Rates & Barrels - Early Drops, Unlucky Hitters, A Gorman Breakout & Weekend Pickups

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

DVR and Eno discuss a few sluggish early bats that have been on the radar to be dropped before examining some unlucky hitters. Plus, they break down the great start to 2023 for Nolan Gorman, the ongoing struggles of José Berrios, and the step forward for Louie Varland and several other Twins starters.  Rundown 3:14 Terrestrial v. Aerial Movers 6:57 Early-Season Drop Decisions 8:49 Jean Segura Falling Toward Waiver Wire 12:37 Chris Taylor's Ongoing Contact Woes 16:29 Trey Mancini's Slow Start in Chicago 21:24 Nick Gordon: King of the Unlucky Hitters? 26:21 Byron Buxton: Regular DH Now 31:02 Is This a Nolan Gorman Breakout? 35:47 Tyler O'Neill's Slipping Playing Time 43:52 José Berrios: Is This It? 48:33 Stuff+ on FanGraphs 54:07 Big Bids From the Weekend Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at $1/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Treat yourself to Tim's new Fudge Brownie Lattes, made with freshly ground espresso beans, frothy steamed or ice chilled milk, and topped with marble chocolate curls. Now that's music to our ears. Available hot or iced, only at Tim's. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Monday, April 17th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we'll discuss some players we have given up on over the course of this young season. What causes us to actually drop players or to move away from our evaluations after just a few weeks? We'll dig into some possible slow starts to target on the hitting side, or at least we'll look at a few laggard boards and see if there's

anything good that we can find from that. A lot of mailbag questions to get to. We've got a question about Nolan Gorman, got a question about walks league-wide being up, and if that's a trend to be mindful of, and got a few pitcher questions to get to later on in the episode as well. Eno, how was your weekend? It was good. The older one turned 11, and so we had a Magic the Gathering tournament at our house for his birthday. 16 screaming young 10 11 year olds how long does a tournament take for magic the gathering a tournament that size three to four hours oh i would have guessed even longer it might have felt longer uh the uh there was one moment that um just sticks out for me. This one child was losing in his semifinal match, and he didn't want to lose.

And so he started taking really long. You just thought if he just waited it out, he would eventually just win because that person would quit? Yeah, I don't know what he was thinking. the person would quit yeah i don't know what he was what he was thinking uh it was also uh just such a it was just such an interesting moment because all the other kids came in and started screaming at him make your move you're gonna lose and it was like they were all screaming at him and this kid just had this most serene look on his face like i'm just thinking through the options and i said well how many cards do you have and he said i have three and and he

said and uh and he said i'm thinking through all the options i was like well if you have three cards i think the math says that you have three times two times one possible permutations so six uh so have you thought those six through yet because he was like i said yeah i said how many choices you have he's like literally hundreds i'm like not if you have three cards and uh but it was uh it was kind of one of those uh i prefer not to moments where you know this kid was just like i'm not gonna do what's expected of you right now do you respected that even though it was frustrating i couldn't help i respect it yeah just uh just uh it was a it was quite the character man so that that part was funny um the kids had a good time we also had lots of baseball and uh yeah one of your more typical weekends i managed to get to the uh to the clubhouse twice last week

so that's it's fun to get back in the swing of things there and talk to some great people talk to uh tommy fam he was telling me all about um the difference in body types it's something i have to read up on now he said that you know there's a lot of instruction in hitting that talks about you know getting into your legs and and and there's the kinetic chain and you're and all this this this energy is coming from your legs into your swing. And so use your big muscles first and stuff. And he said, that's fine, except I'm an aerial mover. And there are people that are aerial movers and terrestrial movers. And so you have to kind of think about the specifics of the way that your hitter's body moves. And so he had some examples of other aerial movers in baseball, like Blake Snell,

people that are more comfortable maybe on the balls of their feet than they are on their heels. Some of my spidey sense went off, like, all right, are we sure this is real? But I found some actual studies on this so I'm going to read up on this. Tommy was pretty adamant that some of the stuff that was out there

would hurt his swing. I can at least open my mind to the possibility of this being the case. I can also without even understanding what a terrestrial mover is know that that's what I am as opposed to an aerial mover. I'm not an aerial mover whatever that is i'm not one i couldn't be my feet are always on the ground that's right period i cannot fly yeah and he did one of these

things where he like he's like okay put your put your weight into your heels and then i'm gonna try to push you over and he pushed me over pretty easily and he's like now put your weight into your heels and then i'm gonna try and push you over and he pushed me over pretty easily and he's like now put your weight into your into your balls your feet and he tried to push me over and he couldn't and he's like oh maybe you're an aerial mover and i was like i don't know man i think that most people are harder to push over if they're in there and they're on the balls of their feet yeah they'd be leading forward if you're on your heels you're on your your weight so he's trying to push me from the side right so not push me over forward backward but still i i sometimes those things i think are designed like pseudo-scientistic scientific stuff i remember um oh like i remember for example i did muscle activation technique when my achilles was was not wasn't not feeling good and one of the

things they do is they do a range of motion thing so they take your so they took my leg and she's like look this is how much your leg can move you have bad range of motion in your hip and then she like tweaked me hard in some small muscles is the best way i can put it another way of putting it is shoved her hand into my groin and made me hurt, but she activated my small muscles. And then she did the thing again. And, and I was like, Whoa,

I got more range of motion. Oh my God. Um, and then I heard, uh, from some other trainers that she could have slapped me in the face and done the rope motion again and i would have had more range of motion so yeah so uh that you know sometimes when people do these little like physical test thingies i'm like i smell quackery well i'm sure there are some threads to be pulled on there that will lead to pieces down the road even if

what tommy fam was spinning isn't something that we're all going to be buying and adhering to at some point in the future but let's start with a big question that everybody has this time of year when are you giving up on players and who have you given up on early every friday al and i have talked about pickups, and this week it was a fun weekend because you had Von Grissom back up for Atlanta. You had Taj Bradley with a seemingly clear path

back into the Rays rotation due to the unfortunate lengthy absence of Jeffrey Springs. We saw Zach Netto get the promotion over the weekend. Brett Beatty got promoted over the weekend. We're going to talk about the prospects on tomorrow's show because that's project prospect day, but to make room for all these fun players and all these opportunities,

you have to make decisions to let guys go. We know that we don't always have injured players to cut, right? When you get injured players, it's easy. When you get players who are sent down, it's easy. A lot of times you don't have that.

