Rates & Barrels - Expectations with xStats, a broken metronome, and keeping an eye on the Atlanta outfield

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss xStats and the limited appeal of using them for in-season evaluations while examining the first-half performances of Nathan Eovaldi, Sonny Gray, Nolan Arenado and Anthony Rendon. Plus, expectations for Atlanta outfield prospect Drew Waters, Jackson Kowar's brief debut, and whether the time is right to pick up or target Logan Gilbert in a trade.  Rundown 2:18 Nathan Eovaldi & Pitcher xStats 11:07 Sonny Gray, WTF? 18:48 Nolan Arenado's Ugly xStats = Sell High? 26:33 Is Anthony Rendon Broken Metronome? 32:36 A Big Surprise in ROS Top-10 for Projected wOBA 37:07 Expectations for Drew Waters? 44:29 Jackson Kowar's Brief Debut 57:41 Time to Target Logan Gilbert 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: 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 back here alongside Eno Saris. Big thank you to Paul Sporer, Andrew Perpetua, and Vlad Sedler for covering over the course of the last three episodes. Good to have great friends to talk to when one of us is gone. I think that certainly eased the pain as we went through a week where I was on vacation and a day for you where you

were unavailable on Monday. So welcome back. Glad to be back doing the show in its usual form with you. Oh yeah. I went camping and got sick. Old story. But also very happy to have you back. I'm very uncomfortable in that chair you're sitting in right now. The lead host has to be on the left side of the video if you're watching this on YouTube. That's the rule. We did an opposite day episode a couple of weeks ago where I was on the right, and it does look weird when the videos start playing back to back. It's like, all of a sudden, I've just shifted. And it's like, wait, what's happening?

I don't know. Where am I? It's a bizarro world. Lots of great questions have been coming in in the mailbag in my never-ending pursuit of Inbox Zero. I took the best of those questions, or at least some of the best of the more recent ones, and cobbled together what I think is a pretty fun rundown for today. We're going to talk about some things related to X stats, a few players who are overperforming and underperforming, and what you should do and how you should utilize the numbers in these particular situations we're also going to take a look at a few prospects drew waters could be coming up for atlanta somewhat soon lots of issues in that atlanta outfield jackson co-ar

debuted earlier this week i had a question about logan gilbert as a possible buy low so we'll dig into that and another one that got my attention another brewer's question i said before it's ultimate hack. You want to get to the front of the line, ask about a brewer. The subject line of this one was Eric Lauer looking like 2019 Burns question mark. And that definitely piqued my interest. So we'll probably get to that one today as well. But let's start with the X stats questions. And I want to begin with Nathan Evaldi. This question came in from Matt. He reached out to you a couple weeks ago about Evaldi and at the time he had a good XERA, good FIP, and a good XFIP and that's still true of Evaldi today. But at the time that Matt reached out to you, Evaldi had below average stuff and command numbers. And at the time, you also told Matt,

you don't use those X stats and gave an explanation as to why. So Matt was wondering if we could dive deeper into when we should or shouldn't use X stats, especially with pitchers, to predict future performance. Yeah, I mean, I think that the FIP, XFIP is very interesting because those are old stats and at some point I used to use them,

and there is a kernel of usefulness in them, of course, because what they try to do, what FIP tries to do is say, hey, the batted ball is a source of a ton of noise. Something like pitcher's BABIP takes like two years before you think you've got anything, maybe three years before you really believe that a pitcher can suppress anything on batted balls in terms of batting average and balls in play. So FIP is like, what can they really control? Homers, strikeouts, and walks. Well, turns out homers are a source of a lot of errors so xif xfip was developed to say what if we looked

at someone's strikeouts and walks and then regular normalized their home run rate so that they basically treated them as league average in the home run department so evie avaldi is a really good example of this because he has a really good strikeout he has a pretty good strikeout rate. He has a pretty good strikeout rate. He has a really good walk rate. And he right now has a tiny home run rate. So FIP says, ooh, 240 FIP. You know, buy low, buy low. He's got a 380 RA, 240 FIP, buy low. XFIP says, well, it's likely that at 0.3 homers per nine is lucky.

League average home run rate is is this and so therefore uh he's got a 3-4-2 xf xfip right now he's sort of pitching to to what he can do um and they're what i like about them is they do try to strip some of the noise out of the batter balls and so that's the good part the problem the reason that i prefer stuff in command is that i think that they're like fully process you mean we're always talking about like sort of process and results and with nathan yvaldi like a lot of the process was good but you know early on the results weren't there and how do we separate that and what i like about xfip and fip is they focus on strikeouts on his walks those are the, that's the core fundamental, the most predictive. You could strip that out of FIP and XFIP and you'd have something more powerful.

So that's why I do look at strikeouts minus walks. And I don't necessarily look at FIP and XFIP because they're both wrong on Nathan Eovaldi. And here's why. Nathan Eovaldi has demonstrated for the last four years before this that he has a home run problem. This version of himself that he's been since 2016, he has a home run problem.

He has always had a high home run rate and he probably always will. So to say that he either owns this.3 homers per nine or a league average home run rate, I think both are wrong. You can look at his home runs per five ball, for example, 19%, 12%, 23%, 20%, 4%. Yeah, one of those doesn't quite fit with the others. Yeah, so they're both wrong in the end. And I think that homers are just a source of a lot of luck.

You'll have a guy give up a couple homers in a game and be like, oh, he's done, and then he'll go five starts without a homer. Oh, he's great again. A homer, from the perspective of the pitcher, it seems like he can control it because no fielder touched it, but there are still just misses. If he's pitching at the top of the zone, most of the time he misses above the zone,

but this one time he missed into the heart of the zone. There's a certain amount of actual luck in that, I think, especially if he mostly misses above the zone. So in terms of what pitchers can control, they can control a vertical spray angle to some extent. And they can control exit velocity to a little bit of an extent, but mostly it's just command. And so that's why I like to look at command and stuff. And actually, in Evaldi's case, it tells the story of someone who has about league average stuff and slightly above average league average command the average command 107 command plus

so here's a guy who has a bad fastball it goes 97 but it's a bad fastball has a couple good secondary sometimes gets beat up on the whole on the on the fastball i would say he's somewhere between like uh let me throw this back to you just sort of where would you place him like somewhere between matchups only and every matchup like he's not an every matchup guy i don't think like do you want to throw him against the the blue jays in fenway i don't i have him in a 12 team league i think it's the only league where i have him and he is not a crock pot pitcher he has not said it and forget it yeah he says forget it i like it yeah you can't just like plug him in and walk away for eight hours and come back and eat the chili.

