggle for a little while before they figure it out, why can't a young pitcher go through some growing pains, too? Yeah, it's part of why I liked Christian Scott a little bit when he came up.

And one thing, you know, the model still underrates lefties. So maybe it has a little bit to do with what's going on with Andrew Abbott. Oh, you know who it is a pitcher that actually That my pitcher for this is he's on your team. Oh, is it Tobias Myers? Yeah Yeah He throws 40% fastball 24% cutter 20% slider 4% curve 11% change the occasional sinker 4% cutter, 20% slider, 4% curve, 11% change. The occasional sinker had better swing and miss

in the minors, not the greatest strikeout rate right now. 92.9 on the fastball, you know, Stuff Plus has a 91. But when I watch him, I'm like, you're locating and you're playing different pitches off each other. And I think he has a decent sense, either a game plan or just like a just a just a general sense of who he is and how he's going to get out. He might be a little better than the model says he is. I think that makes sense. But having a million pitches certainly is that foundation you're looking for like, Oh, what do you have that helps you beat the model?

Well, I just have a lot of, a lot of different things I can throw at you. So you're not really sure what I'm going to do. And that could work for righties and lefties. You have multiple things you can do to hitters on both sides. Maybe you don't have a bad platoon split. There's different, different things that could help you fall into that. That's what this is sort of like trying to get at, like the way fit things, fit together off their list. Um, you know, the name that, that, that sort of comes to mind is Gavin Williams

as someone that might be actionable for you right now in your leagues. And it hasn't looked great, but we've talked about how his VLOS going up and something about his arsenal looks good in their estimation. And so, sometimes you also, with Gavin Williams, he also clicks that bucket where it's like, oh yeah, plus VLO, maybe he just figures the rest out. Maybe I should just take the guy who sits 97

and see if he figures it out. So it's interesting because I think for a long time there were expectations about what a player could or couldn't do based on a few factors. And race is one of them. The Rob Arthur study that you mentioned, right? So that that leads players down certain paths. But then there's like a skills bucket. Oh, well, it's a big fastball and not a lot of command must be a reliever. Right. And I just wonder, like across the entire universe of ways

people could analyze baseball players, like how many ways can we possibly have been getting it wrong over the years and how many ways do we still have? Like even if we're building models, models built by people are going to have some of those built in biases in them too, in some instances. Yeah, I think the thing I struggle the most with is command. I mean, you've heard me say I'm a stuffist on the show a million times and you've heard me say I'll bet on a guy

with big command, big stuff and figuring out the command and all that and I've watched Joe Boyle starts every time. But, you know, part is that we've just found that, oh, it's not a sticky year to year, and this and this and this. Well, one of our big plans for stuff plus revamping this off season is to make our location plus more predictive.

And we think we can do that with a combination of release angles. That's a Michael Rosen's work at fan graphs and some other stuff So I think if we take release angles and we take some stuff that Scott powers presented at Saber Semar last year We think that we can make it more predictive and that would be the model following our intuition again And I think that I think also the other thing is like to be careful to To not just... This is gonna come up in tomorrow's show a little bit too, because there's one more study

that I think people will be interested in from the S.A.V.E.R.E. seminar, but we often find that the models catch up with their intuition. And I don't wanna say that every time, just be like, what do the old school people say? Like they were, they were always right. They weren't always right.

We do make, we do make progress. We do find things. We do change the way the game is played. We do, you know, move forward because of analytics. But when somebody says like, oh, you haven't shown, we haven't been able to create a measure of stuff, of, of clutch that is sticky year to year that shows a skill. That's a different thing than saying clutch doesn't exist. And that's, I know it's a, like a nuance and it's a little line, but you know,

lineup protection, I've always tried to be careful of saying no one's going to It's a nuance and it's a little line, but you know, line up protection. I've always tried to be careful of saying. No one's been able to show lineup protection exists, and we'll learn a little bit more tomorrow, but that this is. You know that what I what I love about people who are serious about researching the game is I think a lot of them share that same feeling, which is give grace to old ideas. I think just as there can be things that were wrong

in that way of thinking, some of those things could have been exactly right or they could have had ideas that made sense as far as like, hey, we think this works this way, but we can't prove why it works this way. And then when people who couldn't prove why it would work that way, couldn't do it, they get frustrated and say,

oh, it doesn't work. No, that gets thrown out. And then eventually you come back around to it and you're like, oh, wait a minute, maybe this is a thing. You're right back to the questions that were being asked 30 or 40 years ago. Yeah.

