Rates & Barrels - Jordan Westburg Gets the Call & Checking In on Second-Year Hitters

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Eno and DVR discuss the promotion of Jordan Westburg and expectations for his offensive performance throughout the second half of the season, the 2023 success of Braxton Garrett, and several second-year bats.  Rundown 4:24 Jordan Westburg Gets the Call to Baltimore 12:39 Would You Rather? (Westburg Edition) 19:17 Concerns About Tim Anderson's Shoulder 22:39 Braxton Garrett's Improved K% and BB% 31:26 Another Atlanta Rotation Flip-Flop? 36:42 Julio Rodríguez: Still a First-Rounder for Second-Half Drafts? 43:05 Bobby Witt Jr.: More AVG + OBP Coming Soon? 47:10 Michael Harris II: Getting Back on Track 49:21 Corbin Carroll: Top-10 Overall Player? 53:29 Adley Rutschman & Gunnar Henderson 59:14 Josh Jung: Everything Is Better 1:04:30 Spencer Torkelson: Big Second Half Coming? 1:08:09 A Pod Divided! CJ Abrams' Outlook 1:11:56 Shea Langeliers: Better Than Surface Numbers Suggest? 1:14:38 Nick Pratto: Some Good News in KC? 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 Check out these offers from our ad partners.... Right now, Nuts.com is offering new customers a free gift with purchase and free shipping on orders of $29 or more at Nuts.com/rates Go to zbiotics.com/rates to get 15% off your first order when you use RATES at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces. A message from the Government of Canada. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Monday, June 26th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris on this episode. We have another promotion to discuss as Jordan Westberg is joining the Orioles.

Injury news from the Marlins in their rotation, another switcheroo in the Atlanta rotation. And then our main topic today, we're dig into some second year hitters just see what direction those players are going as they get more exposure to big league pitching you know as we get started you were telling about some biodome thing you were in this weekend what was that all about yeah i have a friend who basically shares my birthday he's the day before and we've known each other for a really long time and we're also poor planners. We do a bad job planning. So we realized it was our birthday weekend and we hadn't planned anything so we just threw some camping gear in the back of the car and went north and had some very loose plans.

There's a site called Hip Camp where we were searching for some campgrounds that were available in the short term. And we found a geodesic dome which is like uh just you could probably sleep like eight to ten people in it but it's a sort of a semi-large dome with a with a wooden floor that's raised up off the ground uh and it was in bolinas so we are when we our windows to our dome, we had this wide view of the pond that was on the property and then the bay. So we were just looking right out at the ocean.

And if you go, we walked down to there, to the beach. I had some beers on the beach. You're basically looking at San Francisco, but you can't see the Golden Gate Bridge. So it's like sort of a you know right around point reyes and uh we had a good time it was fun you know getting to know a little town and uh you know stopped by and saw some friends on the way the logo is a flying slipper like a flying shoe okay and it's about how like your abuela might hit you with the shoe if you were bad

so one of those i got some new new shoes for my wife he's like nice i like oh there you go just saying like you know i wear the same shoes all the time so yeah yeah i'm guilty of that that's uh it's it's gotten worse in the last few months too i'm getting real real lazy so i got a bunch of new shoes that i ordered recently i think my my midlife crisis is going to be becoming this 40-year-old guy that wanders into sneakerhead situations with no prior knowledge of anything about sneakers and buys the crap that no one actually wants. I'm going to be the mark when I go to those kinds of places. Look at this guy. Look at this idiot buying stuff nobody wants. That's going to be me.

Well, it'll be cheaper. It'll be cheaper. That's right. It'll be cheaper, and I will like it. That's the important thing. As long as I like it, that's gonna be me well it'll be cheaper it'll be cheaper that's right it'll be cheaper and i will like it that's the important thing right as long as i like it that's all that matters well glad you had a nice weekend i'm looking at those domes it looks actually a lot like some of the stuff that started popping up like a bigger version of the domes or popping up on sidewalks and streets during covid when they were trying to create more outdoor dining spaces especially in the midwest where it's colder. New York, I think I saw some of these small dome things.

So very cool. It was a really cool property. It was so weird. We were thinking about maybe just planning and actually having our birthday party there next year because there was a cactus garden. And it was a real quality cactus garden. Really nice cactus garden. And then a blue fire truck that looked like it was straight out of Burning Man. And just like stuff to bomb around on, like a whole pond with a little pier in it and stuff. So we were like, this could be fun with two airstreams and like another property.

Like it could be something where we just take over the property for a weekend and have fun there. Awesome. Scouting. That's what we fun there. Awesome. Scouting. That's what we were doing. We were scouting. Scouting for your lack of planning was just scouting for future birthdays. Exactly. Well, let's talk about Jordan Westberg for a bit.

The Orioles are bringing him up. Joey Ortiz was the corresponding demotion to make room on the roster. The immediate question most people have is what type of player should we expect Jordan Westberg to be coming up from the minors for the very first time? You look at his results at AAA. They've been fantastic. This is a guy that has spent basically a year at that level, 158 combined games between 2022 and 2023, 36 homers, 15 for 18 as a base stealer. 15 for 18 as a base stealer, and that's with about a 280 average, 365, 66 OBP, something in that range, and about a low 20s K rate. So he draws walks.

He doesn't strike out too much, hits the ball pretty hard, and can run a little bit. This all seems like good stuff for Jordan Westberg, but what do you expect this to actually look like against top-level pitching? Yeah, the ongoing discussion we have about how much a guy will actually strike out in the major leagues has come to a head. We have more at our disposal, like more stats at our disposal now that he has played in AAA. And in fact, at Ruvver at Rotowire,

you've got contact percentage which is overall contact percentage and that's at 76% so just comparing across all levels this year some people near him are Samad Taylor

Bo Naylor and Vidal Brujan near him are Samad Taylor, Bo Naylor, and Vidal Brujan. Just by contact rate, a little bit better than Mark Vientos, which is good, because Mark Vientos does not make much contact. And a little worse than... Let me see if I get somebody interesting here.

A little worse than... Oh, these are all uninteresting. Taylor Trammell. Taylor Trammell showed up somewhere else on Accomplice. You did a slightly different approach to coming up with your Accomplice, and you also came up with Bo Naylor. I did. I took players 24 and under at AAA going back to 2006, sorted by WRC+, and then started to look at the actual slash lines and some of the swing and miss.

So Naylor did pop up as a similar player. I think what is really difficult to discern using the leaderboards this way is that the quality of the contact makes a huge difference in terms of the long-term outcomes. And by most indications of what we have for Westberg so far, he does hit the ball hard, right? And the player that I started to see when we were describing what he might do going into the show is Matt Chapman, right? If there's a little bit of swing and miss, a little more swing and miss in this profile against top-level pitching

than you'd think based on what we're seeing at AAA, that wouldn't be that much of a surprise. He's going to draw enough walks to keep the OBP at a good level. He plays on the left side of the infield, and he's going to get to the power consistently. And you think about some of the up and downs we've seen from Matt Chapman, that sort of makes sense. We know that if you barrel the ball consistently,

you can get away with those stretches where you might strike out 30% of the time. And that's not necessarily where Westberg settles in long-term, but I think you can see a few snapshots of the type of player he's likely to be. And with some speed added on too, it's Matt Chapman with some stolen base potential. I don't know if Jordan Westberg is going to steal 15 bases every year in the big leagues, but he's probably going to be at least a five plus sort of guy, especially with the rules and the things that we've seen

that have opened up speed so much in this game this season. Yeah, yeah. And it's funny, like how you find your comps is as important as anything. I tried another way. So this is the third way to try and find Jordan Westberg comps. This is thanks to Chris Clegg, Roto Clegg, that's C-L-E-G-G on Twitter. He posted Jordan Westberg's zone contact rate, which is specific and also I think pretty interesting.