You have to be very careful about the toughest of the tough matchups, or at least look at your alternatives, right? I mean, you can throw Evaldi in that spot home against the Jays and live to tell the tale. Maybe he goes five plus, gives up three runs, strikes out six guys, and sneaks out a win because Boston scores enough runs like that obviously can happen. But to me, it's very borderline in those tougher matchups. And it all hinges on what your alternatives happen to be at that time, what those matchups look like. So that probably puts him just outside the top 40 among starting pitchers. But then if we're going back to the rubric we were using during the winter, you were talking about having injury flags on your rankings. And unfortunately, Evaldi's had two major arm surgeries. So I think he still carries that elevated injury risk

kind of indefinitely. That's just the nature of having that. You can't really ever completely get away from that. I like him from a skills standpoint. I think he's evolved as a pitcher in a way that if you go back to the beginning of his career with the Dodgers and even with the Marlins, there were shades of what we were seeing from early career Dustin May, where you'd watch him and say, man, that's a ton of velo on that fastball, but where are the K's like he's a six k's per nine guy that that that doesn't make sense he's definitely not that guy it was a bad fastball yeah absolutely and he's not that guy anymore the arsenal is deep there are some really good secondaries in in the mix like i

think he's a very good pitcher who's doing about as well as he can over a long haul with the numbers we're seeing right now. The numbers in the shortened season look almost identical to what he's doing right now. Back in 2018, he was right in the same range, a.381 ERA, a.113 whip. I think if he goes back to being the pitcher that projections suggest he's going to be, I'd be surprised because projections are baking in a miserable 2019. A guy with a home run problem in the year of the rabbit ball got crushed. He had a 599 ERA and a 158 whip,

and that's baked in to the point where I don't think you can necessarily trust the projections in the case of Evaldi either. Yeah. One thing that occurs to me is that home run rate peaks in August, and you've got a guy who's been kind of home run lucky.

So, I don't know. It's interesting to me that the bat has him giving up the most home runs going forward, and the worst projection. I think there is that risk that the bat is correct, and he's a 4-4 ERA guy or 4-3-6.

He's had bad whips in the past, so a 1-3-1 whip would not at all surprise me either. The bat does adjust for the new ball situation and the new run environment. With that in mind, I i i kind of like the blend the blended projection 398 era 125 whip um that's about as as as as uh as happy go as happy go lucky as i'll go on this guy but uh it is also interesting that his x era was part of the question and the X stats. And we had another question that brought up XERA.

It was basically Sonny Gray, WTF. And Gray walked off with an injury. I think it was a leg injury in his start on Tuesday against the Brewers, which was disappointing. A good start. Yeah, yeah. He looked like he was kind of putting some things together in that outing and maybe just getting out of that game and missing a turn or two keeps him from missing a significant amount of time.

Had he pushed it, maybe it would have been a lot worse. But I am a Sonny Gray truther at this stage. I was a skeptic during his time in Oakland, but he's been a different pitcher really ever since his stop in New York. I mean, he's now three years with the Reds have included that elevated K rate. I think the whip was probably likely to come down a little bit from where it was. He's at 130 through 50 innings so far this season. I think what we saw last year in terms of ratios was probably a pretty fair sort of expectation for him given the park and given the likelihood that while he was doing a good job suppressing home runs in the shortened

season even as a guy that doesn't typically give up a lot of homers he was probably pretty fortunate on that side given that park yeah i'm in a awkward position of liking the xera on sunny gray uh which you know has like a mid threes, I think that Gray is capable of that going forward. But I don't like the stat and I don't use it. And the reason that I would point to Sonny Gray doing better going forward is that he has a really, really good strike and minus walk rate. And I know that's not on a scale that's super easy to read, right? Like if you look at ERA or XERA, you're like, oh, a 3.5 ERA. I know what that is. That's good. When you look at era or xera like oh a 3.5 era i know what that is that's good uh when you look at his k minus bb you're like oh a 21 k minus bb is that good

and i i understand that but it is a better stat it it does do what fip and xfip wanted to do better and it's been proven to be a better in-season predictor than FIP and XFIP. So just know that it used to be 12%, but I'm getting the league average right now. I don't know. Should we split it up between starters and relievers? The league average overall in strikeouts on his walks is 15, but starters are a different breed.

So I would use the starter one, which is 16. I was just looking at the leaderboard with a filter of 50 innings pitched so far this year, which Gray narrowly meets. There's 109 pitchers who've done it, and he is tied for 23rd in narrowly meets. There's 109 pitchers who've done it, and he is tied for 23rd in K-B percentage out of 109. Yeah, he pitches in a park that's

a little bit tough on homers, so maybe he'll have more homers, but New York was tough on homers, and that wasn't the reason he had a trouble in New York. Right. So, I would say I would expect that home run right to go down the strikeout minus walks are really good and the reason why i don't like xera is this xera is based on xwoba

so first of all xwoba for pitchers was not designed to be predictive and has not shown to be valuable as a predictive stat just in terms of what, you can look it up on baseball. Perspectives has done a thing on it. You can even say, you know, you look at Tom Tango tweets where he says X, well, what for pitchers or X, well,

it was not designed to be predictive and it's not predictive for pitchers, but the way the, why the, why it's not predictive is interesting because so X, well, but says, okay,

he allowed this launch angle and this exit velocity right and so therefore we even if it wasn't a double we can call it a double right and that is useful for stripping out defense however it doesn't strip out that luck i was talking about which is the ball sort of drifting a little bit or this one hitter guessing right or whatever. There hasn't been a lot of evidence that pitchers reliably control exit velocity. The way that they do, if they do at all, is by staying out of the heart of the plate. And that skill is called command. And we know that we have a better stat for measuring command in Command Plus. And that also that nobody's command is amazing.