You know, that was like Brett Phillips, by the way. Brett Phillips, I got an IVB. I texted Brett Phillips asking for his IVB. Did he laugh out loud? Oh my God. Yeah. 20, 20 IVB sitting 96. Okay. So we might actually see this. This might actually be a thing. He might actually make it as a so we might actually see this. This might actually be a thing. He might actually make it as a reliever.

Oh my god, I can't wait to have that laugh back in the dugout. But Brett Phillips once told me that if you could get our catapult that if we could wear catapults, and catapult is like this kind of harness that gives you real time information about your heart rate and different things. He said, if we could wear the catapult in games, there would be absolutely classes of people that do different things biologically in clutch moments. And if you could, if you had that measurement, you might be able to tie it together with results in a way that people haven't been able to do before.

Yeah, unfortunately, you can't wear that in the game. I'm not I'm not telling the MLBPA they need to start giving away heart rates in games. I know that's that's a that's a battle I don't need to have. But, you know, you you could do it in practice environments and see, you know, if you can, you can goose it up and see what happens if you make it a scrimmage. And there's the games on the line and the scrimmage.

I mean, people do care, even on little games like that. But in any case, my point is that sometimes the model and the measurements have to catch up to the thinking. Yeah, well, it sounds like a great weekend and one that I'd like to get on my calendar in the future, especially if it's still in Chicago. It's so close now that I'm back back here in the Midwest. And again, thanks to everybody who came to the meet up last week. We're I'm going to do another meet up this week on Sunday.

We're doing a meet up with Nick Pollock and a bunch of local writers. I know it's the long weekend, but on Friday, did I say Sunday before? You said Sunday before. It's not Sunday. It's Friday. On Friday, I know it's a long weekend, it's Friday at Garaje. We're going to hang out and record a live podcast with audience participation and multiple fantasy writers from the local area going on the pod. So Friday meetup garage five o'clock.

Very cool. Be sure to check that out on Friday. On Friday. Let's take a look at where the money went this weekend. A few interesting names in the move. Not as many as usual. It seemed like a lighter weekend for pickups, probably because we're getting to the dog days of the season.

People are just patching holes and a few teams have sort of dropped out in a lot of leagues. But John Kenzie Noel is in the shallow league pool now because the power has been there and the playing time has been there a bit more consistently. It is legit plus plus power. Absurd power. I think a lot of the players that we thought were over their skis power wise were. If you just look at Stephen Kwan's power numbers and his projections since he was peaking, they've all gone down. And so I think Cleveland has said, okay, well, we do actually need a continuing power source. And so that's Noel has been in the lineup.

And he's kind of turned my feeling about him, which was I thought he was maybe there is still a whiff of from your race around him in terms of not a great walk rate and a high strikeout rate and great power. But he's younger. He's there's a chance that he adds a little bit more selectivity as he goes. And he is the type of person who's going to make a lot out of the contact he does make because he hits it so hard. So, you know, not my normal type of player player but I'm coming around on him for sure. There is a remarkable swing percentage on his player page right now. Is that forty nine point one percent and that is unbelievably high but the good news is it's just it's a big.

The good news is it's just it's a big decline from when he debuted. He is making adjustments, just adapting to a completely different caliber of pitcher. So I wouldn't look at that and say, oh, this is going to be a disaster. I would look at that and say the swing and miss you're seeing is backed up by the approach right now. But I don't know if the approach will be quite that extreme as we get more time. We're still talking about 12 hundred and twenty four plate appearances. Playing time has been pretty choppy until recently for Noel.

