Rates & Barrels - Eno's Hierarchy of Consideration vs. Ron Swanson's Pyramid of Greatness

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Eno and DVR unveil 'Eno's Hierarchy of Consideration' and discuss the role of Statcast in their smaller in-season lineup decisions, balancing xStats vs. ROS projections, the continued excellence of Framber Valdez, the relative struggles of Shane Bieber before he landed on the injured list, and more.  Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Subscribe to The Athletic for just $3.99/mo to start: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels presented by Topps. Check out Topps Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. It is Monday, June 14th on this episode. We will discuss how or if we use StatCast in our weekly lineup decisions or even daily lineup decisions for that matter. Anything on the micro sort of level. And we'll dig into what one of our readers has called the secret Eno hierarchy of consideration

when it comes to daily league hitters. I like that name. Won't be secret anymore. Nope, not going to be secret in about five more minutes. We'll talk about the balance between X stats versus rest of season projections. Several player questions came in and another injury, Shane Bieber, goes to the IL with a shoulder injury. Perhaps that offers up some explanation for why he hasn't quite been the Shane Bieber we were expecting coming into the season. So those topics and many more as we get rolling.

You know, how was your weekend? It was good. We spent it poolside in Sonoma at a friend's house, and the kids really enjoyed it. We got to see extended family that we hadn't seen in like two years so ones with you know babies on the way uh my uncle that got covid and was in the hospital for a couple months for a couple weeks first time i saw him since that happened uh just people we kind of stayed away from for so long for because of covid uh we all were in the same room eating and drinking and having fun. So it was really great to see everybody.

Yeah, absolutely. Nice to get those gatherings back where it's possible to do those things. Let's get into the first question for today, though. It was about stat cast and lineup decisions. Question came in from Josh. And Josh wanted to know if you're debating player x versus player y on a random monday for a weekly league or any other day do things like barrel rate and exit velocity even matter or are they better used to identify trends on whether to play drop or trade

someone so is there any way in which you use StatCast on a smaller level to make decisions? It's hard for me to figure out where to draw that line because you're always trying to evaluate players, right? So the question, you know, those things matter to me when I'm evaluating a player. But he's right that there's a difference when it comes to like whether or not you want them on your roster right whether or whether or not you want to play them because there's like a hurdle you have to to come across which is like they have to be good enough to put on your roster if they're good enough to put on your roster they should be good enough to play um and so therefore maybe you don't need to like evaluate their talent like top level now. Now you're just sort of seeing like, who like, okay,

I thought that Joey Votto and Brandon belt were both worth what rostering. Right. So I think that they're somewhat close to each other in rankings. I think they're somewhat close to each other in talent. What's going to help me choose between Joey Votto and Brandon belt versus choosing between Joey Votto and CJ Krohn, who I'm not rostering or something like that, you know, like, or, you know, Colin Moran,

who I'm not rostering. That's a bigger gap where I might just look at barrel rates, look at certain things and make that decision. But now I've decided these two players are somewhat similar, but now I need to decide. And so that's, that's a slightly, I think he's right to say that's a slightly different sort of grouping. And then I think I would look a little bit less at stack cast and more environmental factors.

So if I think that these two players are somewhat similar, like I'm going to go look at the handedness of the opposite pitcher as the number one thing. Right, right. I think the first thing we're looking at generally in a weekly league is number of games for a hitter. Yeah.

If it's weekly, weekly number of games for a hitter. Yeah, if it's weekly, weekly number of games is... And then, so the top three things, I mean, if it's weekly, that's the top three things. And daily, the top two are park factors and handedness of the opposing pitcher. Yeah, so I think I was trying to come up with ways where I would use stat cast to possibly break a tie. So if you were talking about a scenario where you had two hitters, let's just say for the sake of this, they're both hitting from the same side. The matchups equal out both playing three games. Maybe it's two starts against the righty, one start against the lefty.

And you think the playing time is about equal. Park factors are comparable. Would you use something like, let's say you're looking for power, would you use max exit velo or average exit velo on flies and liners or anything like that in the underlying numbers as a possible tiebreaker in a scenario where players are generally very similar? Because I do think usually one of those more consistent top end factors just guides that decision. It doesn't often come down to a coin flip type situation, but once in a while it does. And I do find myself always kind of wondering how I should break the tie when I don't have a clear indicator. we were talking about like a struggling star and how that struggling star might sort of fall back to your bench option and all of a sudden you start like remember who wasn't there's time i was like oh yeah i might start so i might not i might sit him against righties or you know what i mean like

was it glaber yeah somebody was like he might, there are stars that'll fall back to more matchup options. And that's when I like stack cast matters a little bit. So like if is bad, my evaluation of his true talent does start to get affected. And he could start to slide back to where I sit him against lefties. That could happen, right? Even if it's only temporary until you see those things. I'm just trying to get the best out of him. Yeah. So I'm just trying to get the best out of him in the meantime. trying to get the best out of him.

Yeah, so I'm just trying to get the best out of him in the meantime. I'm not going to drop him or sell him low, but I might want to get the best out of him until he's going again, and that would mean getting the platoon advantage. And you'll see it with veterans, you'll see it with teams, like start to make

someone more of a platoon guy. Belt himself, Brandon Belt himself, joey vato these guys were every day every every every night guys right in fantasy and in real life and then in real life they're starting to get sad against lefties yeah vato i mean if you think back five years ago and anything before that was an automatic in the lineup all the time sort of player eventually and it happens at different ages for everybody of course you fall to a level where you become much more matchup dependent again you probably enter the league as oftentimes a matchup

dependent sort of player because of usage not necessarily because of skills because they also don't know exactly how much they've got out of you right they don't know if you can actually handle lefty lefty matchups yet you know you haven't had that many chances like i don't even know that we know that winker is really as terrible as his lefty splits are right and like we we just talked in the last show he's starting to play against all lefties so let's see what his split against lefties is at the end of the year he might be 100 wrc plus from against lefties you know i think a lot of times players have not that much say performance wise in their chances in those splits because

if you have a right handed veteran on the roster that you do want to get out there. It's such an easy choice right? Yeah it's like well we know this guy can hit so why would we take what's behind door number two and we feel good about this guy. If I'm not going to play him now. So I think that sometimes happens too and then it adds to the narrative. why would we take what's behind door number two and we feel good about this guy? Why is he even on our roster if I'm not going to play him now? Right.

