Rates & Barrels - Infallible Inflatables

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Rundown3:55 Unsolicited Working From Home Tips9:26 Noah Syndergaard Undergoes Tommy John Surgery15:29 Michael Kopech, Brendan McKay & Nate Lowe to Triple-A20:26 Spencer Howard to Phillies' Rotation, Cutch Ready To Go27:29 "The J-Lo A-Rod Family"32:45 Still Concerned About Aaron Judge45:51 Re-playing the 2019 Fantasy Season?52:44 Fantasy Analyst Street Cred59:45 Advanced Pitching Metrics & Great Pick-Off Moves?68:46 Beer of the WeekFollow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode of Rates and Barrels is brought to you by Remarkably Remote, a new daily microcast from GoToMeeting all about making work from home work for you. With indispensable intel on how to stay sane, motivated, and productive at home, we're here to help you in this brave new remote working world. Add to your flash briefing on Alexa or subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 81. It's Thursday, March 26th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. It's opening day at home, of course.

Today would have been the start of the 2020 baseball season. We're here to try and help everybody through that. I mean, Eno and I are definitely bummed about the situation, as we've talked about in recent weeks. But we're going to talk about some roster shuffles, the unfortunate injury for Noah Sindergaard that we found out about earlier this week. Probably a little bit of talk about some changes I'll be making to my rankings prior to the weekend. We got a few mailbag questions that were holdovers from the last episode, and we have the triumphant return of beer of the week. So it's going to be as fun as it can be for an opening day without baseball. How are things going for you this week?

going for you this week you know i just assisted on two zoom classes one for a five-year-old and one for an eight-year-old so i can do anything that does seem like a challenging situation like a five-year-old in particular on zoom seems like it's really tough right you get to like 10 12 year old kids like they can probably handle it as far as like controlling the mute and just doing the things that you need to do to learn in a group setting that way but there are there are adults who can't figure out zoom like i've bumped into them teachers are having some trouble with this right now where's this the whole thing begins and so the teacher's saying you know oh where's the mute button oh you know oh gosh why can't i do and like sort of fumbling around and then the kids start just talking to each other

there's like cacophony then she finally mutes them all and like, oh, where were we? And oh, can you see this when I share the screen? No, you can't. Why not? You know, it's just like, wow, this, I want to throw something. With the five-year-old, we haven't tried it yet. Next week will be a full Zoom. This was like a parent-teacher type conference

and he still could barely handle it looking at the screen and i had to follow him around while he was doing things uh in order to make it work but the eight-year-old today discovered that he could chat with his friends while the teacher was talking oh no so he was just chatting and i was like pay attention i kept i kept minimizing his little chat screen he had going with somebody else. And just on top of that all, the first time the eight-year-old tried, there was a parent in the background who didn't know that his entire conversation was being captured. And he was on the phone with somebody loudly talking about all the things that were a problem with this lockdown and how he was thinking about getting a dog just they had a reason to get out of the house and how you know teaching is a

full-time job and uh you know just just like just like kind of banal at this point because we're all dealing with this sort of stuff but like loud to the point where the teacher was like i don't know if i can do this and then we were all like trying to figure out who was it hadley hadley tell your dad to get off the phone or at least mute yourself so anyway uh yeah i i love that our first read was for a work from home thing because everyone's trying to figure that part out yeah that's definitely a new thing for a lot of people and you know it definitely a new thing for a lot of people. And it was a new thing for me when I started with The Athletic just over a year ago, actually. My one-year anniversary, I think, rolled by a week ago Wednesday.

And I wouldn't have known. There's an automated email we get that just lets us know, like, hey, you've been here a year. So I'd kind of forgotten about it. But we're all going to become better at these types of things. And there is definitely a learning curve if you're not used to working from home and you've only been doing it for a few days or a few weeks. The main things that I have learned over a year, they're mainly things I was told initially by people who have done this. And I didn't necessarily follow through on what they told me right away, which is stupid. Like if someone gives you good advice, you should follow it.

The truest one for me is to get up and make it seem like you are going to leave the house to work. So for most people, that would include, you know, taking a shower and putting on some new clothes that are not the same clothes they slept in. Legit, clean yourself up a little before you go sit down at your workstation. That does go a long way to refresh you and make you feel like you're about to begin work. That one is the one that I didn't not shower for a week or anything like that, but there were days where I'd say, oh, I'll shower at lunch. Yeah, think about how that would go, going into your office and being like, I'm going to go home during my lunch hour, take a shower, and then come back. You would never do that.

So you shouldn't do that when you work from home. Yeah, you know, it's definitely good advice. This is one thing is that everyone's going to have like their unique situation when their toughest work time is like when the most work needs to be done and how that interacts with their home schedule. a published piece, you know, a piece already being out there that needs to be promoted and needs to be interacted with, needs to comments to be interacted with, needs to make sure there's no errors, that sort of stuff. You know, I just can't, I don't have time in the morning. So, you know, around two, my time around five East coast time everything becomes for tomorrow you know what i mean okay yeah because of the time change yeah so i actually mostly shower and i've seen some things like work out in the morning and shower in the morning i mostly work out and shower around three three and four um just because i have to, as soon as I can,

I have to get to my computer and deal with interactions. So I'm not saying that it's not good advice for people. And if you can, definitely do it. The main thing for me was I got a lot better at my job, I think, when I secured a space

that was separate, which is similar to what you're saying. You know, like go somewhere, like get somewhere else, a space that was separate, which is similar to what you're saying. Go somewhere. Get somewhere else. Have work be something else. And so it was a big deal for me when I got a little office. I'm in the basement, ironically, but it's not my mom's house. It's my mother-in-law's house.

But it's not my mom's house. It's my mother-in-law's house. I think the big challenge, though, too, is if you don't have that second bedroom, for example. I'm lucky enough. I live in the Midwest, so I've got a two-bedroom apartment. Some people have a one-bedroom apartment or they have an efficiency. I think that's where it would be. Get up, make the bed, move the furniture around a little bit whatever you have to do make it feel like an office yeah right like kind of

convert your space would be kind of the starting point because if i mean imagine that like if you had an efficiency and you had to basically work from the same surface that you sleep on that would be an extremely difficult transition to make every single day it was part of why we left new york city actually because our last apartment was was like a extended it was not a studio somewhere between a 1b and a studio kind of kind of open space the whole thing and um we would like looked around we're like baby goes so yeah work goes where and i and i would recommend not just sort of like rolling out of bed and just like putting the laptop on your lap that's a good recipe for just strolling through twitter for four hours and then turning on the tv being horrified and going back to bed having done no work you know yeah um my my worst habit which

isn't even necessarily a work habit is that when i wake up when my phone alarm goes off i often open twitter before i take my feet and put them on the floor no to get out of bed and that's a horrible habit i've been trying to break it for a long time. So I'm hoping. I have a similar, yeah. Hoping to get out of bed. Slack and Twitter are open sometimes before I peed. Good tools, but damaging if not used correctly.