So who have you given up on so far this season and why hmm uh no one uh you know like hitters that i've dropped for the most part are either just long shots or somebody that i had you know sort of ticketed for uh kind of using it like almost streaming. I don't think that I've really dropped anybody. I made some bad choices before the season started. I dropped Josh Rojas because I thought with Evan Longoria there, they wouldn't play much. It's usually I'm always like sort of concerned with playing time. And so, yes, I guess on this list that we have

here had i had some more shares of these guys i might have dropped some of these guys so you know on the rundown there are players that i'm not hopeful about going forward i just don't have too many shares and if i do have shares i believe in them and i haven't dropped them yet yeah so i think this is think this is more of a hypothetical because I thought about dropping this player as Gene Segura in my 12-team leagues. I've got other players on that roster who have middle and corner eligibility, so his position flexibility doesn't matter. His team context is probably as bad as it's ever been

as far as the supporting cast, the opportunities to score runs and drive-in runs. That's down, so his value, I think, has taken a bigger hit than maybe I expected going into the year. I didn't do it this week, but I think it's coming at least in 12 team leagues. When you start to look at the projections for Segura, just look at the WOBA for rest of season. And it's 317. And it's 317. He's got a 273, 326, 395 line, 10 homers, 12 steals, like 53 RBIs and 60 runs. That's a very replaceable player in a 12-team league. And that almost seems like a little bit too lofty for him with some of those counting stats. So I think he's the sort of player where I'm patient for a few weeks.

I think he's the sort of player where I'm patient for a few weeks, but once you get to that third or fourth opportunity to cut him, if I have the coverage that I need, if the only thing he's offering me is versatility, and I can find versatility somewhere else or I have versatility somewhere else, I'm willing to go ahead and start giving up on a player like that. Because I think Segura, he fits the description that you've talked about before. Once you get to a certain age, the projections become less reliable. He's 33 years old. I think he's in that window now where the metronome player that he's been for the last four or five years, that could go away at any time.

And maybe we're already starting to see that. Maybe the fact he ended up in Miami is a sign the league saw that coming. That 29 other teams saw a guy that has a nice track record, but probably doesn't have a very bright future. So I think he's kind of in that range of player that I'm most likely to start giving up on relatively early compared to my initial expectations. Yeah. And I mean, he was much better play in Philadelphia where the park would aid him,

you know, two or three times a year. And that's, it doesn't seem like a lot, but two or three more homers, uh, changes a guy who might hit seven homers this year into a guy who hits 10 or 11, you know? And, uh, you know, in a better lineup, he would have better runs in RBI when he was in. Um, and you know as he ages the ste the the steals just aren't there anymore uh he's averaging uh i would say something like uh 15 i mean he i would say his upside this year is like 15 stolen bases so 15 stolen bases and then you

start looking at the home runs in the different parks, and you realize, oh, the 20 home runs that was his career high was pre-Humidor, Arizona. And otherwise, his second one is Philadelphia, 14. In more neutral parks, he's had years where he's had 10 and 5 and 6 homers. So he could go through this whole year and hit six homers and steal 12 bases. When you start thinking about it that way, you're like, wow, man, the batting average really has to come on for him to do that.

And look at that. He's got his second worst whiff rate and the second worst strikeout rate. Even if the BABIP comes online, you're talking about maybe a 270 average, seven homers, 12 stolen bases. It seems like a low replacement, actually, for most fancy leagues.

Yeah. Yeah, especially a 12-team league. I think I'm having a problem right now where my brain has become so calibrated for the 15-team league. I played in the 15-team mixed league for Tout Wars for a long time. I played a lot of the NFBC main events,

the big auctions, the draft champions. Those are all 15-team formats. And I think I have a hard time letting go of players like Gene Segura in 12s. I think even Chris Taylor probably fits into this bucket, too. I mean, Chris Taylor's also 32 years old, hasn't been in the big leagues as a regular quite as long. So it doesn't seem like he's that old. There's a few things in this profile that i ordinarily like he is still a good barreler but the contact issues that jumped up

last season have carried over through spring training and now through the first dozen games he's played in the regular season and i'm starting to have that same kind of problem where yeah there's been some some power so far for homers but it's come with a absolute anchor of a batting average and there's really no sign of him figuring it out again at the plate and becoming that more consistent player he was you know two years ago in 2021 when he popped to 20 homers and and stole 13 bases and I think there's also there's playing time downside that wasn't there previously because they have a few other younger guys that are emerging to take on prominent roles. I can just see this starting to fall apart on him,

even though he's in year two of a four-year deal. The Dodgers can just eat that contract and make him a part-time player if that's what the best usage for Chris Taylor is at this point. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I mean, he's one of those late bloomers that we're starting to see the denouement of his career. And you can really

see it in the strikeout rate. 2020, 25.7. 2021, 28.7. 2022, 35.2. And then this year, 38.1% strikeout rate for Chris Taylor. And if you look at the whiff rates, they've been going up accordingly. So I think that this smells a little bit like a hole has been opened in his swing

and the league has dived into it. And so I don't remain super hopeful. And I have this bias towards deeper leagues. So I do have shares of Segura and Taylor, and I have not dropped them because they're in draft and hold formats. And what I can tell you is I have, quote unquote, given up on them because now they are backups. Other people that were on my team that were behind them are now playing over them. And that's people like Isak Paredes in one league.