So I think that sometimes happens too. And then it adds to the narrative. Oh, this guy can't hit lefties. Well, no, they didn't ask him to because they didn't need him to because they felt like they had a player who was good enough in that role to not push it. So I think this all points to handedness of the opposing pitcher as being the number one uh the number one thing i think park

factors are big too um there's a sortable park factor page on on stack cast that you can use i think it might be at least has the potential to be the best i haven't seen it vetted in a way that we've seen like past park factors really uh gone But I think StatCast allows us to take... We used to take players when we did park factors. We used to take players and be like, okay, player X did this at home in this park and Y on the road. And then we'll match all those up

and we'll sort of compare them. And that's our park factor. That's terrible, I think. I think that's just a horrible approach we didn't have a different way of doing it now we can say let's take this event away from the player and let's just look at how like as simple as you want to make it say like let's look at how like 20 degree to 25 degree 100 mile per hour balls do in this park versus this park versus this park versus this park.

So we can sort of bucket all the events and we can just look at like the physical events and just take the name off of it. So we're not concerned if Mike Moustakas hit it or whoever hit it. So I think StatCast, one of the things I was really most excited about was to get Park Factors right. They have really cool Park Factors. You can do one in three year that's great um and what's nice about it too is you have to you could have different kinds of players where you're like oh this is a player where i care most about hits so let me sort for the hit park factor um and this is a player where i compare we mostly think about home runs right so the i think when we think of like the great parks we we think of mostly just the home run parks but uh you know the nice thing about those ones on Savant is that they're sortable for every event.

So if you whatever you need, you can you can kind of check, take a look. Yeah, I do like the idea of taking that new approach with park factors and really bending it to fit what you're specifically looking for, because it was very broad before. bending it to fit what you're specifically looking for. Because it was very broad before, and I would agree with you. I was always thinking about home runs and not whether or not a park actually boosted hits or suppressed hits in general or what types of hits it boosted or suppressed. I think we had a great American ballpark for years, had this reputation of being kind of an extreme hitter's park, and all it really did was boost home runs.

It's all homers. Balls in play in the outfield are likely outs because the outfield is relatively small. It's like the hardest part to hit a triple in. Yeah. You can't really find a spot where someone's not going to get to the ball quickly. The opposite is a little bit rarer, a place that's good for hits and not for homers. a place that's good for hits and not for homers. But Kauffman is a place that we always think of as being really good for pitchers, right?

It actually boosts all hits by 10% and has a top 10 overall park factor. Yeah, I would put that in the surprising park factors folder. Yeah, and then there's Comerica, which suppresses everything but triples. Triples, it has a 262 park factor. My God, I guess that's because they're not going over the fence. Yeah, and it's so funny too, like Coors being Coors, like you see the deep, deep shades of red across the board.

Red everywhere. The triples thing is hilarious because, again, if you haven't really ever seen the ballpark or you haven't just observed it on TV enough, triples having a park index of 212 just blows my mind. Yeah, Comerica at 262 is even greater. I've been to Comerica. I've not been to Coors.

Comerica feels huge. I went on a day when they were letting fans on the field before the game to walk around on the warning track. I had no idea when I bought the tickets,

but we saw a bunch of people standing around and we're like, well, let's go check it out. How often do you get to step on the field? It's like the last thing you get to do

if you get to do a ballpark tour. Usually, there are people just making sure you don't do that. And you kind of start do that and you can start walking around you're like whoa this is these are big gaps out here there's a ton of room for a ball to drop in here and turn to extra bases pretty easily no this is not super important for our discussion here but it can be i think and it's definitely overlooked i actually think that

the source of all of the deep red, or much of the deep red, other than the big outfielding cores, is the deep blue at strikeouts. It actually suppresses strikeouts more than any other park in baseball. And we know the mechanism of that. It's that the air doesn't allow curveballs to break and breaking balls to break in the same way.

So I think that's actually the source of so much evil in this situation, which is just that the pitches don't move the same way. So I think that's actually the source of so much evil in this situation, which is just that the pitches don't move the same. So the hitters see different kind of stuff at home in the road. If the pitches don't move, saying they're easier to hit, everything becomes more fastball like, of course, the, you know, every hit is easier to hit in that case. So, you know, it's therefore kind of interesting that Great American boosts home runs, but also boosts strikeouts. Yeah, it's actually near the top.

I think only Seattle boosts strikeouts more, but you've got Oracle Park, Tropicana Field, City Field, Great American Ballpark. You can put Cleveland and Milwaukee in that same bucket too. So Giants, Rays, Mets, Reds, Cleveland, Brewers. In the Giants park, I think the source of that is a terrible batter's eye. I mean, just a consensus worst batter's eye in baseball among the people I've talked to. The ball is coming out of shining, sun-reflecting bleachers in San Francisco.

So I don't know what necessarily the source is everywhere else. Tropicana, I think it's a little bit batter's eye issue too. And there's just a lot of white at that field where I could just see just not being able to see the ball. Like you think of it like the fielders, right? A lot of times they're just looking up being like, it's all white. I wonder, you know, looking at these park factors, like we talked a lot about the Willie Adame splits at the time that the Rays and Brewers made that trade.

And part of the Willie Adame's problem going back to last season has been an elevated strikeout rate. But he went from a park tied for second in boosting strikeouts to one that's very, very close and essentially tied for fourth if you kind of look at how they're clustered. So the skills improvement that we may have been hoping for it's so individualized though too like i feel like you can you can look at these trends they mean something but the impact of a bad batter's eye could probably vary a little bit from player to player i mean your individual eyesight could literally be something that makes you more susceptible to being a struggling hitter in one park versus another. Yeah, there's different ways that this gets leveraged in the big leagues too. I think that in this case, Milwaukee said, oh my God, he has

terrible home splits and our park is almost a polar opposite where it'll boost home runs where he's been in a park that's been suppressing all his homers. What if this will just be the perfect fix for him? I think another way you've seen that sort of opposite thing go down is the Pirates trading with the Yankees for pitchers a lot. The Pirates' home run park factor is 83. In Yankee Stadium, the home run park factor is 108. So just taking a pitcher that has had some home run issues in new york and then and sticking them in pittsburgh to some extent you're just saying like hey this is we're gonna look good because it's just basically uh like uh

here's probably the same picture but it's just a better fit for this park right right um so i i think that this is this page page is useful for splits, but I also think for daily lineup decisions, but I also think it's useful for trying to figure out what a player will do when they're traded or in the offseason when they sign with someone. The other way that it's leveraged, of course, is San Francisco going after Rays hitters and Pirates hitters. I think

there's some demonstration of that fact in the past, and I think that's partially because these are hitters that have succeeded in parks that suppress offense in similar ways to San Francisco. You mentioned Coors being the most difficult place for a pitcher to strike a hitter out. We understand very clearly why that's the case. I'm very surprised to see Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City very close to Colorado. I wonder what it is about that park. Maybe it's a really good batter's eye or if there are some environmental conditions there that have been previously overlooked because they're really not that far apart. 88 is the strikeout park index in kansas city and it's an 86 in colorado but they're very different like um geographically

right like isn't columbus stadium pretty low to the ground and wet i like sort of just i think of it as being humid as heck very humid humid in Kansas City throughout the season. And Coors is dry and up in the air. Elevation, Kansas City, probably also a pretty big difference. Does this say 699 feet? That's it? For Kansas City? Yeah.