Even the best command artists miss by 10 inches. So someone like Kluber, whose best foot forward right now is not stuff anymore, it's command, was giving up homers because he'll drift'll drift over the plate he'll he'll miss a spot maybe the front door two seamer gets too much plate whatever it is and so i don't think that x wobba does a good job of capturing that um luck and strikeouts minus walks are better because they're just like how often does he strike out a guy and how much does he walk? That's like a very fundamental skill. It's about as close as you can get to process and outcome.

So anyway, I could have probably stopped talking if the things that do impact the actual results are changing. If a player's changing teams, moving into a new park, getting a new defense behind him, what are the skills taking away a great defense or a bad defense and then thinking about how much of a change, what is the magnitude of change going to be based on the skills? To me, that's one of the better applications of X stats. Defense does matter. An elite defense is good. You want that. You're going to beat your X stats more often than not as a pitcher if you have one of the league's best defenses behind you, and you're going to struggle to meet the X stats if you have one of the worst defenses behind you. Interestingly, the defense

doesn't play the same for you as it plays for the other pitchers. It doesn't play the same every night. And sometimes that's because the personnel changes a lot. I mean, that's what Batesville is right now, right? Like, there's, you know, there's everyone gets used. Everyone on the roster gets used and so some days you'll find that you've got somebody

that's short that's not your best shortstop defensively. But it also just random. Sometimes they make great plays for other players. And then there's a little bit of if you have a really high ground ball rate, they're on their toes. There's something weird there. Like if you have a really high ground ball rate, you have a lower Babbitt for some reason.

That's a kernel of truth that goes into Sierra if you want to look at Sierra. It does believe that you can suppress your batted balls a little bit if you are like Dallas Keuchel and have a 60% ground ball rate. If you were looking at something in season, trying to make a decision with one of those front-facing era estimators is sierra your choice over fip xfip and xera i mean quick era is strikeouts minus walks problem is it's not listed anywhere can we make that happen uh you know look at fangrass i mean

there's like 800 stats on each page they do have strikeouts minus walks so i don't know can i just say strikeouts minus walks i think we'll allow it in this case that's that's the stat i use all right well i'm still a believer in sunny gray as long as this injury proves to be a minor one i know it's been a little bit of a bumpy ride so far but i was encouraged but we were seeing, especially in Tuesday's start before he left early with that injury. All right, you know, we had some questions come in about a few hitters, and those were also X-Stats related. One that came in on Twitter from DM. It was not a DM. It was from someone listening named DM. Important distinction there. And it was about Nolan Arenado. Arenado's X stats are

really ugly. Is he a sell high candidate thinking I could leverage him into Mankata plus Mankata seems to have the opposite issue with X stats. And this is not in a keeper league. So I would agree just, just in the basic assessment of the two players without even looking at stack cast that if you trade arenado to the team that has moncada you'll get something else back with moncada moncada has been a stack cast darling at his peak right hitting the ball very hard that's something he's definitely shown he can do pretty consistently when he makes contact when he's completely healthy and i'm wondering wondering if Nolan Arenado, who really wasn't a

stat cast darling, even during his time in Colorado, and that's probably what led a lot of people to say, yeah, he's leaving Colorado. He's still good. He's not great anymore. So just be careful, right? He's not a second rounder. He's a fifth rounder. That was sort of the takeaway from a lot of people after that trade to St. Louis

happened. I'm wondering if Arenado's got a little bit of the Alex Bregman thing going on where he does the just right thing to get optimal results without having great process-related numbers in StatCast. So I'm curious if you buy into that assessment of Arenado and then how you feel about possibly moving him in a deal right now as a relative sell high. Yeah, he is also interesting because he makes so much contact. So if you look at, you know, on Fangraphs, they've got barrel rate.

And I'm trying to get right now. So they've got a bail rate there and it doesn't say if it's over balls in play or if it's over plate appearances. It says he's got a 7% bail rate, which isn't league

leading, isn't great. But let me see which one it is because he makes so much contact. It is barrels he makes so much contact. It is barrels over batted ball event. Yeah. That's the, that's the one they've got on the player pages at Savant too,

which he's never been great at that, right? You look at year by year, 5.4% was a low point for him last year at his absolute best 9% in 2016. So right within his, his high and his low right now. a lot of years, yeah, he sits in the 7.2 to 8.5% range in barrels. So

it's nothing new with Arenado. By that one, he's like 86 and this is not going to be like, oh my god, it's so different. But barrels by plate appearance because he makes so much contact, he does a lot better. He's 70-something.

72nd. So yeah, it's only a 14-point drop, 14-point improvement, but that 14 spots is actually a whole 10%. You know what I mean? So he goes from average-ish, actually below average, to above average,

depending on which bail rate stat you used. And I think given his propensity for contact in the past, you know, 14.9% strikeout rate for his career, basically 13.8% this year, I'm going to use the one that is per plate appearance because his strikeout rate for his career for basically 13.8 this year i'm going to use the one that is

per plate appearance because his strikeout rate is a big part of why he's good so i actually think uh i'd keep him i think he's the best player in the deal i think he's going to hit 280 from here on out. I thought using Jeff Zimmerman's vaunted method of two times road splits plus one times home split for a person leaving Colorado, I had a back of the envelope that was like 275, 330, 500 for Arenado, which is almost exactly what he's doing. It's crazy. So, like, I see no problem. I see no problems here. The projections line up with what he's done.

If you look at the right barrel rate, you see that this is a guy who's an above average at barreling and elite at contact. So, this is a guy who should have a really good batting average and 28 homers on the year, maybe 30.

I'm cool with that, man. How many people are going to hit 280 with 30 home runs, not Juan Mankata? Probably not, no. It's a short list. I've been making a lot of trades the last 10 days or so. I think that's what I used half my vacation days for was to try and make trades in my leagues.