And let me see my other draft champions. I'm trying to get Alec Thomas into the lineup a little bit more over Chris Taylor in the outfield um and ryan mcmahon is playing some second for me so i'm just trying to find other options and sometimes that works for you even with a daily lineup bench league where you can just be like you know i'm going to put this guy on my bench more often until something happens and um i could see doing that with with taylor maybe a little bit more than segura because i think he could still hit 230

with you know 15 more homers and 10 more steals i think that's a slightly better line and he's you know a second base slash outfield with outfield the way it is i think he's a slightly better um he's got slightly better eligibilities if you had to would you rather between segura and and taylor do you have one segura i think segura has a better chance of being a 600 plate appearance player than taylor does so i have more confidence in those counting stats being there even though the 2023 dodgers is still a much better supporting cast than the one that segura has but the playing time difference could end up being 150 to 200 plate appearances i think

it could be that that big yeah i think i might lean uh taylor but it might just be because i went cheap in the outfield and so a lot of places my my last outfit was not that good about this there's another player that's similar kind of more of a corner outfield type trey mancini k rate up at a career worst 27.3 so far uh barrels have gone away he's not drawing walks right now the biggest concern for me is that the ground ball rate is through the roof 56.8 it just makes me wonder if he's hurt i don't really know what to make of this if it's just a really bad slow start another new environment for him you know he's traded mid-season last year didn't seem to play as well with houston as he was playing in baltimore

is this just an extension of the second half or is there some other underlying problem there or is trey mancini an actual legitimate buy low sort of player that you'd be trading for and quickly picking up in some of the more shallow leagues where he's going to pop up on the wire? Well, I don't think his upside is that great for like a 12-team league if you're just going to pick him up off the wire. I mean, we're talking about a guy who's projected to hit 250 with 15 homers and no steals, right? So that's not really like something you need to run and get off of the 12-team wire. something you need to run and get off of the 12 team wire if he's like available in deeper leagues and trades or maybe he sits your 15 your hit 15 team wire i think i might be interested you know one of the things that's weird is that mancini was uh did have some good bad ball stats in the

spring um he had a better max ev than he's uh showing in the regular season so if you combine his spring with his regular season you can at least put a max ev of like a i think it was like 112 or 113 on there then he starts to look like he has the same raw powers ever right because right now the max ev is down the barrel's down you're saying oh my god what's going on um so if he has the same raw powers he always did now you can see that ground ball rate as just part of his continual foibles with the ground ball rate like he's he's struggled with this before you know his first two full years in the season in the big leagues he trim mancini had like a 53 percent ground ball rate so i would say these look like temporary problems that are uh something is just not. He's not on time yet or something. He has a 24%

pull rate and pull rates are associated with getting the ball out front. So somehow he's striking out a lot and not walking, but he's also not getting the ball out in front. So I think he's just struggling to get his timing. It's been a surprisingly poor start though. I thought that was a good signing by the Cubs that he'd go in there, pop his 20-plus homers, and be a nice source of RBIs, kind of stuck in the middle third of that lineup. Even though they're not a great lineup, I just thought he was going to make them a bit better. Hasn't happened so far.

I think I would pick him up maybe in some 12s as well if I was just chasing some playing time in that corner spot. You'd have to look at, real quickly uh a teammate of his a couple teammates of his let's see here uh hosmer is what's he doing hosmer has a 73 wrc plus uh hitting 250 with no power. I think that I would keep Mancini, especially given their contracts. If I were

the Cubs, I would keep Mancini over Hosmer. Matt Mervis has a 159 WRC plus in AAA. So if you are going to bring up Mervis, I do think Hosmer is the cut still now. So that's just something to throw in the conversation real quick. Yeah, Matt Mervis keeping the K

rate down at AAA, 15.8%, walking a ton. It's over a 20% walk rate right now. He's already homered three times in 12 games. Everything he was doing last year at that level, he's doing it again in terms of that batted ball distribution. So it looks really good. Something's going to have to change. Maybe Mancini does go on an IL stint, or maybe they just thank Hosmer for his 100 mediocre plate appearances.

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Terms apply. Best Western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze. And it felt a little like... Come on kids, back to the hotel room. life's a trip make the most of it at best western so i was looking at the expected stats leaderboard you can do the sort over at baseball savant just I was looking at the expected stats leaderboard. You can do the sort over at Baseball Savant. Just look at the difference between expected WOBA and actual WOBA and I was curious to see who

has been the most unlucky group of hitters so far. Not surprisingly, Chris Taylor and Gene Segura made the top 10. They were near the bottom. There have been even more unlucky hitters. I'm going to rattle off the list and then we'll come back and you can tell me if there are any players in this group that you want to believe in one of the problems is you'll see if you look at this is some of these players are just

flat out bad like their their actual woba and their ex-woba are both no and so you can have these like large differences right where you're just like it still doesn't mean yeah a lot of times i do these improver lists and and you to be and somebody's like, why is this terrible player on your improver list? I'm like, well, he went from really awful to just kind of awful. And there was a big there was a big possible there was like a hundred points of a difference there. And he's still bad. So that definitely happens. Yeah.