It sounds about right, but yeah, that's pretty low. So just one of those things. I never considered the strikeout park factor in Kansas City as something working against some of the pitchers there. I always just thought the pitching's just not actually that good. That's true. I was like, they just keep developing fastball slider guys that don't have a third pitch and don't have great command.

I mean, that's true too. Yes, that is absolutely true. But thank you to Josh for sending in that question uh the great you know hierarchy of decision making it's kind of like the ron swanson pyramid of greatness we should make a graphic at some point it could be but i never i never look at things like do you ever look at like slider run value like oh this guy has been good against sliders i don't want to get that far into the weeds not because i don't think it could be helpful but i feel like i would start to make bad decisions because I would begin to abandon parts of my process that I'm a lot more comfortable with for something that I haven't determined to have a lot of predictive value.

getting a little bit closer to it's not quite batter versus pitcher which is like the worst thing you could ever use like i hope nobody listening to this uh uses that do not do not ever use that if there's like a the opposite thing like you know is lowerarchy lowerarchy just do not at the very very bottom of the list is batter versus pitcher. It shouldn't be ever mentioned on the air. It shouldn't be ever used for analysis. It is useless. Above that, you kind of get into some place where maybe you can determine that this batter has a similar swing to other batters, and this pitcher has similar movement and arm slot to other pitchers with similar movement and arm slot

and batters with this type of swing have problems against pitchers because then you've really upped the sample right then you can maybe talk about thousands of at bats and plate appearances but if you just tried to be like you know what has Randy or Rosarena done against

J.A. Happ I don't care what has Randy Rosarena done against J.A. Happ? I don't care. Yeah, and I know there's still a faction of the fantasy baseball playing community that cares about that. I think it's dwindled in size from where it began, but I do think that those people still exist, especially on the DFS side.

That was always the big argument in DFS. There was the Paul Goldschmidt versus Tim Lincecum. Goldschmidt always hit Tim Lincecum, and that was the one where every time Goldschmidt would face Lincecum and he'd come through and double or homer, it was always the, see, told you so. It's always the confirmation bias loop. Yeah.

Plus, Paul Goldschmidt, really good. Also that. Against everybody. yeah plus he was like paul goldschmidt really good also that against everybody like you're you're you're like you're also like you'll be reaching back into like like imagine if someone brought that up now you'd just be like and like tin linscombe comes back and he's like reliever on the mound they're like oh paul goldschmidt always you know murders tin linscombe be like well yeah dude linscombe's out there throwing 89 miles an hour. Players change. That's the other thing that I never liked about batter versus pitcher

splits. That's what's so tough. When Michael Brantley was facing this guy that used to be in the AL Central five years ago, and now they're both on different teams. The pitcher throws harder. He's got better command and new pitches. What good does the matchup from five years ago have?

Or the converse that he's worse. Yeah. Oh, he's really struggled against this pitcher, but now this pitcher is 39 in his last season. Yeah. He's going to crush that guy because that guy's just not good anymore. He's not going to not hit that guy because he didn't hit that guy in the past. Just absurd,

but a thing that has been bounced around on fantasy Twitter for a very long time. All right, you know, we had another question come in related to what we were talking about last week with X stats and the limited value those might have in season. Clinton was curious to know, if you're looking at a player, and he used Kyle Seeger as an example, how he'd want to balance X stats versus rest of season projections when making an evaluation. So the example was Kyle Seeger has an X WOBA of 345 right now, but his rest of season projection for WOBA from the bat is down at 320. Would you trust the bat projection completely or take both into account at different weights, 75% projection, 25% X stats, or some other variation, really enjoying the show, keep up the good work, Clinton. So curious to know here, as you think about a trade or a pickup, how would you balance these two things?

Well, I mean, one thing I would do is look at the bad X versus the bad, especially for hitters, because one thing that's nice is that it takes a lot of the factors that are in that ex-woba and then puts them into aggression and like puts them into a projection system so even if like for example when we talk about stabilization right we talk about like okay uh this person has 50 balls in play he has a barrel rate of 15 he's that's reached a stabilization point that's a really good barrel rate. That's good in the abstract. You're like, okay, I understand that as like,

okay, that status is more meaningful. But what that literally means is that if you're projecting his barrel rate going forward, that 15% that he's got now means more than league average. Before that point, you would use more league average and less of his own. So that just means it's crossed over 50%. So even if you're projecting that person's bail rate going forward, you're still going to regress it. You're going to take 15% for maybe 60%, right?

And then you're going to add 40% of league average to get your projection, right? And the more sample you get, the less of league average you put in. And that's a little bit tough to do on the run in your head right that you have to be like okay he's got this and then league average is this so then really and sometimes we'll do it and we'll eyeball it and let's like look at seager real quick he's got a 14 percent bail rate he's got 185 events over a season he'd probably have like 400 uh so you could take that 14 take uh his his current his his career average of eight percent and be like okay going forward i expect something like a 12 or like an 11 percent barrel rate right that's putting in the regression that's all hard to do in your head

so the nice thing about the bad x is it does that for you where it takes it takes the the barrel rate it says how predictive is the barrel rate how important is the barrel rate how much do i have to regress the barrel rate wraps all up and if you look at the bad x boom the expected wobo out of the bad x is 329 that's that's not exactly the 346 that stat cast has as an x wobo but it's higher than every other projection that does a little bit less of the stack cast work. So that's why I like the bad ex. It shows you that this person's batted balls

suggest that he's going to hit better than these other people think he will. But it's mostly slugging in this case. He's still going to be a 230 hitter. And so we're arguing about maybe four or five homers. But if four or five homers could make the difference for you in your standings. And so it could make the difference about whether or not you want Kyle Seager or not. So I guess the short answer is use the bad X.