But yeah, game changing power is absolutely there. And it's in a lineup that desperately needs that down the stretch. I ended up adding somebody who is very much like him, but has been playing every day. And I know he's not a lefty. Some people love the lefties because of the platoon advantage, but Joe Adele is playing every day. They're just pressing go on him and just letting him go.

And I think at this point in the season, a lot of people's batting average is what's going to be. You know, and if it's not a very good batting average that you've got, you can easily plug in Adele. So that is I have some Ellie builds where yes, turns out my batting average is not amazing. And so Joe Adele was my John Kinski Noel in a couple of places this year, this week. Yeah, I think when you look at Adele, I mean, his season's kind of been broken down into three parts, the beginning when it looked really good, the middle chapters when it looked brutal, but they were still playing him. And now this final third, going back to even July 1st could end up being a good second half overall.

The K-Rate's under 30 percent. It's a 253, 331, 405 line since July 1st, five homers, five steals. I think we talked about it when the trout injury update came around that both Adele and Mickey Moniac would just keep playing a lot the rest of the way because they didn't have one guy coming back that was gonna chew up a regular share

or near everyday share in that outfield. So at least from the organizational perspective of learning more about Joe Adele and deciding what they want to do with him as a player who no longer has minor league options, like they have done right in the sense of maximizing opportunities for him this year. What do you think he's fourth outfielder long term, like an interesting fourth outfielder, a soft regular, like where do you come down on the actual expectations going into 2025? Because the power and speed look solid, but projections are pointing to like a 220, maybe a 230 average sub 300 OBP, still kind of a tough profile from a real life perspective,

even though the tools look pretty good. The barrel rate's a career best this year, almost 12%. Yeah, I mean, that's what he that's what he needs to do is continue to push that number. I think it can go further judging off his his raw power. And he's got he's hit balls 117, 118 before. So, you know, this is a guy who could have a 14, 15% barrel rate. I think that's what he needs to do. He needs to kind of do the John Kensey Noel

where he's just going to hit the crap out of the ball every time he does it. And the more chances you get, the more likely he does that. And the Bat-X's projection of a 233, 297, 449 is actually 5% better than the average. And I know that's not super exciting. I think the way I see his career is the guy who played in anaheim in the corner for three years while they're rebuilding. And that's not super exciting in any league or any format on a on a on like.

Unlike, oh, I'm getting I'm not I'm not I'm not circling his name saying he's gonna be superstar. There's still like a five percent chance that he turns into an above average player. I think, you know, he plays the rest of this year and inches that power up and maybe finds a way to also be a little bit more selective. Like there he has the tools to do that. So I say, you know, star or like, you know, above average regular fantasy, you know, fantasy player like top 150 top 100 type fantasy player, 5% chance. Regular and baseball 60% chance. I'm bad. I mean, it's been a long road, but I think the other thing that's pretty intriguing too,

I see a plus six for defensive run save now for Joe Adele. That's going to matter. That's going to matter. That's going to matter. It's going to make a big difference in terms of keeping him in a position to get every day or near everyday reps. So I think that's the other fast of his game. It's been better this year overall. That helps a lot for longterm projection.

I got some people liking Grant McCray. You know, he is a 23 year old lefty that seems to be playing in center a lot. But if you think Joe Adele has problems making contact, I'll give you Grant McCrae. And then Grant McCrae also just does not have the same history of demonstrable power. So I think he's a play if you're desperate for steals. Yeah 60 grade speed you know at least an average defender so that could help Grant McCrea in the long run but even even seeing those 30% K rates coming through the miners right at 29.3% at high A last year. With large whiff

rates too. Yeah it's it's gonna take a little time if it's gonna be something he whittles down in the years ahead. So it's a bummer if you were trying to get power out of Gérard Encarnacion because he's now kind of in a small side platoon role and he was one of my cuts. I had to make a move to add Julian Aguiar