Let's talk about some news because I wanted this to feel kind of like a normal opening day as much as it possibly could. Things are happening. Things are actually happening. Teams are still making roster moves and we found out about a major injury again this week.

Noah Sindergaard is going to have Tommy John surgery. It was scheduled for today. It's almost 4 o'clock on the East Coast as we record this so I'm assuming that the surgery has actually happened by now. But we've kind of come to this place. We know that 13 months is kind of the typical timetable for a return, so we're not going to see Syndergaard pitching in games probably until May of 2021, maybe the end of April next year. But this seems really bizarre because he wasn't

struggling this spring in the limited innings he threw in the grapefruit league so this one really kind of just blindsided me when it popped up a couple of days ago and the mets have a little bit of depth they've got rick porcello and michael waka who were sort of competing for the fifth starter spot they're just both in the rotation now i think as things stand with cinder guards injury i actually had the Mets in Brad Johnson's OOTP experiment. And so right now, I'm looking at, you know, Porcello and Waka in my rotation and wondering how much of a big deal it is. Not, yes, it's a big deal to lose at the top end, but I'm wondering how much of a big deal it is that those guys are my 4-5. They actually built

in some depth. And, you know, as far as 4'5 go, how bad is that situation? I don't think it's that bad. So I'm debating whether, and I'll take feedback, I'm debating whether or not I should trade for Evaldi, who's on the block. I'm the kind of person who wants Evaldi to be healthy and productive because I want everyone to be healthy and productive. And he's been through a lot with multiple surgeries himself.

But I think I've just hit a point with him where I'm very skeptical of his ability to not break down at this stage of his career. And it would be just terrible if I used up all my money and then also had two more years of him, used all my money getting him and had two more years of him um used all my money getting him and had two more years of him and then he you know had a big injury i just i'd be like sort of chasing what's it called chasing the dragon that's like a heroin reference isn't it um anyway let's leave those aside and no uh yeah i i don't think i would cost much is the one thing, but it would sink most of my free agency acquisition budget.

So I'm kind of tempted to just start the season and see how it goes. But you never know with the simulation. So when it comes to what the Mets will do, I think that's the same thing. I don't think that they're going to react to this very much. I think that's the same thing. I don't think that they're going to react to this very much. No, unfortunately, there's not much they can do at the present time. I don't think it changes anything with their plans for guys that they had lined up in the bullpen.

I don't think they would change their mind on Seth Lugo as a reliever. He's such a huge part of their bullpen right now. Do you feel like they gave him enough looks as a starter to this point where they can comfortably say, this is a reliever at this point? In a full spring, maybe you could say, wow, let's see if we can stretch him out. But the biggest number I've heard for what this spring will look like is three weeks. And the last time we had a shortened one, I think it was 1995, coming off of the lockout, they had a 19-day spring training.

So that, I think, is the long end of it. They can't get word to Lugo. And this is a little side note that came to me in a conversation with a, I don't even know how to refer to them without giving them away, but it's like sort of a person in pitching in a front office, you know, like a person who dedicates himself to pitching in a baseball front office. They were saying, you know, there's a liability issue here. We cannot tell people to do certain things when if they do those certain things and those certain things make them get into contact with other people and they get the virus, then we're liable.

So it's they have to play this sort of very touchy feely like, well, this is the recommendation. Number one is your personal safety and so on and so forth. So I think it would be pretty hard to get a message to Lugo to stretch out. Well, yeah, and to feel confident in his ability to comfortably find a safe way to do that. Right. So what, do you just blow him out, and then you've got a hole in the bullpen, too? Yeah. So what do you just blow him out and then you've got a hole in the bullpen too? Yeah, and I think sometimes we look at Porcello especially and probably we overlook his real-life value in a normal season as an innings eater.

Last season was rough, 552 ERA, 139 whip. But normally you're going to get a low, maybe a mid-fours ERA, but usually an above-average whip from him in a lot of innings. I think he's a decent deep league guy. I think he's going to come over to the National League and enjoy getting the extra out and have a 4-2-5 type ERA and be just a fine guy. For what it's worth, I think Waka can get close to that too.

One thing that I discovered is that they have steven gonzalez in triple a um gonzalez i thought was interesting you know his his velocity is not very good but at one point his velocity was stepped up a bit so i would i'd love to know what his current velocity is uh but if you have him as a long man, he's an interesting long man because he's a lefty. So, you know, if you have, you know, Waka out there, maybe you can do Waka for three, Gonsalves for three, and maybe you're still in the game.

So I think that they're still a decent team in a short season. A lot of things can happen. I'm a little surprised by some of the other things that have showed up on the transaction wire that you have on the rundown here yeah uh michael kopech and brendan mckay option to triple a i think mckay we could kind of see the writing on the wall a few weeks ago with that they've got a lot of depth and he had some struggles after getting called up last year. I still really like him in the long run,

but Copac, especially with the white socks being a team that have spent so much this off season, we've talked about them as probably maybe the biggest winners, if not the, maybe the runner ups to the reds in terms of how much they have improved just in this off season alone. I'm a little more surprised there.

I think a big part of it, too, is I look at the depth they have in the back of their rotation. And Gio Gonzalez is a nice innings eater. Gialito, Keichel, Ronaldo Lopez, Dylan Cease, I guess, just being a little healthier in the last year is the difference maybe. But I was kind of surprised they didn't go Kopech over Geo for that spot. But this is one of those things. Maybe it's only a handful of turns at AAA when the season does begin before Kopech's up.

Well, I guess so. But the White Sox had an 18.7% playoff chance by Dan Zimborski before the season started. And then in a 110-game season, that number goes to 31.5. So they're instantly more in it. I think we might be looking at an 81-game season, and that's a 35% playoff percent for the White Sox. So I just figured that given that boost, the White Sox got the third biggest boost next to the Rangers and Angels. I just figured given that boost, they'd be all system goes from the beginning. But I guess, I would guess that you're right, it's a little bit more of a depth chart situation where they have geo gonzalez on the staff and geo gonzalez came

to be a starter so you start the season and you see what you got out of geo gonzalez and if you got nothing you either release them or you know put them in the bullpen as a lefty long lefty or something and then here comes kopeck so it's like everybody right now is healthy as soon as someone isn't or as soon as someone plays himself out of the role here comes kopeck so i guess that's really you don't really want to have kopeck up in the bullpen because you you really want him as a starter i would look at ronaldo lopez as the other guy who could be healthy and underperform to the point where they just make that role change call pretty early this season but i think that's going to be one of the tricky things about 2020 you know once we do get to

the baseball season teams are going to have to make faster calls because a shortened season fantasy reduces they're going to have to make faster calls. Yeah. Every game becomes more impactful as the season gets shorter. One thing I would point out is that I had a piece in the draft kit

that could be very helpful in a short season. It was my toolbox basically. Let's see here. why is it called inflatable expert inflatable expert yeah that's in the title anyway that's what to say infallible inflatable it says inflatable uh i am inflatable i am your sex doll. The beginning is stuff that you've heard here all the time, but it does it by sample. So the beginning is if you have a really tiny sample,

sample of one, you have max exit below, max pitch below, that sort of stuff. But it gets really interesting because I have one game stuff, pitch mix, pitch shape, one month hitter swing rate, pitcher swing rate. So I just give you basically the toolbox that you need for looking at small sample stats. So it gives you a little kind of a checklist in order that you can use. And also there's a cameo of Ted Berg singing his small sample size song, which is for the ages. Definitely revisit that piece.