That gets really to your ability to make contact outside of your decision-making process. We know that his chase rate is 26%, so it looks like he has pretty good decision-making uh westberg does uh but the zone contact being 80 that is not great uh and so what i did was i took all the major leaguers this year that were within a rounding uh of 80 percent um kind of zone contact and uh were qualified so i got 20. As an average, they averaged nearly a 10% walk rate and a 26% strikeout rate. So if you look and you see the bat, for instance, projecting a 26% strikeout rate for Westberg, even though he only struck out 21% of the time, this is partially

where it might be coming from. And an ISO of 200, 207. And I think that's important because I think this is the kind of profile where you have to hit for power to make it work. But Westberg has cleared those ISOs in the minors, and so he could join this group. This group includes Matt Chapman. However, Matt Chapman's max EVs over the past few years past few years have been closer to 115 while jordan westberg's max ev this year in the minor leagues is 110 so who is matt chapman

with a little less raw power but but also with some good defensive value. Gunnar Henderson's on this list. That's a possible outcome. It also speaks to maybe Baltimore having a sort of type in how they produce players. Anthony Volpe is on this list. Eugenio suarez is on this list uh paul goldschmidt is on this list and that's the last one i want to bring up uh really quickly because westberg pulled the ball 50 of the time last year and only 38 of the time this year. So, looks like there's been an adjustment already

to a sort of pull happy approach that got him to this power, maybe, and got him to this whiff rate level. And he's pulled up off of that. And so, you know, Goldschmidt is obviously hall of fame bound

and really a top endend outcome for anybody um but uh just want to throw out there that goldschmidt is also on this list so i would i would assume the over under for his strikeout rate is around 26 the over under for his iso is around 200 i'm going to take the average of all these players and kind of say that's that's a kind of a likely outcome actually um and i think that makes them interesting but it isn't someone who's going to maybe save your batting average yeah so there's some risk there but a lot of things that jordan westberg should be able to do in relatively short order it probably is going to cost jorge mateo

playing time he comes up a lot on this show already buried the bottom of the order that's been the case for most of this season and all that stuff that we believed in in short samples and I I don't know I'm not gonna say we I'm not gonna put throw you under the bus but I'll throw myself under the bus I saw you know with Jorge Mateo early on a real change in his chase rate. And it was great. And it was awesome. And it lasted 30 games.

And now he's actually, his chase rate right now is, the rolling chase rate is higher than it's been in his career. Yeah, makes sense. WRC Plus down at 70. So it doesn't really matter how good you are defensively. If you are throwing a 70 out there, you're not going to play. Did his eyes get big? Like what the heck happened? It's just hilarious. Like there was real change there.

I was sure of it. And now everything looks really about the same as ever. It's not great. As far as your who is Westberg an upgrade over, if you're looking at rest of season projections, I mean, he's going to fit, I would say, down to at least 12 team leagues, maybe even down to some tens, depending on who you're rostering. This slash line that we're seeing projected is going to be right where you start

to see players that are kind of borderline for those rosters. Do you think let's see let's get some would you rathers fired up in here i should have had these ready to go he's eligible at short and third in a lot of leagues i'm curious what how that's gonna impact him too but let's say now and third is harder to fill is he is he third and short on on um nfbc got to check him on there. I couldn't pick him up this weekend, so I got to take a look. He's not even in there maybe yet.

We'll have an answer on that momentarily. I mean, if you're playing Suarez right now, given some of the concerns, we believe the power is coming back for him. But if you're in a 12-team league and Eugenio Suarez is the spot. He's shortstop only there. Yeah. Okay.

Well, that kind of blows up the Suarez question. Well, I mean, there's other places. NSV is not the only thing in the world. Sure. Suarez versus Westberg, rest of season? Well, since Suarez is on the comp list and so old and Westberg is young, I'll just go with the younger version of Suarez. I hope he just hits the ground running.

In a shallow league, that's playable. We'll do another third base one just to throw that out there too. J.D. Davis? He's not really a cut because he's not bad, but would you see Westberg as an upgrade over J.D. Davis the rest of the way? Not in batting average. In power, Westbrook would have to hit for the power that is expected of him, which is not always the case. Speed, he'll win. Playing time? I'm not worried about him playing. I think Westbrook's going to play. He'll play unless he gets demoted.

You have to factor that into your risk. Yeah, that one's tougher. I think I might stick with Davis. Davis has just quietly been so good and having improved his own defense really stabilized his playing time in a way that we probably wouldn't have expected coming into the season.

If you're throwing Brandon Drury out there, that's an easy one. Justin Turner? Is Westbrook a clear upgrade over Justin Turner at this point? Probably. Westbrook over Brian Hayes? Yeah, a power upgrade. So he'd probably

do that. And then on the shortstop side, we're looking at rest of season shortstop options. You mentioned Anthony Volpe before as one of the comps that came up with one of those methods. Volpe versus Westbrook? New toy versus new toy from three months ago? I think so. The graphs, the day-to-day graphs are there. It is interesting that Volpe has survived the first he-should-be-demoted

media hubbub. He has. But that doesn't mean he's going down i mean how many times have you heard the dreaded he's got my vote of confidence from the manager and then oh well we just you know we've got a roster crunch in this situation we need some healthy guys up here and whatever it is i think that's sort of my entry point for for for westberg is around vulpe um i did the auction calculator and uh 23rd on the auction calculator among all short stops is jorge mateo 22nd is chris taylor 21st is anthony vulpe 24th is luis garcia So this is the would-you-rather group for me. He's comfortably ahead, I think, of Elvis Andrews, Ha-Seong Kim, Orlando Garcia.

No, those are all layups. CJ Abrams. Yeah, those are all layups. I think if you're in the Ezekiel Tovar, maybe Jeremy Pena, who we talked about last week, as someone who hasn't really been the player we expected. Even Tim Anderson. Oh, so you're excited.

Well, no, I think it's more like if you're in a shallow league and you're lagging in the middle infield especially, you're thinking very hard about cutting those players because we're nearing the midway point. We're not quite there yet. It's hard to believe that we still have more than half a season left to play. I have these guys in so many of the keeper days where I'm like, you can't just cut Jeremy Pena.

Yeah, but in a 10-team league or a 12-team league with more shallow rosters, you could. And you might have to. What about these people in more medium-team 12, more 15-team leagues? Then I think you're looking at Volpe, Taylor, Mateo.

I think I might have Luis Garcia over Westberg just because you know garcia i think is underrated is that possible uh yeah it it is but i mean he 11 strikeout rate you're taking luis garcia over jordan westberg no i'm not doing i'm not doing that it's a bird in the hand dude 12 strikeout rate six six percent swing strike rate, 7% bail rate, 110 max EV for Luis Garcia. You're just not impressed with the home runs and the stolen bases. Yeah, it's just not enough.

There's so much more ceiling on Westberg right now, and I think you have to go Westberg. All right, that's fair. I also know that it's fair because I would take him over the other guys in there. The only caveat I have is that Chris Taylor can be roster

glue. He's hurt right now, but even as bad as he's been at times this year, he's saved my butt. When I have him on my roster a lot of times it's like oh god someone got hurt on a tuesday well good thing i have chris taylor and i can move my whole roster around and make this work because there are very few people who are outfield mi and ci plus second third and short you know what i mean like like chris taylor is

is a godsend in that way so you know when comparing him to Volpe, Mateo, and Garcia, you're just comparing them to people who only play short for the most part. Yeah. All right. That gives you some basic ideas. I think the most difficult decision you'd have to make right now. I'd take him over Tobar. I'm going to throw Tobar on that list.