The long answer is, I guess, use the bad X. Look at how many bad ball events he has, and then sort of judge how important you think his current bad balls are compared to his career bad balls. Yeah, I think the thing that also jumps out to me looking at Kyle Seeger's profile right now, he's striking out more than ever. So that is a problem. He's 33. He might be at the point in his career where that K rate is not coming all the way back down to its previous norms.

This might be sort of the beginning of the end phase for a guy who's been a really good player for a long time. But a lot of times, players who hit this phase of their career end up being significantly undervalued in trades. Oftentimes, they're widely available in mixed leagues, despite the fact that a guy like Sear plays a lot. widely available in mixed leagues, despite the fact that, you know, a guy like Sears plays a lot. Yeah, but he could, he plays a lot, but he could be, he could be a year or two from the end of his career. It's possible. I mean, 33 year old corner infielder. Yes. He's playing good enough defense, but at some point he becomes, you know, an extra, uh, lefty bat that, you know, at some point he becomes a platoon, just like we were talking about in the last segment, right? At some point you sign him and you're like, well, worst case scenario

he's a platoon bat for us on the infield, and at some point he becomes a guy that, oh, he really should be playing first more days, and then he's out. Right. You know, he's gonna follow an S. Drubal Cabrera arc more likely than not. I don't think he's gonna whiff his way out of the league. That would actually be

that might, I might, if you think that's gonna happen, he might have three more years left, four more years. I don't think he's going to whiff his way out of the league. That would actually be, that might, I might, if you think that's going to happen, he might have three more years left, four more years. I mean, if he can manage to have a little bit of defensive versatility, and the defensive numbers suggest maybe he could, and still, you know, hit 20 homers a year. Yeah, because I'm buying like a 22% K rate

and a 9% walk rate rate and that's where the bad x happens to be with those numbers right it's a slight k rate improvement from where he is right now but still higher than his career norms he's still walking a decent amount when he connects he still hits the ball pretty hard i i think he's the kind of player that if your team has a problem at third base right now or has a problem on both infield corners. And yes, if you're watching YouTube, I'm wearing the hat of a team that has exactly those problems. They're not the only ones, but he fits on,

he does fit as a secondary offensive contributor on a contending team, even at this stage of his career. But I do think it, it kind of comes out to that 75, 25 split, but thankfully we don't have to do that anymore because projections are getting better. Five years ago, I think having to make a calculation like that, at the beginning of the StatCast era, you would have had to balance this out yourself

and make more of that decision kind of on your own or make a rough estimate. But I would agree with you that because the bad X is pulling all that information in accordingly, it kind of balances it out for you and saves you a few steps. Yeah, and I don't want to suggest that the other projection systems are not using StatCast data. There was definitely some pushback on that.

Like Zips definitely uses it. Steamer definitely uses it. I just, I don't know. I just have personal confidence. I've seen the Bat X win in competitions against other projection systems. I guess in full disclosure, I've,

you know, I've worked with Derek Cardy before and I've discussed the inputs. So I kind of know how he thinks and what kind of inputs he puts in and how he treats the run environment across baseball and stuff like that. So, you know, I hate to be a shill for one projection system and make anybody else feel bad about, about, uh, ones that they use. I think they're all pretty

good. Uh, they're all getting better. Like you said, they're all, they all have some elements of this, but, uh, the other, I think the bad X does the best job of incorporating this stuff. The best. Thanks a lot for that question, Clinton. I think you can like a thing without it being some sort of like thinly veiled critique of other similar things. I believe that is a possible outcome. I think you can enjoy something. It doesn't mean that you don't enjoy the other things that are similar to it. That he's too harsh on rookies or, you know, that's been a very public conversation that Derek Hardy has taken part in. And I don't know that I actually have an opinion on that one. I know that there are other systems that are more positive about rookies. and can get an idea of the spread of possible outcomes from the projection systems where some team some projection systems are a little bit more kind to young players coming up and then some are a little bit harsher just gives you a little bit of a range of ideas of what could

happen yeah i like seeing where the projection systems disagree do you remember that show was it called battle bots where the robots would go into that little robot cage thing and they would try to basically just kill each other? Yeah, I think Chris Rose used to host it. Awesome. You know, I kind of wish there was some sort of way to have the projections do battle in a way where we could watch them. We get to see it play out over the course of the season

and measure these things with just numbers at the end of the year and figure out who's the most accurate. But if we had a robot representing each system, like if the bat and zips could get into the cage and one could try to grab the other with its mechanical claw. It's like, custom, sure.

Yeah, and drag it over the table saw. K percentage will be, but they go back and forth and they disagree and then the voice is like, eyes turn red. Steamer gets K percentage. Ding! And then they just have to go they have to actually

like settle their differences with the table saws and all the various weaponry that that show had what an amazing show I want to go back and watch that on YouTube

later today it would be really irrelevant to see a bot destroy another bot in the name of steamer though but what is interesting about that

is that the test means so much when um so like i i like the way that ariel ariel cohen has done the tests in the past where he's done some stuff where it's basically which of these projection systems would buy which of these players and when which of these would have been a win if you had you know what i'm saying it's like which which projection system projected this player the highest and so therefore you would have bought him and did it turn out that way and would you have made a profit that's a very specific way to try and break it down right like that's a very that's what that's most people listening to this use that right oh yeah which

hits did you connect on because your projections and which flops did you stay away from? Not the guys that got hurt, the guys who actually underperformed. There's going to be a system that's lower on each player. And if that system was right, that's huge. Like you avoided that pitfall. The rest of the room was using a different set of projections. They bought in on that player. You avoided that player because that system steered you away. You avoided that player because that system steered you away. So that's a really great way to do it, but it also might have its blind spots. So think about this. Let's say you're only testing players. Let's say you have a cutoff. It makes sense.

Let's say you're only testing players that have 300 plate appearances. Okay, I'm on board. Yeah, 300, sure. 600, 500, whatever. 300 is fair. Because you only want to look at players that you would have rostered or you would have played. You don't care so much about how much did Oledmus Diaz, what was he projected for?