I'll try to drop it into the show notes. I've got a note here to add Eno's inflatable toolbox to the notes. So it'll be in the, whatever podcast platform you listen on, it should be in the episode notes for today's episode. But Kopech to the minors, McKay to the minors, Nate Lowe to the minors also for the Rays. Kind of saw the writing on the wall with that one if they didn't do anything with the G-Man choice. Like five first basemen.

Yeah, they're just overloaded. I think the other interesting young starting pitcher note that's popped up this week comes from Scott Lauber. He's on the Phillies beat for the Inquirer, I believe. Spencer Howard could open the season as the Phillies' number five starter. I think he may have come up on this show or some of the other pods we've been hosting just as a young starter who in a shortened season has a better chance of making a big impact. who in a shortened season has a better chance of making a big impact. And it would probably come at the expense of Vince Velasquez, who I think in a lot of ways is probably right on that bubble for getting that permanent move to a relief role.

But I thought you said something about Velasquez getting his changeup going back during spring training. He got his changeup going. In terms of stuff and the metrics that I was using for my ranks, both him and Pavetta are seriously underperforming. And I do wonder if there's a park effect situation here. I know that once Keith Law said we were talking about Las Vegas and how messed up Las Vegas was

and how the Blue Jays were skipping Las Vegas with their pitching prospects because it was such an offensive environment that it was no good for developing pitching. I remember Bill Petty had a piece that said that extreme offensive parks were bad for a team win percentage. And so I think about the Phillies and think about Pavetta

and think about how I talked to a person in the Phillies front office once who said, I just don't know why Pavetta is not better. You know, and I think about how these stuff and command metrics look good for Vince and for Pavetta and how they haven't had the results. And I think about that park. I just I wonder if that park gets in their head sometimes. And especially with the rabbit ball is just, it's just a toxic place to come up. So as excited as I am about Spencer Howard and you know, all the, all the stuff he's got and all the, he has a wide variety of pitches and it seems very exciting. Like he's following right in the footsteps of Pavetta and Vasquez you know other pitchers who I have different times have found exciting um so I like Howard I'm just saying

I like a lot of the other young pitchers that are better that are going to debut this year better because of their park situation in particular I guess so how does spencer howard for a redraft league let's just say it's a 15 team mixed league how does howard compare to nate pearson when you account for pearson having to deal with the al east but the fact that pearson gets a much more forgiving home park relatively speaking the blue jays go from a zero percent playoff percentage to a 17 percent playoff but you did you announce did you just say that pearson was demoted i don't know if i saw anything on him yet let me double check that real quick it was when i was in blue jays camp uh 10 000 years ago the the buzz was that he was going to make the team thornton was going to be

the fifth starter and he's going to make the team which is kind of a hard thing to figure out um how why they would do that or how they would do that but i guess seeing the copec thing kind of makes me think i was wrong to say that all the teams would push all their chips in. Maybe Gore still starts with the Padres. They already did once with Paddock. And I feel like there's a fire under AJ Preller's butt right now. So maybe Gore starts there. But I'm guessing that Pearson doesn't start there now. the fact that howard might start and that the phillies have a 31 chance in a shortened season um makes me think that howard is going to get that role but on talent i'd take pearson and howard does have four pitches

and yeah he does sit in 98 99 this spring pe Pearson obviously can bring it velo wise too I think that's where I'm a little bit torn I I think the arsenal for Howard is a little bit further along at this point it may just be splitting hairs I mean well no but he also the same kind of guy's lock on his quote-unquote lock his his opportunity is higher his opportunity score is higher so if the talent score is close and the opportunity score is higher on Howard, I guess you've got to take Howard above Pearson. But I wouldn't – wherever Pearson has been going, I would take Howard near there. Man, you see the 80 grade next to Pearson's fastball.

If the opportunities were equal, I think I would still take Nate Pearson even with the AL East factor. I think you're right. It is coming down to the opportunity right now that that's the thing that's separating them, but it's not still not much of a difference. The other news item, by the way,

from Philly's camp that I thought was worth bringing up on the show is that Andrew McCutcheon is expected to be fully recovered from that torn ACL and he'll be ready to go whenever the season gets underway. That was kind of under the veil of a mid-May startup, which is probably the earliest possible startup, but kind of a nice boost, though, to that offense. He's a little lucky. I mean, none of us is lucky right now,

but he's a little lucky that the portion of his rehab that he was in but when this hit was the end portion where you're you're kind of doing everything but you're waiting to do the hardest cuts you know what i mean yeah um it's kind of the portion that like curry was in with his hand before this went down stephen curry and basketball we're like he's playing basketball he's playing basketball. He's just, I mean, actually he came back, but, you know, like I guess where Klay Thompson might be, where Klay Thompson is running around and taking shots and stuff,

but he's not doing cuts. He's not doing five on five. You know, he's not doing that. So, you know, I think McCutcheon was in camp and he was running around, didn't have a brace and, you know, looked like he was doing okay. So he was, you know, when this breaks off and you have to go home and do training on your own he was able to do that i think whereas i did just talk to someone who's had surgery a baseball player this year who's had surgery since jan 1 and said it was a little bit difficult because

you know the rehab therapist and the massage therapist and all those people are off limits to them right now so you got to kind of go old school and and you know google it and try to figure it out and do i guess massage yourself yeah i mean if you got someone else at home that can do it i mean i've seen i've seen players uh you know with their wives like wives doing flips wives wives playing catch. Yeah. Garrett Cole was playing catch with his wife. I saw Freddie Freeman just launch a home run off

of his two-year-old. Just murdered the ball. The reaction of his two-year-old was great. It was like this look of disbelief, like, Dad, you just hit the ball so far that we lost it. Why did you do that? So Freddie pretends to start running the bases,

and his kid just starts chasing him. It's adorable. The J-Lo A-Rod family. Do we have an acronym for that? J-Lod? This is going to surprise a lot of people. J-Rod. That's not my area of expertise.

I've never accidentally heard a nickname for them as the great Hollywood power couple that they are. What was it? Bennifer? There was Bennifer. Bennifer. It's horrific. Anyway, yeah, that was horrific. That family is very athletic, and J-Lo was hitting some tanks, so that was pretty awesome.

Yeah, that's, I mean, what else are you going to do? You're stuck at home. But if you are single and you don't have a spouse who can help you with your rehab or your flips or whatever it is you need, yeah, you're kind of just stuck to your own creativity. You can get an inflatable one. I think Jared Hughes was throwing to an inflatable catcher. I forget who the catcher was. Maybe an inflatable Rod Barajas? I don't know.