I think the Tim Anderson line for a shallow league, even though I still believe in Tim Anderson long-term, what am I doing in leagues where I have Tim Anderson? He's on the bench. He's on the bench with four games to begin the week in NFBC leagues for me. Yeah, he is for me, too, in my main. It's so aggressive. I feel like if I get good news that he's starting tonight,

I might put him in. The projections still like Anderson more than how he's playing. I just wonder about this shoulder for Tim Anderson. You know what I mean? He obviously is sitting games because of it. He's got a 64.9% ground ball rate. I know when we last checked on him, the ground ball rate wasn't quite that far out of whack.

I'm getting closer to the drop point where I'm like, hey, this projection is good but it's kind of like what we dealt with when max muncy i think was dealing with the elbow injury last year and the projections kept saying keep him keep him trade for him do you know projections that he has a shoulder problem and and you know what it's funny i was just on the luis garcia page and this is way too uncomfortably looking like the Luis Garcia page. And in my main,

I actually have both of them. I wonder at some point if we're just like, well, this week we're playing Luis Garcia over Tim Anders. Actually, we might be sitting both, but, um,

you know, if, if we get to that point where we'd rather have Garcia in over Anderson, then maybe it's drop city. Looking at the recent EVs too, and you talked about this a few years ago. I think it was one of the first times you ever did a presentation at First Pitch Arizona

about StatCast and how you could sometimes look at the rolling graphs and you can see just how much an injury might be impacting a player compared to his normal baseline. I'm wondering if that might give us the information we need with Tim Anderson. How are you seeing that with Tim Anderson? I'm looking at it more on the game log page right now

and just kind of eyeballing it that way. A game log on Franjafs? Yeah, you can look at the EVs from there. Because they've got StatCasts in there now. There's not a lot of hard contact in the last couple of weeks. Those are gross. There's a lot of 70s.

This is not good for Tim Anderson. The optimism I had just a few weeks ago is fading the more and more I look at the profile. And look at those terrible launch angles. A lot of negative launch angles. I've always thought, too, that when you have a shoulder problem, the ground ball rate tends to go up.

It's one of those numbers that I don't know. I need more information to state it as fact, but I've noticed that a lot with players that have had shoulder injuries for the last 15 years now digging into these players. The second base thing, it's about the shoulder as much as anything

and that's not good news either that he's playing second base. Oh yeah, flipping him with Andrews defensively to take some wear and tear off his arm. That's awful. I feel bad for him. This might not get better. I mean, the all-star break maybe could help, just giving a few days off.

Maybe they could give him some rest before it, too, to really extend that. Or something. Okay, Westberg versus Tim Anderson. I think I'm on Jordan Westberg for the rest of the season. I think I've talked myself into it. Wow. That's painful, dude.

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Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access membership separate. Terms apply. All right, well, we'll stop with the rambling how concerned we are about Tim Anderson. Let's talk about the situation in Miami. Trevor Rogers shut down through the All-Star break, so things are not progressing quite the way they had hoped. The good news is Braxton Garrett continues to pitch really well for them. And we had a question about Garrett.

If there's anything going on with his pitch mix, anything that's just different about him that's enabled him to reach this new level. The strikeout rate is up. The walk rate is down. Love to see both of those things happening together. He is getting hit inside the zone a little bit less this year than last year. And everyone knows braxton garrett doesn't throw particularly hard but if you have a 92.4 zone contact percentage which he had last year it's hard to live that way unless you're an extreme ground ball you know peak dallas keitel

type that's that's just a unbelievably high zone contact percentage to have a big difference seems to be the cutter as far as the pitch mix changes. That's something that Braxton Garrett didn't have before. But looking at some of the heat maps too, I think his slider is being commanded a lot better. Or at least if it's not an actual command change, where he's locating it makes a lot more sense now. And I think that's been a big difference for him so far this year too. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot about location. I do think that the cutter is cool, but it's on the level of, you know, he has a bunch of pitches.

So I'm not – this isn't like how excited I would be if Graham Ashcraft had a third pitch. You know what I mean? Like this is like, okay, well, he had five pitches. Now he has six. And it's not like the cutter comes in as a super high stuff. Uh, you know,

answer either. What's really interesting is that he does have, uh, five pitches that are all like basically 90 stuff plus. Um, and that doesn't sound great at first, but you know, 92 stuff plus for a sinker is not terrible.

Um, and all these other pitches are usable and functional and uh he's got a great location plus so this is definitely um you know a way to try and find um sleepers is just kind of look for guys who can command it and have large arsenals and um i think he's a little bit over his skis honestly uh this type uh you know he can keep it going for a while but like for example his velocity on his on his foreseam is 90 so this isn't something where i necessarily think it's just stuff plus mist you know it's just like stuff with a small s missed you know like there's nobody who watches Braxton Garrett and thinks

woof like you know need to fan myself um so uh I mean I think in any given year I will bet on this um and I know he's now had like two good seasons uh you know two good half seasons in a row but the two seasons you know when two good half seasons in a row. But the two seasons, you know,

when he debuted before were with five ERAs. So, you know, I think this is, he's over his skis a little bit. He has a really nice home park. He has some good matchups. When those are all lined up, I'm into him. In any given season, if I found him, I'm great with this.

But if I'm in a keeper league uh I would chop him I get the sense that most people in most leagues are are skeptical but what he's doing is at least working well enough where he's probably more than a home streamer and that's where he started the season it was in deeper leagues oh if he's pitching in his home park I'm using him now I think I'm going to choose a few more spots outside of Miami where I'll actually throw him out there against some of the leagues, weaker lineups where in the past I may have been a little bit more careful. You know,

this week he's at Boston. I don't love that spot for him. That's, that's one where I would actually try to avoid him home next week against St. Louis and Philly as part of a two step. I think you'd have to use that two at home. If you can't use them for two at home, you can't use them. So I think you'd be in for that,

but out for this road trip against the Red Sox. Yeah, I think he's a lesson for us. We picked up Colin Ray this week as a streamer in our main because he's got a bunch of pitches. He's got good matchups. He's got the same location plus and the same sort of approach as Braxton Garrett. So anything can happen.

I also was talking to Gabe Kapler about how the Giants hit Bobby Miller well. And he said, not to take anything away from Bobby Miller, but our team sometimes has a harder time preparing for, you know, the Michael walkers of the world, you know,

guys who have four or five pitches and can mix them around and command them all. So, you know, you might be saying like, why don't we, why isn't this in the model? Why,

why, why can't we spot these guys better? Why can't we bet on these guys? Why don't you just bet on Braxton Garrett to keep it going? And the problem is just that, like, with command guys like this, I think a little thing goes in their mechanics or their health, and it just kind of all falls apart. And there's, you know, just look at Tyler Anderson over in Anaheim

as an example of a guy who's basically the same guy, right? Lots of pitches, good command, was great last last year and is not this year you know another guy who's a little bit like this although Merrill Kelly has more out pitches his change up and curve are like legitimate out pitches um but Merrill Kelly is and Miles Michaelis are these uh this type too and they kind of go up and down you know uh Zach Evelyn is this type. Marco Gonzalez is this type. Sort of, yes. That's where my mind keeps

going. Eduardo Rodriguez is this type. These guys go up and down. They're not good bets every year. I think the problem is all of those pitchers have pretty wide ranges of outcomes. But even within that group, there are still subtle enough differences. The difference between Erod and Marco Gonzalez is actually pretty big for me.

Even though by result, sometimes when Marco Gonzalez is good, he's better than Erod. When Erod's bad, you step back and you're like, wait, why? If one of those guys is bad, it should be Marco Gonzalez. But these subtle differences may not all speak well on Braxton Garrett is what I'm saying. Because when I pointed out that Merrill Kelly has some out pitches, he has multiple pitches over 100-stuff-plus. And you pointed out that Eduardo Rodriguez is better than Marco Gonzalez.