So this is the list. Nick Gordon has been the most unlucky hitter in the league just based on the difference between ex-Woba and actual Woba, but he's in that very, very low club. Jack Sawinski, Marcelo Zuna, Josh Naylor, Michael Massey, Eddie Rosario, MJ Melendez, Oscar Gonzalez, and then Segura and Taylor rounding out the top 10. So those first eight guys, there's at least a 100-point difference between their actual Woba and their expected Woba so far there was only one name on that list that I was interested in back during draft season actually they were I'm not lying there were like three and a half MJ Melendez I liked a lot I'm not worried about MJ Melendez yet I liked Michael Massey as a very late sleeper so I'm going to count him as the half and then Naylor and nick gordon i think we both liked both of those guys do you still like the guys that you liked on this list before or are you

starting to lower expectations based on what we've seen so far i think massey there is something to worry about i mean it was weird that he had this low max ev and high barrel rate and a small sample last year. He's doing the same thing again, but what really is sticking out is he did have a high whiff rate last year. He had a 14% whiff rate for a 24% strikeout rate. That's not usually the kind of, you don't see those two together like that. And so this year he has a 16.7% swing strike rate Massey does and a 40% strikeout rate and you're and you kind of wonder maybe he's gonna have more trouble making contact than I thought

and then you start to say oh well he doesn't walk if he's gonna strike out a lot and he doesn't have great raw power he's gonna have to get to that barrel rate a lot and i guess the one thing going for him is that the royals may not have that much else going on so they may just give him a full season of run but that also might be a full season that tanks your al only team because he keeps playing every day and it's terrible so uh i've sort of revised my expectations of Massey downward a little bit. Nick Gordon I'm worried about because of the interplay between the quality of the team, the quality of the options around him, and his play. And though I think that he can get it going, and I like the fact that he has a 7% strikeout rate,

and he's putting everything in play, I like some aspects of what he's doing. He's playing his way, even with that strikeout rate and with the lack of power, he's playing his way into kind of the ideal backup utility guy role instead of everyday starter anywhere. You got Jorge Polanco coming back, and you got Eduardo Julian up. It's getting crowded. And the only place where you can really make an impact I think on this Twins team is the outfield.

And right now, Buxton is healthy. Trevor Larnock is playing pretty well. Max Kepler just came back. And Joey Gallo has some things going for him. I think he was hurt, but he's coming back shortly. So it's not like they are hurting that badly for personnel in the outfield either. So Nick Gordon suddenly starts to feel like someone who doesn't have an immediate role, even as a guy who doesn't strike out. They have Donovan Solano who doesn't strike out and have Donovan Solano who doesn't strike out and is playing and puts the ball in play but is playing better and so if you were

the manager you if I was the manager there I would feel like maybe uh take Solano you know um so his his specific use case for when do I reach for Nick Gordon is getting skinnier and skinnier. Yeah, he has become an AL only player very quickly. A couple of things have changed with the twins that I didn't really see coming, but the biggest one is probably Michael Taylor. Look at how much Michael Taylor is playing. Michael Taylor has started every single game for the twins in center field. Wow. 16 for 16.

League average bat right now. Byron Buxton is a DH at this point. They are really trying to keep him healthy. Keep him healthy. And there was that play last week. I think it was last Wednesday. We were just talking about the Twins on the 3-0 show. Buxton's running the second base.

And people were pretty critical of him on Twitter saying how he didn't have any awareness of where the second baseman was and I just thought maybe he was just running as fast as he could and wasn't worried about it. Should he have presence of mind? Should everyone have presence of mind of the fielders around them? Ideally, yes, but also if you think you're just going to

get through the path of the ball before the player gets there, you're going to run people sometimes. They also all have a very high opinion of themselves, right? They're pro athletes. They're elite. So he probably just saw it and thought he would get there first.

Yeah. The weird thing about all this, so Buxton's played 15 games so far. Great. 60 plate appearances. Awesome. On pace for 600 for the first time in his career. Amazing.

So far, he has not hit the way that he has hit the last few years. I think it's probably an outlier, but you look at the plate skills, five walks against 24Ks, does have a couple of home runs, zero for stolen bases so far. Just a puzzling player in every way. He's morphed into an all-or-nothing slugger that plays DH. It's like, how did this happen?

We talked about it last year. It's like somewhere along the way, Byron Buxton and Kyle Schwarber became more similar players than we ever thought they could be based on where they were when they entered the league. That was a pretty big plot twist. Of course, the emergence of Trevor Larnik and

you mentioned Edward Julien being on this roster. Alex Kirilov is on his rehab assignment. He's getting healthy. The Twins are going to have a crowd. I think the thing that maybe keeps Nick Gord on the roster for your ultra-deep leagues, he doesn't have minor league options left. If they're going to try and send him down, he's got to clear away.

There was a time last year where I thought they would just release him when people were getting healthy. And this year he looks a lot closer to that. So maybe he'll end up in a trade. I mean, one other thing that's keeping him on the roster, I think, is his ability to play shortstop, which I don't even know if it's that good, but it's better than maybe some others. But if they think that Kyle Farmer plays a better shortstop,

they've also got Jorge Polanco can go over there in a pinch. Then all of a sudden, Nick Gordon doesn't need to necessarily be on the roster. So yeah, I think things have gone maybe most poorly for him of all of the people on the list. There was one other one that I found that I did. Oh, Josh Naylor. I'm a little surprised because, you know, going into the season,

