Rates & Barrels - Final Draft 2023 Season Takeaways

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

DVR returns to join Eno and discuss their takeaways from the 2023 draft season including teams' varying processes for promotion prospects on Opening Day, a few of their most heavily-rostered players, and a few things they need to go right to have a successful season. Rundown 3:45 Taking a Moment to Look Back at Draft Season 8:34 Was DVR's Heavy Targeting of Fringe Top-100 SPs Too Risky? 15:28 Leaning Into Mid-Tier First Basemen 20:55 Did Spring Performances in WBC Have Elevated Impact on Drafts? 23:02 Rookie Helium: Anthony Volpe & Jordan Walker 30:42 What Puts Prospects Over the Top for a Roster Spot During Spring Training? 37:39 Team Factors Are Critically Important and Tough to Read 43:32 What Needs to Go Right For You in 2023? Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at $1/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Treat yourself to Tim's new Fudge Brownie Lattes, made with freshly ground espresso beans, frothy steamed or ice-chilled milk, and topped with marble chocolate curls. Now that's music to our ears. Available hot or iced, only at Tim's. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Thursday, March 30th. Derrick Van Riper back from paternity leave leg one along with Eno Saris. Eno on the road celebrating opening day in Brooklyn this year. What brings you to Brooklyn, Eno? We have a super event tonight at Other Half.

We're going to be debuting my beer, Staring Into the Shift, a hazy pale ale with Other Half brewing, and then my sandwich that I did together with the head chef from Philly, Other Half, Ryan McLaughlin. We've been working on a sandwich for like a year now.

And the result is a breaded and fried pork cutlet but it's more complicated than that it's kind of like well you're from Wisconsin it's a breaded and fried head cheese yeah okay and okay. And so then we put a matbacha, matbucha sauce around it, which is a Israeli tomato sauce, and some greens that have been tossed in a mustard vinaigrette. Sounds like a great sandwich. Lots of flavors, lots of textures. It's going to be good. Then we'd have a panel tonight.

The RSVPs are full and if you are listening to this before the panel and you have RSVP'd know that people shared the Evite after it was closed. Supposed to be closed and there are lots of people RSVP'd on there

and limited space so i would come early well yeah there might be a few people that get to hear this before the event starts but the timing on that is uh dependent upon the little guy actually the uh the son of mine he is he's erratic he is wonderful but he is erratic he has thrown a wrench into my previously well-organized schedule the google calendar of my life has just been absolutely decimated over the last six weeks. Couldn't be happier. A lot of folks reached out and said some really nice things, sent nice emails. I got a few gifts, actually.

This is the most incredible gift I've ever received right here. I'll hold up to the camera if you're watching on YouTube. This came in from, I believe, listener Daniel. It's a Victor Robles rookie with an autograph and a jersey patch. And I did see that Victor Robles had a great spring. I caught that in my limited viewings of various spring training games and news snippets and 3.30 a.m. Twitter storms. I see the same guy. I took a quick look.

Couldn't hold back. I couldn't just say, all right, I'll trust same guy. I took a quick look, couldn't hold back. I couldn't just say, all right, I'll trust this. I'm back in. I had to look and see, is he hitting the ball harder? No, he really isn't hitting the ball harder. Does this matter? No, this really doesn't matter. So Victor Robles will always have a special place in my heart,

but he has absolutely no place on any of my rosters this year. Zero exposure to Victor Robles for me in 2023. Yeah, you know, I've got somebody like that. Jarrell Cotton is probably my version of that. I will always watch him. I'll always wait for that crazy ass change up, and I will never put him on a team of mine. If it comes down to the point where Victor Robles jerseys are going for $10, $20 at TJ Maxx in the DC area, I'll get one. I'll find a way. I'll get one. It's a memory. Maybe I'll put it on the wall. More likely, I'll just wear it once in a while to drafts or something, and people will get a pretty good laugh out of it. I did see our friend Jeff Zimmerman making a really good point, I think this was a couple days ago now, about taking a moment as the season begins to look back at draft season and just take some inventory of what you did, what happened when you employed various strategies, what situations

were you in? Because the problem solving we just did over the better part of the last six weeks, but for some people like six months, if you go all the way back to the fall, I mean, I was drafting back in the fall because I'm a weirdo. You will forget those things if you are focused entirely on the games that are happening. So it's important to just stop, gather your thoughts, write it down, talk it out, and then check in. Make sure, like, hey, did these theories, these ideas I had about the rosters, the A, B sort of decisions I made, did I get them right? Did I get them wrong? I do think that's a really important thing to try and do right now because it's harder to do it later. You can look back at your roster and remember some of it at the end of the season, but then you have more results based analysis that's like, oh, my team was good. And why was it good? But you didn't really find out the things that really kind of put it over the top. Yeah. When you were talking, what came to mind was I had a fairly light NFBC season this year because I don't know why.

That's just how it broke down. So I only have two draft champions leagues, but the first one I was all excited to get all sorts of young pitchers that I thought I would be out in front on, like your Kyle Bradish and Hayden Wesnenski types. And that's all fine and good. They are in the rotation, but they're not pitching in the first week. And so I have on that league,

I have, I think, four relievers. One of them's a closer in there. That's also a league where I just got hit in the groin by injuries. I started with Edwin Diaz in the second on an auto pick. Oh, yeah. That's a famous squad on this part. Reese Hoskins was my first baseman. And Tylerler glass now uh pre early injury was uh like my second pitcher or something so that one is doomed to fail i don't think it's gonna go anywhere i think it's already dead in the water on day one but uh one thing that i did learn from that in my second one I took a lot more guys that you would consider boring, but are now starting week one and making me feel pretty good about this staff. And these types, we went hard on as well in my main event.