He played for 180 plate appearances. Nobody cares. However, that does matter. And something interesting can happen. You can train a projection system to win on the players that play a lot but have a blind spot

for rookies for part time players for players that don't ever get tested you don't like the players that don't make 300 player appearances don't get tested so you will then project a player to either be good enough, like you might have built within your system without knowing it,

like this cutoff where if they're good, if the projected Woba creeps over a certain part, boom, they have 500 plate appearances, and they have 25 homers, but if the projected Woba isn't quite big enough boom they have 100 played appearances they're not in the test you know and uh this is super meaningful when you talk about young players coming up because if your projection system says you know they're only going to have a 280 wobah they're're not going to play. So your projection system won't give that

player any playing time and that player will be irrelevant. This is another way of talking about why we might've missed on Shane McClanahan. The projection systems might not have given him many innings if they didn't think that he was worth those innings. I think with McClanahan also, I mean, and this is true for any player debuting this year, that missing 2020, that of course skews everything, even written evaluations, right? The people that go out and get live looks at players not having the chance to do that. If we had seen Shane McClanahan, we as in the broader community had a chance to see him pitching in games last year throughout the regular season. I think it would have been obvious to the people who evaluate prospects, hey, this command is actually better than we thought, and everything is nastier than we

previously thought. And I wonder if we're going through something similar with Shane Boz right now. Have you seen his numbers in the minors? I mean, I think he's in a three-way. My surprise pitcher that I throw in this might be Max Meyer. But for me, Max Meyer, Grayson Rodriguez, and Shane Boz are the troika of pitchers that I'm most interested in. Yeah. And with Boz, he's basically doing in the minors what Corbin Burns did in the majors to start the year. He's pretty much stopped walking guys. And he was walking guys kind of a lot at all of his previous minor league stops. I mean, the amount of development that appears to have occurred with both Boz and McClanahan in the lost season is huge. And I think we're just beginning to put

those pieces back together right now. We saw it with Alec Manoa getting up to the big leagues already. I think we saw it with Jackson Kohler. I know the first couple starts from him in the big leagues have been just brutal. But there are guys that took huge steps forward last year. And pitching, of course, a lot easier to do that than hitting where you're not getting game reps. How are you really going to get better as a hitter? I think the best buying opportunities, as we think about the trade deadline, we talked about this a bit on Friday, it's going to be with hitters who are struggling in the first half of 2021 in the minor leagues, because there's a good chance that as they get more comfortable at the plate, they're going to

start looking more like the players we thought they would be, or the guys that look like they were back in 2019. And I also wonder too, a good example of this might be Spencer Torkelson, not because we had a long track record on him. He was obviously in college a couple of years ago. But Torkelson's spring was awful. Iumped to begin the year at high a and then just got red hot and is doing the things at high a that you expect him to do just got promoted i think yesterday to double a like he's age appropriate for the level now at double a and could still continue to move quickly i think we're going to have slow starters that lag all the way through the first half of the season at every level we're seeing it at the big league, but we're also going to see it at every single minor league level as well. Yeah, because it's easy to get super excited about Alec Thomas,

who's kind of ripping up AAA, or AA, I think, in the Diamondbacks organization. And he's probably pretty close, and we should be excited about him. But remember how excited we were about Brandon Marsh and yeah his early numbers aren't great but maybe that's just a buying opportunity you know he's still a guy who's close to

big leagues who's shown a lot of different skills who's just struggling a little bit with the strikeout right now doesn't have great results but he's on the field you know he's showing he's healthy and there could be just kind of getting back into baseball everyday baseball shape I mean he's on the field. You know, he's showing he's healthy, and there could be just kind of getting back into baseball, everyday baseball shape. I mean, he's missed a lot of time,

and he missed the whole year like everybody else. So, yeah, I think that highly, the past highly touted guys like Brandon Marsh that are struggling right now are very interesting acquirers. Maybe you saw this. But in the context of the projection system, too, like it's just um you know we're missing a lot of information too like you and i can talk about this stuff you know about how

we feel and we can have live looks at them and all this stuff but we just don't have the stat cast right so we just don't like we like we literally don't know what brandon marsh's max exit below is maybe some scouts do maybe you know some people in the scouting community do but i don't know what brandon marsh's max exit below is i don't know what his barrel rate is i don't i don't know what shane baz's spin rate is there's a couple guesses on on fangrouse stuff that they ask but they ask players you know yeah and who knows are you gonna get the best of the best workout they ask teams yeah they ask team like the way they have spin rate is they ask teams and they ask scouts. And, like, I think that scouts

could have reasons to fudge it or they're also just rounded to different numbers and stuff. So, I mean, I'm not dinging it. It's just because it's more information than we have, which is zero on all this. But it's super meaningful

because, like, you know, Sam Long strikes out a bunch of guys in the minor leagues, does his thing, and I'm i'm like i'm not touching him until i get the stuff plus numbers right then he comes up gives me some stuff plus numbers and i don't know everything right away but i know eh i'm not that interested co-ar i'm still interested and i think it's command that's sinking his ship yeah and i think clearly in the first start, he was just amped up. We talked about that. Second one, you got to start to settle in

and eventually it's the tough development thing. It's like, does he need to go back and just get confident again? Or is he fine working through it? I mean, I think one way you could handle it in Coar's case, if he comes out and starts again and flops, consider bringing him out of the bullpen

without the pressure of expecting four or five innings from him. Maybe you get two or three innings. He settles in, gets into a groove. You kind of stretch him back out as a starter and he finishes the year back in the rotation. There's any number of ways I could handle it. The Indians seem to have something on that and the race for what it's worth, right? Put a guy in the bullpen, get three innings out of him. If those three innings are good, out of him if those three innings are good get four if those four innings are good get five yeah if their three innings are not good go back to two yeah but if i can't everyone's i can't get five let me get make it more than one like that's fine right yeah yeah i'm a little there's something I like about what the Royals are doing on that, you know,

in pitching development. Like there's some whiffs of like seam shifted weight development with Brad Keller. There is also this idea that like sliders perform really well. You know, they perform a little bit less well from a righty to a lefty, but even a slider from a righty thrown to a lefty performs better than a bad changeup. So to some extent, I'm like, hey, good on the Royals for just saying, hey, what we really want out of all of you is a good fastball and a good slider. And we'll work on that third pitch later. Yeah, I mean, you need two good ones.

The accompanying bit should be, we also only want three or four innings from you. That would help. I mean, I think that would, there's a confidence component to this too, but it would also just give them better on-field results, regardless of how aggressively they're trying to compete at any given time. They'd be probably maximizing their chances of making the unexpected run if they weren't overexposing guys who currently have two big league caliber pitch pitches. I mean, that would be a pretty significant adjustment for them if they could do that. I think it takes a really long time to figure out you have an ace or to develop an ace.