I had him picked out as a guy that would benefit from the shift rules. And so I thought his Babbitt would go up, not go down to 163. And part of that is he's not pulling the ball like he used to. The raw power is a little bit down, but the barrels are there. The strikeout rate is fine. The walk rate is fine. Maybe he's letting the ball travel too far because we see this walk rate and he's a guy who's always had a high uh high chase rate right so maybe at the in order to get

those walks he's not doing the right thing you know what i mean uh maybe he's just a guy who does not have a great natural sense of where the zone is and should just grip it and rip it and have like a 6% to 8% walk rate, 15% strikeout rate, and have a 200 ISO. That's where I thought he was headed. Get on base through hits. That's the type of player I think he is. So maybe he just needs to find himself again. I don't think that given the 60 plate appearances,

you can't even... 60 plate appearances you can't even 60 plate appearances i think uh the one thing that you could say with stabilization or whatever like the one thing that's supposedly stable right now is his is swing rate and his swing rate is up one percentage point so like i just can't point to that and be like that's why josh nailer is struggling he's swinging one percent you know like he's seen 200 pitches so that's like two expected swings more two swings more than you would expect yeah i would actually go so far as to say i think josh nailer is a great by low sort of target in leagues with trades i think you want to go after him right now i think this is a cleveland lineup

that's gonna score plenty of runs i think we saw from a power perspective last year was real yeah i i just thought of something uh cleveland is actually a hitters park but it's cold so in the first month uh cleveland hitters i think look bad and then i think that they they sort of get it going as the as the weather warms up there and if you want to make it more of a would you rather comparing him to someone we talked about a little while ago i would much rather have josh nailer rest of season than trey mancini yes if both of them become available if you think they're relatively easy to trade for i I have more faith in Naylor at this point. He also is doing the opposite thing where he's

hitting a ton of fly balls. I feel like all you need to do is warm up the weather and those fly balls are homers. Yeah, absolutely. Let's move on to a few mailbag questions. We got one from Adam. This is about Nolan Gorman. It's a good start

for Nolan Gorman. Walks are up, Ks are down. High BABIP so far. But the ISO, of course, very high. Hard hit rate, obviously higher than last year. This is a guy that did barrel the ball a lot last season. And the question from Adam is how sustainable is this for Nolan Gorman? He's asking because he's got Marcus Simeon and Gorman in a 12 team keeper league. It. It's a 5x5 head-to-head keep eight players sort of consideration. Keep configuration. He wants to know, is it too early to consider moving Simeon even if I don't plan on keeping Gorman? Can Gorman put up similar power numbers to Marcus Simeon? And will Nolan Gorman keep second base eligibility next year? So a lot to unpack here. Let's just start with the core skills for Nolan Gorman. Are you buying what we're seeing in this

great start as a step forward for him that many people were kind of hoping we'd see even right away from him as a rookie? The best resource I have for people is a piece called A Long Needed Update on Reliability on Fangraphs.

And it requires a little bit of sort of clicking around and getting to understand what's going on here but the number that you're looking for is 0.75 so at 0.75 alpha i know that's sounds pretty technical but at 0.75 the number you're looking at uh becomes more important than league average when going forward. So that's the point at which you start actually looking at actual results instead of basically saying they're all going to regress. So swing strike rate takes about 260 pitches to become reliable it is one of the faster uh pitches one of the faster things to come online like that he's seen 206 nolan gorman has so i would say that i i think that there's something to his swing strike rate being down.

It was 16% last year for Nolan Gorman. It's now 13.5%. That's part of why his strikeout rate is down. I think I would take the under on 16%, for example. If that's his demonstrated swing strike rate or the 15.7% that he has for his whole career, I would still take the under on that going forward so i do think there's a chance that he's improved something when it comes to making contact his walk right now looks like it's in line with what he's done before he's got the barrel rate in the max ev where he's been before so this is a guy who was a kind of patience and power guy

that has improved his strikeout rate a little bit in his second year. I don't believe that he's going to hit.333, but do I believe he can maybe hit.240,.245? Yeah. And so, you know, you put that together with maybe a 10 walk rate you got a 245 with like a 330 obp uh that looks like where he was that's where he was kind of supposed to be headed uh if you look at his minor league numbers that's absolutely a major league player it's someone who's 10 to 15 to 20 better than league average that's someone who's going to play. So, those are all the positive things I can say. On the defensive side, I don't know, dude.

Has he played any second base? He's played three there, and Donovan's kind of breaking out. Right, and Donovan's a good defender, too. So, if Gorman's playing at second base, it's because they want Donovan somewhere else, or Donovan's getting a day off. I think it's going to be cutting it really close.

If your league requires 20 games played at a position to qualify there, that might be a photo finish into September unless Donovan spends time on the IL. I think they're comfortable enough with Gorman at second base where he could get to 20 during a Donovan IL stint and he could fall just short if Donovan stays healthy all year. Yeah, it's going to be close. They don't prefer him there. It's pretty obvious. I don't know where he's going to end up. Maybe he takes DH from

Yepez. Yeah, I mean he's started nine games there so far. By far the most of anybody for the Cardinals. That's really his spot. It would be nice if eventually he becomes part of the plan, maybe in left field. This is a guy that was originally a third baseman, started to move off of third base when Arenado was acquired from the Rockies. So I would think if you are fluid enough to play third base when you're really young, you probably could play left field.

And something's changing with this team. The Tyler O'Neal situation... They're falling out of love with Tyler O'Neal. Something's going on there. That's got to be a trade situation. He's in the lineup playing left field, batting sixth on Monday to start the week. Something's off with him.

They're publicly talking about him not running out balls. They benched him. He's been a healthy scratch. I talked to him in the spring, and he was talking about letting the ball travel and also that he trained in St. Louis

at Bush Stadium during the offseason. So I thought that was a really interesting pair of things to say because training in St. Louis during the offseason suggests I'm being a team person here. I'm letting them guide me. Letting the ball travel is not necessarily the Cardinals way. They led the league in pulled fly balls. You don't do that by letting the ball travel. So there's just something and then then throwing him into this center field battle and not really telling him that he had a job to start the season it all kind of just adds up to some weird falling out of love thing where

i do think a trade is in the future but i just don't know when the trade is going to happen. I mean, they could do it now because they've got Alec Burleson batting second and playing. And then with Newt Barr, they can play Carlson in center.