So these are the boring pitchers that I think will be meaningful. Guys like Luis Garcia, Spencer Turnbull, Jose Urquidy, Nate Eovaldi, those aren't necessarily upside picks. And yet I think they're going to be really important. In my main event, we've got guys like Aaron Savali, Jameson Tyon I have a lot of shares of, Spencer Turnbull again, Jordan Montgomery, just innings, decent innings. And if you have decent, healthy innings, then you have choices, and then you can play matchups.

You know? And I think that sometimes, and I think the reason why I bring this up right now is because we're going to have some breakout performances in the first week. Right? In the first, even for four days. Somebody's going to pitch really well. And you're going to be like, oh, Graham Ashcraft pitched really well against Pittsburgh at home. And then somebody's going to be like, Graham Ashcraft put you really well against Pittsburgh at home do I and then somebody's gonna be like do I drop Nathan Evaldi or do I you know what I mean like there's gonna be like do I drop this kind of boring veteran and I would say try to do something

else like try to keep the boring veterans because they give you options the more of those guys you can have the more options you can have and the more you can weather injuries and the more you can start to do two start weeks from your own bench where you take a guy in weekly lineups and take a guy off your own bench and put them in you know there's just it's just those guys are useful even if spencer turnbull has a 99 stuff plus and isn't super exciting. He's a useful guy. Yeah. I think the challenge I ran into with pitching throughout draft season is that I felt like I was getting too much value on the Clayton Kershaw, Luis Severino, Tyler Glasnow.

Freddie Peralta, Dustin May, Chris Sale. Those guys are some of my most heavily rostered pitchers across everything. I'm in seven different leagues on the NFBC site. That doesn't sound like a lot when you are then told that only two are online championships, two are draft and holds, one's TGFBI, one's a main event qualifier, and the other one is a satellite. I didn't play the big auction this year. I didn't play the main. The main reason for me, honestly, there were so many nights in the last 10 days, especially after the main event weekend. I'd look at my phone. I'd be up.

I'd be feeding Braden. It'd be like 4.30 in the morning. I'd have FOMO. I'd be up, be feeding Braden, be like 4.30 in the morning. I'd have FOMO. I'd be looking at draft boards or something just to stay awake. I'd go, oh, there's still a few spots left in the main. Oh, there's a 10 a.m. main on opening day. He's usually up around 6. Maybe I could do this.

Then I'd get a nap, and the rational part of my brain would say, you're going to spend $17.50 on an entry for a 7 a.m. draft when you're getting broken up crap sleep. And you haven't been as connected to the game as you normally are because of this life event. You're going to go play in those conditions? You're an idiot. So I think what happened, fortunately, with the auction was enough people just kind of piled in over the weekend to fill the spots. Auction temptation went away, and that's a longer time commitment.

The main was a little bit harder for me to actually pass on because it just kept, each day would pass, like, oh, there's still a spot there. Maybe I'm meant to be there. But I'm okay with this. I got a couple shots at the big prize in the online championship. There's a ton of money up for grabs in that overall contest. There's a lot of teams in it. And I took that high-risk, high-reward pitching build, and I used it because I think that's one of the ways to actually do really well in an overall contest. You have fortunate luck with pitching injuries. You have guys that haven't thrown a lot of innings

that hold up and actually give you the innings that you're looking for. So this is the typical Derek rotation for this year, right? I get an ace. I got Woodruff on this particular team. Got him in the fourth round. Josh Hader as a closer picked him in the third because i felt like there was gonna be a little run at that three four turn i heard you talking about one of your teams and just if you don't like the back end of the first closer group as much you don't really want to

overpay for those guys like if that's presley or romano whoever that is for for you it's different for everybody it also depends on your draft slot. There's a big draft slot thing there where you just know you either have to jump a guy a full round or you aren't going to get one. I was smack dab near the middle with pick six and I just felt like

I was vulnerable to runs on each side of me really easily. I've had so many drafts this draft season where I was on an end. I felt like I could dictate tempo and get whatever I wanted and pivot more easily because you can change direction with greater magnitude with two picks at a time.

When it's one pick, wait 12, you're just at the mercy of everything that happened. I got beat up by an early catcher run. What I felt was a good catcher run in that pick 100 to 125 range, MJ Melendez, William Contreras, Sean Murphy.

In my mind, they went bop, bop, bop. We managed to get MJ Melendez and we were happy about it. Then it just went crazy right after that. I was sitting there. I was like, this is going to be the round. I'm going to get my catcher. I was really pretty laid back about which one I was going to get. I got zero of them because I just played that game of chicken too long there's always going to be a cost

to those types of decisions it could have happened at closer I didn't want it to happen at closer in a league with an overall prize so I went hater in the third woodruff in the fourth I ended up getting another closer I didn't do this as much this year as last year I went Felix Bautista in the sixth where I did the two closers somewhat early. Part of the reason I did it, though, is because it's a 12-team league. I felt like the concerns we have in a 15-team league don't all pour over quite the same way. I think the waiver wire can be a lot more kind to your draft day errors if you decide to be a little more aggressive with certain categories or certain positions. So the question is going to come down to whether or not the guys behind Woodruff, Kershaw in the ninth, Peralta, Freddie Peralta in the twelfth, Tyler Glass now in the fourteenth, obviously hurt already. Tyon in the twentieth, Jack Flair in the twenty-first, Zach Eflin in the twenty-second, and a couple dart throws late.