Well, Eduardo Rodriguez's slider is above 100-stuff-plus. He has a legitimate out pitch. So if you're watching Braxton Garrett, I mean, one of the questions is, is that slider a legitimate out pitch? Stuff plus says no, it's just a boring pitch. You just said in your walk up to this that it seems like he's locating the slider better.

Yeah, definitely looks like it. Look at the maps from 2022 to 2023 you see the i know the stat cast with percentage calculations kind of ridiculous but it's his it's his best whiff pitch right now 45.3 by the way they measure because it's whiffs over swings yes yeah right so that always makes it look way way bigger yeah and he's getting more with the with the change up than he did last year. I don't know how viable that really is. But the cutter, that's the funny thing about that cutter. The cutter doesn't seem like it's an extraordinary pitch. It's work to get him whiffed so far.

So, yeah, this is pretty interesting. That Kapler comment, you know, it kind of makes me think about building a pitching staff. We've talked about it with the raised bullpen and other bullpens that have all these different angles and different looks and the giants certainly have that too maybe your rotation sometimes like if you don't have four or five guys that all have bobby miller's arsenal it's hard to get five of those guys and then keep them healthy maybe having a couple of guys that throw four or five different pitches and are funky and just keep you off balance maybe that's that's the next best thing maybe we own maybe we underrate that because we like 98 plus and

gross sliders and underrate players like garrett as a result the thing about garrett that's pretty interesting in the in the profile too the swinging strike rates they're higher than i'd predict compared to a lot of the names that you mentioned as possible similar pitchers. So even though it's not overpowering, he is getting a lot of swinging strikes, 13.3% this year and even 11.8% last year. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I do think it's all in the back of location, so I'm still a little wary of it, but you're right. It's a better profile, probably the best whiff rate out of any of the guys that I mentioned. I think that question came from Billy Ripkins-Burner, not literally. I think it's just one of the regular listeners of the show that was asking us about Braxton Garrett before we got started.

One other note here real quick before we get to some of the second-year hitters. It looks like Michael Soroka might be getting another look from the Braves. Three pretty good starts at AAA Gwinnett. I don't know if anything's actually changed in terms of the quality of his stuff. When we talked about him earlier this year, it wasn't really eye-popping on his first rehab run in the minors. But AJ Smith-Shavar has been sent down. So apparently the Braves want to get another look at Soroka to see if he in fact has taken another step forward as he tries to get back and be a consistent healthy member of that rotation again uh i don't see much difference in the stuff plus um uh it's it's down he was

actually he started the year uh better than anything he's done since um and i don't see much difference in location plus so i don't know about that I can maybe do some pitch mix stuff here real quick um but I mean one thing that was uh true for me when I uh when I saw uh Smith-Shalvers debut when I watched it and when I uh you know look through the model numbers and stuff I thought the fastball was a little too close to average and one of my big clues was watching him face the rockies on the road and it was a it was a fine start uh for me uh you know let me like see what the actual numbers were on that one. Do you remember? It was like, yeah, okay, five and two-thirds, six strikeouts, three earned runs.

You could look at that and be like, yeah, great start. Good job, rookie. Except it was Colorado on the road. And there were some not great hitters in that game that touched his fastball in a way that I was kind of surprised. Tovar went two for four. Coco got a hit off the thing. And then there were some high whiff guys like McMahon got two singles off of Chauvin, I think.

So I thought that people were squaring up the fastball pretty well. And the model never liked his curveball. It's a really big curveball, and he didn't really throw it that much. So it became kind of dependent on his slider. And so I was never that big in on Smith-Schaufer, and the model did not really like him. And long story short,

Rockies on the road hit him, and that's not really like him. And long story short, Rocky's on the road, hit him. And that's not a good sign. I wonder if when we see Smith-Shavar next, if he'll be elevating that four seamer more consistently than he did during this first run. He was not elevating it. He was surprisingly low in the zone. I could not understand that either. I was like, you know, this will do better if you elevate it.

Because he did have enough ride. But I couldn't tell if it was, you know, missing or that was the plan. Yeah. I imagine they'll try and change that up once we see him back. But hopefully this time around, things can be better for Soroka. A little bit of a bummer that you're not seeing anything really different in that arsenal so far, but maybe it'll just be fine-tuning the command a little more and locating exactly where he wants to once he gets that call back up, probably at some point this week. I have a June 16th start.

Soroka threw 42 fastballs with a 75 stuff plus, 12 sinkers with a 99 stuff plus. That's weird for me because hasn't the sinker always been better than this 4 seam? Yeah, why would you throw so many 4 seams in? The slider looked good. 117 stuff plus. That's a good sign.

That's actually something nice. The slider looked good. He threw 6 changeups. Is that a demonstrably different mix than he was doing in the big leagues let me look real quick i would i would assume maybe they told him to work on his four seam maybe yeah he was he was equal four seam sinkers in the in in the in the uh big leagues maybe it was just like some some short-term work on the four-seam, and maybe he'll come back and pitch the same mix, but the four-seam will be better. But he's a risk by any metric. K-BB

is negative. Swing strike rate is 8% this year, and it wasn't that great the last time we saw him. Strikeout rate's bad. So Soroka's a little bit of a wait and see for me yeah i think if you're interested in him it's more for deep deep leagues it's like a or even an nfc a stash where you do like you you put them on a on a stash chain where you're not gonna you know start them right away and you're just putting them on your bench yeah yeah if you're lucky enough to have a spot for that you could try to do that with soroka. Let's get to some second-year hitters. I put the question out there on Twitter from the Rates and Barrels account, just asking people of the second-year hitters, who are you most interested in? And I thought we'd get more names from the bottom part of the leaderboard. I thought we'd get more questions about Spencer

Torkelson and CJ Abrams and Shea Lang Lears and Nick Prado. And I put them on the rundown anyway, but a lot of the questions were about the potential stars, the higher end players. I mean, Julio Rodriguez was a player people are still very interested in for good reason, right? If you take someone in the first round and they don't do what you expect them to do, you want to know why.

Is there something actually wrong? And I think we talked about Julio maybe a month or so ago. At that time, I didn't look at him and say, yes, he's definitely going to fall short of expectations I think there's still a lot of things going right in this profile he's still making a lot of hard contact barrel rates down just a little bit from last year but we're still looking at a power speed combo that's right on track with what he was expected to do even though the slash line has taken a pretty good hit from where it was as a rookie.

Yeah, I tried to talk to him about this a little bit. Didn't get far. You know, he's like, you know, I'm always adjusting game day to day, but I was trying to get to the fact that there, you know, the book is pretty much fill him up on the outside part of the plate and outside low. And this year he's swinging a little bit more at those pitches. You can see it in the 37% chase rate last year 41% this year uh neither of those numbers is very good and um you know but he wasn't concerned and you know I could see his point because you know he's still above

league average he's still going to hit maybe maybe 30 30 this season he's like he's still above league average. He's still going to hit maybe 30-30 this season. He's going to be really close to doing 30-30 this season. He's still the star center fielder on a great contract, blah, blah, blah. You never know when. And that's sort of what we were talking about. I was trying to ask him, when does it become a problem? When is it I have to do something as opposed to let me just game plan for tonight you know what i mean when is it like oh this isn't

working and it's kind of hard to say if you're still above league average and still headed for 30 30 like it's kind of hard to be like oh this isn't working i really need to do something you know what i mean so i don't know that we're going to see major changes, maybe just some hot stretches where maybe he hits some pitchers that aren't that great at filling up the outside corner, or he just runs into randomly a stretch of some lefties that he can hit well, gets going, gets into a good spot, starts spitting on that pitch away, and just sort of naturally with the ebb and flow of the season gets into a hot stretch. That's the narrative I'm telling myself because there's not that much different from last year to this year.