Have they been playing Burleson in center? They play Burleson mostly in left burleson i mean if they put burleson in center something's gone horribly wrong they've played o'neill the most there but it's carlson and newt bar that are getting those opportunities more recently the weird thing about this is o'neill projects as their best outfielder for the rest of the season projections. It's not... Newt Barr's close. You would think those two would be playing a ton out there. And maybe it is going to be a trade.

And there's plenty of teams that could use a guy like Tyler O'Neal, someone who can play center field, who has power, who has speed, who's shown some ceiling. So maybe this becomes a surprising early season trade where the Cardinals get an upgrade

for something else on their roster and some other team out there looking for an impact bat, maybe they actually go ahead and make this happen. Tyler O'Neal, just to put this into context too, looking at him sorting again by just Woba for the rest of the season, using the bad X,

Tyler O'Neal's projected for a .345 Woba. That is 63rd among all hitters, and this has 601 hitters projected. That's a good player. If they don't like him, someone else does. Guaranteed.

I'd put him on the Marlins in a second, except that the Marlins are trying to improve their strikeout, right? Yeah, I don't know what the issue is, but I also do know that the Cardinals do not have enough pitching right now. I don't. Maybe the Giants could get them. I don't really. We always like to put everybody on the Giants.

Let's put Tyler O'Neal on the Giants. Yeah, I wonder what would go back. Disclifani. If that's all it takes, I mean, easy. I don't know. It would probably take a minor league or two. It would probably take a minor league or two. It is hard to get a match because Tyler O'Neal is a win-now player, I guess. He's only got a year left after this, I believe.

And so it's not like you're trading Tyler O'Neal to a small market team and taking their expensive starting pitcher. Nope. It has to be a need for need trade. Who is a contender that has too much starting pitching? It's basically an oxymoron. Arguably the Giants by volume, even if the ceiling on a lot of those guys isn't very high. That's why they came to mind as one of those teams that could pull something like this off.

Everybody else is already feeling the burn, dude. I mean, I guess the Braves have this Elder Schuster-Dodd situation. Would you trade one of those guys to get Tyler O'Neal? Probably. Okay, so then you're just cutting Marcel Azuna. I mean, you could, and Eddie Rosario hasn't gotten going. That's not impossible. Soroka's getting healthy. That's not an impossible idea.

I don't really like any of those three pitchers. If they don't like Vaughn Grissom as a shortstop, they could probably just move him to left field on the fly and just let him hit and just play there. He'd probably be a good left fielder, wouldn't he? He's playing short right now. He just came up. Right now he is, but once Arcee is back,

if they still don't like what they're getting from left field and DH, why not just use Grissom there? They don't seem desperate for offense. I don't know. No, they don't. Not right now, anyway. If you're the Giants, you have Kyle Harrison, and he puts together a couple of good starts,

then you could feel like weants and you have Kyle Harrison and he puts together a couple good starts, then you could feel like we can just bring up Kyle Harrison and we can trade any one of our guys. Minaya is on a shorter term deal, right? Yeah. What is it? It's all pretty short deals. They extended Logan Webb, and they wouldn't trade Logan Webb here.

And he can opt out after this year. So Minaya might make sense. It would kind of be weird for the Giants, but they're always looking for offense. Everybody else is just struggling to put stuff together. The Twins, Louis Varland is... I just put up a list of the biggest improvers year over year in Stuff Plus among starters.

And Louis Varland was on it, along with Pablo Lopez and Tyler Malley. Joe Ryan has added a sweeper. All of a sudden, that starting rotation looks pretty healthy. They have Ober, Varland, and Woods Richardson. If you're the twins, do you really mess around with pitching depth when you've had so many injuries in the past? Nope. You hold all of those guys because you have a fragile group of guys in your rotation. You will probably need all three of the guys who were not in the rotation to start the season to make a handful of starts, if not more.

I think you leave it alone. Their position player depth is good. I love the way the Twins are built right now. It's interesting that they've had so many guys take these steps forward though, because we were starting to wonder after the first year of Wes Johnson in Minnesota as an organization, did the twins have some things figured out in pitching development? And this early return would kind of point more toward the, yes, they do. They have some organizational growth in that they can they can

make pitchers better that seems to be an organizational skill that the twins have right now what if you're the guardians and you feel like you know we build pitchers pretty easily would would you take a shot at cal quantrill if you were the the uh and tyler o'Neal doesn't really fit the Guardians philosophy, but maybe you can just stick a Tyler O'Neal in a lineup that makes a lot of contact, and it's a good mix. I think that's an ideal sort of fit from a, we already do this other thing really well, let's get a guy that's a bopper that can actually

offer something for us. And it didn't work. But Tyler O'Neal is so much more athletic than Franmil Reyes. I think there's a lot more, there's so many more ways that can go right. But just to close the book on that Gorman question, Gorman can put up

similar power numbers to Marcus Simeon. That's not ridiculous. That's not a slight at Marcus Simeon. That's like a low 20s home run total for the rest of the season. The playing time looks like it's going to be there. I do think Gorman can match that. I think where you're going to be lacking is that Marcus Simeon runs, and then Marcus Simeon's place in that Rangers lineup probably leads him to better all-around counting stats as well.

So if you're going to trade Simeon and replace him with Gorman, that's where you're going to feel it. It's the other categories. It's definitely not the power, at least from my perspective. But I'm glad you brought up Louis Varlin because he was among the questions that came in from Tim G. Tim also wanted to know about a former twin, Jose Barrios. What is going on with him right now?

The surface numbers are still bad. K to BB actually looks pretty good. Is this actually an opportunity to start getting back into Jose Barrios as someone that could put the pieces together here in the next few starts. I'm out. I'm out. I flogged that tree too long. I don't know. That's not the expression.