He had an inflatable catcher he was throwing to. This is a completely overlooked market. Inflatables are usually limited. Why is inflatable the word of the day? Well, I can guess. We're all home. Yeah. It really has been a theme of this show.

But yeah, imagine just inflatable catchers that you could throw to. I was thinking of the punching bags that you give little kids that are plastic, but they have sand in the bottom of them. We had those growing up. You could get Fred Flintstone and punch him in the face for all the times he was a jerk to Barney. Damn you, Fred. But an inflatable rod brass

that you could throw to. A little noodle arm coming back to you. What if they could be customized? Like if you did it with the Players Association. Big heads. Big head?

What is it? Fat heads? Fat head. A fat head crossover. You could make them for all different kinds, too. You could make them for actual training.

You could make them for destruction. You could make them for beanings where you just have a batter you don't like. Yeah, you just get an inflatable like,

yeah, I never really liked your Vittorialba, so I just want to throw at him. This is where our heads are right now. What did your V ever do to you? I don't know why that was the name that came to my head. That was the random catcher generating program in my brain. A couple other notes to get to.

The Yankees are always good for injury updates since they're hurt all the time. James Paxton is throwing at home, which apparently is in Wisconsin. I did a little digging around. His wife grew up in Eau Claire, which is kind of by the Minnesota border. I was pretty sure he lived up near Seattle.

I just assumed he lived somewhere in Canada. Seattle's not quite the place to be right now. No. He's lived in Wisconsin for a couple of years, but he could also be ready for mid-May games if we have them. I was moving him up my rankings when we were actually having spring because

there was good news coming out of his camp. Yeah, even back during the labor weekend six and a half months ago, or more accurately, three and a half weeks ago. Actually, it was about one month ago this weekend. Now,

almost when I got home from that, um, like shortly after that, I got sick. So I have left the house some, but for the last three weeks I've, I've been like, I'm not going anywhere.

And then this is day, uh, 11 of not having gone anywhere at all I was trying to figure that out I went for a walk last night with Steph and Hazel and I asked Steph when was the last time that we went out to eat

we probably never in our relationship we've dated since the end of college so we've dated since the end of college. So we've been together about 15 years. And we couldn't think of a time where we'd ever forgotten the last time we went out for a meal,

even just like fast food burgers or something, right? We just have completely cut that out. And what we're trying to figure out is, what do we do? We want to support these places that we normally go to buying gift cards is the one kind of obvious way but even like i'm a little bit reluctant to get takeout from places just because i want to continue to minimize exposures but i definitely want to do something so do you guys not have gift cards like door dash or grub

home we do it's a little bit limited like We kind of live away from the campus area. We're about 15 minutes away from the Capitol, so we're just far enough away where the places that we'll deliver out here, it's probably like a third as many as we could get if we lived three miles closer to downtown. Yeah. I don't know. We'll do something like that. But anyway, James Paxton continues to progress.

Aaron Hicks is progressing too. He's throwing. He's in Arizona, I believe, so that's home for him. A return for him could be June at the earliest, but the range is still kind of wide. I think it's because he hasn't hit that last part of his rehab. He hasn't done that last 20% where you kind of get a feel for what the timetable really looks like, but he's at least making some progress. And then there's Aaron Judge. He's going to be evaluated again in a few weeks for the stress reaction in his rib. I'm still kind of worried about Judge. I just, something about this seems really odd. Like, he had the collapsed lung that apparently came from when he built for a ball. Where did that come from? September, apparently.

Do you know that was in September? Did he know it was a collapse? And he's like, oh, it'll inflate or what? It's still like, with all the stories that are written about it, it's still puzzling to me. And they just, something doesn't seem right in that situation.

And I can't put my finger on what exactly it is. And while it seems like a stress reaction with time would would heal and be fine the fact that this kind of stuck with him through the entirety of the offseason just gives me some pause about him as one of those those injured players who should be fine you know whenever we get things back yeah and like obviously scans are really important and like how many scans is he going to be able to get? Yeah, you're not going to go in there for excess scans right now. I feel like they could start up, and they're like,

okay, let's scan you, and they're like, oh, crap, it didn't heal. Is he just so big and strong that if he sleeps on the wrong side, his ribs just crush each other or something? Dude, I'm having like Rick Smith's flashbacks. There's this thing in basketball that if you are over seven something, you just have constant knee and foot injuries. Yeah. I think it's like, I think it's been researched think i think it's like i think it's been research i think this is like a thing i think and i think we've actually seen the effect of that research because the

market has optimized for like six foot ten in basketball now you have more guys that are sort of six foot ten to seven foot than you have you know a lot of like this guy taco fall who was like seven foot eight or something, went in the second round and isn't playing in the NBA. That might be because the game has gotten fast. And yes, there are other things going on. And three-point shots have been more at a premium. But I wouldn't be surprised if this part of it was the injury rate on really tall guys.

And it got brought up with my love with O'Neal Cruz, too, where just the success rates in general for really tall, really tall guys and it got brought up in with my love with o'neill cruz too where uh just the success rates in general for really tall really big guys in baseball is not very high yeah it's i mean you're right i do wonder how much of that is is those athletes at younger ages especially in america getting pulled into football or getting pulled into basketball you know if you're a 6 88 or 6'9 athletic kid, the basketball coaches are going to be all over you. Yeah, like how is Richie Sexton not a center?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. What made you think of Richie Sexton, by the way? What did I make of him? What made you think of him? Oh, I did a piece on players that killed certain franchises. Oh. That were published today, and it would be the NL version. And so the comments has basically been like, oh, but what about this guy?

So somebody said, what about Richie Sexton? He always killed us. I think he was talking about the Pirates or the Cubs. So I had to look up Richie Sexton versus somebody's team today. He was fun for a little while. I think I even had, in high school, I think I had a Richie Saxon Brewers jersey. Yeah, no. One of my first jerseys.