And the other half was like cutting grass and rototilling the garden because, you know, you got to do something outside when you're on vacation. But when I was looking at the rest of season numbers from the bat, I was using that as my sort of guiding principle to try and find some players that were maybe being a little bit overlooked. It's easy to get wrapped up in players that are way overperforming, way underperforming, and then we just don't even look at the guys that are doing what they're supposed to or only a little better or a little worse

than they're supposed to be. Yeah, we don't have like a do-do-do-do-do, sell high, buy low, you know? Yeah, we keep on trucking. Just keep doing it. He's doing what he's supposed to do. We don't have like a sell high, buy low. Yeah. Keep on trucking. Just keep doing it. He's doing what he's supposed to do. Good job.

Maybe we need more of those to go around. But I was looking at just projected WOBA for the rest of the season and just looking for names that surprised me, high and low on the list, and then trying to go acquire the bats that were high and try to maybe deal away some acquire the bats that were high and try to maybe deal away some of the players that were low that was my my basis for how i wanted to get deals done seemed seemed pretty logical pretty straightforward and the the thing about a guy like arenado is that he he's at 356 so he comes out in the bry Nelson Cruz, Nick Castellanos range. That's a good group of players.

I mean, that's a top 30 or so hitter, I think, if I'm counting correctly. There's not really any reason to give up on a player like that, especially when you factor in he's still well above the line where you start to worry about playing time being shared with someone else, right? Because defensively, great at third base, the Cardinals will give him a maximum share of playing time being shared with someone else, right? Because defensively, great at third base, the Cardinals will give him a maximum share of playing time. And that was the other factor I was looking at as I was trying to make deals. I was looking for bats like Avi Garcia and Starlin Castro, a couple of guys I traded for, some kind of oatmeal-y guys, some that are a

little more interesting from an underlying numbers perspective. But I wanted guys who do not get days off because we had some questions that were coming in about, how do you make up ground? I was lagging in offensive stats pretty much every stat in Tout Wars because of injuries. You get guys who are playing more than the guys that you have right now. That's the simplest way to do it. Extra playing time means extra counting stats.

It gives you a chance to get five extra runs scored every couple of weeks that will eventually help you climb the standings, especially when you've got three and three-quarters months left to go. Trade away your rays. Right. Yeah, trade away the guys who are really good on a per-plate appearance

basis, but just don't get as many plate appearances as they should because you won't be able to make up ground with those players, even though from an efficiency standpoint, you might've been right about them back on draft day. But I think the other player that kind of fits into this conversation is Anthony Rendon, because he is not doing what we would expect. He was the subject of a question that came in as well. This one came in from ryan every projection system had him in around 88 games the rest of the season which means he plays 50 of the final 104 at the time of this email i think he had a hamstring injury at the time this email was written so

he's healthy again now and i think rendon is a metronome player as we've said before a guy that is just going to come out hit for a good good average, pop 25 plus homers, get the counting stats, and you're going to be very happy with what you get at the end of the season. So far, though, we have a barrel rate that's as low as it's been at any point in the stat cast era. Naturally, the X stats here are not good. A 247 XBA, 385 X slug, a 311 X WOBA. I mean, these just don't look like typical Anthony Rendon numbers. So are we at a point with Rendon where we should actually lower the expectations going forward? Or can we chalk up what has been a pretty poor stretch of about 169 plate appearances

to the injuries that he's been battling on and off throughout this season? Yeah. It's so tough when a guy's 31, you know. There are just guys that hit a cliff there. But he was really good last year, so it's not necessarily like he's a poor fit for that park.

And there is something going on with his plate discipline and his swing strike rate. There's definitely something going on here. I don't know. I don't know that I can give him the full... Look at this.

Highest swing rate of his career. Yeah, it doesn't really make sense, does it? Highest swing rate of his career almost 10 percentage points higher than last year second highest reach rate of his career so is he pressing is he coming off of injury and pressing is it is he getting pitched differently? I mean, the lineup is better this year than it was last year, right? Yeah. The chance for improved counting stats just by existing in the same lineup,

well, prior to the trout injury at least, that was projected to be a better lineup than really it's been in a long time. But in the two years that Rendon's been there, this year's lineup is supposed to be better than last year's lineup. Yeah. time, but in the two years that Rendon's been there, this year's lineup is supposed to be better than last year's lineup. In terms of the pitch mix, he's seeing more fastballs than he's seen in his entire career currently. More foreseen fastballs than ever before. This actually I think all comes together.

I think what happens is you get injured. You're in the second year of a big deal. You're supposed to be a good team. You come back from your injury, and maybe your bat is lagging a little bit, and the opposing scouts have figured that out and are just filling up the top of the zone with hard high fastballs and you start pressing

and swinging at more of them and swinging them out of the zone. And it might still be related to the injury at the beginning. I tend to think it is. I mean, I'm again looking at the rest of season projections where there was a pretty good separation between Rendon and Arenado in the original projections from the bat this season. where there was a pretty good separation between Rendon and Arenado

in the original projections from the bat this season. They are much closer together now factoring in what has been happening so far in season, but we're still talking about a guy in Rendon who's basically a top 25 hitter the rest of the way. It's interesting though that he's projected to be almost the exact same player as Justin Turner. And I feel like if you were in a league and you're trying to upgrade at corner or upgrade at third base, it would be quite a bit easier to go get Turner, assuming rational people have both players in their roster. It'd be easier to get Turner by comparison.

Maybe there's more risk because of his age and a more extensive injury history by comparison. But I'd rather have Turner. That's interesting. So you prefer Turner. I think I'd still prefer Rendon if cost were equal, but I don't expect cost to be equal, and they're close enough where I would just take the discount on Turner.

The other part of this, though, the counting stats, right? The Angels don't have Trout. The Dodgers are still the Dodgers. They're still among the league's elite offenses. So you're trying to get those runs and RBIs to pile up a little faster. It's much more likely to happen with Turner, and you're getting what looks like an identical projection across the board. Though the Dodgers might sit Turner sometimes.