who I mentioned earlier in the show and happened to be a cut from the position player group because Encarnación wasn't playing enough to be on a mixed league roster. He's only as useful as he's playing because he's a 26 year old who does have some interesting sort of barrel and max. EV numbers, but you know, is barely involved basically. I mean, he was playing in Mexico this year. So if he's not, he's not playing all the time and he's projected with 33 to 37%

strikeout rates himself, Jermier, X and Carnazio, and that's going to be a split, a change you make when I picked up Adele, I dropped, uh, this might be interesting to you. I dropped Eloy Jimenez. Oh, okay. And the reason I did this because it's not that he's playing terribly or that I think he's a bad player. I just think that they're not going to play him much. And you say, oh, well, you played this many days.

Well, look closely. He played against all lefties. They just had a weird portion of the schedule where he got a lot of lefties. And in terms of righties, I think he has two starts with the Orioles against righties. Really? They only see one lefty during the upcoming week. There is a trip to Coors for the weekend. Which seems like, oh, you should have kept him around for that. Well, what if I keep him around for that and it's one start?

It's one start and like one pinch hit appearance. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. It's one start. It's one start and like one pinch hit appearance. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. It's a crowded that's a crowded team. So that's that's the decision I made. We've talked a lot about Bowden Francis on this show over the years, but yeah, he's always been kind of like that fringe guy from like a laborer to 15 team

leagues and now they into more shallow formats. I mean, a couple of really nice starts the last two times out of, they're going to push his roster rates even higher. There was also some stuff going on between the J's and angels over the weekend. It was just bizarre, but just rude, just Taylor Ward being rude. Yeah. Not sure where like what really caused that. Maybe there's more to that story that we'll know about.

You know, it was Taylor Ward that broke up his no hit bid. So it's probably an answer to the question about that that led to the quote that led to all this, you know, fine, whatever. But what is it? What do you say? I think he referred to him as not special and hittable. Yeah. I think it was before even because Bouton Francis doubled up on the angels. Yeah. I think it was before even because Bouton Francis doubled up on the angels. Yeah. So I think it was before the start and then he took a no hitter into the night. Yeah, in between starts and then Bassett trolling the angels at the sign behind Francis during an interview.

Like just the thing about Francis is always had good shape on the fastball, even if the VELO is only okay, and always had good shape on the breaking balls where the VELO is bad. And so, you know, you're saying, okay, here's a 28 year old who's like, just trying to get there, you know, and, you know, what's, what's, why would I be interested in him as a prospect? And it's like, well, good fastball shape, good shape on the breaking balls. And then the reason it's working now is a new splitter. And that's the thing that makes it so hard to evaluate pitchers is at some point they could just add a pitch and be a totally different pitcher.

So I think Bouton Francis is a top 50 starter now. Yeah, suddenly It happens. I mean, I think Francis is a little older than Kyle Bradish when Bradish put all the pieces together that was in the second half of 2022. And then of course all of last season, it looked great with the sub three ERA, strike out parading stuff.

But I think what I was trying to kind of nudge out earlier too is with all the extra research being done right now around pitch grades, arsenals, I think we're just gonna find pitchers in different ways. So not like the way that Jacob DeGrom with hip shoulder separation being corrected was found or elevated, but we're gonna find guys that do different things

really well that work, and then we're gonna be able to tweak other guys to replicate that. It might be guys in the 26 to 29-year-old range who don't have premium velocity, who turn into better than expected starters that ends up being the group of pitchers for the next little while where we find surprisingly good ratios or strikeout know, strikeout perennials stuff. Like that, that might be where we're headed right now. This just may be one of the examples of that. Brian Bannister came on, um, uh, on the show on, uh, and did a presentation.