I think if you look at a lot of the best pitches in our, in our league, they're old. And if you look back at their beginnings, Max Scherzer was supposed to be a reliever at some point, you know, Tyler Glass now was a reliever. And then he was like a three-inning guy. There's so many guys where it just took either developing enough to stay healthy for 200 innings

or developing a third pitch or enough feel on his secondary pitches. Gio Gonzalez, when he started out, was supposed to be a reliever because he couldn't command anything. Well, the more he pitched, the more he commanded his secondary stuff, and the more he was a really good pitcher for a while, good starting pitcher, and then sort of reverted back to being a reliever at the end. But I would just say, just generally, if I had young pitchers, my plan for them would always be some sort of rotating stable of like, you know, okay, these two starting pitcher slots, I don't know what I'm doing with them. I'm not just going to take Mackenzie Gore and just shove them in there and be like,

Mackenzie Gore, you're our number five starter. I'm going to take Mackenzie Gore, Luis Patino, and Ryan Weathers, and I'm going to ask them each to pitch two or three innings. I'm going to piggyback in the major leagues. I'm going to fudge that spot and play with it. How often does the ninth best reliever, eighth best reliever on a team get any pitching in? Not often.

So replace that with another starting pitcher. So you have six starting pitchers on your major league roster, on your 26-man roster. Boom. Already you can take that fifth spot and make it a tandem yeah you probably need that last short reliever a lot less than you need someone

to go three or four because someone got hit or someone got hurt in the rotation you need length more than you need some kind of specialist or some kind of mop-up guy cal quantrill right josh fleming it's valuable i mean have those guys and then if someone does go down you have someone closer to being ready to go four or five if you need to push it as opposed to... Do you have a stretch guy on the major league roster? As opposed to bringing up someone from the minors who you don't even know is good enough.

Right. And then when you bring up the young guy, you put him in the stretch role and he gets a soft landing. And if he's good, you can switch them. Yeah. And if he's better than Cal Quantrill was, oh, sorry, Cal, you're going back to the stretch role. This guy's going to take your spot. But at least he's good, you can switch them. Yeah, and if he's better than Cal Quantrill was, oh, sorry, Cal, you're going back to the stretch roll.

This guy's going to take your spot. But at least he's still going three and not just going one. And for Cal, he can be like, at least I still can have my name in the starter bucket. Like, at least I'm still possibly a starter. I haven't been, the book hasn't, like, I'm not pitching the seventh for one inning, you know? I've still got one foot in the rotation.

We need more hybrid roles like that, and I think that the better teams have figured that out. Thinking about it from an MLBPA perspective too, I would imagine that a high-volume swingman does better than a low-leverage short reliever in terms of arbitration value. Pitched is is a huge, is just a huge moneymaker.

Yeah. So, I mean, you'd be receptive to that as opposed to my A versus B, like, well, I don't see, maybe C is the best way to develop pitchers and give you opportunities.

And maybe it's, I mean, the other thing that I heard during a game this weekend, I want to say it was Sunday during Mets Padres, and it was someone in the Mets booth was talking about Blake Snell losing fastball command because he was throwing his secondaries too much. And I said, well, wait a minute.

That's all they work on in the bullpen, by the way. Yeah, I think it also completely ignored the possibility that if you were throwing your fastball less, you could improve the command of the pitches you started to throw more often. Like if you had better feel for the curve, the slider, the changeup. That was the whole Gio Gonzalez thing. He said, you know, you don't work inside sessions in the bullpen. You don't work on your command of your changeup and sliders and your breaking balls.

So that actually just improves over as you get older. Yeah, and that seems like an area where the way pitchers train and build those pitches, that's changing and needs to continue changing. I think that was a case where a guy who played in the 80s was just way off base trying to talk about what was happening 40 years after he played. I like that booth too for the most part. I like listening to the Mets broadcast.

I just thought that was some Sunday galaxy brain stuff that was kind of coming out of there. I don't usually hear that when I watch that. The big thing that I think about with Blake Snell is he can't command the change up. It's not good. He stopped throwing it and boom, he's better. Yeah. That's not the analysis I heard on my TV though. The fun part was when Blake Snell said

I'm mad at my change up. I'm putting it away. I was like, yes. Put the change-up in the corner. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Have you ever seen these dolls that are like children that are standing in the corner? What?

No. Where would I even see those? What are they for? It's like a grandparent thing. Oh, I don't know what it's like a it's like supposed to be like it's like a three or four year old height and it kind of looks like a little boy kind of like looking into the corner but i will tell you it is nightmare fuel if there's anybody listening who's ever seen this like it is just straight up nightmare fuel it is like

what is it's like a ghost in the corner it's this somebody in Florida who's been to their grandparents in Florida who's like, I know, that's the worst thing. It's so weird. It's really weird. So there was a creepy doll that was unironically gifted to some of my cousins when they were little kids. And the parents said, this is ridiculous. We can't let our kids play with this. This thing's terrifying.

But the doll became kind of a source of entertainment for the rest of us because we would- For the adults. We would randomly, so we'd go stay with someone and it would randomly be in your room. In your bed? You'd go to your bed at night and there'd be this scary doll and it would scare the crap out of you. What was scary about it? The hair was all messed up. It probably had a wig at some point that got lost and it just had a really creepy expression.

Like a little Chucky vibes? And it was about the size of like a kid, like probably like a five-year-old that you could kind of put it into a corner and it'd freak you out. Maybe that was one of these corner dolls. Maybe it was ahead of its time, but we just used it to play jokes on each other.

And the game ended. I took it too far. Oh, you ended it. I crossed the line with the placement and the timing of the placement of the doll. In the shower. That would have been pretty good. The shower would have been pretty good. I had it positioned inside the garage

when the family came home from a ski trip and it was just in the garage as the door came up. Oh, that's crazy great that was the end of that game because again i took it too far freaked them all out didn't think about the long-term effects of doing that and you know having now every time they open the garage they're like yeah this is what happens when a person without children starts to prank a family with children and then realizes after the fact, like, wait, that was too scary. He shouldn't have done that.

Bobby was crying in the car, Derek. Yeah. He was crying. For now, that game's over. I'm sure, but I least expect it. Next time I go there to visit. Someone's going to get you back pretty hardcore. I'm going to go.

Try the shower, guys. I don't think they listen to the show, but I can't rule it out completely. So, yeah, a lot of fun at our family gatherings. Just like put a little soap in their hand. The soap. Like reaching out with soap. I'm going to do that if I ever find that thing again. A lot of great questions in the mailbag.