He must have been, yeah, he was relevant. When I started playing fantasy baseball, he was a good fantasy pick. Two 45 home run seasons in Milwaukee in the seasons in milwaukee back was a little bit more rare to have them yeah a couple 30 plus homer seasons in seattle as well uh last injury update to pass along two from the angels actually shohei otani continues to throw on flat ground he could progress to a mound soon so it's just a of like, how much can he do on his own? And then Griffin Canning may resume throwing next week. I really want Griffin Canning to be healthy and ready to roll. I'm just really nervous. You know, I just, I don't, I think the organization has had such a

rough run with elbow injuries in particular that maybe that's sort of adding to my skepticism in this exact instance yeah and it there could be organization failings when it comes to this sort of stuff because there are increasingly best practices when it comes to tracking bio tracking this is going to be the next foot forward, the next competitive advantage for teams, is as Hawkeye comes in, the optical tracker, and it gets rid of TrackMan, the radar-based tracker, we're going to have limb tracking. And so when you have limb tracking, now you can say with more precision stuff like what is the angle between the humerus and

I think the humerus is like like shoulder like the upper arm going into the shoulder like what's the angle between your humerus and your clavicle or something I hope I got that right someone's gonna be like that idiot those two bones don't connect

we have to start doing the connect song. The elbow connects to... Anyway. The humerus and the ulna? Yeah. Anyway, you can say with more precision how two bones interact and what the angles are and where things are. So then you can start to say, oh, people with this kind of angle at this moment, um, you know, are at a higher risk for Tommy John. And like, I just read a piece that, uh, Glenn Fleissig has like a, maybe a two tracker,

uh, thing where he has like basically a shoulder tracker and elbow tracker. And like that, that interaction, uh, informs his training regimen that he, that he, Glenn Fleissig is with, uh, ASMI and he's a, he's a well-respected and I, and I'm not questioning his research, but, uh, he had this, he basically has a two tracker thing. I just read this research, uh, yesterday that said that you should probably use four, uh, points, uh, of reference. So there, you can have two in the shoulder and, uh, or three in the shoulder and one of the elbow. if you use those uh you get closer to understanding when an elbow is overstressed and when mechanically a pitcher needs to make a change

so if the angels really are having tommy john problems they like it could be a failing when it comes to their biomechanical modeling uh their stress modeling, their workload monitoring and their workload situation. And then none of that stuff's going to get better right now. You know, the data's not coming in right now. Today, we'd get our first data from Hawkeye. And we're not going to get that. And you can't really, you know, workload monitor like you normally would. So and then on top of that with canning in particular

like it just like doesn't it seem like we just don't know like like that's not good they haven't ever said like oh it is this and this is what we're gonna do it's been more like uh his elbow is no good like we're just gonna give it a couple weeks and try again you know this feels to me like the run-up of something bigger yeah the pr the PRP injection was back on March 6th, and the four-week shutdown period for him was expected. That's another thing. The Angels try to avoid surgery, which more power to them. I understand that because there's an 85% success rate on Tommy John.

There's a 15% failure rate. That means you don't want to have surgery. They've done PRP with a lot of their guys, but I can't remember a PRP working for them. I feel like all their guys that they've done these things with have ended up getting surgery. They did PRP with Otani when he first came over, and he got surgery.

I'm pretty sure it was Garrett Richards, too, went down the PRP route with them. PRP and rest, and it didn't work did Haney maybe it worked for Haney I don't think it did I think this is probably a research project that's

worth some time we may have to look for a future episode anything with Haney and workload has to come with scare quotes because oh look at this he missed 2016 and 2017. I'm sure he had Tommy John in there. Yeah, I'm pretty confident he did have the surgery. I don't think he just missed it trying to avoid it.

Yeah, that's a full. He pitched 27 innings in two years. I'm pretty sure there's a surgery in there. So, I mean, I understand what they're trying to do. But PRP in the past with the angels you know he kind of went on my do not draft list and i was a big griffin canning fan so uh that's something and do not draft to the point where we just had you know a monster you know 12 team best ball with like you know 60 60 roster slots or whatever it was. And Canning was available in the last couple of rounds

and I still didn't take him. Yeah, I'm in the same boat. It was July 2016 for Heaney. He did have Tommy John. So I think everybody in their rotation has had it at some point. I think it was Mark Kerrig who had pointed out that the projected Mets rotation,

now with Syndergaard having Tommy John, everybody in their rotation had had it at one point, or at least there was a previous iteration of that. It was the Harvey-Syndergaard-DeGrom rotation that he put in there. I think there's a two-part thing going on with the Mets, which is that, yes, there could be the sort of more refining that can happen with the workload and the sort of biomechanical stuff.

That, I'm pretty sure the Mets aren't necessarily on the forefront of that, but maybe that'll change with Hefner in there. But Hefner's more of a guy who's going to deliver the research rather than a guy who's going to drive the research. And then secondly, the thing that I used to love about the mets i now think is maybe been their downfall the worth and slider so they all throw like 94 mile an hour sliders and basically everybody who's thrown the worth and slider has now had tommy john yeah that's not good i think the only one who hasn't is familia and I'm pretty sure he missed some time with shoulder before they signed him. 2017, Familia threw 24 innings. I'm pretty sure that was a fairly major injury in there with his shoulder or something.

Yeah, once we get Hawkeye, though, maybe that'll help. That situation could help the Angels. There's some research for the Werth and Sider thing. there's some research for uh the worth insider thing um if you look at stress on the elbow we wear the motor sleeve and you just do newton meters uh and just be like stress per newton meter you know like newton meter stress on the elbow the most stressful thing is velocity the most stressful thing is the fastball and velocity however if you then say what what are the newton meters per mile per hour what is the stress per mile per hour? Breaking balls go in front of fastballs.

So you would normally say, like, hey, Thor got the surgery because he throws 98. Or, you know, but since he throws like a 92, 94 mile an hour slider, you don't actually know which one it was. Both of those things are really stressful. You know, if you say like sliders are normally less stressful, well, sliders are normally 87, 88. What about a 92 mile an hour slider? Yeah, those extra ticks seem to make a pretty big difference.

I think so. I think so. There's a driveline study on it. You can just, you can look it up. It's just stress by pitch type uh where they use the motor sleeve so i think those those uh keywords will get it for you that's pretty interesting the black tux believes every groom deserves a better experience when it comes to finding formal wear a suit or tuxedo for their big day did you know the black tux was

actually started by two guys who had one of the worst tuxedo fittings you could imagine it turns out they aren't alone in this frustration just listen to these one-star reviews from Did you know the Black Tux was actually started by two guys who had one of the worst tuxedo fittings you could imagine? It turns out they aren't alone in this frustration. Just listen to these one-star reviews from competitor tux shops that shall not be named. Go elsewhere. This place is pretty terrible, unless you're dressing like your grandpa for Halloween. We felt weird buying a suit from somebody so unhappy. We were afraid his bad vibes might follow us to our wedding day so we left what i love about the black tux that they have an easy online ordering process that brings your suit or tuxedo straight

to you just pick a style at the black tux.com and request a free home try on so you can feel the fit and quality before you commit and if online isn't your style the black tux has showrooms all over the country where you can find your fit and plan your look from there they'll ship your order two weeks before your wedding so you can check it out and plan your look. From there, they'll ship your order two weeks before your wedding so you can check it out one last time. Talk about commitment. Whether you're buying your outfit or looking to rent, you won't find a formal wear experience or designs

like the ones you'll find at The Black Tux. If you want your wedding to be remembered for the right reasons, order your suit or tuxedo at theblacktux.com and enjoy 10% off with the code DRAFT. That's theblacktux.com with the code DRAFT for 10% off your purchase. The Black Tux, formal wear for the moment. We got a few mailbag questions

that we didn't get to on our last episode and a few others have started to trickle in that we'll probably get to early next week. Which we have to get to because we teased them at the beginning. It's true. We definitely have to get to today's because they were teased in the last episode.