Brian Bannister, former Red Sox giants, and now, uh, uh, White Sox, kind of director pitching, and he kind of laid out his career in things he was obsessed with. And so it was kind of funny because it was really like, oh, like I, oh, I see myself in here a little bit. You know, it was like, oh, you know, because he was like, and for these years, I was just obsessed with pitch mix because, you know, we just got Brooks baseball and he said he would do things like throw a pitch in a game. Once so that you could get on Brooks baseball afterwards and see what the movement profile was and if you liked it, you know, and if it was a good idea. So, you know, you saw a pitch mix.

That was his first obsession. I wish I should have taken a picture of it, but then he one of the things he was talking about was like, oh, and then I got into Seam effects and I was like. He's a he's like one of the more out in front guys, so I would assume that right now there are still 10 to 15 teams that are getting more comfortable with Seam effects. comfortable with scene effects. So you know that's a thing where like oh this guy who never had a good change-up like we were getting better at understanding scene effects we found one for him you know. So I think there's gonna be some of that coming on. Real quick I also got some relievers Porter Hodge, uh, for 20 bucks. I think he's the closer, uh, there, um, a little bit of a, a, a thing that I heard, uh, over beers at Sabre Seminar. Watch Nate Pearson as a starter next year.

Oh, okay. Nate Pearson is a starter. Sure. And if you look at his usage, they've been running out there in two, two innings since, so I don't think he's the closer anymore I think they might be thinking about him as a starter next year And they think that they've made some advancements in keeping him healthy and the way he's pitching So he's always had two good breaking balls and the rumor that I heard was that there was a good change-up in there that

That's gonna come out. So I change up in there that that's going to come out. So I also got Jack lighter. Jack lighter is in line for a white sock start this week and he has through the roof stuff. I talked to an executive was like, if you took his name off of the player page, you would say, yeah, this is a young guy with great stuff. Who's trying to put it together. It wouldn't be as disastrous as everyone sort of thinks when they think they'll name Jack lighter right now. So I think that's a soft landing in terms of matchup. And there's a chance he pitches his way into

staying on my roster. So paid for him $2 like, you know, streamer style. The best streamer for me this week is Davis Martin. You know, I don't know if it's the very best. There's probably maybe there's somebody, but I don't have like it all ranked out that way. But Davis Martin is the one I ended up with that I ended up spending sort of $10, $12 streamer prices on because it's a really good matchup this week. He has that Birdsong kick change, has good command where Birdsong doesn't. And a lot of good matchups for the White Sox. So I'll take Davis Martin, maybe even beyond this week.

Yeah, I think it's easy to overlook the guys pitching for bad teams right now. But there may be occasional streaming opportunities, especially this late in the year, because some of the other bad teams are worse or breaking in some new players that there may be softer landing spots, better K totals, easier ratios to find if you dig in those corners. There's those other pictures available too. So it's kind of all your left to choose from if you're chasing volume at this point in the year. Picked up Deval back for a couple of bucks just because, uh, his manager is already saying he's in

the mix for, for closing. And he said in a quote that being sent down was a huge wake up call for him and that he realizes that he needs to do what it takes to stay in the major leagues. There's been a lot of sort of reporting and quotes that you can read yourself that seem to suggest that before this, he was having a, having a hard time taking coaching. So saying a quote out there like that, I looked at the movement numbers. It's not like, you know, he just turned the light switch on and changed everything. Um, but, uh, at least in terms of outlook, uh, you know,

I thought that was worth a shot. Yeah. I think just something different acknowledgement from the player goes a long way and Deval has electric stuff as we talked about at the time He was sent down and I dropped Verdugo in one of them partially because of some of our conversations It's just it's time. It's just time to move on Alex Verdugo it's time for us to go on our way out the door I might even get a subscription to the athletic for two dollars a month for the first year at the athletic comm slash rates and barrels

You can find you know on Twitter at EnoSaris, find me at Derek VanRiper, find the pod at rates and barrels. That's going to do it for this episode of rates and barrels. We're back with you on Tuesday. Thanks for watching!