Some player-specific ones that I wanted to get to. Frambois Valdez has pitched really well since coming back from that finger injury. As Manny writes, you were very high on Framber back in the preseason. What are you thinking based on what you've seen so far? And thank you to Manny for sending us this question. I mean, Framber

has basically picked up right where he left off last season. The results have been even better, but if you were the kind of person who thought what he was doing last year, both in the shortened season and in the playoffs, were a fluke, skills kind of say probably not based on what he's done to this point.

Yeah, he's a very interesting pitcher for me. I mean, there's like sort of my top line analysis, which is that he's got one of the top line analysis which is that uh he's got uh you know one of the best curveballs in the game um and then uh a representative sinker and change up and then he's got above average command so it's a 102 command plus uh 130 stuff plus on the curveball overall the stuff plus is only 88 89 so he's a little bit more command than Stuff, but that curve is such a devastating one-pitch thing. And that's where I think there's a little bit of a jumping-off point for future iterations of Stuff Plus and for discussion of what

blind spots there might be in Stuff Plus and just analysis in general, which is that he has one elite pitch. And he can shape it a little bit differently, and he can play with it, and he has this one really good pitch. And how do you put that up against Kyle Gibson with five average pitches? You know what I mean? It's really hard to know how to weight number of pitches versus elite pitches. I think Tyler Glass now was a guy who had one elite pitch, maybe two, and no command.

And he's been great. But he's kind of also an outlier you know a lot of the guys who have one elite pitch end up in the bullpen adam adovino i forget if we talked about him a few weeks ago we had a question that came in a while back about non-starters who could become starters and i don't know if we talked about patrick sandoval on that episode but he kind of fits this fromber arc that you're describing where his slider stuff plus loves that pitch he's got a slider at a 157 his curveball is at a 102 so the overall stuff number is only 81 because horrid fastball yeah the fastballs are brutal the change-ups not good but the command is good right he's right average command, and he's getting really good results.

I mean, I wonder if he also is the kind of guy that it's going to take a while for people to realize that there might be a little more going on with him than what first meets the eye. I mean, the results are certainly there for Sandoval the last couple times out. for Sandoval the last couple times out. And one thing I've also noticed that if you're looking at Stuff Plus, I think like an 88 Stuff Plus like Framework Valdez has, I don't know if average is the right word to use, but it's a lot closer to average for a starter

than 88 might sound. It's not quite on the same scale as Command Plus where 100% is basically league average no matter if you're a starter or reliever. Stuff Plus, like Shane McClanahan, you have these debuts. I tried to do this a little

bit in my post on Friday, which was all about how we can use Stuff Plus and what's going on under the hood and stuff like that. Shane McClanahan, Alec Manoa, when they debuted, they were a little bit closer to relievers than starters almost because A, they had a one mile an hour boost from their debut. That's actually something I've shown, that in your debut, you have about a one mile an hour velocity boost. And then B, they didn't go that far into the game, right? So if you're going to

throw three innings, you're going to have a higher stuff number than if you throw five or six. So there is this relationship between quantity of pitches and quantity of innings and stuff plus that needs to be explored some more. But the thing that I don't want to get into is like, okay, so I don't know, I don't want to get too technical, but like in Bayesian math,

basically, you can say like, it's a little bit like regression, right? You could say, okay, so Alec Manoa debut, really good stuff plus, right? However, it was a debut. So let's adjust for that. Let's throw in some ballast. Let's throw in some regression. Let's regress his Stuff Plus towards the mean a little bit based on the fact that we don't have as much information and it was a debut, right? And so, therefore, the number of Stuff Plus

would become more predictive, right? So then you would take Alec Manoa's 130 debut and you'd push it down towards 100. It's only one start. So let's say it's 110 stuff plus. And then from there on out, the one he went below and when he went above, you would have actually been more right, right? Because you put some aggression in.

Even with McClanahan, he debuted at like 140. He settled in at like 115. You know, you could be more right. It's almost like the projection system thing. You can be more right by tests if you put the bayesian stuff in however the the thing that's so cool about stuff plus is it it just looks at the stuff it doesn't do any of that other stuff it's not a projection system now you could take that stuff plus and put it into a regression in regression system put it in a projection system and that's sort of what Cardi is going to do, right? So it's a little bit of the difference of like, Stuff Plus is ex-woba.

And I don't want to say that because there is an ex-woba for pitchers and it doesn't work. But Stuff Plus is the raw thing you're looking at. And then there are reasons to think about, oh, well, that was just his first start or, you know, this or that. He only went three innings, that sort of stuff. There are mitigations to it. Just like when we were talking about barrel rate. There is raw barrel rate, but you could get more information. So you want to throw some regression in. So at some point, the bad X is going to have stuff under the hood.

Which is really exciting. That's why they're right. And it'll regress it. And it'll turn it into something that's more predictive. And that's exciting. That's something that Derek Hardy's working on right now. So, you know, I think that's better. But you can also, as a human being, throw this into your head and be like,

okay, there was a debut, Alec Manoa, 130. That's really exciting because even if you do regress it, it goes down. There was a debut, Sam Long, 77. That's less exciting because that was his debut. He had an opener in front of him. He was in Texas. It should have been a real soft landing.

It's only 77 stuff plus. I don't know if this is really going to continue. So you can use this stuff in your analysis and try to make the most out of it. And just thinking about the different ways pitchers are used, I mean, Michael Kopach hasn't really been used like a normal starter. So when you see the gaudy stuff plus number from him, maybe you do have to bring down the expectations for a guy like that.

It's going to regress as a starter, 100%. So, yeah, 105, 110 might be more of your expectation once you put him in there for five plus innings. Still very good. Still very excited about him as a starter. Yeah, absolutely. So, good question from Manny, I think, that got that rolling. What's the brass tacks, though?

I mean, like, where do you put him? I think I've been asked about him online on Twitter and stuff. And I'm saying, like, with that package of skills, I still can't. I don't want to push him much, like, top 50. You know, somewhere between 40 and stuff. And I, and I've saying like, I, with that package of skills, I still can't, I don't want to push him much like top 50, you know, somewhere between 40 and 50, like still some question about if I want to start them in every matchup, like still some question.

Like when people ask me, they want to start it from Bervaldez against the white socks this week. You know, I'm like, you know, I'm still looking at their options. I still picked from her out of those options, but he's, I'm not sure that he's a hundred percent started yet. And I like, he's definitely not like top 20 or something. Like he doesn't seem elite to me. He doesn't

have the elite strikeout rates. Didn't have a large group of pitches. Doesn't have elite command. There's nothing elite about him. Right. I would agree with that take. I think the problem you're running into already is that the market, because of results at least, values him much more than you do based on those underlying numbers. It's not a good time to trade for him. No, definitely not. Much better time to trade him away than to trade for him if you can afford to spare him. But he's not an obvious sell high either.