First one comes from Dougie Z. He writes, do you ever wish you could see into the future a league with no dart throws, no upside, LOL, risks? How about doing an auction league with standard rules, lineups, auction and fab budgets, 5x5

league. After the auction, you could see who wins and then play it out either weekly or daily lineups. Imagine knowing who's going to have a big week or who's going to stink who's going to get hurt and when if you have javi baez do you trade him in may or june knowing he's going to be out almost all of august and september so this is like a redo of 2019 idea that doug sent us and he said the league would be called the Houston Astros Bang the Can because you know it's coming league. Might not be a popular league name in Houston, but yeah, I mean, like I think we are at this point

where playing with old stats is, it's more on my mind now than it's ever been. Like it's something that people have done for a while. Like the Roto Junkie forums have a thread dedicated to drafting with old stats. It kind of ties into the Project Goat stuff that we've been doing a little bit too. Same sort of concept, but this one's more

just locking into a season. The week-to-week thing, I think it's too granular for me. I like the idea. I just don't know if it's something that I would actually end up doing. I was in the league that Dan Rosenheck ran that had weekly rentals. This is a more a standard league where you don't know

the future where you're playing through it. But it was too much for me. It was too much for me because he basically had to model he had to have a DFS style model where he could model, he could basically project a player daily and then accrue those daily projections and then say something like, oh, I think I'm going to get more value out of player X over the next two weeks than I would from player Y over the next four weeks. And it was just too much for me. I was like, what do we do what you want to give me two weeks of billy hamilton like i ended up because i had too many steals and i had billy hamilton that year i ended up giving somebody three weeks of billy hamilton for the rest of the season of junior gara it's weird isn't it it was so weird and it just it's it's one of those things where and but you know what now maybe maybe more than ever because it's one of those things where

i would love to have that league it was my only league and when it was one of 10 or 11 i was just like this is too much for me i can't handle this So this league, we don't have a lot going on right now. It might be an interesting way to kind of go back through 2019. And it might work. It'll be a fair amount of work. And I also feel like someone could, the person who spent the most time on it would just win. That's probably true.

Most time would probably pay off in that format. Maybe there's a way to cap it somehow. Maybe we can't use a chess clock. Everybody gets three hours and that's it. You don't win because you were the biggest grinder. You win because you were the most effective grinder in equal amounts of time. That concept reminds me a lot of what ScoreSheet does in the offseason. I think what they did this past winter is they took stats from four different seasons,

85 through 88, and kind of replayed an era into a combined season. So for a three-week stretch, they were pulling stats from 85. For another three-week stretch, it's from 86. And they have a simulation program that plays out actual games. And that's pretty cool, too, to do something like that. You don't have to go all the way back to the 80s to do it, but just another way to think about it. But, yeah, I mean, this is the time to be creative with games,

especially, I think, in these next, like, six weeks. Like, we're going to have the time to be creative with games, especially I think in these next like six weeks. Like we're going to have this lull where we're like, okay, now what do we do? So I like where Dougie's head's at. I just don't want to be the one who's the commish of this league. I don't have it in me right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying with OTP to bring something and still trying to figure out something for Korea and Japan.

Maybe we'll just do something by pen, almost like the Goat League, where there's just some sort of home run derby type thing for Japan League, where we just have some sort of draft or three groups of players you can pick from, five groups of players. You can pick one from each group, submit it it and whoever has the most home runs wins you know yeah like a

box pool kind of yeah something simpler where then we can uh you know do a little bit of scouting when it comes to the japanese league and the korean league and try to identify some big sluggers and and have some fun with it that way. But yeah, I think April is going to be the thing that we've got to knock out somehow because hopefully by the beginning of May, schools here were canceled until May. So May 1, I'm hoping, even if they say school is done because there's only four more weeks,

we could get more clarity near the beginning of May where baseball says, okay, another week or two and we're going to have spring training. That's what I'm hoping for is that we get not necessarily baseball in May, but we get clarity in May. Because clarity will help all of us too, right? Then we can restart up our leagues, whatever drafts are not finished, you can just just have those we'll have something to build towards we can then start doing our our positional

previews again like we the whole thing about fantasy is round two yeah exactly for the whole thing about fantasy is you have to like you can't just keep doing the same thing because we don't know when you need like a you need to build towards a moment there has to be like a date so yeah i've got new rankings coming out probably over the weekend if not friday afternoon before midday monday taking into account just a shortened season and yeah dropping cinder guard off the list and just you know things that need to be changed in case people are still there's still people drafting every weekend you could still do the nfbc still running some contests and are they yeah they did a few like uh i think they're not

doing like the main event and all those things right yeah they put those on hold for now but i'm pretty sure if you go to the lobby yeah if you go to the lobby right now there's i mean there's still some online championships there's still some cut line stuff out there and uh you know if you have the itch you did the work already if you just want to get something in like you've got you've got options there uh but thanks a lot for the email doug there's also a nice compliment about the pod and whatnot in there too so we really appreciate that as well a couple questions from gordo these are the ones that were teased in the last episode the first question he asked us was how much of a fantasy analyst credibility and reputation

stems from performance of their teams in expert leagues can a poor commentator be a great manager or a chronic second division expert league finisher a peerless analyst so we'll take that combination of questions first um i feel seen go ahead elaborate yeah i haven't won labor yet god damn it my finishes keep getting better um i will say this there is something about analyzing the game that is different from gameplay. There's something that's different about analyzing baseball and understanding baseball that's a little different from winning the room. And I think that I get a little myopic sometimes when I'm in the room. And perhaps I don't practice enough. Like for example, I do labor and that other than my auto new auctions, which are totally different, that's my only auction of the

year. So just because of time wise, because I'm also on the regular baseball beat and have my, you know, the things I have to write for regular baseball, I just don't have enough time to do a lot of practice auctions. And you'll see one of the things that makes Matt Modica so good, Modica so good at what he does is that he plays a lot, you know, and he understands the NFBC format almost like no other. So he knows that format and he plays so often that format that he knows, even if it's auction or snake, like he just knows what players will be available at what times, what people do, what strategies people do, how people act. And over time, I've started to learn that about my labor partners or colleagues or foes or anyone to call them because, you know, every year becomes a

practice for the next year. So I have gotten a little bit more of a handle on how people act in the room and what strategies work for me and how I should be in the room. And so my standings have gotten, my finishes have gotten slowly better. Like last year was fourth and I could have won if Severino was healthy. I would say that there is a difference between the game of fantasy baseball and the game of baseball. On top of that, what we're doing here is entertaining and informing. You can be entertaining and informative without necessarily dominating every draft you're in. Yeah, I mean, there is a hustle component

of being in leagues too, that if your primary job is to create content, you actually might not take as much time as you could or should to hustle in your leagues. I'm not implying that that's what's happening with you. You know, that's just like... No, but there's also, your also your ranks are everywhere man like if i want to know what dvr you know thinks of players i just call up dvr's rankings and boom there they are like i i was in the it was in this uh online championship my first nfbc like online championship