So you get an 85% to 90% playing time share instead of a 97% playing time share. But better runs in RBI out of that share. So the things that I like to look at for hitters are the same as pitchers, actually, in some ways. Strikeout rate, walk rate, then reach rate as an underlying basis for any changes in strikeout rate. So Turner, his strikeout rate, his reach rate, his walk rate, they're all in line with career norms.

And then I will look at barrel rate a lot of times up against the player's own barrel rate. Because if they've demonstrated a certain amount of success, like Arenado, right? He's demonstrated a lot of success with a 7% barrel rate. Yeah. So why are we going to hold that 7% so hardly against him? Turner's barrel rate is in line. He's 9% right

now on fan graphs and 11% last year, but 8% for career. So, you know, all of his stuff is in line with norms. Rendon's are not. His track out rate is weird. His reach rate is weird. His barrel rate is weird. Everything's off.

By the way, looking at the top of the Woba projections from the bat for the rest of the season, it's names you'd expect. Trout and Soto, Acuna, Tatis, Freddie Freeman. Vlad Jr. is now part of that group, which is nice to see. He's third. And Jesse Winker has soared up to the point where he is now seventh in projected Woba for the rest of the season from the bat, which, I mean, he's been amazing this year. But you talk about a guy that from the middle rounds is turning into just a monster this year. Jesse Winker has been an absolute smash pick where he was going. I'm trying to guess this from the game log, but it looks like he still sits against lefties sometimes, huh? Sometimes. Yeah,

I looked at this maybe two weeks ago or so, and you kind of wonder, it's like, okay, how many guys with a projected top 10 WOBA are going to sit against lefties in the long run? That might be a thing that they used to do that they're going to start talking themselves out of. Look at the last...

Actually, I'm looking back. He hasn't sat against the lefty... Is that all season? Is this right? No back. He hasn't sat against the lefty. Is that all season? Is this right? No, he actually hasn't sat. They haven't seen that many lefties. Okay, so the game log misses I'm seeing are just days between series? That could be.

Yeah, because I'm looking back. Or some injury stuff because. 531 was just a day off. That was a righty because the baseball reference page, this is a great tool, by the way. Baseball reference has the batting orders tool where you can highlight a player and it tracks them. Then on the left-hand side

on the game log, it puts a little pound sign next to the lefties. Yeah, Jesse Winker, when healthy, has not been on the bench against the lefty all season. I'll have to look at it someone else. If that matters to somebody in weekly leagues

or if that's a little chink in an armor that you can exploit, you could say something like, so far this season he has a 210 WRC plus against righties and an 85 against lefties. There's a problem with Winker. You should give him to me. That is too big of a split. That should not continue.

I would guess that they kind of go towards each other. Yeah, he could be league average against lefties and 50% better than league average against righties, and that's a pretty good player. That's a really good player. And even career splits are not predictive. So even if you switch over to the career side and say well you know he's had uh you know uh 234 plate appearances against lefties and a thousand against uh against righties maybe this is really a split um you're talking of wanting uh three to

five times more sample than that to just declare him to have his career split, which is 74 against lefties and 152 against righties. Yeah. So I think I'm looking at Jesse Winker. And as you can see, if you're watching us on YouTube, Jesse Winker is elite now. That is where he has gone with what he has done so far this year. Interesting, too. I mentioned Bregman kind of

beginning of this X-Stats conversation. He's still projected slightly ahead of Rendon and Turner and a lot of the names we're talking about, even though it's been a quiet start to the season for him. And I think he definitely fits for me into the compare him to his previous norms for all the reasons we've talked about in the past. The is so unique and like arenado alex bregman puts a lot of balls in play so some of the barrel rate numbers are lower than you'd expect them to be for a guy that comfortably goes in the early rounds yeah i mean putting the ball in play is a huge skill and in a league with with you know the batting average right now league-wide is like 240. You know, you may look at something like Alex Bregman's projected 275 batting average and say he's really not that good.

I mean, that's a lot better than 240. It's a pretty nice cushion to fall back on. It's, again, a guy that plays a ton and has great hitters around him is going to give you, at the the very least good run totals, good RBI totals, even if the power ends up being a little bit lighter than you expected when you dealt for him. So I'm still absolutely in on Bregman. Maybe I was a tick too high on him back during draft season, but definitely not a case where I'm moving away at 80 cents on the dollar where I have him. I think he's a comfortable hold for me at this point in the season.

All right. You know, as I mentioned, lots of great questions coming in on the pod this week. So the next one came in, it was about drew waters. It was basically, could we see him soon?

And what should the expectations be? Of course, a lot changing in the Atlanta offense with Marcelo Zuna getting hurt and facing a lengthy suspension for domestic violence. He will be gone for a long time. And Christian Pache has been struggling. He's been hurt. It's been just an ongoing battle for him.

So we've seen a lot of Guillermo Heredia, a little bit of Abraham Almonte. And this is from a team that had a pretty intriguing group of young outfielders making its way toward the big leagues. This doesn't even mention Michael Harris, who's been one of the bigger risers on prospect lists that have been updated over the last couple of weeks, but Drew

Waters, also there kind of that entire time jockeying with Christian Pache for top outfielder status in the Atlanta system for the last couple of years. I'm curious to know what are your expectations for Waters if he gets the call because he's tooled up, but he's always had very questionable play discipline despite getting very good results in the minors. Yeah, I mean, this is totally not my type of player with the 30% and plus strikeout rates in the minor leagues. It's just not the player I gravitate towards.

There's totally a possibility that I miss on him. And he just catches fire. And these sort of things catch up with him later once the book is developed. You know, there are players. I mean, Jazz. once the book is developed. You know, there are players, I mean, Jazz. Jazz Chisholm has had the strikeout rate problems and it hasn't really caught up to him yet.