I don't know what the expression is. I tried to defend him for too long, and now I'm out. He did have a little bit of a stuff plus surge in his last start and so now his curveball is above average but that's bad news dude his curveball he had an elite curveball he had like a 145 stuff plus curveball last year and it's 105 this year and so yeah you can look across the line be like okay 92 fastball stuff plus 96 sinker stuff plus 105 curveball 102 change up if it was anybody else i put those numbers on i'd be like yeah this guy's interesting but it's still barrios who in the past has underperformed his stuff numbers so you kind

of had to look at these numbers relative to his own on some level, I think. And then you have just awful matchups in that division. You get a little less often though. The new schedule got to make that work for you. To me, he's like a guy I'd pick up off the wire in a 20 teamer, a 20 teamer. Okay.

So basically mono leagues only, unless you're playing in an ultra-deep league. If I have a space for a stasher in 15s where I'm just like I'm going to pick up this guy who someone has dropped just because he's had better days in his past, but I'm not going to start him for the foreseeable future,

okay. But he's kind of a name that people depend on and would still think, like, I'm going to put him in the lineup this week. Like what, like right now,

what I really want to just like rush to get him in the lineup against Cleveland. What's his, what's his start. What's his, what's his next matchup. He's got Houston on the road this week. So anybody who picked him up this weekend has to throw him against the

Astros on the road. No, we're not even with the Astros missing the road? No. Even with the Astros missing Altuve, not doing that. Next week, maybe a little more of an open question. Home against the White Sox. That's right on the borderline of a start you could

think about for a 15-team league, but you're still looking really closely at your alternatives. The White Sox do chase and strike out, and maybe he could get them chasing and striking out, but they also are a volatile team that could just spank the ball is do you say Kikuchi

a better option right now than Jose Barrios if we reach that point I mean the stuff numbers are all better for Kikuchi the stuff numbers are great through spring for Kikuchi and the only question was can he command it and even location numbers are good through spring for Kikuchi, and the only question was, can he command it? And even the location numbers are good right now.

I know that's, I don't want to, I'm not going to use that as a real way in, but he's a guy who can strike guys out. So I'm going to go with Kikuchi right now. By the way, a quick follow-up I think is deserved here because the chris bubich experience was completely derailed by an injury unfortunately he's going to get a second opinion on his elbow the initial diagnosis is a left flexor strain his velo was way down stuff just wasn't the same in the third start as it was previously i was really looking it's too bad for me because i was really looking forward to seeing his movement numbers in his third start yeah no it's too bad it's one of those he really seemed to have changed his his arsenal and so right he put all the work in and i just people people had such a funny

reaction to that on twitter and by funny i mean kind of annoying or it was like it was almost like the nelson months ha ha like that it didn't work out it's like dude got hurt yeah i think people were laughing before they knew the reason but it's like if velo drops two or three ticks in one start and movement is as far off as it was yeah that's not conditions right that's not my mouth shut yeah that's not a slick mound that's not cold damp air that's a guy that's hurt. That's really the nine times out of ten. That's the explanation for a stuff decline that sharp from one start to the next. Yeah.

That was too bad. So now we may have to wait a long time to see it again. This is why people breathlessly report big ups and velos and downs. Right. It's a big deal. As soon as you see that, you still, that's not good. Whoa, what are you listening to this for? Wait, who's talking?

You know, you're driving a 2024 Ford Escape with available Alexa built in so you can change the music. Oh yeah. Alexa, change station to 99.2. See? Purchase a 2024 Escape ST line all wheel drive with tech pack at 3.49 apr for 72 months with down payment that's just 267 bi-weekly cash value of 40 294 plus eligible ford owners get a thousand dollar bonus for details visit your local ford store or ford.ca we had a question from aaron this is about the Stuff Plus on Fangraphs. I think it's more of just wondering if there's going to be other ways to view it on individual player pages eventually. Do you happen to know how it's currently displayed? Is the plan for the foreseeable future? Are we going to have more ways to be able to look at those numbers going forward?

going forward that's all i know is what people know because that's all in david appleman's court however i can tell you a couple things um it's available in the custom leaderboards part uh so you can do anything you can do with regular leaderboards and i discovered today that uh the time splits are there so if you are interested in getting someone's last start or something you can do last seven days you can do yesterday um i haven't done the custom date range yet but if the if the weekly splits the those the splits work i think maybe the custom date range will work so that's uh that's fun because people talk about wanting to know the last 400 pitches or whatever and you can approximate that by doing stuff like, let me just look at the last month and see who's been surging over the last month. Yeah, that's awesome.

I didn't realize that the date searches, the splits and all that would actually work. Yeah, I think they're starting to work now. So I just keep open the leaderboards and change it team to team. I think this is the easiest way to find people. But if you're looking for it, it's at Fangraphs Pitching Leaderboards Pitch Modeling and then you can find

it. Hit that tab. I really like it too. I think the team approach is really helpful, especially when you're looking at players who are getting an opportunity for a spot start or you're looking at prospects that might be coming up. You can see who the weak links really are on a team from a skills perspective. I find that to be one of the better usages that I've had for the current configuration so far. I highly recommend going that route if you're looking for those Stuff Plus numbers over on Fangraphs.