and there was one guy that just took every picture i wanted in the round i wanted it's frustrating and i was like this person has my ranks out so i think the challenge when that happens it's a unique problem that most people i mean like if you're not publishing your ranks or going around telling people who you like you can't relate to it but i think it it forces people who do that to be very flexible in their strategy and just kind of knowing the pool inside and out you know you have to be able to counteract something like that as difficult as that is kind of like drafting against yourself you got to have some way to work around that yeah my way is tears and i know some people denigrate tears but like yeah like if you're

gonna take my favorite sleepers i'm gonna think of people in groups and i'm gonna have a group of sleepers and you can't you can't take everybody in the group like i'll get one of them so that's that's one way to combat it one day i don't like is that some of the better players talk about not giving you all of the information they've got or not giving you all of their analysis, especially when it comes to something like free agency bidding. I know there are players out there who are analysts or public analysts who do not give you all of the information because they do not want the people in their leagues to know what they're thinking. It's a really tough line to walk with fab bidding in a competitive league in

particular. But if you're going to be in a position where people subscribe for your content and pay you money for your content, I think you have to be completely transparent with what you think about the player pool. Like you can't have your cake and eat it to borrow an expression that I, I owe dollars to donuts. I hate that one too.

I don't like most of those old timey phrases, but that's what it is. You can't sell the content and not give the best possible content. That's just a terrible, terrible way to go. Yeah, and a while back, I made that decision very sort of forcefully and in those words where I was like, my priority is

content. If I'm going to make it in this industry, it's going to be my content. It's not going to be, I'm not going to make it like, that's why DFS never really appealed to me because my content wasn't going to be enough for DFS. And I would have had my own projection system and win at actual DFS in order to make DFS part of what I offered to people, make that analysis part of what I offered people. In DFS, it's really how well do you do in DFS? That's the only reason I want to listen to you. And so with that, I was like, I'd either have to rededicate and really focus in on DFS and win at DFS and play DFS and really focus on winning rather than the content. So I've always been content first. To answer Gordo's question in simple terms, like a good bit rides on it, but it's not the only thing people should be judging analysts for. It's not just a

performance-based sort of thing. I think a poor commentator can be a great manager. Vice versa. You can get any combination of those things. Some people are bad players and bad commentators. Sometimes they have a microphone too. That's just how it goes. Sometimes you get both. Sometimes you get

one skill that's stronger than the other. Sometimes they have the smoothest voice in the business and they win all the time. Sometimes you get lucky. The other question from Gordo is the highly anticipated Zach

Plesak's pick-off move question. Again, there's a broader question attached to it. Gordo wanted to know if XFIP and DRA and other advanced pitching metrics adequately account for the effect of a pitcher's pickoff move. The example he sent was Zach Plesak, ticketed for regression by many analysts given his XFIP, ERA chasm from last year. But he's wondering if some of that gap could be explained by his excellent pickoff move.

A good move not only results in pickoffs, but could also shut down the running game and perhaps enhance the strand rate. So what do you think, you know? I don't think it's in anything. Right, it's never accounted for in stats? It is not accounted for in stats? It is not accounted for in stats. I'm looking right now, I'm sort of quickly looking through war because that's the closest because it really brings everything together.

But I'm pretty sure the only thing that's changed over time with war is that they put in leverage for relievers and that they put in uh pop flies infield flies and that's about it that's fangraphs war now could baseball reference war maybe include it maybe um but war is the closest thing you get but i know that like johnny cueto for example controls the running weight really well. And for his career, I think war underrates what Johnny Cueto has done. And you can see it where he has a.335 ERA and a.381 FIP. He's one of the bigger differences over a large sample than anybody. And he kind of also does other things that don't show up, like his deception.

Cueto has the five different deliveries that he does. So I think that is a question. But two things. One, how much is it really worth? And two, how much is it really worth in the face of the decline of the value of the stolen base and the emphasis on stolen bases in baseball? Somebody like Syndergaard is way on the other side of the picture

where his results are a little bit worse than you'd expect. And he has, like last year, he was a four- win pitcher with a 4-2-8 ERA and he had a 4-2-8 ERA with a 3-6-0 fit and his ERA has been 0.4 higher than his FIP over his career so those are extremes though Thor and Cueto are probably described the entire extreme like one and the other. And I think at the ends, that's where it could be a little bit impactful, but I do kind of wonder if it's just a marginal

thing. It's a nice skill to have. You'd rather have it than not have it because it gives you that extra little nudge in the ratios, but I think the broader trend that you brought up is kind of what sticks with me too. It's becoming a lot less important in the absolute middle. The middle 90% of pitchers are probably almost unaffected by it.

And the extremes are the guys that you look at. Now, I don't know if Plesak, does he fit the extreme? Man, he does have a really low K rate last year, at least. Is that where he really is skills-wise? Do you see him maybe growing in that area? I don't necessarily think I would want Plesak on the strength of that particular skill, but I'm looking at him and kind of wondering,

okay, is this really all we're going to get? Like a sub 7 Ks per night under 20% strikeout rate? Is that who he is? Yeah, I'm not really in on him. I mean, you probably could have seen that from my ranks, but I'm not really in on him. Let me see what I have him as being below average in both stuff and command. Oh.

See, I would have guessed that because of what he did, that he was above average in command and potentially was above average in inducing weak contact. Those are two things I would have guessed to be true based on the surface numbers. That could be, but look at his homer rate. 1.5 homers per nine last year. Yeah. He didn't allow homers in the minors.

Didn't allow walks really in the minors. And he struck more guys out in the minors. He was just a better pitcher against lesser competition. There could be more here, and maybe I'm missing it. And I do think the Indians seem to get the most out of their guys. So that's one thing. And there's something with the park where like it is a pretty friendly park to introduce a pitcher to the major leagues

you know um so there's a lot of things going in different directions but for me uh 95 stuff 95 command it's uh basically league average so zips says he'll have like a 4-5-8 ERA and be worth two wins. That is basically league average. So I'm telling you that I believe the Zips projection, I guess. All right, you're on the Zips projection for Plesak. I think he's probably more of like a home streamer than a guy in mixed leagues who would be on my roster all season long. I think that's the best way to go but i mean they got they got great numbers i think over their careers out of guys um that had less stuff i mean who is the tomlin you know oh man they went to that well so many times too tomlin had a 468 era

and had a year with a uh a 440 and 174. And, you know, there's one year with the Braves that might mess it up a little bit, but let me just look at his home away split for his career. Home ERA 457 for his career, which includes some bad years. So, you know, I don't, I think he's maybe a little bit better than Tomlin because he's got more velocity for one and he has more strikeouts. But I wouldn't say that he's necessarily so much better that he gets out of that class. How would you compare Plesak to Aaron Savali? I mean, to me, they're like magnum and blue steel. Yeah.