You know, he's still a very productive player. And I guess Drew Waters could catch fire like that. But I tend to stay away from people who strike out 30% of the time in the minor leagues. Yeah, I, especially after writing the minor league piece a few weeks ago and looking back at high K-rate players at AAA, guys that were at or near 30%, looking back through the lens of,

well, Keston Hira did that, and who else has done that historically? I landed on George Springer as one of the few currently really good players who's done it. But more often than not, players continue to have that problem at a really elevated level. And I think with Drew Waters, part of the reason why I'm a little skeptical of what he's going to become as a big league player is that I don't think he has the kind of power that a lot of other players

who strike out that much offer. I think of all of his tools, power is probably the most questionable one. Where he could make up for it, though, is if he is able to get on base enough. He's walked 9% of the time at AAA since arriving at that level for the first time back in 2019. If he walks enough, he could be a 220, 230 guy initially that gets on base at like a 320 clip, walks enough to steal 15 or 20 bases right away with ceiling for more, and that ends up being his way to being such a solid fantasy player. But I'm really tempering my expectations

because I think swing and miss right now in the upper levels of the minor leagues is even more problematic when we're looking at a game with strikeouts being as elevated as they are and with it being so difficult to get hits. I said this is like maybe three or four shows ago, when you put the ball in play, it is more likely to be turned into an out than it ever has been at any point in the past because of the way defenses play too. So I think even for a guy

that runs well and can make some hard contact, it could be really tough sledding upon arrival for Waters. I would say a 15 team mixed league is probably the most shallow format in which I would think about him once he gets called up, because I also think there's a very good chance he is stuck in the bottom third of Atlanta's lineup once he gets that initial call. Yeah, and I just also wonder if the Braves don't just do something else. the Braves don't just do something else. They've kind of cycled through the young guys at center and just going from Christian Pache to

Drew Waters when you're at 500 but you're only two games out of the top of your division. I'm not sure that's what I expect. you're only two games out of the top of your division. I'm not sure that that's what I expect. I just want to throw some names out there. Brian Reynolds. I'm trying to go through some non-contenders, outfielders with plus OAAs, outs above average.

Reynolds is on there. I guess Cedric Mullins, but I mean, maybe, right? If you put together the right package for Mullins, I think maybe he's gettable. Even if he has a lot of US control left. Maybe things get crowded in Tampa and Brett Phillips.

If Wander Franco and Vidal Brujan come up, maybe Brett Phillips becomes available for a song. Or Margot for a little bit more. You know what I mean? Like there are guys that could play good defense and be more of an offensive boon for that Braves team. And they seem to kind of be coalescing now. And there's a little bit of like,

let's do this while we still have Albies and Acuna. Like, do we want to worry too much about if we have Drew Waters or Pache two years after Acuna and Albies are gone? Yeah, I can see them moving one of these really young outfield prospects as part of a deal to get a more established player. And I think a package with one of these really young outfield prospects as part of a deal to get a more established player. And I think a package with one of those guys might be enough to get someone back with some control left.

I mean, from the Pirates perspective, trading Brian Reynolds, yeah, he might be their best position player right now other than Brian Hayes. That's going to make an impact. You're going to get a good player or a couple of good players back for Reynolds because Reynolds himself is good. I think he's pretty overlooked right now. One thing that they also have in Pittsburgh are some relievers. If you got Reynolds and Richard Rodriguez

and put Pache in the deal, I think you'd get him. I think you'd get Reynolds. It wouldn't just be Pache, obviously. It'd be a bigger deal, but I think you'd get him. You'd't just be Pache, obviously. It'd be a bigger deal, but I think you'd get him. You'd get Reynolds for a couple of years. He wouldn't be necessarily your center fielder of the future, but he could be a

center fielder for a couple of years. Richard Rodriguez would be a help to the bullpen. I don't know. Yeah, I like that idea, and I think if you're the Pirates, you prefer Pache over Waters because, at the very least, you've got gold glove defense in center field for the next half decade. And that alone is valuable.

And there's a chance that a special bat or a very good bat develops over time. They can afford to just let them play and not really worry about the results. Whereas with the Braves, it's tougher. We still have Waters, right? We still have one. Like? We still have, we still have one, like just trade one, one and keep one. And then you still have

the opportunity to have a young guy come up and take, push Reynolds to a corner. Definitely. That's a great question that came in from Jim, by the way.

But I think if we've learned anything from how prospects have fared so far this year, stashing them in mixed leagues might be risky and just expecting a lot from the jump because of the environment is also pretty risky as well on that note let's talk about jackson coar who was called up to debut on monday and did not make it through the first inning

of his first big league start but in some ways there are leagues like the nfbc where you couldn't pick him up before that start because he hadn't been rostered previously. Yeah, wasn't out of the pool yet. So we're going to get probably one more look at him before bidding happens. I'm curious to know, as you look at some of the underlying numbers in that very brief debut, was there anything to be encouraged about from Kohar? Yeah, absolutely. The one nice thing is that all of his pitches were around average i think that's i think that's good there's no like oh that's a terrible pitch you

shouldn't throw it forcing fastball 97 stuff plus change up 107 curveball 109 so that's really good especially when you consider that within pitch type like four-seam fastballs just don't rate as high 100 is not average so within pitch types that four-seam fastball is actually a 105 stuff so i'd say average fastball good change up good curveball he didn't use very much you know i mean didn't get deep enough into the outing to really get a feel for everything the big question is come in and i think how patient will the royals be and i think this is a really difficult question to answer i talked about it a little bit on monday with vlad because at the time the demotion of jared kelnick and the second demotion of Keston Hero were still like really fresh breaking news. And I put a thread out on Twitter yesterday. And I think people always assume that

when I ask questions that I know more than the people who are making the decisions, and that's not at all what I'm implying. I think it's more of a, why don't we have a middle ground with young players between demotion, which can be the right option. I wholeheartedly agree. I think Andrew Perpetua, Sandy Casimir, a couple people reached out on Twitter and said, hey, you know, these guys aren't machines, which was not at all what I was implying. But it's important to remember that, that failing for the first time or failing on the biggest stage even just for the first time can have a pretty significant toll on a player. And if you're around that player, you know, if you're the hitting coach, you're the manager, you're seeing how he's responding, you could decide based on how he's reacting to a prolonged slump, 0 for 38, I believe was the number for

Kelnick, you could decide that just getting to clear his head without the added pressure of being a first-time big leaguer is the right call. That's totally possible. My general push, though, was if you thought he was big league ready based on three years of being a pro, again, a pandemic year mixed in there, and we're talking about a really young player, you thought he was ready. I'm not sure three bad series or a three series slump should be enough for you to go from you got a 90% playing time share

to you're going back to coma. And I think it's a lot like what we talked about with how teams handle pitching for a long time. Hey, you know, you can't go six. You're a short reliever now. It's like, well, what happened to going two, three, four innings? Like there has to be some other ways.