I mean, he's going to be like a 3.75, 3.8 guy. Not going to give you as many strikeouts as some other guys in that category, but the curve should help suppress some homers. He's nearly in every down back. He's just trying to do some different stuff, though. Look at that extreme ground ball rate. What he's

trying to do versus what most pitchers are trying to do, Frambo's kind of off on his own. It's true. That should help protect the home run rate, which is the source of the big blowups. I mean, maybe it's kind of like in the eyes of the Astros, they're saying, well, let's see if we can make another Dallas Keuchel type pitcher. And peak Dallas Keuchel missed a lot more bats than current version of Dallas Keuchel.

And I think for years, I looked at Dallas Keuchel and said, this can't continue. There's no way you can do this. I missed on him for several years. And there's a guy with above average command, one really good pitch and a good sinker. So there you go. Maybe that's somehow helpful. Look at his,

I know that I don't use the ERA estimators that much and have talked about this in the past, but look at the difference between his Sierra and his FIP. Because Sierra actually part of the research behind Sierra was that ground ball rate is not linear and that like a 51% ground ball rate

is okay but a 61% ground ball is way better than that. Like not even just 10 percentage points better. It's just way better. You start to get way better results when you have an elite ground ball rate. By all accounts, he's going to have an elite ground ball rate.

Not only is it 75% now, but it's been for his career, it's 65%. I like the new Dallas Keuchel. It's actually not bad. Pretty fun if that's actually what Fremont is. Keuchel had better command plus numbers bad. Pretty fun if that's actually what Frambois is. Keuchel had better command plus numbers, but... But that's a guy that's going to be

more valuable, a lot more valuable than a 40 to 50 range SP, which again, I understand why you're there. I get it, but I see him as just more of an outlier, more of a guy that's starting to break the models and break down what we think a pitcher should be because he's

not trying to just blow it by everybody. He's perfectly content to get you to pound the ball into the ground, and he does that about as well as anybody in the league right now. Got a question about Shane Bieber, which became even more timely because just before we started recording, Bieber went on the IL with a shoulder strain, and he didn't look like he had his a stuff just kind of watching that game against the Mariners on Sunday afternoon so I'm just kind of curious this is a question from Steve G

I'm curious about this too have you spotted anything in the underlying numbers with Bieber that was giving you some concerns prior to this IL stint yeah I did want to point out I'm doing a piece for tomorrow on spin rate changes across the league and i think that they've been over reported and one of the sources

of confusion i think is that it's tied to velocity so So in his last start, he was down in velocity. And so he was down in raw spin rate, but in sort of spin rate per RPM, he wasn't down that much. And even in raw spin rate, his change of about 50, down 50 in June compared to before, is not what I would call significant.

So there's more on that tomorrow. But I want to put that hand in glove with the fact that some teams use spin rate as a marker for injury. So one game drop-offs like he had in Velo and spin rate were absolutely indicative. So, I think if you see the spin rate and the Velo go down in pair, that means one thing, possibly, probably injury. If you see the spin rate go down without the Velo, that might mean something else. And obviously, anybody listening knows the implications there. Obviously, anybody listening knows the implications there. And so with Bieber, I would guess that it was all a precursor to injury. Yeah, because I think the thing that struck me with Bieber, just looking at the Stuff Plus leaderboard page, he was down, not at the level where I would say, oh, he's not elite anymore.

But it wasn't elite of the elite in terms of any one thing. It was above average stuff. It was still above average command. It's still great called strike and whiff rate. So a lot to like, but just not a guy that should have been in the first round of drafts, based on what we were seeing, more of a second or third round pitcher, which seems like nitpicking, but you also want to make sure that you're maximizing the value of those picks. If you're committing to a pitcher

as a top 10 overall guy or a top 15 overall guy, you want to be absolutely certain that you didn't get a guy comparable to someone you could have got two or three rounds later. Yeah, and hopefully we'll get this app out to listeners and users uh soon uh we're just working on trying to make it uh usable and friendly user friendly but one thing you can do in this is split the pitch type so you can see which pitch type like his stuff plus has been a

little bit volatile this year and so you can kind of split it out and see what what's the source of the volatility and the source of the volatility has been mostly his foreseeing fastball dropping in Stuff Plus since the beginning of the season. In the last three starts, it's gone down fairly precipitously to the point where it was his foreseeing fastball Stuff Plus, which had been comfortably above 100 at some point in the season, was around 75 in his

last two starts so um that's one thing that we also want to do before we we put this app out is get a little bit of an idea about the hot hand theory so rob arthur has the hot hand theory which is that velo in past starts can be predictive of future outcomes on a small level. And I think there's a philosophical difference discussion to be had about whether or not that is actually hot hand, because I would say that if your velocity is down, you're a different pitcher. And so therefore, the projections to just reflect that you're a different pitcher because your velocity is down. So it's not really hot hand. But what it is trying to discuss is whether or not the stuff is predictive on a short term level. And my theory is that it probably is whether or not the stuff is predictive on a short-term level.

And my theory is that it probably is. Because if Rob Arthur is finding that velocity is predictive game-to-game, velocity is one of the inputs into stuff. And if teams are using spin rate to identify injury, spin rate is in stuff. So I have been peeking at Stuff Plus. we were talking about the hierarchy a little bit. I have been speaking at stuff. Plus with, uh, for example,

rich Hill, who by projections by the streaminator on Ras ball keeps showing up as like a, the best streamer, the best pickup, the best pitcher, one of the best pitchers in baseball. And, and yet I look at his Stuff Plus page,

and his Stuff Plus is falling off. And so that does matter to me. I had a big fight with myself about starting him versus, I forget exactly who it was, but it was him that started Seattle this week. Probably a good matchup, probably going to do fine, but his Stuff Plus has been falling off yeah i've been waiting for the other shoe to drop in the one league where i was lucky enough to not drop

rich hill when he was struggling earlier this season i've got a couple leagues like that like oh this league was deep enough where i couldn't make that mistake be like oh i'll just keep him another week oh yeah keep him a few more weeks so far so good on that. If you want to check out that piece when it goes up on Tuesday, be sure to get a subscription to The Athletic if you don't have one already. $3.99 a month gets you in the door at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. It gets you all the other great content we're cranking out as well. On Twitter, he is at Eno Saris. I am at Derek Van Ryper.

That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.