But much easier to have them there than in the Google Sheet. It's been a big step forward. Yeah, and since it's on Fangraphs, it's only upwards and onwards here. So yes, I do think hopefully it'll be on player pages soon, but I can't promise that. It's not my gig. Thanks a lot for that email, Aaron. And we got one more question this one comes in from jerry jerry wants to know he wonders maybe i'm just unlucky it's all of my pictures but our

walks way up this year so far and if so do you think it's random adjusting to the pitch clock or do pitchers always walk people early as they're still settling into the season yeah this is an easy one uh walks are up early in the season. Batters are struggling to be on time and pitchers are struggling to command their pitches. That, I think, is a truth in the early going. If you look, walk rate declines over the course of the season. Right now, we have a 9.2% walk rate, which if you look at it season by season, you say oh, that's higher than it's

been in however many seasons, and you can make a big deal out of it. If you limit it to only April, you'll see that in April 2019, we had a 9.2% walk rate, and that it was 8.8% and 8.9% and the other april's in between so i don't think there's actually a uh real substantive change here it is the thing that happens in spring and so i think that you know in terms of what this means for fantasy i think that the the tough part is that you know people talk about wanting to like bank innings right okay so you want to bank innings in the cold when the hitters are behind. Love it. Except that your pitchers don't have command.

And so you're throwing some guys that may not have the command. I think streaming is really, really hard and almost impossible. And so mostly us terrestrial movers just have to figure it out week to week. And Todd was messaging me yesterday, and he said, I've realized that you don't really stream effectively as much as you do a better job building in that depth on draft day.

If your plan in a 15-team league is to stream a couple of spots, it's not a very good plan because you're going to have a really hard time finding enough quality in these. Those players that you pick should have a chance of sticking on your team. Yeah, you really – You're going to have triage. Instead of having five or six starters, have like eight we that's trust all of them in most situations which probably just means when you think about a draft grid having more yellow bricks higher up throughout

the middle like investing more in pitching and then turning and burning more on the position player side and it's sort of the opposite of how I started playing. 10 years ago, I think the first time I was playing NFPC, I thought I could just find all the pitching I needed on the wire because in every other league I'd played in prior to that point, there was plenty of pitching on the wire. And year over year, the lesson has been learned and solidified that more pitching up front is the way to go and yeah if you're

replacing injured starters that's one thing if you're replacing starters were bad you probably didn't draft enough good starters yeah yeah that was 100 my plan in the main that i'm doing uh let me see if i have a standings update if anybody cares stand update. We are sixth right now. That's okay. We just spent $326 out of a thousand on Taj Bradley. And he's going into our lineup, even though he's at Cincinnati, but it's just because we, we did hit the thing middle,

hit pitching middle hard, so that's why we have Logan Gilbert, Jordan Montgomery, and Kenta Maeda there in our middle with James and Tyon. We still feel good about that, but we just feel like our whole, and then Corbin Burns at the top, we just feel like our whole rotation will be better if Taj Bradley can bradley can join grayson rodriguez as an everyday starter in our lineup and uh then you what we have on the bench right now uh we even just had to give up one of our pitching slots for a hitter because of injuries we have aaron savali jameson tyon spencer sternbull and ryan nelson on the bench right now and i feel good about that.

You know, I think when Savali's healthy, those are guys who can start in any given week. And they're definitely guys who, if you find out on Monday that, you know, Kenta Maeda is going on the IL, you can at least take Turnbull against Cleveland and throw him in there, you know? Or Nelson, I think Nelson against San Diego, we're trying to keep him on the bench. But, you know, these are all guys who can start for any given week,

and then when they have two starts, you say, oh yeah, man, Turnbull two starts, he'll start over Maeda one or whatever. So that's the kind of work we're trying to do, is have four or five useful starting pitchers on our bench. Yeah, I think that's exactly the way you want to play it. Once you're able to get to that level, sometimes the injuries make it really hard

to actually have that many choices. Yeah, because in TGFBI, my bench is Jared Walsh injured, Juan Mankata injured, Tyler Glass now injured, Zach Eflin injured. And so everybody else in between has to be healthy and has to be in the lineup. One interesting thing that I've done in TGFBI is I benched Luis Garcia at home against the Blue Jays.

I'm officially worried about Luis Garcia. His fastball stuff plus is way down. He may have to go to cutter slider change up um and kind of turf the foreseeing which i think reduces his upside as a pitcher and makes him much more matchup dependent so at least for now i'm keeping on my team but i'm benching him for that toronto start i uh like you ended up with a little bit of Taj Bradley. Didn't have to go over $200 in those $1,000 fab leagues to do it. It was like a $177 winning bid and I think

a $157. The one league where I went $157, I didn't need pitching, but I just thought, yeah, you kind of always need pitching, so at least put a solid bid in that could work. The cheap pitchers I got everywhere, we talked about JPCers a lot last week,

so not a surprise that I had a bunch of $11 JPCer bids. Brad Keller on a few of my teams because the two above-average breaking balls, I think that plays. That's big.

And Tyler Wells. And I think the Tyler Wells thing that really caught my eye going into the waiver show last weekend with Al was just that the usage is different than last year. With Tyler Wells,

the Orioles were super careful with the pitch counts last year. With Tyler Wells, the Orioles were super careful with the pitch counts last year. That already has not been the case. We've already seen a normal starter's workload for him. Upcoming schedule's really good. Stuff's not off the charts good, but I think the park is actually becoming one where I'm starting to trust some of

the mid-rotation quality guys that the Orioles have developed, and I think Wells sort of fits into that group. 100%. Yeah, the Brad Keller thing. He had a lot of the same story that Chris Bubich had, except he's remained healthy.

So I'm into Brad Keller. John in a lot of places. A lot of prospect talk coming up on Project Prospect on Tuesday. We'll talk about Zach Netto and Brett Beatty. We'll get into more Taj Bradley stuff. Shouldn't it be Neto? It's like Vito, right?

It should rhyme with Vito. It's just, that's Neto. I would have guessed Neto initially. But it's Neto, apparently. So we're living with it. If you want to subscribe to the athletic, you can do that for a dollar a month for the first year at the athletic.com slash rates and barrels.

You can find, you know, on Twitter at, you know, Sarah, so you can find me at Derek van Riper. That's going to do it for this episode of rates and barrels. We are back with you on Tuesday.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.