So I just, I was just kind of pushing out the idea that... Like sit him against lefties for a while. Sit him against lefties. Give him a series off. You have a bench. You have a big league bench. You've got backup guys that you can play for a few games for him.

Let him be around the veterans. Let him be around your best coaches. And I'm not saying this to necessarily to be critical of the Mariners. I'm more just openly wondering if we're missing opportunities to help the be critical of the Mariners. I'm more just openly wondering if we're missing opportunities to help the final stages of player development because of the temptation to just option

a player down, let him get his confidence back. I think that gap between AAA and the big leagues though, they're so different in terms of the quality of the pitching and the defense you're seeing right now. I don't know if you could always solve your problems against big league pitching by going down and beating up on AAA

pitching for a little while. I think with Kelnick, he was at AAA for such a brief time and even just the upper levels of the minor leagues, he had so little experience there, it's easier to make that argument to send him back down. And I pointed out Dylan Carlson as an example. He went down to the alternate site last year, came back 10 days later, and has been 20% better than league average since the day he came back late last season. So it could be a situation just like that. It could be a longer demotion, a return where he struggles again, where he goes down again. There's any number of possibilities. It just seems weird to me that the biggest button on the dashboard when a young player is struggling seems to be send back to AAA.

And I don't know if that's always the best choice, even if it was the best choice in this case. Yeah, it's really tough. I mean, we don't have all the information. I think that's what makes it so difficult is that there's a lot of different things that could be going on. there's a lot of different things that could be going on. He could be not listening to coaching, in which case a demotion is like, hey, buddy, it's not going that well.

Even if your coaches are saying everything, your private coaches or your dad or whoever it is you call because you're not listening to our coaches. I'm not saying that's what's happening. I'm saying that could be a reason to demote somebody uh confidence is a big one uh but there are organizations that have ways to increase confidence even during um bad stretches some uh will actually bring out the analytics and be like hey by the way your expected WOBA is like 200 points higher. You're doing the right thing and you just need to keep doing the right thing

and the hits will fall. I've definitely talked to players who've gotten that feedback from the front office and really valued it and said, oh, that came to me at the right moment because I was like, what am I doing here? And that really helped. There are other organizations that also create

what are called Dig Me videos, where they basically, to a soundtrack of your choosing, will create like a YouTube, or just a bunch of clips of you doing well, set to music you like, to pump you up before a game so there are little things you can do about confidence before you do the big thing and even the big thing that's like to restore your confidence is maybe not all that effective because it's like um we're

gonna send you down to improve your confidence? Because even if you go back down, you're going to be like, well, yeah, okay, good. I'm hitting homers again, but this isn't the big leagues. No, it's like if you were a sophomore and you were the best player on the JV team and the varsity coach brought you up and you went 0 for 4 with four strikeouts and back-to-back games, and he said, yeah, you're going to go back and play against JV pitching again. He wants you to get your confidence back. You'd be like, well, I'm a JV. There's other ways to get your confidence back. Like He said, you're going to go back and play against JV pitching again. He wants you to get your confidence back. He'd be like,

well, I'm a JV. There's other ways to get your confidence back. Yeah, right. You know it's not the same. I think players know that. I think every player is different.

I think we're closer now than we ever used to be to teams understanding the individual needs of players. I think we're still probably a long way away from teams fully getting it,

but they're more likely to get it in 2021 than they were at any point in the past. So I guess that's somewhat encouraging. And like you said, there's any number of reasons, any number of things that we might not know about. Maybe there are things that the Mariners don't want to tell us. Maybe if Kelnick isn't listening, which again, we don't know, they don't want to put that on him by telling people that in a press conference because then that creates this extra friction with a player that they already developed friction with with Kevin Mathers Rotary Club comments several months ago. So there's always more to the story than we have. I think what is hard for me to grasp is that we all just want something closer to the truth. We

can understand. Just let us know what your process is, because this is a hard thing to do and a hard thing to decide on. And I'd like to know how you made that decision after less than 100 plate appearances, because you seemed pretty confident that he was ready when you called him up and you gave him a pretty quick hook when it didn't work. So again, maybe it's the simple tip of the iceberg thing where we'll just never quite get the full story. But I think it'd be fun to talk to some players who had this brief demotion and say, did that help you? Do you think it was seeing pitching you could hit? Do you think it was just clearing your head of the expectations or some combination of both? And you might get a wide range

of answers from those players who've gone through that before. Just put that on my idea board. Which is literally a piece of paper I scribbled, sent down on. Sent down. You might need more notes once we're done to clarify what exactly that is. I think, yeah, the Mariners could have said,

you know, the division is slipping away. You know? And we wanted to give it one last shot with the best players we have right now and we think that jared will be part of that going forward maybe they said that but uh maybe and maybe it's the truth that we just like we just like swim move past that and be like oh that can't be the truth it's obviously service time manipulation yeah and i mean for. For me, I'm not even really suggesting at all that that's part of the calculus here. I just want to know

how do you make that decision because it seems like a really hard decision where there's still a lot of old school thought that maybe supersedes some of the newer ideas about how you can do it. But it's interesting to hear that building people up with the hype video, if you're an older fan of baseball, especially, I could imagine you're just laughing

at that concept. You're like, come on, that's ridiculous. But there's absolutely psychological benefit to seeing yourself being successful that will make you feel better and think differently and help you pull out of a funk like that. At least it will help pull a lot of people out of a funk like that. Yeah. And there are also things that will become meaningful in as small a sample as, uh, you know, the 92 plate appearances that,