Yeah. Neither one shows up well by, you know, Savali shows up a little bit better by stuff and actually command where he's like 102 by stuff and 98 command. that early stuff number overvalued sinkers. If you looked at stuff and you looked at the very top of the stuff list, there were a lot of guys with sinkers where the game is going away from sinkers and the pitchers that it was highlighting as having great stuff with the sinkers were not the best pitchers. I'm trying to think of Andrew Kittredge, for example, had a 119 stuff number, and that just seems wrong.

And he's a sinker guy. Marcus Stroman had a 110 stuff number. So I would say that probably more likely, Savali's like 98-98 uh and police hack is 95 95 i don't know i just look at what they did level by level in the minors because they kind of just moved up the system together uh-huh good walk rates i mean they're really good at slider command and and slider command in my past research slider command is more important than slider stuff so at the least, these two guys can command their slider,

and that's going to help them with their walk rates and I guess their home run rates, hopefully. But it takes stuff to get to that 9, 10 strikeouts per 9 that kind of make you a good starter these days. I'm a weirdo. I think Plesak might be better. Yeah. I just think that... He had better strikeout rates than the Miners, for sure. Yeah, that's just what's kind of sticking with me. He was better at all the Minor League stops.

He has kind of a wider arsenal, too. Savali is pretty much sink or slider. Yeah, that's a 40-grade fastball. Yeah oh really that's what that's what they put on savalli that's what they got on him the police act scouting grades are no longer visible oh interesting but at 94 miles an hour it had to be really straight to be uh a 40 yeah he threw four different pitches last year. Fastball, slider, curveball, changeup. Yeah, and I think they're legit decent pitches. They're just, none of them is

really amazing. It's kind of like engineering your way to a league average starter, I feel like. Could work, though. They do handle pitching well in Cleveland. Thanks for the questions, Gordo. Let's close things out with the triumphant return of Beer of the Week.

You know, we've had some opportunities to drink beer in our isolation this month. And judging from the state of my beer fridge, I have taken advantage of those opportunities. Is there empty real estate in the beer fridge? Dude, I don't know. I've got nowhere to drive, I guess. Dude, I don't know. I've got nowhere to drive, I guess. What's kind of stood out to you as you've made your way through the collection that you'd assembled?

Well, you know, I've mostly been doing the local thing. But I did try a sour saison with a terrible name called Milk the Mustache. That's a bad name. I did not enjoy that. I had a honey pilsner from Bogota that was really fun. But the one that stood out for me was a stout called Nocturnal Creatures.

And I want to bring that up because it wasn't super local. It's from Double Nickel, which is in New Jersey. And it had cacao, toasted coconut, and Madagascan villain villain vanilla beans in it. And one of the reasons that stood out for me was that, um, most of these stouts like this have, have coffee in them. Uh, so it was nice for me. And if it has coffee in it,

I, I usually reserve it for the weekends because I'm a little nervous. It'll keep me up. That's right. You're not a regular coffee drinker. So like I have a coffee tolerance it'll keep me up. That's right. You're not a regular coffee drinker. So I have a coffee tolerance. It's pretty high.

So I'm going to be one of those old people who at like 65 can drink a half a pot of coffee after dinner and just fall asleep afterwards. I could accidentally have a little coffee dusting on my dessert at the restaurant and not sleep. No tiramisu for you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I was thinking of tournament. So, uh, it was just a really enjoyable, uh, a stout. And since I'm also, I ran a new max yesterday, uh, eight miles, eight miles, I've gotten up to eight miles. Um, I, uh, I've been running pretty hard, uh, to just get rid of the stress and to get out of the house. And, um, uh, I've been rewarding myself with a few more stouts. Also the stouts keep longer. Um, so what's left in my, in my fridge right now is like 80% sours and stouts. Uh, so I, I wanted to highlight, uh, a good stout from the East coast.

I wanted to highlight a good stout from the East Coast. Nice. I've been trying to do the local thing too. Again, on my weekly supply run, I'm just going to the grocery store. Fortunately, grocery stores here carry a lot of local beers. It's not even the case in some places. I never realized that was how other states operate until somebody, I think they were tweeting at you about some distribution or something. And they're like, oh, I live in New Jersey.

And you can't, I don't know if you can't buy beer at the grocery store at all. Or if you can, it's just garbage or whatever. But that was weird to me. So I got into some more Carbon 4 recently. They have a beer called Champagne Tortoise. It is a mild english mild ale and i think the thing i like about it is it's totally different than anything else i would ordinarily drink a lot of stuff i drink is hazy and hoppy uh and carbon four makes a lot of malt forward beers they have some stouts that are very malt forward as well. But Champagne Tortoise has that kind of sweet, bready, yeasty flavor that I really like. And the thing I think

is really great about it too is if you have friends who don't like the beers we normally recommend, they would like that style. But I was trying to think like English style mild ales that are widely available. That has not been a popular brewing style in this craft beer movement we've really seen in the last decade, right? Like do any come to mind for you that are at least regionally commonly available? I will say I'm happy when I go to a brewery and they have that kind of depth on their in their lineup i will also say that i don't usually then buy it but i bought it because it's like five percent abv and i'm like well if i'm not getting out exercising as much as i would like at least i'm not drinking three yeah one my choice in those situations is pilsners i got a

heater allen pilsner uh that i've been drinking from um portland i think and uh it was really good especially since some pilsners are too sweet and uh that that one from boca i thought was a little too sweet but uh i like the crisp pilsner that's my that's my um that's my light beer of choice the milds i lived in england for a little bit and the milds there may have just turned me off of it i don't know if that's fair but they weren't always very cold yeah they drink their beer pretty warm in england and it wasn't always too cold in some cases but yeah kind of like cask cask milds you know cask bitters that sort of stuff and like i just uh i didn't dig on it i ended up while i was there getting more into pilsners and getting more into cold um like lager and pilsner so i was having

like star or promen and 1664 when i lived in Cronenberg, 1664 when I was living in England. Yeah, that warmer beer thing would take me a while to get used to. I think the mild ale too, it reminds me of drinking tea, like iced tea a little bit, something about it. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's kind of a nice refreshing thing to target as the weather starts to warm up a little bit. If you're enjoying the show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it,

please take a moment to do that. We'd greatly appreciate it. If you've got friends who would enjoy the pod, pass it on. This is a good time to share things you're enjoying with the people closest to you. If you are not already a subscriber to The Athletic, we do have a 90-day trial available at theathletic.com slash rates and barrels. Everything we do is included with a subscription, so it's a great time to check out the site if you haven't done it yet.

If you're ready to sign up, you can get 40% off a subscription as well. So lots to look at. Lots of great stories. Our full staff, we've got a staff of 400-plus cranking out content. We're all missing sports. We're all missing the fact that today would have been opening day, but there's a lot of good stuff to read,

hopefully a lot of good stuff to listen to on our network of shows as well. As always, you can reach us via email, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com if you want to do that. You can spell out the word and, though, if you want to go the email route on Twitter. He's at Eno Saris.

I am at Derek Van Ryper. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Tuesday. Stay safe out there. Thanks for listening.