And he's still a very good player. I'm not comfortable saying that any of the shine has come off yet. No, I think if you are participating in some mid-season drafts, I know NFBC is going to have some gladiators coming up during the All-Star break. Those are just $50, 15 teams, no benches. I know Underdog is running a big best ball contest for the second half. It's only $7 to get in that. If you're getting the itch for more drafts,

they're coming. Still a first-rounder. Still probably moves from the early part to the late part. You're talking about a top 15 player still even with this half. If not not still a top 10 guy. I think it's a little bit like Acuna not quite being Acuna coming off the ACL. We don't have the injury explanation,

but you still see those flashes of all the things that you liked in Julio Rodriguez that would keep you interested in him because you know there's a very good chance you're going to get that payoff over a half season. The second half could be monstrous and it could be an easy 30-30 type season and it could be one where that slash line at the end of the year ends up looking much like you thought it would going into the season. Yeah, although I was agreeing with you, head nodding. I'm now running a year-to-date auction value. So what he's earned so far.

And this is according to the auction calculator. And I'm not seeing it. Oh, there he is, 30th. 30th among hitters or 30th overall? 30th among hitters. Okay. I still think he's going to jump in there. And there's some weird stuff on here.

Lane Thomas is 14th. The rest of season projection from the Bad X is 280, 344, 508. That is almost identical to the slash line he gave us as a rookie last year. The fact that the K rate hasn't gone through the roof. Rest of season projection is 11th among batters. Right. And I would comfortably draft off of that. Would you draft him? hasn't gone through the roof. Rest of season projection is 11th among batters. Right, and I would comfortably draft off of that. Would you draft him?

And would you take him over Soto, who's 10th? Yeah, for the steals, probably. I think so, yeah. Categorical balance. Would you take him over Trout, who's 9th? Yep. Maybe. I'm not sure I'm taking him over Tucker, who's 8th. Yeah, we talked about Kyle Tucker, I think, a week or two ago.

I don't think anything's wrong with Kyle Tucker. Yeah. Paul Goldschmidt is seventh, but would you draft Paul Goldschmidt seventh in the second half best ball league? Nope. No. I don't think anybody would. Even though the projection says that.

It's amazing how you're just like, nope, I just wouldn't. I see it, but I wouldn't do that. And then now you're getting into Otani, Jose Ramirez, Vlad Guerrero, Freeman, Acuna, Tatis. I think he's behind those maybe. So maybe I'm slotting him in seventh behind Jose Ramirez,

Shohei Otani, and Tucker, seventh or eighth. Yeah, so not much. Not much has changed even though it's still... Ramirez, Shohei Otani, and Tucker, 7th or 8th? Yeah. Not much has changed, even though it's still... What would be your best ball top 10 for the second half of the season? I think I'd go Acuna over Tatis. I would, too. Third, Otani? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, Otani. Fourth, you're looking at Vlad Jose Ramirez Freddy Freeman or unless you bump the Tucker

Rodriguez into that group probably skipping that group and moving someone else up yeah so then you could

then you could do there's Tucker Rodriguez um Bo Bichette is the possibility Bo maybe Wander

Wander up in there um not by this projection although I don't have Bo Bichette is the possibility. Bo, maybe Wander. Is Wander up in there? Not by this projection. Although I don't have... I do have M.I. Well, here's a good segue to our next player. Bobby Witt Jr. Rest of season expectations for him. He would have been in there.

17th by the auction calculator in the Bad X. Behind Bo Bichette, Mookie Betts, Randy Orozarena. Ahead of Trey Turner by 10 cents. Yeah, this is pretty fun. That's amazing. We're looking at Bobby Witt Jr. now in a year and a half in the big leagues with a 251-293-427 line. Normally, if I say that slash line, you're like, oh, okay, that's a flawed

player. Yeah, I'm not putting that player in my first round. But he's got 32 homers and 53 steals in 966 plate appearances, and this year he's running even more than last year. He's on pace to maybe run at 50 steals. He's returned

more value so far than Julio Rodriguez. 26th, according to the auction calculator and there's some improvements along the way more hard contact overall so more barrels and a little less chase even though he still chases more than you'd like this is still a really good profile it's just it's just strange to see someone that we 23 this is this is still progress this is you know It's a little bit small progress, but it's still progress. Do you think there's a path for Witt to

even if he doesn't draw more walks, just do better with balls in play and lift his average and OBP that way? 100%. Because that's kind of what the projections are saying is likely to happen. 277, 324, 501 from the bat with basically the same strikeout and walk rates. I think that's actually believable.

Bo Bichette walks 4% of the time and strikes out 17% of the time this year. Tell me Bobby Witt Jr. can't do that. The only thing for me, I watch Bo more than I watch Witt Jr. can't do that. The only thing for me, I've watched Bo more than I watch Witt. Bo Bichette has just a ridiculous hit tool. The stuff he hits is stuff that most guys just can't get to. Witt's swing strike rate is higher. Witt's strikeout rates have been higher. Yeah, that's true.

So, I mean, it doesn doesn't mean we can't be there you know like a five four to five percent walk rate a 19 to 18 percent strikeout rate that's totally doable for him he's he's he's improved a little bit he's improving a little bit if he does that and ups the barrel rate to 12 i mean this, this is just little, little, little improvements, but he could do all that and push his OBP to 320, 330. You know, his batting average is 280. Now you've got a 280, 320 guy who's, you know, 30, 50. Yeah, not a lot of 30, 50 guys out there.

Nope, no, there really are not. Yeah, sometimes we focus, I think, too much on flaws like this. I don't know. I still see a lot of improvement. I still see, I see ceiling beyond this even. I see another level. So, you know.

I think the funny thing about it, if you go back to the beginning of Trey Turner's career, Turner struck out a little less, but also didn't walk a ton his first couple seasons. And it was more speed over power back then. Had the power every year, yeah. Yeah, but if you

just change the outcomes on the balls in play, and I realize that's a pretty big adjustment. Oh, look at those Babibs Turner has run in his career. Right, you would have probably seen something that was Bobby Witt Jr. without the power and the general read of Trey Turner would have been a lot different. I realize

I'm rewriting history in extreme measures here. The other way of saying it is, Turner's OBPs were inflated by Babbitt in a way that we haven't seen Bobby Witt take advantage of yet. But given what we know about Witt, it seems like he would be capable

of that outcome. So nothing to be disappointed in, really. I think there's a ton to still like and the long, long-term outlook is still very bright for him. How about Michael Harris? Last time we talked to him, he was, or talked about him.

We'd love to talk to Michael Harris sometime. But he was not really the same player he was as a rookie. I think some of that was just kind of getting back up to speed coming off the IL. Looks like in June, he was more like himself. Four homers, three steals, hit.350. It's like 54% better than league average for the month. I mean, this seems like the guy you were expecting to get if you were taking him at the 2-3 turn back in March.

Is there anything in this profile that even gives you a pause, or would you actually be excited to take him if there's a discount based on the slow start he was having after that IL stint? I don't want to pick the knits right after we just talked about we picked the knits too much. I see, you know, a little bit of like an inflated BAP of his rookie year that kept him at a 300 average. He had a 361 batting average on balls in play. That's pretty aggressive.

Although he's had some of those in the minors. But the minors, they have poor defenders. The other thing is he does hit the ball on the ground a little bit more than you'd like. But he manages to barrel the ball still. Not really. I don't really have any problems with this. last time we looked at and we looked and said you know the max cb is there the barrel rate is there like he's gonna be fine yeah i don't think much has changed for michael harris uh from last year to this year i i think you're likely to get what you got last year prorated over the rest of the season i don't

know that i'm uh dream projecting him into 30-30s. There's something that strikes me more as sort of 25-25 as a peak. You know what I mean? That's fine. That's totally fine. It's the ground ball rate. It's the, you know. I think the key difference for me in Harris' ground ball rate,

sometimes you see a player reach the big leagues, ground ball rate jumps up, and you think, oh, okay, what's wrong? Nothing's wrong with that player. It's just adjusting to better pitching. Harris has always hit the ball on the ground a little more than you'd like. Just about all of his minor league stops. So this is not totally out of the norm for him, but he's still so young. He's 22.

A lot could change for him in the next couple years. Best Western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze, and it felt a little like... goodnight kid goodnight mama life's a trip make the most of it at Best Western

the guy that actually belongs in the conversation you were asking earlier about your top 10 for the second half drafts Corbin Carroll he's in that conversation he should be in that top 10

he should he's probably he's probably in the top 5 for a lot of people right now in terms of what he brings to the table. I'm surprised the projections haven't caught up with that. Yeah. I nitpicked him too much back

in the winter and I regret that. He's eased the concerns that I had about the barrel rate. He's chasing a little less, making more hard contact all around. Probably has a path to be a top three guy for 2024 if this continues is there any particular reason when you look at the profile that you think the projections would be a little slow to push him all the way up looking at a nine percent

barrel rate 114 max ev last year six percent barrel rate 108 EV. I guess I'm surprised that he might hit 30 homers this year. And I think that might be where the projections don't line up necessarily. We see 16 homers on June 26th and do the mental math and say, this guy's going 30-30 this year, right? No projection has him going 30-30. year right uh no projection has him going 30 30 and i i guess it's the same knit that we picked before the season so we shouldn't get too excited about picking that knit again uh a nine percent barrel rate is good but it's not great so you look at that 268 iso and be like nine percent

barrel rate there's a little bit of like what's going on here but i do think that the feet is what's going on here there are times when he can make a single into a double you know there are definitely times where he's making a double into a triple um and so uh i just think he's a super exciting player he does not hit the ball on the ground as much as michael harris so he he's going to hit some homers that aren't barrels. You know what I mean? And he gets to play in cores some. The strikeout rate is great. The walk rate is great. The swing strike rate is great. I mean, it's really hard to look across this and find a problem. And I'm guessing the projections just look at that barrel rate and say, I don't believe a 268 ISO, but I'm telling you, man,

I think he's going to hit 30 homers. If you were choosing rest of season, Corbin Carroll or Julio Rodriguez? Oh, man, I really should have seen that coming, shouldn't I? Yeah. Walked into that one. I really did. The auction calculator has them really close. Corbin Carroll, 26th rest of the season.

Well, not that close. Julio Rodriguez, 11th rest of season. So the auction calculator says Julio Rodriguez. My heart says Corbin. Although. It's not a slight of Julio Rodriguez if you take says Corbin. Although it's not a slight of Julio Rodriguez if you take Corbin Carroll. Yeah. It's not.

Corbin Carroll, I mean, especially with the shoulder surgery that cost him time, plus the 2020 that cost everybody a minor league season. He just produced everywhere. Everywhere. Just passed every test with flying colors

and he's striking out less within his first calendar year in the big leagues. He is striking out less against the best possible pitching than he ever struck out in the minors. That's wild to me. That might be enough for me to take him because Julio Rodriguez's quality

of contact is better. But Corbin Carroll makes a lot more. And I think I want that combo. Hulot Rodriguez's quality of contact is better. But Corbin Carroll makes a lot more. And I think I want that combo. Yeah. This is, again, not a knock on Hulot Rodriguez. It is high praise for Corbin Carroll, who

I really, really wish I would have had everywhere, because it was out there. Every projection system, well, not every, but most projection systems have Hulot Riaz going 30-30. And they're very narrowly missing that on Corbin Carroll. So don't fall for it. Get in there. Get him.

Adley Rutschman. Is there another level coming from him? I mean, it's just been more of the same, and the same is great, because he hit the ground running last year when the Orioles brought him up. Average is up a littleoles brought him up averages up a little bit OBPs up a little bit actually the K rates improved from where it was not a ton of

barrels but also a reminder that the lower K rate guys can often run those lower barrel rates so I think the the bigger question with Adley Rutschman is like what does the peak look like is there another level coming in the second half of this year or is it coming in 2024 or is this just already a guy who's at his peak and he's just really good and we should just be excited about the player he is today because this is what he's going to do for the next several years 25 years old i mean the the research says peak is 26 uh but that's always a range and like you know he could have his peak here at 27, 28, um, you know,

catchers debut later. And from what I've seen in the research peak later. So, uh, let's say in the next three years, I think he can have a season where he hits two 80 and like 28 homers. That's pretty good. Yeah.

Yeah. Catchers peak later. I mean, switch hitters sometimes could take a little bit longer to, you get two swings you're working on all the time my evidence for this is just that he's been so good for so long that and then there's like you know there's natural variance like you can't just look at his seven eight percent barrel rate so far and be like that's what he's gonna do the rest of his life you know what i mean so there's going to be a season where an eight percent barrel guy has you know 12 barrels just randomly and so that's that's sort of my argument not necessarily that

i look at any part of his game right now and be like oh he could obviously be doing much better just based on this thing he's already doing i don't see that he's earning everything he's doing right now he's not necessarily earning more than what he's doing right now but uh what he's doing right now is great and i think there could just be another level in another season where something clicks in the way he prepared in the offseason or he approaches the plate or something like that yeah i think you're right that high 20s home run peak season it still seems possible because all the things you need in that foundation have been there and they've been there consistently going back to the start of his career with the Orioles last season. Let's talk about Gunnar Henderson for a moment.

The Orioles were patient with him through a slow start, and it has really been a thing that's paid off for them, right? He looks like the player we saw a season ago. K percentage is up from last year, but more barrels and generally the same underpinnings that were there with the impressive debut. The things that pushed Gunnar Henderson toward that top 60 to 80 range overall in ADP, those are all there. It looks like low to mid 20s home run power, double digit steals, solid value where he went if you were able to ride it out in deeper leagues, you kind of had to. you where he went if you were able to ride it out in deeper leagues you kind of had to i almost think gunner henderson leads us back into our how do you project strikeout rates going forward because what he did at double a is looking like an outlier right kind of like we're talking about corbin carroll reaching this new level in the big leagues well gunner henderson hasn't done

that yet maybe he will over time but a lot of his strikeout rates in the minor leagues were a little higher than you'd like to see for a player that is going to be an early rounder for what looks like the next several seasons yeah you know what he did it by um you know it's not chasing less you know the the recovery did not come from chasing less he's he's he's a he's a good non-chaser and he stayed that way. In fact, he's chased a tiny bit more as he's gotten better over the course of the season. What has happened is a spike in his rolling contact rates.

So in game 94 of his career, which was a couple weeks ago, his rolling zone contact was 91%, a high watermark for his career, which was a couple weeks ago, his rolling zone contact was 91%, a high watermark for his career. When he debuted in game 18, it was 90%, you know, and in between, it got down to 73% zone contact rate at times. In the end of May, his rolling zone contact was 71 we just talked about a whole thing about this with jordan westberg and whose comps are and what do you what the average

guy does the average guy at 71 zone contact i'm sure has over a 30 strikeout rate you know that that group it's not it's worse than the group i was talking about earlier worse than suarez you know like worse than Juanio Suarez. And here we are. That's game 77. And here we are 20 games later and he's almost

20 percentage points better by zone contact. So, he's figured out something in the zone. They were doing something to him in the zone. He's figured out a way to deal with that

and he's gone through the roof. And I think some part of that just comes from he doesn't chase much. So he doesn't have the greatest hit tool in the world, but he has great play discipline. And I think this adjustment he's made speaks very well to the fact that given some time, he can make an adjustment. And I don't know that he'll ever have a 22% strikeout rate,

but I bet you a peak season from Gunnar Henderson, who is 21, may actually maybe have one season where he has a 23, 24% strikeout rate, something like that. And in that season, he will hit 290 with 35 homers and 10 steals. These great Orioles seasons, these peaks all happen at the same time. 90 with 35 homers and 10 steals. These, uh, great Orioles seasons, these peaks all happen at the same time.

Oh man. And even more fun year to be an Orioles fan. Yeah. Just totally ridiculous. Uh, Josh young, everything is better in that profile right now. It helps that,

you know, nothing was really right when he came back from injury last year. Uh, we didn't really know what the baseline was. It was just an exposure to big league pitching after a couple of years of major injuries for him. I think what we're starting to see now that we've got really a half season of healthy Josh Young is there is a ton of power.

Hard hit rate is close to 50%. He gets the ball up in the air. He's going to be a great run producer. The 30 home run pace looks absolutely legit. It's harder for me to even come up with a reasonable, where do we go from here with the K rate? The projections say this is about who he is, and I'm not sure they can be... I don't think the projections can do a great job because of all the time that he missed in the minor leagues. I think this is one where you could actually see a little more improvement than you might expect for a guy

that's run close to a 30% K rate through his first 400 plus plate appearances. Yeah, I mean, he's the type of guy that if he did chase just a little bit less, his contact rates could go way better. Because first of all, you can look at the rolling graph and see that he spent way more time at 90% zone contact than Gunnar Henderson. And for the season, he's at 85.6, but he spent two thirds of the season so far above 90%.

He just had one little part where he just went down and cratered. I think that's just a young player. We're like, Oh, Oh my God, they're just doing this one thing I haven't seen before. And then, you know, three weeks later he'd, he'd rebound and figured something out he does he does chase a little bit but not not like on the 40 level like it's it's fine um so i could see just a little

bit less chasing and a little bit more living at 90 and uh i can definitely see 24-23% strikeout rates in this guy's future. I mean, his minor leagues is literally with it, you know? So I think that was just sort of being a little green and dealing with what they were throwing at him. But you can tell just, you know, given almost the same amount of sample as Gunnar Henderson, he's at 86% zone contact. Gunnar's at 80%.

There's a difference here. Second half leagues. Josh Young or Alex Bregman? Who do you like better? That one you didn't see coming. I did not see that one coming. The reason I'm asking this question is to give you a moment. The auction calculator says $4 difference between the two. Favoring Bregman, I'm asking this question to give you a moment. The calculator says $4 difference between the two.

Favoring Bregman, I'm guessing. Favoring Bregman, but obviously quality of contact is going to go in Young's favor. But it's never been one of Bregman's things. Quantity of contact is going to go in Bregman's favor. This is good, though. This gets us back to the Corbin Carroll thing from a little earlier. There's still, between Bregman and Carroll,

there's like the extra, I'll take the Carroll profile as the better spot where you're making more contact, but you're not making so much undesirable contact along the way. Yeah, so 267-12 homers is sort of the consensus projection for Bregman, and 255-13 homers is the consensus projection for her.

It's like, oh, that's $4 difference the rest of the season? It is, because it all adds up, ding, ding, ding, and it's like the batting average, and it's only one homer difference, and yes, I get it. But then you also have just performance to date to look at, and that's 274 with 15 homers for Josh Young and 248 and 11 homers for Bregman, who just really hasn't played to his projections.

I'm comfortable with this idea because I've definitely had him in a couple keeper leagues where I'm just staring at him being like, yes, the projections say you're always going to be better in the future. And then are you? He did have a better second half last year, but he ended the season at 259-23. I feel like he's going to end the season very close to that. And so I'm going to take Josh Young,

especially I think in a best ball, man. I feel like Josh Young could just have like a, just a destroyer level in a week, some weeks. Yeah, I'm there with you. The reason I asked because there was that big gap in ADP back in the winter and spring where we said Greg was the last chance to win. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, I think Josh Young is that guy that sort of jumped into that group. There's maybe a few others too, but he's someone Gunnar was like, well, you know, some,

I, I must've in at least one league taken Gunnar, um, you know, over not taking Bregman, you know, like, uh,

you know, taking Bregman. So I wouldn't take Gunnar, but, uh, you know, that's going Bregman, you know, like, you know, taking Bregman so I wouldn't take Gunner. But, you know, that's going to be pretty close too. Saying something to the effect, I'm sure I've done this before, where it's like, well, Bregman's the player I want Gunner to become. Gunner might run more, but why don't I just take the guy that's done it before? And sometimes that doesn't work because they stop doing it.

They're not. They're not robots as much as we would like them to be robots sometime. They're not. Spencer Torkelson, this is going to be the harder part of the show. We'll get through these guys. It looks like things

are getting a little better for Torkelson overall. It's still, from the full season view, a lot of similar things that we saw last year. Big difference, though, more hard contact.

47.9 hard hit rate that's up more barrels that's definitely good results eight homers in 75 games compared to eight and 110 games last year so he is getting to the home run power more often slash line overall still pretty gross are you willing to buy into torkelson hitting the ball harder hitting it in the air more often and the projections pointed to him being a pretty good player in the second half. There have been some 12-team leagues where he's popped up on the waiver wire, and you'd have to at least consider picking him up if you're looking for some help on the corner.

Yeah, I think he's a decent guy to try and acquire in keeper leagues. I like the fact that he's still only 23, and he's made substantial changes to his batted ball mix, his barrel rate, his max EVs up. And he's done this without striking out more. He's, in fact, whiffing less. So basically every sort of leading indicator is either solid and stayed the same or got better. And so I'm going to take him in a lot of places. I think I lean a little bit more towards being interested in him

in keeper leagues where I'm like, okay, next year he takes that next leap and he gets to a 12% barrel rate. And then he really starts to have like a 180-200 ISO. And then we can start talking about a guy who will you know have a 330 on base percentage plus and maybe uh you know a 475 500 slugging you know that's somebody i'm a little bit more interested in even these projections that you say are are good and they're decent uh they're for like 230 240 average 11, 11 homers, 320 OBP, 400 to 420-ish slugging. Not that great for a first baseman, you know what I mean?

So I'd be a little bit careful in how excited I was in redraft leagues. But he also just seems attainable. And so sometimes you're like, man, is he going to be any better than Jared Walsh, who just got sent down? And yeah, he is. So let me just see if I can go get him real quick. So if you look at the rest of the season projection, you kind of make that a full season projection for the future and say,

that's kind of where I think he's headed. Okay, fine. That's like 245, 22, 24 homers and good run production because it'll be in the heart of the order he'll play every day who had that projection at first base coming into this season christian walker was like that 252 24 homers you know that's kind of the same player cj crone if that's the player torkelson is it's a disappointment relative to being a first overall pick and everything but it's still a good outcome in the sense of that's a solid everyday sort of player that does make a fantasy impact and actually

does make the tigers better over time the strange thing about torkelson is that even in the minors like a lot of guys like him they hit for average in the minors they hit for a pretty good average he was a let the ball travel guy who didn't strike out that much. Yeah. It's like to see a two 38 and a two 29 from him and his two stints at triple a it's kind of weird. Even in double a two 63, it's not bad, but this guy went one,

one, he should have hit like two 82 90. I know that's splitting some hairs in some ways, but I think it's the type of contact he's made. Hasn't been quite what you'd expect it to be, but maybe, maybe just maybe turning the corner. How about C.J. Abrams?

You mentioned Luis Garcia earlier. I think if I'm looking at the middle infield in D.C., I'm still a lot more interested in C.J. Abrams than I am in Luis Garcia. Do you share my optimism? With who? C.J. Abrams? No. You have optimism?

Some, yeah. What? Why? I like him more than Luis Garcia. I don't. I think there's still room for more power growth. We've seen the barrel rate improve a little bit this year. K rate is not horrible. I'd like to see him walk a little bit more,

but there's a power speed combo. You're probably talking about a 15-15 guy right now with room for more growth, and I think because of Abrams having a ton of injuries during his time in the minor leagues, there's some lost development time that isn't necessarily accounted for. And I think that's part of the reason I still believe there's one more level he'll reach over time. When we were talking about him at the end of last season, I think I even traded him around this time last year in one of my keeper leagues,

I thought we're going to have to wait a while to get the power. And we're still, we're not getting as much as people initially thought. But this is sort of the progression that we were expecting. This is a little better than last time I looked. 112.5 max EV is, I think, probably 50 raw power. Yeah, max EV is 83rd percentile. so does that that's that's more like 55 60 60 sprint speed 55 he got given a 45 55 raw power by fangraphs so but they also gave him a 70 future hit tool and he has a 12 swinging strike rate% strikeout rate like I'm just not seeing it

and then he has a minus minus plate approach I mean just awful like a 44% chase rate last year 41 this year like a combined two and a half percent walk rate for his career this is like all the worst parts of Luis Garcia without the without all the good parts yeah but we're talking about a guy who was drafted out of high school and got to play 114 professional games before he debuted. And is 22 years old. Yeah. The flaws in his game, like the plate skills still need to improve, like chasing outside the zone too much.

To me, it's so much more excusable. And maybe I'm forcing the narrative to just work in my favor in this case, but if all the things people who analyze prospects said and wrote about C.J. Abrams three, four years ago, if we're going to believe that, and I think we should, he still has some significant room for growth. He's just getting to do it at the big league level instead of doing it stuck at AAA, which would be more than appropriate. For me, he's just a cautionary tale about how we get all up in arms

and excited about the new uh prospect that you know is is doing something in the minor leagues and you know he becomes his buzzy name and you know i think even aj preller trades on that where he's just like yeah i don't think i'm not sure this guy's any good and like i'm gonna trade him before anybody realizes i don't even think he's good you know like uh so I I I think the best thing he has going for him is his age um and I don't think that I would uh spend much more to spend you know the next three years trying to figure out if he's actually going to capitalize on that stuff I don't I don't really see it I actually going to capitalize on that stuff. I don't really see it. I am going to try and get C.J. Abrams everywhere. That is my goal. Everybody's out.

I'm in. I mean, even I guess he could be one of those players that's just better in fantasy than he is in real life because he is going to end the season, according to projections, with 13 homers and 20 stolen bases. That's fine. That plays.

I think he's going to keep getting better. More than I thought. How about Shea Langoliers? You see him a lot. Better days ahead for him. Chases outside the zone a bit, but by the numbers, probably deserves better results

than he's had so far. I love him for almost the exact opposite reasons, which is I think he's a better real-life player than Pesci. I'm not sure that I'm advocating everyone go get him, but I think he's a better real life player than Pesci. So I'm not sure that I'm advocating everyone go get him, but I think he's a heady catcher, starting catcher, a guy who he could potentially grow into some Murphy-esque type shoes, but because I see a lot of the same work ethic and how hard he works to have a good rapport with his pitchers and to to call games well and

how he thinks about the game i i feel very positive about all that uh in terms of what i'm looking at in terms of on-field results and numbers for shea langoliers he's uh kind of maybe one of these conventional swing and miss catchers who hits the ball hard. Yeah, that offensive profile behind the plate is somewhat common, but I do think because of the lineup he's in and the possibility of them gradually getting better over the next couple of years, he might be a little underrated in the short term as someone that

has that big batting average flaw. I do wonder when you get those guys that have the added work ethic when you can spot that. Marcus Simeon or somebody you talked about had that years ago too. ethic when you can spot that. Marcus Simeon, or someone you talked about, had that years ago too. How much you can just keep betting on that profile to change. And I think with Langoliers, it's early enough in his career where I'd be willing to do that.

It's hard to see it from the outside. I mean, maybe you'll see it. It is rare probably for someone who has poor work ethic to have an article written about how good his work ethic is, right? It is harder to spot the ones that don't have articles written about it and be like, hmm, does this guy or does he not? I don't know. And you try to watch him. But I heard similar good things about Cal Raleigh coming up in terms of,

I went to Modesto and met Logan Gilbert and Penn Murphy and a lot of those guys, and they talked about Cal Rally then. And so, I think Cal Rally has similar sort of secondary characteristics, but his primary characteristics are better. His barrel rate's better, his max EV's better, his strikeout rate's better. So if there's a would you rather,

I guess I'm taking Cal Raleigh. Yeah, I think there's still a little ways to go before Langoliers gets up to that level. But Langoliers could be like that. He could be like that. Yeah, he could do something like this. Yeah, look at what Raleigh was doing when he entered the league, and look at what he's doing

now with a little bit of time facing big league pitching. Last one for today. If you got others from this group you want us to get to, we can get to those on Wednesday. Nick Prado, maybe some good news in Kansas City. I think there's actually a few things that he does well. He's a career double-digit barreler. Doesn't really have

a reaching problem either. And now he's got a much clearer path to playing time, unfortunately because of Eddie Pasquantino's injury. But he was playing in the outfield even before Pasquantino got hurt. So those two guys could actually coexist in the lineup long term. So what are you seeing with Prado? 84% zone contact rate. Just to give you an idea of like maybe the Westbrook thing is actually,

maybe we should be a little bit worried about strike all right 84 zone contact rate for nick prado who has a lifetime 36 strikeout rate i don't think i understand that totally because he's 84 zone uh contact rate and then a 24 uh oh swing so like is he just like really missing anytime he's he swings outside the zone let me see here his zone contact is out of zone contact yeah that's really bad 40 is pretty bad so he should be a guy who should try to whittle that chase rate down even more because he's done a pretty good job of that in the zone he's better yeah yeah and that could happen with more more playing time but the minor league track records suggest this is a uh your first base version of the catcher who swings misses a lot and makes powerful contact yeah frustrating because there are some pretty intriguing tools

here in terms of that power especially for prado. I think I like someone like Ryan Noda better just because the chase rate is better, the barrel rate is similar-ish. We're talking about similar guys, but Noda walks more, plays all the time, does not have a guy coming next year that's going to take his job necessarily in terms of a big old prospect

unless you think Soto-Strom's going to push him. There's still a couple places you can put big, tall guys that can't play defense. So I think I like Noda a little better than Prado, but I like Prado a little better than I did last year. Yeah, I think he's one of those players that in deeper leagues is slightly overlooked that could actually be surprisingly useful in the second half even though it comes with some batting average downside i think that's very clear for anyone that has a 35 k rate yeah yeah and i think what the best use for him

in a lot of leagues is uh like a bat streamer which is something we don't talk about enough but uh you know you get a schedule a point in the schedule where he goes and visits the White Sox and goes to the Red Sox or something where he's like, oh, wow, it's two series in a row. Maybe he gets six games this week or seven games this week away from home. Then I get a little bit more interested. Yep, I think that's a really good way to look at Prado if you're in a weekly format and just looking for someone

to give you a little upgrade from time to time based on that schedule. We are going to go on our way out the door. A reminder, if you've got questions for a future episode, you can email those to us at ratesandbarrels at gmail.com. You can also tweet at us, enos at enosaris. I'm at DerekVanRiper. The pod is just at ratesandbarrels. If you'd like to send questions there, that's an easy way to get them in as well. Or you can drop us a question under this video on YouTube.

We've made it to the end. Thank you for listening and watching all the way through 78 minutes of, of goodness. I hope it was goodness. I made the rundown too big. Oh, it's your fault. I knew it.

I put news on top of a rundown. That was a whole show. Gavin talking, whatever. Yeah. Mutual shared, shared flaw, shared flaw, but that's going to do it for this episode of rates and barrels. was on top of a rundown that was a whole show gavin talking whatever yeah mutual shared shared flaw shared flaw but that's gonna do it for this episode of rates and barrels we're back with you on tuesday thanks for listening

you Thank you.