Ryan Pepeo, Graham Ashcraft, and then a closer, Jonathan Hernandez, maybe in the 25th round. I have one of the most injury-prone groups of pitchers you could possibly have, but I think I did it in the right place, in the right kind of league, with opportunities to go after guys like Ashcraft or whoever it is that pops in these early weeks. Because I do think you can turn over a couple spots on a pitching staff in a 12-team league in the first month and end up going from high risk to steady floor and high ceiling. I think it's possible to do.

You just have to be really sharp on the wire. I struggle sometimes to talk about things that are relevant to all sorts of different players and different settings. I'm looking at my player shares over at NFC, and one of them is just super specific to two-catcher leagues. I have a bunch of shares of Cabert Ruiz, and I can't tell you that I think he's necessarily going to break out. I can't tell you that he should be a 12-team catcher.

I don't even know if he's a 15-team one catcher. But I do have him in a few places across different formats because he just makes a lot of contact, and I think he'll be decent. And I think catchers are underrated, undervalued. Catchers that can actually have some offense are undervalued in most leagues. It's definitely something I saw when I did values versus adp and nfc for the main we saw that catchers were as a unit undervalued by the market and so that's something that we wanted to do so we ended up with mj melendez and cabret reese as our starters and we feel pretty good about that

i i am not a proponent of uh really punting that position because a lot of times you end up with the worst players in the game like literally back like like back half catchers are the worst players in the game offensively so i did like i'd wanted to not have that uh but the another a different player that I think is more universal to all settings and representative of another pocket of value that I saw this draft season, I wonder how it'll continue into the season. But Josh Naylor is a guy I have everywhere. And he was really important to my run last year in labor. And yet I have them again in a lot of places because i found that mid-tier first baseman were also uh underrated when i looked at my numbers and so that includes

like rowdy telez um andrew vaughn um rajosh nailer there's a there's a whole grouping there of first basemen that kind of go from 150 to 200, and I like almost all of them. And so if you didn't get Vlad or any of the top first basemen, and I'm not saying don't take a top first baseman, but if you went with speed or if you went with a positional value, do not fret. There are guys there later, and a lot of them are lefties that are going to benefit from the shift rules so you know if nailer's out there in your 12 team as a free agent i would consider adding him like i think he's uh relevant in all leagues and i think he'll be a pretty good player this year yeah i think that was definitely a consistent pocket of value across all drafts i was in i don't feel like that's a bottom could fall

out sort of group the way that the high risk, high reward pitchers with arm injuries in their past and back injuries in their past will be. I felt comfortable doing that a lot. I think Josh Bell is one of my most rostered players. He's in that pocket too. There was one team, I think I have Bell and

Naylor. I'm like, I don't care. It's first base and DH. Pretty good lineup. I think they're both going to meet their projections'm like, I don't care. It was first base and DH. Right. Good lineup. I think they were, they're both going to meet their projections. They're both underpriced. This, this makes sense to me. And you really don't want, uh,

to, to cheap all the way out on first base. When you, if you're in like a super deep league or something like, uh, the very bottom of first base is a real problem. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. bot on the first base is a real problem. you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton bike or bike plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access memberships separate. Terms apply.

Whoa, what are you listening to this for? Wait, who's talking? You know you're driving a 2024 Ford Escape with available Alexa built in so you can change the music. Oh yeah, Alexa, change station to 99.2 see purchase a 2024 escape st line all-wheel drive with tech pack at 3.49 apr for 72 months with down payment that's just 267 bi-weekly cash value of 40 294 plus eligible ford owners get a thousand dollar bonus for details visit your local ford store or ford.. Did you find anyone who emerged from the depths of first base over the course of spring that you started to trust? I was in an AL only league last night, and that was the worst first base cluster I could remember. Being a keeper league too, that took away the best options, and it was an absolute battle of attrition.

that took away the best options. And it was an absolute battle of attrition, just trying to find someone who would play, keep the job even part-time, and not actively hurt you while doing it in a mono league. So I had a pretty deep look at the pool, and I didn't like what I saw. Yeah, and it led to a panic move on my part in AL Labor. So that's why I have an $8 Spencer Torkelson in AL Labor,

because I looked beyond him and saw the void and panicked. You did mention that someone sort of played themselves into Better Graces, and it's just luck. I did not really see anything in Spencer Torgeson before this spring that I liked. But this spring, he's hitting the ball hard. So I do like when people hit the ball hard, and he's been doing that this spring. And I think also the Christian Pache deal for the A's means that Seth Brown is probably a little bit safer than I had thought he was before. He's an only league play, though, I think, because the batting average is going to be pretty bad.

I started to soften my stance a little bit on Joey Manessis over the course of the spring. Maybe the World Baseball Classic, the big home run with the epic bat flip. Maybe that helped kind of sway me in that direction. But the more I looked at the quality of the contact he made, the less my initial, maybe this is another Frank Schwindel cloud that I put over him, the less I really believed in that. I didn't rally back and draft two or three teams with Manessas on it. But he's one of those guys, if I'm wrong about him, everybody else got a bargain. That works against me. So my terrible call at the beginning needs to somehow come through in the form of the playing time being less than we expected.

I'm not rooting for an injury, more just that they rotate him a little bit more because they don't see him as a long-term player there. But, man, I kind of think I got that one wrong already, and they haven't even played a game yet. He also falls into an interesting class of players that um played in the wbc and so uh you might think they didn't play much or they struggled um i think i i even made the mistake uh talking about trace thompson be like oh the dodgers aren't playing him much. He was in the WBC, Bella.

And Joey Manessis, we were doing the Friday pod with Al, and he mentioned something about Joey Manessis struggling in the spring. And I was like, yeah, with the Nationals, it didn't look good. But if you flip over to the WBC page, he definitely did a little better over there. Masataka Yoshida is someone, if you look at the spring stats, you might have a very different opinion if you didn't watch any of the WBC. So Yoshida is a guy that I have taken a shot at

in two or three different places. And I was a little disappointed that he struck out some in the spring, but in the WBC, we saw why I like him which is I think there's a chance there for like Stephen Kwan with more power and that's pretty exciting so

Yoshida is on my labor squad he's in a couple other places did not get him in the main the sharps were too sharp those rooms are incredibly difficult so yeah and a couple other places. Did not get him in the main. The sharps were too sharp. Those rooms are incredibly difficult. So, yeah, good. Totally understandable that you'd miss out with... Spring seemed to matter a lot this year because of the WBC.

I think there were people that were reacting to things in the tournament that ordinarily wouldn't have moved the needle if they had just happened in the Grafruit league or the cactus league i think you can get a bump from spring training games in the states but i think that bump from a good wbc performance on a global stage i think that actually does have more of an impact on what people are doing at the draft table yeah and table. Yeah, and it seemed to have an inconsistent but important role in roster decisions this year.

I just can't help but think of the Orioles sending Grayson Rodriguez down after a poor spring, but not rostering Franchi Cordero after a great spring, yet the Yankees signed Franchi Cordero minutes later. I think one of the most awkward things in baseball

is making a decision off of, it's not even six weeks because they don't play full games. They take days off. So it's almost like three or four weeks worth of stats with a player. I think we were looking at plate appearance leaders. I think Michael Tolio with 83 plate appearances was one of the spring leaders. You're going to make your decision off of 83 plate appearances. What was the news? I think he got sent down. Yeah, he ended up getting sent

down. Led his team in plate appearances, gave them what they wanted, led the entire Cactus League in RBI, I think, and your reward is to be sent down. So there's a lot of other consideration always. There's long-term development considerations, short-term roster value considerations. If I use this guy, then I lose this guy who's out of options, that sort of stuff. I think a lot of times, if you just follow who has options, that's actually probably the best way to figure out who's going to make a team. Thinking back to some other draft season lessons, I think this can fall under that category too. What about helium when it comes to prospects? Anthony Volpe is the best example of it. Jordan Walker was another example of it.

Back when we recorded our position previews in late January and February, Walker was a fringe top 200 guy in terms of his draft champions ADP. I think as it became increasingly realistic for him to carve out a spot in the opening day roster, of course, his ADP took off. Anthony Volpe, same sort of thing. Very reasonable to get him up until about a month ago.

And then things changed a lot, especially as those higher stakes leagues started to happen in the last couple of weeks. Do you see those guys when they jump and say, I'm out because they jumped? Do you see them sometimes and say, I'm in because they jumped? I agree with the people that are taking them now. The thing we needed to see has been proven. What do you take away from those really exciting players that everybody has FOMO for that just erupt up the draft boards.

It happens every single year. I don't know if it's a one-size-fits-all sort of thing, but I tend to find myself once the price goes up, I just say, I'm out. I was throwing darts occasionally on guys like that back in January. I'm good. I'm not paying full freight at the end of March. If we asked a projections guru like Derek Carty, I think for the most part, he'd be out. His projections are pretty harsh on rookies because he does a fair amount of regression.

And that regression is baking in the risk that not only does the player not make the big leagues, but even if he does make the big leagues, he may not be much. There's always sort of a 50% bus rate however that 50% bus rate is lower on the top prospects so I have an ear for a top prospect play Julio Rodriguez was huge for me on my main last year however I don't want to pay the the peak price you know when the hype is at its frothiest so I kind of wish that my main had been a week earlier because I did have this inkling of a thought that you know when the hype is at its frothiest so i kind of wish that my main had been a week earlier because i did have this inkling of a thought that you know yes uh jordan westberg is still in camp and uh there are other players that are still in camp that might be there because the team has

split squads or they just need people or they just want to get as long a look and because westberg is coming but he might not be coming on day one that sort of uh thought process but when I looked at the Yankees I thought man they just did Oswaldo Peraza his name was IKF his name was Isaiah kind of Falefa they're not going to do that again you know the like they're itching to put somebody that has some offense at that position they're itching for Anthony Volpe so two weeks ago I could have gotten Anthony Volpe. So two weeks ago, I could have gotten Anthony Volpe at 200. And I would have. But last week, by the time that I was drafting, Volpe hype was in full gear. And he would have cost me, I think, a 120. Now, 120, I just see too many players with high floors that are very useful, and there's still, at that point, some risk he doesn't make the team, and then risk compounded on top of that that he doesn't have a good debut.

I mean, that's all in the package. So, I don't want to pick the peak price, but there is a price that I am in because there are young. So we did pay the price at 140 or where I would have liked to take, where I would have liked to take Volpe. Volpe was gone. So we took Grayson Rodriguez as our rookie shot in the dark. So I did take a shot in the dark and I maintained that I think I'm going to argue with my co-owner that we should keep him for the month that he's down because the other name that we had circled there was Tyler Glass now. So there are points in every draft where I will take a big risk, a health risk, a prospect risk. But I think generally in the top 100, I don't want to.

I want to be as risk-averse for as long as possible so I can take better risks later. I think it's easier to let those players go if you get bad injury news if you take them a little bit later. If you take them after pick 200, you can accept that in a 15 team league. You say, well, this is a 12th round pick and

he's going to miss four more weeks or six more weeks. Fine. I have to just accept this as a sunk cost. If you drafted that player at pick 75 pick 90 you're a lot more likely aspect to it yeah you have to know yourself you have to have that that skill and the ability to just accept it if it's not going to work out but a lot of people and i'm one of them don't necessarily have the discipline to make that decision correctly in season and that becomes really costly because you're not,

you're not going through that turn. You're not going through the waiver wire, not taking chances on streaming pitchers or other exciting players who are playing more, who could actually make a really positive impact on your roster. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

those are all, all different factors, but I would never, I try not to have a really hard and fast rules. There are certain rules that can guide you, but if you have two hard and fast rules, they can also hamstring you. I think of this also in the player types. Yes, I like guys who make contact and have a good sense of the zone,

but if Jazz Chisholm is there for me at the right price, I cannot have a hard and fast rule that says I'm just not going to take anybody that I don't like their plate skills that much. Because Jazz Chisholm is a hell of an athlete. And there are players that can sort of perform despite. Javi Baez was a great player in his prime. I would never have signed him to that long-term deal.

And I'm not necessarily in now, but the price is dropping, and maybe one year at the end of his career, I will get one of those last 260, 16, or 230, 16 homers, eight steals, or I got him for two bucks kind of seasons. Yeah, I mean, he ended up being a very consistently affordable player i think in main events just outside the top 150 was his final adp if you wanted a boatload of playing time with the

possibility of both power and speed pretty good counting stats and could afford the average hit i think he actually makes value pretty easily from that spot would you be that surprised if we're drafting javier baez earlier in 2024 than we were in 2023? I don't think I would be. Yeah, that's totally possible. I think the bigger question, though, that comes out of this conversation about Volpe and young players, why did they make the opening day roster for their teams? Volpe and Jordan Walker, what really moved the needle? What mattered? Because I saw a whole bunch of analysis, again, bleary-eyed, exhausted. I don't know who was throwing it out there.

I wish I could give credit. But I saw takes that were pointing to Volpe's time at AAA and the 30% K rate there being a reason why he wasn't ready or why he might struggle. And I looked at that and I said, that's 22 games. I think the 110 games Volpe played at AA last year probably tell us a lot more about what he's likely to do in the big leagues this year than those 22 games at AAA last year are going to tell us about what he's going to do in the big leagues this year. into draft season, if things broke a certain way, it was very reasonable for him to go to AAA for at least part of the season, just to show age to level would be very appropriate. He's 20. He's going to turn 21 in May. Last year, it was 119 games at AA. Did everything you could possibly

want him to do age to level, but I wonder what it was. Was it really the spring performance? Was it something over the course of the winter winter or was it something we can already see somewhere on the stats pages in the underlying data why did these guys make the opening day roster whereas someone like von grissom didn't the easy answer on grissom is defense but there are players that are in this range westburn yeah similar resumes clearly an opportunity where the player blocking them is not good enough to block them and the organizational decision is now we're going to wait i really have a hard time figuring out from my vantage point which of those situations are going to trend with the rocket ship adp going up and which ones are going to result in going down to AAA and not going to be able to roster them in a redraft league.

And how do we spot next year's version, right? Yeah. And a few things come to mind. One is, I would say, something I'd want to check is finishing school. And so finishing school, in this case, for Jordan Walker, was the AFL. And finishing school for Volpe was, I think, a combination of AAA and spring. So what those are are reps against quality opponents

at a high level in places that are considered sort of the next step as the major leagues. And there are plenty of players that we saw at the AFL that made their debuts the next season. We saw Trout versus Harper. We saw Acuna down there. We saw all sorts of people there that were like, hey, this is you extending your season so you're ready for a full big league season. This is you getting some good reps in front of everybody. And this is us telling you we're going to be aggressive with your assignment next year. I think that's something. So I think seeing somebody who's pretty advanced go to the AFL, that would be something that I would notice. Somebody going to AAA that's young, I think that's really interesting. And the next box that I want clipped is the Major League team is competitive. I actually think you want the Major League team to be competitive.

Because if the Major League team is not competitive, there are too many incentives to play service time games. Endy Rodriguez, and this is a small one, and it's not a big deal. The Pirates probably should do something like this, but Andy Rodriguez is ready and they don't really have a good catcher in Pittsburgh. If Pittsburgh was good this year,

Andy Rodriguez would be the open day starting catcher. If they were ready to compete for the playoffs, I think Andy Rodriguez would start day one as catcher. Yeah, I was wondering about Bo Naylor in a similar vein. Maybe his

ADP was a tick high for I don't know, the lack of certainty about his roster spot. I thought it was pretty well-certain. He ticks my boxes and didn't make it, right? He did everything. I thought he did everything he could do to at least share with Mike Zanino.

I thought the Zanino signing made sense. Zanino's a righty. Naylor's a lefty. If Naylor struggles, he's more of a backup in year one. It's a one-year deal for Zanino. Zanino handles the staff well. Okay. That all sort of makes sense.

Apprenticeship. Apprenticeship. Yeah. If there's something defensively you want Naylor to work on, he can work on it with someone that you trust to handle your staff. Okay, that all sort of makes sense to me. Why they demoted him, I really don't know. That one's a little harder for me to understand.

The Grissom one, I mean, I'm not an expert in defensive ability. I know there were people that had questions about Grissom as a shortstop prior to this even being a possibility. So those were not new questions that surfaced, so maybe we shouldn't have been as surprised by the way that unfolded. I think they really surprised us, though,

because they didn't do the Tolia thing. They didn't take Grissom and just keep throwing him out there day after day after day after day. Yeah, that was weird. It was like five days he didn't start. We were stretching like five days. Yeah, five days where he didn't play shortstop or didn't play.

And it was like, oh, is he hurt? And then we get the news. No, he's going down. It's like, what? Shouldn't you be maxing out his opportunities in spring? Even if you're still going to send him down anyway, shouldn't you be getting a look at him in your infield and just letting him solve the problem with the other guys

he's going to be playing alongside at some point. I thought that was really strange. So the Orioles, uh, are not a great test case for the guardians, but I wonder if catcher is just a, it's own beast. Cause I'm looking at Adley Rutschman and he had 185 plate appearances at

triple a to finish 2021. So he had his quote unquote finishing school. The Orioles weren't competitive, so they didn't really need to put him in, but they didn't put him in until a sort of a month had gone by, which is the kind of service time aspect of it, I think. But also he's a catcher. And so it's pretty easy to say he needs help on something that you guys can't measure and nobody in the media can.

Like he needs to work on his game calling. Oh, good. There's no game calling metric, so we can't call you out on that. I mean, I'm being cynical. I'm being cynical. But catching his tongue. No, no. It is one of the things that you can get away with that as an explanation a little bit easier because the nerds pointing to

self, we can't just point to something no, not here. Here's proof. He can do that. He is good at this. He should be playing ahead of this guy. We can quantify it in many instances. There's still a handful of ways that we really can't do it and it's an easier out from the PR

damage control perspective. But Logan Ohapi made the Angels, right? There's a competitive team, though. So are the Guardians. That's why the Bo Naylor thing confuses me. I think Bo Naylor makes them better, even if he's catching half the time. I think Bo Naylor makes the Cleveland Guardians

a better team, and I think they seem both reluctant to deal their upper-level prospects because I made that case, I don't know, last summer, I guess it was, for them to be the team to go get Juan Soto. Of course, they didn't. Spoiler alert, they didn't play out that way. And they're not really promoting those guys aggressively. They're coming eventually, but they're leaking into Pittsburgh territory. I mean, I know they're very close geographically, so maybe the whiffs of Pittsburgh pirate air have made their way to Cleveland or something

because they're being really cautious about promoting the current group of prospects that they have. And I've been throwing darts at Tanner Bibby and Gavin Williams, trying to get help on the pitching side and wondering if they're going to try and bring up Valera or Brian Rocchio to play in the middle infield

and it's just waiting and waiting and waiting and I can't figure out why. Okay so add the third box you want to check is team factors just sort of soft boxes team factors how aggressive have they been with young players in the past?

That probably resolves all of our different cases that we're talking about. Yeah, and I think that's where it's defense, historical team tendencies, and then finishing school. I wonder what the team tendencies are with the Yankees. I think that the Yankees will play a rookie. It's just that they usually have such high-priced options in every place that they're usually like a free agent there.

You know what I mean? And this year, I think the news is that Oswald Cabrera did win left field, so Hicks is more of a temporary center field replacement and then maybe taking a backseat to Cabrera in left field despite his contract. And at the same time, Volpe looks like he's being installed at short. So that's a bit of a one-year change in terms of maybe how they've, so they've maybe changed.

I don't know. The Yankees, that's a little bit tough. But I say if you have those three boxes and two of the boxes are checked very strongly, then you can start to get interested in that guy. I don't know who it's going to be next year that's going to rise. But let's say Jackson Churio, you know,

makes it through, has double A, and goes to AFL next year. All right. Jackson Churio does double a goes to NFL next year. And Garrett Mitchell and or Tyrod Taylor had poor years. I would say Jackson Churio could be somebody that you could take a shot on next year, depending on like, if he was,

if he was good in all these places, you know, I mean, I'm sort of saying like he'd finished the year this year, presumably a triple a, could take a shot on next year. Depending on if he was good in all these places. I'm sort of saying like... He'd finish the year this year presumably at AAA without that late season debut, which is totally possible. Yeah, but you go to the AFL, you play well there. He'd be an easier case for people to make

because he'd have that highest level of the minors plus the AFL. Whereas Walker didn't. Volpe only had that brief time. So I think you'd be looking at something in the neighborhood. Not some of ADP that we saw on Gunnar Henderson or Corbin Carroll

because we saw them in the big leagues at the end of last year. But probably not quite as cheap as 2022 Julio Rodriguez. Not quite as cheap as the start of draft season prices on Volpe and Walker for someone like Churrio because he's already got that hype. It's coming from every corner.

He's had more than a year where that question of who's the best player you've seen in the minors this year, the common answer to that question was Jackson Churio last year. That was the guy. And the hype keeps coming out from the organization too. So I think they see him in their outfield as soon as possible. I really think they could push him up at the end of this year if there's an actual need at that time. Amazing.

That would surprise me a little bit. Then otherwise, if you're kind of looking at top prospects now, I don't see an immediate candidate, I guess. There's an idea that Marcelo Meyer is going to be due in Boston in 2025, but I could see him, he's going to, I don't know where he's been assigned yet, but let's say he plays some AA this year and goes to AFL and just is great all the way through. I could see them installing him because the Red Sox there's pressure on them to be good every year they might have had a down season and they are pretty terrible up the middle so I could see a Marcelo Meyer story where he pushes his way on now what do you think the team factors are Boston wise in

terms of the past and how they've treated young guys? Tristan Casas has kind of had to push his way in, but they did give Dahlbeck a chance. I think this is the kind of team that would maybe just say, screw it, like Volpe, we're just putting Martin Meyer in. He's better than Enrique Hernandez. He's better than whatever free agent is out there. We're putting him in now.

Well, I guess when you're grading historical context, are you looking more at what the person in charge of the front office did in the organization where they previously worked or what the organization has done in its recent history even before them? You're talking about the Rays or the Red Sox? Right.

Is Kylen Blum going to manage Red Sox prospects the way the Rays manage their prospects or is he more likely to do what the Red Sox did with Rafael Devers and Xander Bogarts where I think they were aggressive with both of those guys those were phenomenal players so they were 100% right to be as aggressive as they were

I get the sense Higham Bloom is very much in the Rays mindset in terms of decision making and promoting players, finding value, all the things he does seem to be much more Rays mindset in terms of decision making and promoting players, finding value. All the things he does seem to be much more Raysian than big market, you know,

pre high on bloom. Like was that Dombrowski? That was the GM when they promoted Devers and Bogarts. Was that even one GM before that? We have a test case in Kansas. Actually, check this out. 2021 AAA 42, 42 plate appearances triple a

and i talked to him at the afl so 2021 double a triple a afl checked all the boxes was a top prospect and i think a position of need going into 2022 um but they chose to give Dalbeck the first chance and didn't give Kassus a chance until the end of the season. Yeah, so I don't know. I think we've got a few things on our checklist that should help us understand what is more likely to occur with these young players that are seemingly battling for an opportunity in spring, even if what they're proving to their organization is happening over a much longer period of time. Here's a question for you. What do you need to have a great season in 2023? What has to go right? This sort of wraps around the strategies you've used, the players you've rostered heavily, you know, but who really needs to come through? Who are you excited about having have a great year and it's going to propel you to multiple fantasy championships this season i'm going to guess it's not your most rostered player because usually the most rostered player you have on your team is someone outside the top 150 overall that just happens to be a good value and fills a need that you create for yourself

on a recurring basis yeah i guess that's true that's true. I have a couple key shares of Masataka Yoshida and Ryan McMahon that I didn't spend a lot for, but I think could be really important. I think good health for Tim Anderson would be important for me in a few places. And then there's the obvious late pitchers that I want to hit because I have pairs of them everywhere and the model likes them. And that's like Mitch Keller, Graham Ashcraft, Ryan Nelson. There's that class of pitchers

that I really need to contribute. But yeah, it's not the same answer everywhere because I have so many different teams. One guy that I'm really fascinated with, and I only have two shares of him, but I decided to keep my shares of Jeremy Pena despite some misgivings about his approach, despite some misgivings about his approach, despite some sort of late season, really chasing pitches outside of the zone, chasing sliders down and away,

that made me nervous about his future. There are certain aspects you can point to in his profile that are not that exciting. But then he had this great postseason run, and he does have a lot of the skills you do like he's going to steal 10 plus bases and he's probably going to steal hit 20 plus homers and it's not going to come with a bad batting average so i think jeremy pena could decide my fate in a couple places for example one in one place i i play in a league that that is full of people that used to work for Pitchfork. Most of them have moved on now.

And I had a keeper decision. I could keep Tim Anderson in the third round, and the auction calculator said he was worth $14 in our settings. And I could keep Jeremy Payne in the 26th round, and he was worth minus $8 in our settings. And I just, I went against the auction calculator. I chose Jeremy Pena. So that decision is one that I will remember and perhaps regret.

But Jeremy Pena is definitely a guy I have circled that I haven't necessarily made a bold prediction about, but I've made some interesting decisions in my leagues, my keeper leagues, deciding to keep him. We'll do a trivia question because I know you love trivia and opening day trivia is the best. Who is the most rostered player across the seven teams I have on the NFBC site this year? I've got them in five leagues. Kristen Yellich. No, I have a decent amount of Yellich, but no. Ramon Laureano. Oh, I have a lot of Ramon Laureano.

I think I have him in both. I did two underdog best balls, too. So, yeah. He's not critically important, but he at least needs to hit his projection, and it'd be great for me if he could go over the projection because it would benefit me in just about every league. And there's some soft

science reasons he could. I mean, he's really trying to play his way out of Oakland. Can't blame him. He'd probably even tell you that if you asked him. He's told me that in not so many words. I'd bribe him with coffee. Yeah, exactly. The coffee guy, right? Really into coffee. Yeah, me too, Ramon.

Into coffee as I've ever been in my entire life because i yes you are right now you are what are you up to how many cups a day now i don't count you don't count i don't count i don't count the the key the key thing about um about parenting that i've learned already is that one your coffee cup needs to have a lid on it and two it needs to be well insulated because otherwise you're going to reheat the same cup of coffee four times before you drink it. That is absolutely peak early days of parenting. You make a cup of coffee and then you have to put out three fires and then your cup of coffee is cold. That's 100% accurate.

I would say the core guys that are really important, the guys I was drafting early a lot, Woodruff ended up on a bunch of teams. He's on four of my teams. Will Smith, I was on a bunch of teams. He's on four of my teams. Will Smith, I was spending up at catcher. He's on three of my teams. Eloy Jimenez, who I said, I think this is the big breakout year for him at the plate, the consolidation year where he keeps all the skills we've seen

over various parts of the last four seasons, but he does it over a full season's worth of plate appearances. I think that's going to happen. I at least was able to get out there and get a good bit's worth of plate appearances, I think that's going to happen. I at least was able to get out there and get a good bit of Eloy Jimenez. And I think he seems particularly important, you know, because in those instances, it was a really tough call of, can I take Eloy, a guy who's not going to run,

or do I have to go for an Edmund or an Andres Jimenez, or in some cases, Starling Marte might have still been there. Do I need to get more steals or can I afford to take a shot on a speedless masher? And I think you really got to come through with the profile Jimenez has if you're going to take a player like that at that price, given all these other factors that have held him back so far. I've got, you know, I decided that I wanted to fill most of my benches with pitchers. It's the Derek Carty rule.

In NL labor, he's mostly known, you know, in the reserve rounds to take only pitchers and all the reserve rounds so that he has streaming options and can do all sorts of things, fun things. And so I want to do the same thing even in mains and other leagues where most of my bench is filled with pitching. And so that meant that I had to take a multi-eligibility guy for my bench so I could cover as many positions as possible from one bat on the bench. So there is an inordinate amount of pressure on my leagues in on two players

isak paredes and luis urias and the reason i have both of them is just as much about their talent as it is about the fact that they have three eligibilities in fact more once you count ci and mi uh you're talking about uh four eligibility guys basically, maybe even five for one of them. So, you know, that sort of thing will hopefully work for me, even if they're not amazing, if they're good enough to back up my guys and give me extra plate appearances and play sometimes. You know, I've also discovered a little bit of value,

even in some right-handers like Drury in one case, but even a right-handed outfielder like Chaz McCormick. What happens is they can be on your bench and then you know when to play them. There'll be like two lefties in a weekend or something, or you just play them against righties because you don't have any other options than injury. Those guys tend to get undervalued because everybody wants to have the lefties. But sometimes a righty, in this case, Urias, Paredes, Drury, and Chaz McCormick are all righties. You can get value out of them as righties in matchup play and also just as backups. I would say this year, more than any year I could remember, I was targeting the

multi-position infielders. Urias and Paredes, definitely part of that group. Gene Segura is going to be a part of that group again because he's going to play third for the Marlins. He'll be second and third after a couple of weeks. Guys like that mattered a bit more to me this year because I wanted that extra wiggle room on the bench. I wanted to take a few chances that if it didn't work out, I could easily just straight up replace someone on the wire and go get the best available player and not have to really find a perfect fit. I think that was always something that I struggled with in previous seasons, especially in 15 team leagues, was that if I didn't have enough positional flexibility and someone got hurt

I was stuck choosing from the pool of second base eligible free agents instead of just getting a hitter the best hitter of the week it's so much better for your team to be able to just go get the best hitter with the best matchups regardless of position because you built in so much flexibility to your roster so that's something that I did more of this year, and I assume it's going to be something that serves me well, and I'll try to do even more of it going forward. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I mean, it is nice to have five pitchers on a seven-man bench, I'll tell you.

You start to see how you can carry a Tyler Glass now in that situation. You can carry an injured pitcher longer. You can play matchups. In a short week like this opening week, if you have five pitchers on your bench, I think we have four maybe in our main or maybe five, we are sure to have starters. We even have a choice of starters. We have a start that we're leaving on our bench because we like other starts better. That's always useful in weekly leagues,

but even in daily leagues, you can really rack up the starts or you can really be, even if you have an innings cap, you can be really choosy about who's starting for you. Yep, and that's a really nice luxury to have because when you're going the other direction, when you're chasing starts off of the wire,

you're talking yourself into very bad pitchers because they have good matchups or very shaky skills in general. It's a bad, bad path to go down. I lived it last year in my big auction league, and it was very frustrating to play things out that way. As we get ready to go, it's opening day. We haven't had beer of the quarter.

Can we do beer of the quarter this year? At least we can do beer of the month now that I'm back. We'll do beer of the month. It's near the end of March. How about a beer of the month this year at least we can do beer of the month now that i'm back we'll do beer of the month it's near the end of march how about a beer of the month for the people out there because i just got an email from field work and i'm already thinking about delivery like well i'm not gonna get over there that's not gonna happen but they'll bring it to me because that's what they have out here and i really like that yeah uh well i was just at um what's it called great harry i think great harry bar great harry great great harry's the great harry dark cold harry great harry harry great anyway that was uh that was a great segment. Good job. Good radio.

So where were you? And where were you before that? I think the story here is where were you before you went to Dirty Harry's or Harry's Dirty Bar or wherever you were? But we had a Bissell Swish. And I had a Bissell swish with Niv Shah, who runs Otter New, and we talked about our Otter New basketball season,

which is in the midst of concluding. I am battling Chad Young for the finals with my Giannis as my core, and we just talked about things large and small, and Bissell swish is a Maine hazy, which is excellent, so I will, and also asterisk my beer staring into the shift is also a beer of the week.

Yes, that was implied at the beginning of the show. I figured that was at least a co-beer of the month. Even though I haven't had it yet. I'm having'm having it tonight yeah i think it's fair to go ahead and put that up there but yeah a lot to be excited about as the season begins right most teams most fan bases excited about what's going to happen over these next 162 games fantasy players out there of course excited to see how all the work they put in pays off in the weeks and months ahead. Of course, we've got the expanded feed here this year. We've got a waiver-centric episode coming out on Friday.

So Al and I are going to dig into some matchups for next week, some early performers, basically some opening day surprises in terms of role lineup. It's really, really tough to take anything away from one day's worth of games. We're going to do our absolute best. So it's going to be a lot of schedule analysis for the upcoming weeks. Be sure to check that out. If you've got questions for us, ratesandbarrels at gmail.com is the email address, the easiest way to reach us. You can also find us on Twitter. Eno is at Eno Saris.

I am at Derek Van Ryper. If you'd like to sign up for The Athletic, if you don't have that subscription already, it's $1 a month for the first year. It's the best deal that we do all year round, so be sure to jump in on that while you still can. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Friday. Last shout out to Lord Bishop at Great Hairy Bar. That's what it was called.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.