that Jared gave that put up, uh, Kelly put up that, um, that we could talk about here, but they almost seem irrelevant because this is not a situation where like the Giants, for example, they were cycling through waiver claims, right? They had Connor Joe. They had, I don't even remember the guys. They kind of went through all of them. Alex Dickerson stuck. Micah Stremski stuck. Two or three other guys did not stick. They're no

longer Giants. And they would actually give them sort of like 50 to 75 plate appearances before they moved on and i think it's a combination of how you would project them anyway so like you'd project connor joe to be at best case scenario maybe a league average guy and then you get him in the camp and you give him you know reps and then you see man he reaches more than anybody he doesn't make contact really well, and he's not barreling the ball. Our projections are already shifting a little bit, and if he's not going to be league average,

then he's going to be a backup, and maybe Mike Kostremski could be league average. So let's make that waiver claim and release Connor Joe. So that is not the case with Jack Kalnick, though, right? You're not evaluating him against other waiver claims. No, no. You're just trying to make sure that you put him on the path to be as successful as he can possibly be in the long run because he's such a huge part of your future. And again, they have every interest in getting it right.

So if they think this is the best thing to do, then they think that's the best thing to do. But the why part, I just think the why part and the how else could this work, I think those are questions that are worth exploring. And some people disagree. They've got 0.4% of making the playoffs. So I think the division running away from us

and we need the best players at the major leagues right now. I don't know. I think we'll probably see him back in July, maybe even before the All-Star break. Maybe by the end of this month if he goes down and just mashes at AAA and reminds them, like, no, no, I was ready.

Just give me a little more time against top level and I'll start to make those adjustments and I'll start to figure it out. And then they might be looking for certain factors. I think that the thing that surprises me the most about uh what he did was the strikeout rate so maybe they were maybe they were like whoa you know you know the the patience is good you've even barreled some balls while you've been up here uh the max ev looks good uh and even when you like look at his like sort of breakdown plate discipline stuff like

you know the the reach rate is not terrible the swing rate is a little aggressive but not super terrible so maybe they're just like there's something about your plate approach that you need to work on and what we really want to see is not you know you going down and and mashing in terms of power or stealing a bunch of bases. That would be silly. What we want to see is a return to the 20% strikeout rate. Right. And it might be that simple.

But I'm curious to watch how this plays out for a million different reasons. By the way, his teammate, Logan Gilbert, subject of a question from Bill, we kind of started with a lot of X stats. And that was also a question from Bill is he's in a rebuilding year in an ale only keeper league has been eyeing up Gilbert to pick him up in a possible trade. And based on your last set of rankings, he profiles as a guy with good stuff who just needs to command it better. And I'm looking at the leaderboards right now. Yeah, above average stuff, average command. Kind of seems like Gilbert's finding his way a little bit in his more recent outing.

Still doing things that a rookie pitcher is going to do. I mean, think back to last season. Casey Mize, a guy who was drafted 1-1, looked like a deer in the headlights at times. It's a hard game. So in a keeper league especially, do you think you've seen enough good from Logan Gilbert to say, yeah, this actually is a really good time to go out and make a move for him because the results haven't quite caught up to some of the things

he looks like he's capable of doing? Yeah, I mean, the location has been up and down. When I look at him, one thing jumps off the page at me, which is a 110 stuff plus on his four-seam fastball. And because four-seamers have a lower than average, that's a 118 if you adjust within his pitch type. So I think he has a really good fastball. And he has a really good fastball and he's a really good slider.

So that's a really good modern duo to start off with. Now, Stuffless is not like his curveball or his changeup, but if he uses them correctly, they could be show me pitches. But fastball slider, you know, plus Seattle is a pretty good combo. I think at least you've got to think of him on the level of

maybe like a Brady Singer type, but better because he's got a better fastball. At the very least, he's a guy in a situation that has the building blocks of what he needs and he's in a good division and park for

for matchup situations i think he's a buy i i contacted james anderson the other day um and it was before his last good start so i don't know maybe now it's a little bit harder to get him uh but we agreed that you know before that last good start was a decent time to try and get him and maybe maybe it still is maybe the owner thinks that he's pulling one over you for one good start. Maybe. And I think if you look at the K-BB percentage so far, 16.7% for a rookie going through his first five starts, that's good. That's right around league average for a starter, maybe even a shade above.

So I think there's certainly more good than bad in the things that we're looking for. It's got to be easier to get going if you have a good fastball and slider. It's like, you know, at least it's not like there's so many pitchers who are in the bin where they're like, oh, well, I like his three off-speed pitches, but his fastball sucks. Yeah, and his team wants him to throw his fastball half the time, even though it's his worst pitch. Yeah, right, exactly. Good luck, dude. I hope that works for you. That player may eventually find success,

but I don't think it'll be in the first two or three years. I think it might be when he changes teams or gets released or something, and they're like, no, you know what? You know, think about Eovaldi, right? He threw hard, but it turned out his other pitches were better than his fastball. And yes, the fastball velo makes the whole thing work,

but he got a lot better when he went from 60% fastball usage And yes, the fastball velo makes the whole thing work. But he got a lot better when he went from 60% fastball usage to 30% and 40%. And so with Gilbert, you actually have a guy who has a good fastball. I think that's a really good place to start. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question, Bill. Thanks for all the great questions that came in. Still a lot of emails that I'm plugging away at. I'll try to answer as many of those as I can, either on the side or we'll get to them on a future show. You can email us, ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com or tweet at us. He's at Eno Saris.

I am at Derek Van Ryper. As we say at the end of every show, if you need a subscription to The Athletic, the best place to get one is theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels3. $99 a month gets you in the door. Britt had a piece about the sticky substance problem that continues to plague Major League Baseball that went up on Wednesday. Get all of Eno's stuff, all of the minor league stuff I write about, rankings, everything you need, plus coverage on their sports, too. It's a great time to be a sports fan with the NBA playoffs. Going well if you're not a fan of the bucks i think at this point if you're a bucks fan like me maybe you're a little bit disappointed at how things have turned in the last couple of days but still fun to have that coverage nonetheless that is going to wrap things up for this episode

of rates and barrels we are back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening.