Rates & Barrels - KBO Opening Day, Project GOAT Round 2 & Aces

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Rundown1:02 KBO Opening Day!9:53 Resources: MyKBO.net & MyKBOStats.com14:31 Project GOAT: Round 2 Champions24:10 What Constitutes a 'No. 1 Starter'?30:31 Changing Fastball Movement with Small Changes38:59 Ideal World Series Ring44:48 Beer Bracket Championship MatchupFollow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail the show: [e-mail] Get a free 90-day trial to The Athletic: theathletic.com/free90days Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 92. It is May 5th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. Cinco de Mayo at home this time around. But we celebrated with the start of the KBO season, so we'll talk about opening day in South Korea. Round two of Project Goat has been scored, so we'll reveal the winner from this

round. Got a bunch of great mailbag questions as well. We'll talk about what makes a number one starter, ways that pitchers can develop movement on their fastball, and probably a summary on the beer bracket at the end of the episode as well.

You know, happy Tuesday. It feels pretty good to have more live baseball happening somewhere in the world, even though it runs overnight here in the States. Yeah, I tried to stay up last night, and when the rain delay hit, I went to bed. I did want to see some baseball. I'm watching it right now, watching Drew Rusinski, who was once in MLB and had become a reliever because he mostly only threw fastball and cutters.

But here he is in the second inning doing pretty good. So he is pitching for the Samsung. Nope, the NC Dinos against the Samsung. What are they? Lions? Lions? Yeah. The Samsung Lions.

Got a shot of the hitter. It's fun. It's a fun league. The one thing that's nice about it is that some may focus on the fact that the talent level is not quite there. I mean, I think a lot of people focus on stuff like the bat flips and stuff. But that's just one part of it. And some others might be like, well, this is not as good as Major League Baseball, which it is not. However, I would say that it's better than low-level minors.

I would say it's maybe even better than like AA. Maybe it's on the sort of AAA level because what you've got are veterans. It's a lot like AAA where you've got veterans that know what they're doing and know how to play the game and know how to sort of sequence and know how to, you know, locate and stuff. It's not like watching A-ball where half the guys on the field stuff. It's not like watching a ball where half the guys on the field won't, won't progress to the next level and can't command half their pitches and have you know, sort of wild approaches to play. These are, these are refined players to some extent. And the movement is there on the pitches and it's generally a good game. It's, it's a well-played game. And after they deaden the ball, it's not a crazy home run contest anymore. And then it's fun also to kind of remember some guys and see guys like Drew Rusinski

and Aaron Altair and Mel Rojas Jr. And every team has got three of them. So you're always sort of like, you can keep an eye out for former MLBers while you're watching too. Which is kind of fun, and Dixon Machado, of course, had that big home run that you heard the highlight of in our intro today. And Machado is one of those guys, I remember watching him in the Fall League probably four years ago now if i had to ballpark it and he looked defensively like a big league shortstop without any sort of doubt like you could just tell he could make all the plays and then some and the bat has never really come around for him i spent parts of four seasons with the tigers spent all of last season at AAA Iowa with the Cubs.

And we know there was a rabbit ball at the AAA level. They used the same ball as the big leagues. We talked about that months ago. But Dixon Machado hit 17 home runs in 393 plate appearances. He's actually shown an ability to draw walks throughout his career. So he's a pretty interesting player because he's the kind of guy that in the states was running out of opportunities and maybe wasn't going to be able to fix some of his flaws as a hitter going to south korea and spending this season or maybe a couple future seasons there maybe he comes

back someday and actually carves out a big career we've seen players do that i mean when eric thames left for korea it wasn't like we all sat around and said, well, this guy's going to come back and be a relevant big league player someday. So that's kind of the fascinating story here, right? It's continued development time for hitters and pitchers alike who are facing, as you said, probably competition that's better than AA and very similar to what they would get at AAA levels in America. Yeah, I think maybe it's more likely for Machado to follow maybe what Jerry Sands did. I think he was one of the RBI leaders in the KBO last year, and now he's in Japan at the NPB. And I just say that because there's just a long history with Dixon Machado

of absolutely no power in just one season. I suppose if he had a season this year where he hit more home runs like he did, he would flash back on radars pretty quickly. He'd be 29, maybe get a two-year deal to be a kind of super sub somewhere. I could see that happening. But to me, first, I wanted to say that even his GM, when I interviewed him for a piece yesterday about how I interviewed him last week, but for a piece that came out yesterday that about how the Lottie Giants are kind of using the some of the process that their their GM Min Kyu Sung learned while he was with the Cubs. GM Min Kyu Sung learned while he was with the Cubs. They're heavily investing in R&D. They're refocusing on their foreign players. It was basically a three-point plan for them. One of the things that came up was that they targeted Dixon Machado not for his offense,

but for his defense. not for his offense, but for his defense. And he got a little bit of crap for that in the media and from fans because if you look at a lot of the other teams, they have power hitters. Jared Hoying is a power hitter over there. He was targeted as a foreign player for that reason. He was targeted as a foreign player for that reason. And Eric Thames, that's the kind of player that fans want to see their teams invest in when they get foreign players.

But Machado, nice home run on a high pitch. And if he's going to zero in on just taking high pitches far, then maybe that skill would translate. The other thing I would say is that generally I would look more towards pitchers because pitchers can change their true talent, I think, quicker. We've talked about changing movement or changing grips, changing pitch mix, adding a pitch, subtracting a pitch. A lot of times people go over and refine their command. And that's one thing I heard from a pitcher in Korea was that

they were surprised at their strike zone and that it was a little bit different, they thought, than the players, the homegrown players. And that is something I actually showed for Japan, that there was evidence of a different strike zone for gaijin, as they call them there, as for foreigners. So I wouldn't be surprised if a pitcher goes over there and refines their command because they are on this separate sort of grading scale maybe. And that follows a little bit what happened with Merrill Kelly and Josh Lindblom.

They made some pitch mix changes and their command improved. And both got major league contracts coming back. So I would look at Dan Straley who pitched last night. He pitched fairly well, four strikeouts, three walks. And then there was also Odrisama Despagna, who lost, his team lost, but Despagna didn't give up any runs and had eight strikeouts. I mean, it was one run and eight strikeouts. So yeah, one run, eight strikeouts, four hits, six innings. That's a pretty good line. And Despain is interesting because he had like 25 pitches.

So maybe he goes to Korea and finds three or four pitches out of those 25 that are better or refines one and gets another chance when he comes back. Right. The extra reps for a lot of the starters who would have probably fawn into relief roles had they stayed stateside they get extra development time to work on all those pitches to improve command it's just a it's a fascinating thing to see this league continue to improve and become a more viable option for pros to make a little more money maybe even a lot more money than they would make riding buses around double a AA and AAA and to possibly come back with a chance of playing at the very

highest level at some point down the road. Drew Ruchinsky, also kind of interesting. He pitched yesterday as well or Tuesday. It's the same day. These games were early, early Tuesday morning in the States. So if we needed anything else to make time more confusing to track, it's watching baseball in Korea.

But yeah, this has been really fun learning about the league too. I kind of started digging into it more when the Brewers signed Josh Lindblom back in December. The site that everybody's been spending a lot of time on, mykbo.net is run by a guy named Dan Kurtz. He's on Twitter at mykbo. It's a great resource. There Dan Kurtz. He's on Twitter at mykbo.

It's a great resource. There's mykbostats.com. If nothing else, it's providing the box score fix that many of us have been filling with out of the park and Stratomatic and other simulations over the last few weeks. Much better than the Google box scores too. Yeah, these look pretty much like normal box scores. Yeah.

So, definitely exciting to have live baseball back and I'm sure we'll be staying up late often to enjoy those games. I did want to point out that DraftKings is doing KBO DFS. Some of you

might have already put in a lineup. I've got a piece up on the fantasy site called Baseball's Coming to Korea, the players known in the KBO. And of the guys I highlighted, one guy, Baek Ho Kang, or Kong, the outfielder for the KT Wiz,

had a home run last night., um, one major league scout described him as the Korean David Ortiz. Uh, so that's a, that's a fun guy. And then I think we'll have a couple, uh, pitchers pitch day two that, that I highlighted, uh, maybe Seawolves Park for the Lottie Giants. We'll pitch game two, or maybe that'll be Adrian Sampson. But, um, I feel good the, between that and the KBO piece about the Cubs way and the Lottie Giants. We'll pitch game two, or maybe that'll be Adrian Sampson. But I feel good between that and the KBO piece about the Cubs way and the Lottie Giants.

I think I can root for a team that's not in the league I cover. So I'm kind of rooting for the Lottie Giants. They've got Dan Straley, Hank Conger, Dixon Machado, and Sung Woon Kim from Fangraphs. And from The Athletic. He wrote for The Athletic, too. So just a great group of people, it seems like. Even Josh Herzenberg, who's a former Dodgers scout and coach, seemed like a really nice guy.

So I think it's going to be fun, and it'll scratch a little bit of the itch for the next few days i'm definitely enjoying just even having a baseball game on as we talk because i'm i'm replaying uh rutinski's game from last night and it's just it just uh soothes me a little bit uh just to have it on and that's one of the things i did miss when people were saying like what do you miss most about baseball there's a there's a few things but one of the things I did miss. When people were saying, like, what do you miss most about baseball? There's a few things, but one of them was the ambient noise. It was the sort of the baseball always being on. Yes, that is very true for me as well.

Even when I'm not in the house, I'm listening to games on the radio. If I take my dog to the park and not having that is pretty strange. But I think I'm jumping on board with the NC Dinos, by the way. That's Eric Thames' team from a few years ago. Aaron Althair is there right now. So if I'm going to jump into the DraftKings, he'll probably be in a few lineups. Just thinking strategy for a moment on DraftKings, I would have to imagine, in part because they're in prominent spots in the lineup, but also because they're familiar names,

I would imagine that the American players playing in the league are going to have pretty inflated ownership rates. So if you're thinking about stacking and building lineups for tournaments, it might actually be generally just a good idea to fade a lot of the American players because of the lack of familiarity with most of the player pool. Not a full fade, but just be careful about only loading up a lineup with names that you've seen before. It is true. And the only other problem

is that they're the ringers to some extent. Last year, foreign players hit 309, 381, 493 around 16% better than league average as a group. And they pitched to a 327 ERA and a 120

whip around 20% better than league average. So as a group, they're good. And, you know, I guess picking the right one at the right time, I have some park factors, some sort of low-level park factors in my piece. And then getting to know some of the other ones, that'll be how you separate yourself. But, you know, Jared Hoying is a stud, and I have a feeling that Adrian Sampson's going to do well there.

But there's also more than a few names that you won't recognize in that piece that'll help you sort of sort through the rest. But it's fun getting to know a new league, and I'm glad they're playing baseball. Yes, I'm very glad they're playing baseball. Now, we have an update from Project Goat. Round two, the leaderboard has been run, and we have a pretty clean top of the list.

You were saying before we started recording that I think 13 entries topped the round one winner yes and i was you know someone pointed out like oh couldn't the the rerun you couldn't a group one team win again and i was like yes but i think knowing the targets is a big advantage knowing what what numbers you have to hit means you know how to sort of move things around and you have a goal. I mean, one of the parts that was so difficult to begin with was that you just didn't know what was enough of any one thing.

I had way too many stolen bases in my run. I think I had like 500 stolen bases. There's nobody above 380 in the top 15 in stolen bases. And if you do that, it's like what you were talking about. You did a 1990 draft last night, and you were talking about if you start punting or if you start overloading in one place. You did this in the first one, too, where you had too many stolen bases. You don't know the targets.

You don't know what the standing points gained totals are. You don't know what the end of season leaderboard looks like. You have no context, basically. But running it a second time, we allowed people to see, okay, this is what you need in here, this is what you need in here. And Sean Tuxell and Kevin Hoffman with Monroe's Reformed Doctrine came out on top. So congratulations to those two. They won it all, and they sent a brief description in their email

about how they thought they would win it all. But another thing that came bubbling to the top was that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The top 8 teams after we ran it again all used the Mark Eichhorn gambit. It's amazing that Mark Eichhorn has become such an important person in our fantasy universe

30 plus years after he made his contributions. So Hugh, James, Scott E, Jeff G, Pete R, Ryan P, and Kyle M. after he made his contributions so hugh james scott e jeff g pete r ryan p and kyle m you are numbers two through eight and horacio g you're nine and eugene f is ten so that's interesting the uh i wanted to point out that Eugene F actually used a closer. And he's the only one in the top 17 to use a closer. And then there's two people who used a closer until you get down to 23rd where it was the closers only teams.

So the one thing is though, using I icon by himself was worth 33 points because if you were in the bottom group of saves punters you got 22 points uh for the category but if you were in the group that had 10 saves the icon group you got 55 points in saves uh And that's a big deal because 1853 won it all. If you take 30 points off of that, you go all the way down to sixth place. It's a big drop. So, you know, the Icon Gamut was big. And then beyond that, I was trying to look at Sean's team. I think that one thing that stands out is how strong they were in runs. One of the seasons that I haven't seen used a ton was Sammy Sosa's 1998.

Yes, 66 home runs, but 134 runs and 158 RBI. He also had Ryan Howard with the Phillies, who had 104 runs and 149 RBI. Ken Griffey with the Mariners, Barry Bonds with the Giants, and Mike Trout with the Angels. Those are slightly more used seasons. But he also used Jose Canseco from the A's for 120 runs and 124 RBI. So that was one thing. The other thing that he did really well was keep his whip really low. And one thing that stood out for me was using Garrett Cole's 2019 season, which he had a 250 ERA, but he also had a.89 whip along with a ton of strikeouts, 326 strikeouts in 212 innings.

of strikeouts, 326 strikeouts in 212 innings. That was a big deal. Also, he had a lot of innings. His lowest starter total was Blake Snell's 2018 with 180. Everyone else had over 198 and 200. And then Eichhorn with 157. So just a really good job of understanding the benchmarks he had the tim raines hack in there uh the tim raines at second base hack uh ivan ardigas's 1999 is on in there of course um and um just a really good use a really good uh uh team there and i wonder how he how whatever his 80s his 80s guys are robin yount at shortstop. Was it his 82? It's 82. Is that the year you had a draft?

Yeah, because that season was nuts. Yeah. He used Robin Yount from the 82 draft. 129 runs, 114 RBI, 29 homers, 14 steals, 331 average. That's a great year. Tim Raines was his other 80s guy. And then Mike Eichhorn was his third and Dwight Gooden 85 which most people use I would have to say. The 1990 draft from last night, the season that really

caught my eye going through that was Dennis Eckersley who at age 35 as a closer had 73 and a third innings of.61 ERA and.61 whip, and a strikeout per inning, which wasn't a lock back then for good relievers, and 48 saves to go along with it. And I'm kind of wondering, is that underutilized in Project Goat because of the Canseco and McGuire and Ricky Henderson seasons that would probably be more appealing

as you put those together. Yeah. You know, also, unfortunately, he only had like four wins. Yep, that's true. It's a big deal with the relievers, too, making sure the wins came with the saves in those years. Yeah, and you saw that was a bigger deal even in 1982 when they pitched more innings and got more wins drafted dan spillner in the fourth round of that draft but a 0.61 era is pretty exciting uh i mean that's

that's like you'd be happy with that as a whip yeah i just love that he matched his era and his whip and both numbers were absurd he actually actually hit a.61 whip in 1989 too. So he had back-to-back seasons with a .61 whip. Damn. It's impressive. Some utter dominance right there. But yeah, congrats

to the duo for taking that down. When they sent their email with that entry, by the way, I had a feeling that one was going to do very well. Yeah, they basically told us how much they would have beaten the last winner by, which is

like, okay, I think you've done the math here. They have the ferocity of your cats. Yeah, and he has a scoring calculator built out. That helps. That definitely helps.

But thanks to everybody who participated in round two of Project Goat. At this time, we don't have an announcement about another version or a third round. We'll kind of think about that for a little while before potentially doing something along those lines. If there's still interest, maybe we'll put something out there in a couple of weeks.

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that you've said that i literally don't have a response for home run i will uh i will move us on to our he. He lost all of last year to a knee injury. He looks like he's back. He's also a Scott Boras client, amazingly. So there you go. Let's go to the mailbag. I had a great question come in. This question was from Jonathan. And he was wondering,

what constitutes a number one as it pertains to starting pitchers? It seems like there should be 30 starting pitcher number ones. Obviously not one for each team. but when I read prospect rankings, it seems like there are very few one or two starting pitchers. Is the standard to be a number one greater than being a top 30 starting pitcher? So what's your take on this? Because think the the designation of number one number two number three you know as you label a starter i almost think different people interpret it different ways like some people in the fantasy community if you say someone's a future number four number five starter it's almost like a cut on them but if you talk to somebody who's actually trying to

develop talent and find players to fill out a big league rotation, saying someone has the future of a number four or number five starter is not an insult at all. Maybe they're at least a starter. They're a starter. It means they're not a reliever, which would be a little more of a dig maybe on their skill set. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a few different ways to use it.

One is scouting. One is just sort of regular fandom. And one is fantasy. And of course the fantasy one is the most complicated because it's complicated by league size. I think that there, there are different sort of thresholds for excellence. I mean,

is he a number, are there 12 number ones in a 12 team league? Is it, is it league-specific? I think it's pool-dependent. I think there are times when pitching is rich or deep, and there are times when it's shallow. And right now, it's a good question.

Are we in a prime time, a deep pitching pool right now? Are we in a normal pitching pool? Are we in a shallow pitching pool? I think it's been complicated by the fact that I think the reliever pitching pool is deeper than it's ever been. I think the sixth best reliever on your squad would be the second or third best reliever years before. When it comes to starting pitching,

I think the answer is more complicated. We have wins above replacement. It's not a perfect stat, but let's just look at it because wins above replacement, you've got four wins is an all-star, right? So we've got 24 pitchers that had more than four wins last year. Okay, so if there are 30 teams, do you want to really push it to the top 30 pitchers? Because then Marco Gonzalez, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Jose Quintana are on there. I think there are not 30 aces.

There are obviously going to be teams like the Yankees or Astros that have more than one ace. So if there's a team like them that have more than one ace, I think the opposite follows, which is there are teams that have no ace in terms of a team like a respected ace with a capital A, right? Right. The label is not distributed based on the number of teams in the league and everybody being allotted one. There you go.

So there's not 12 aces in a 12-team fantasy league either. I think that those two things follow each other. Right. And they go back to your pool idea. Okay, so let's go back to this pool of the top 24 that are all-stars. The back end of it is Mike Soroka, Luis Castillo, Kyle Hendricks, Mike Miner. You know, Luis Castillo is the ace of the Reds. And maybe with another season or two, I would feel cool calling him an ace.

I don't know about... I mean, Soroka is borderline ace, but very young. Like, calling Kyle Hendricks an ace doesn't make sense to me. And a couple up from him is Jake Odorizzi. They just, if you're going to do like a smell test, I just, they don't make my smell test.

No, no, you've got to smell gas from the strikeouts. Yeah, you've got to, I think there has to be an element of dominance, strikeouts, gas, I think that's got to be part of it. So, I think where it gets really the hardest for me is when you start getting under rank 20. So basically, last year, Noah Syndergaard, Jose Barrios, Mike Clevenger, Zach Wheeler, Jack Flaherty. Okay, so Wheeler's had some ups and downs, but he got paid. I don't know.

Did he get paid like an ace? Not really. He got paid like a 2-3. Yeah, he got paid like a 2 who could still become a 1. Right. Which is such a weird, subjective way to describe him still. I don't feel good with that. Ryu was 12th last year, and Ryu got a similar deal to Wheeler

in that it was a lot of money, but it wasn't as much as others, right? Right, it wasn't Strasburg. It wasn't like Cole. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's almost like the big haul, small haul thing where some people will say there are five aces, and their names are Cole, DeGrom, Scherzer, Verlander, and Strasburg maybe. Maybe somebody gets mad I left sale out or Walker Bueller. But that's your small haul. I think your big haul includes Shane Bieber, Charlie Morton,

maybe Ryu Corbin, Flaherty, Clevenger, Berrios, Cindergard. So I'd say that there are five to ten aces in Major League Baseball. Yeah, I'd probably come up with a similar number using a reasonably similar process. I mean, I think it's all just kind of fun and subjective and creates debate more than anything else. I guess we could try and define the ace of the future, right? Could be worth an article, yeah. What's an ace? Like, what really

is an ace? And I bet you could ask old scouts about that, and you could ask people. Well, thanks for the idea. I'm a little low on ideas. It's a pretty good idea. I think I'll use that one. Well, thank you very much for the question, Jonathan. Both pod fodder and possibly article fodder as well. Another question came in from Daniel.

It's a follow-up to the Mitch Keller question last week. We talked about Mitch Keller having kind of a bad straight fastball. So Daniel wanted to know, is there any way for a pitcher to add or develop more movement on the fastball via a grip change or by some other means? Yeah. Yeah. Um, there, this is the work of the modern pitching coach is to take a player and I've seen these plans. The plans include, um, basically where you are on a movement heat map and then what the good parts of the movement heat map look like. So basically they'll show you, this is how your sinker moves and this is how good sinkers move and we need to get towards that. And then they'll have a list of different cues that

they can go through and try them out basically until they get the movement they want. And those cues will include grips. They'll include sort of release thoughts like I want to get around side the ball. I want to get out in front. I want to get this out. I want to release this out as far in front of me as possible. I want to stay behind the ball. I want to put pressure on my middle finger. I want to put pressure on my middle finger. I want to put pressure on my index finger. So there's all sorts of things upon release that they can figure on.

I think those are the basic cues that people go through because those are easily changeable and they can actually give you a lot of results. Just think of how many people were like, oh, I just changed the grip on my change up and boom, there it is. So when you start going up the kinetic chain back towards the beginning, there are things that you don't want to change as much because they can lead to injury and that are harder to change. So think about asking a player to change his arm slot. On the extremes, when a guy goes to submarine or comes back or whatever, it takes years. But even asking a guy to change his arm slot two or three inches, I think is a big deal because the arm slot is a product of your entire body moving in a certain direction. You know,

like your body has a rhythm, your, your, your, your, your, your emotion has a rhythm. And if you're asking them to change something fundamental about it,

it's, it's a rebuild, right? It's a macro change. Yes. It's a macro change. And if you're asking them to, to just concentrate on different finger upon release, I release, I mean, as crazy as that sounds, because when I tried to throw in front of the machines, all I could think about was like, I'm going to load my scap, I'm going to slam my front foot down, I'm going to turn around, all the stuff that people think about for velocity, because I wanted to throw as hard as I could. I had no idea what the ball would look like or where it would go once I let go.

Zero command, not even let go. Zero command. Not even 20 command. Zero command. And then the result was something that Andrew Perpetua said moved like the very worst hanging slider that you might ever see in pro baseball. So basically just gravity, no movement. Basically just gravity, no movement. But I talked to Michael Lorenzen, who's not even, I would say, an elite reliever. And he was talking about the difference between a slider and cutter was just how long he kept his middle finger on the ball.

And that he would just sort of think about, as he was releasing the ball, his middle finger differently. I was like, that's crazy. That's a micro level change. But to think that you could do that is totally insane. But what's happened is you've built up your delivery. You've done all the macro stuff so many times that you're not thinking about that stuff anymore. And now you can think about what you're doing at the last moment with your index finger

or your middle finger. So, you know, can Mitch Keller and the fastball is also so fundamental that almost changes to the fastball feel like macro level changes. And also, once they get to the major leagues, and maybe they've had a year or two in the major leagues, it's pretty rare to see gross changes, big, large changes in fastball movement. Just because a the fastball is fundamental b uh it it sort of depends the most on your macro level stuff it's everything is sort of based off of your mechanics of the fastball and c they probably run through all those different micro level changes and nothing stuck right yeah and it's probably i mean thinking about it this

way too the fastball would be a little more a little bit more difficult to change because if you look at keller as an example just from what he did in the big leagues last year he threw his fastball three times more than he threw any one of his other pitches he's had a lot of practice doing that yeah it's just more ingrained so if you start tinkering with that it might be it might be more difficult to make that change at least that seems like a very reasonable hypothesis at least i i've seen like sunny gray has a weird fastball and oh this is a great great example of it here we go sunny gray has a has a weird fastball because it's high spin but it's not high ride he does not have good spin efficiency he does not turn most of his spin into ride. And that's partially because his arm slot, he's kind of a, uh, I guess you'd call like a two thirds or something. It's not, he's not, he's not anywhere close to over the top.

And so, um, you know, when he went to the Yankees, they said, Oh, you have a high spin fastball throw high in the zone. Well, unfortunately it's not a high-ride fastball, and he doesn't have a lot of confidence or history throwing high in the zone. So he got pummeled high in the zone. They asked him to do a couple other things he couldn't repeat very well. He comes to the Reds, and the Reds say, okay, let's try and turn this spin into ride. And they have him throwing a vanderbilt and sonny gray said if i pretended to be pronating so this is his his his thought his his his cue upon release if he pretended to be dragging his his his index finger sort of down towards the ground that's pronating right if he concentrated on that

he could get good ride on one out of every four fastballs that's not enough that's not enough that's not gonna work that's not gonna work because you're gonna you're gonna go out there and and try to throw to major league hitters and one out of every four fastballs does what you wanted to yeah yeah you might get lucky get like a called strike on one you're gonna give up a double on the other and a homer on the other yeah exactly you might get lucky get like a called strike on one you're gonna give up a double on the other and a homer on the other yeah exactly you know you're gonna swing and miss on that fourth one because ride uh especially for him is on the order of three or four inches think about three or four inches at the top of the zone you know like you're you're you're like you're like

oh this one's gonna have that extra four inches of ride i know it and then it's dead centered up up in the zone that's like half of baseball could hit homer off that yeah i mean that was kind of like the dixon machado home run yeah we just talked about earlier missed high so um yeah and there's plenty of players who just made a living power wise just just hitting those high pitches. Now that pitchers are throwing more high pitches and if they miss a little bit up high, it's a home run. So, you know, I just think that it's more likely that Keller's excellence comes from a pitch mix change than it does from a fastball movement change. Right, and he has enough other weapons to make it work

even without an overhaul of that fastball anyway. I think that was one of the takeaways from last week. If you're dealing with a condition like erectile dysfunction, you want treatment ASAP. That's why our friends at Roman have spent years building a digital platform that can connect you with a doctor

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And I was there from 1986 or 87 until 94 when I went away to boarding school. And that was just a huge time in the Braves history. And I got to see them kind of go worst to first. If they had won in 91, I think it was, against the Twins, I would have chosen that because that was just a magical season worst to first both the twins and the Braves worst to first um just a a really good series I thought and um a culmination of a four year thing in Atlanta where they kind of put all the pieces together to finally get there but they won in 1995 and um I think that was a little bit of redemption

because they were already starting to get the Buffalo Bills treatment, where it was the idea that they couldn't win it. And I should want, I mean, Tom Glavin won the final game, and I should maybe want his ring or something. And I don't even remember exactly what John Smoltz did, if he was a reliever at that point, or if he wasn't a reliever, but it doesn't even look like he got a win in the series. I don't care. John Smoltz.

I want John Smoltz's 1995 ring. That was the World Series. So when I was a kid, I rooted for the Braves. And I was so excited because that was the first time and the only time that my favorite team had ever won a World Series. And the Braves are still not my favorite team today. As I moved to Wisconsin in eighth grade, I started going to a bunch of Brewers games. The Brewers became my team because I think when you're a kid especially,

it's okay to pick a different team. You can live with that. So I like that choice quite a bit. My choice for this one is a little bit different. I was just thinking about baseball history. And I know John Shea has got a book coming out about Willie Mays. And I think part of my answer is-

I've got it right here on my desk. I have to work on it. I'm really looking forward to reading that. And so Willie Mays, when people say, who's the player that you wish you could have watched? Willie Mays is the guy that I wish I could have watched. Just could do everything, right? And

fortunately, Willie Mays was on a World Series winning team in 1954. The New York Giants won the World Series and Willie Mays was the MVP that year. It was probably the best overall season of his career. And I think my choice would

be the Willie Mays 1954 Giants World Series ring, just for that reason. Just because I think his place in history is almost somehow overlooked. Like he's clearly a great, people recognize him as a great, but he might be the best ever. Like he might be that guy. Like there's an argument for that. And you also consider some of the things going on around that time, including the fact that he was fulfilling a military obligation in 1953. So he didn't even play the previous season, came back in 1954, won the MVP, and his one of the most special pieces of baseball history that you can find, and it happens to satisfy this question, is a World Series ring. I would say some of the things that stand out for me is that Willie Mays was amazing at all facets of the game. There's no statistical foible. There's no like, oh, but he didn't X, Y, or Z. You can even do it to some extent with Babe Ruth, who was not a good

defender. Barry Bonds was not a great defender. Willie Mays was a better base runner and a much better defender than Bonds. And that, to me, is the Troika at the very top of baseball. And yet you don't hear it as much. I think you're right. I don't think you hear as much about Willie Mays as you do about the other two. And Barry Bonds has his own asterisk. So if you want a well-rounded player, like the best center fielder all the time,

you want Willie Mays. A 5'10", 170-pound center fielder who won 12 gold gloves, was a 24-time All-Star, and he hit 660 home runs. Yeah. You're right. There was no flaw in his game, which I think is a huge, huge punctuation mark on the fact that he really could be the best player of all time. But as I mentioned, I'm really looking forward to reading John's book about Willie Mays because obviously as a child of the 80s, I didn't get to watch Willie Mays play.

And that's one of those things that if I had a time machine, I'd want to watch Willie Mays play baseball. Quick update on the beer bracket. It came to a close over the weekend, right, Eno? That's right. That's right. And I was kind of hoping this wouldn't happen, but it did come to an all-IPA final. And it was Founders all day against Sierra Nevada, Pale Ale.

And should I announce who won? I'm going to write about it. I actually didn't know if you previously announced it. I have not. I'm going to not announce it just now.

If you voted in it, you know. And I'm trying to announce it in now uh if you voted in it you know um and uh i'm going to i'm trying to uh announce it in an interesting way uh so i'll leave that out there but yeah founders all day versus uh versus sierra and uh you know the final four included guinness and yingling um which i thought was interesting yingling went really far far, defeated all the loggers, defeated Stella Artois, just came out of that light bracket on fire. I kind of figured Founders and Guinness would be there. They just seem like the obvious.

I mean, there's tons of cases and cases and cases of Founders all day have been sold. It's a really great ballpark beer that's available in a lot of ballparks. It's kind of, it's getting close to being like the, I don't want to bother with beer. This is the best quick thing I can get at every ballpark. It's really close to being that. And for good reason, it's a crusher. It's, it tastes great. It's a light and it's a And it's a great day drinker. So Sierra is also ubiquitous on the West Coast, at least. You can get it anywhere, in the airport, at the game, wherever you want it.

So it has that goat feeling. And that made sense to me. Guinness is super popular and really smooth for how dark it is and how and like it's only like 120 calories so it's not even like a thick like put me to sleep type beer you know uh it's kind of like a a crusher on the dark side so i kind of i kind of figured this something like this youngling was a big surprise for me, but I guess they've got a dedicated fan base that were passionate in this bracket. That holds up, though,

because there are a lot of people I know who don't necessarily even care about craft beer who will, when they have a friend crossing state lines in which Yingling is sold, they will have their friend bring them back a case or a couple 12-packs, whatever it might be. It's strange. It's a non-craft beer that the typical beer drinker seeks out. So they definitely have that covered. So I'm not surprised to hear that

Yingling did really well in the bracket. If I had to make a wager on a future bracket, let's say this happens again next year, five years down the road, whenever. But especially if you're looking like three to five years down the road, I bet Sierra Nevada's pale ale would be replaced by Hazy Little Thing. And I bet Hazy Little Thing has a shot at making a run at the founders all day. I think those are in line with the tastes of beer drinkers for the next few years. I think maybe just not enough people have had it yet because I, I thought that I would go further.

I thought that it might go further than Sierra in this one, a regular pale ale in this one. But it's just, you know, to some, you know, pale ales are still bitter, hot bombs.

So to some, pale ales are still bitter, hot bombs, and I think they may need some nudging to try a hazy little thing because that's a new take on the IPA. I think it tastes different. It'll happen, though. All Day was kind of different when it came out, too. Yeah, exactly. And, and, and both of those beers have nothing to do with Sierra Pale Ale or even Boston, uh, Samuel Adams, Boston Lager or Stone IPA, the first, the first group of, of craft beer IPAs, right? Like if, if, if the first time you had an IPA was in that group, then I can see how you thought, you know, these are bitter beers. But if you can go out and try an all day or a hazy little thing, um, you may find that IPAs

have changed dramatically, um, uh, since those days. So, um, I'm not hectoring anyone. I'm just saying like, you know, uh, if you don't like IPA still after those two, then fine. You don't like them. It's good. I don't good. It's no skin off my back. But I thought it was a thing that sort of came together about as I expected with a couple surprises, which is what you like to see, really. Yeah, I'm curious to see what the final result actually is. I didn't vote in the final, so I don't even know who won yet. So I'll keep an eye out for your piece on that here in the next few days.

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And if you send us an email, you can find, you know, on Twitter at, you know, Sarah's I'm at Derek van Riper. That's going to wrap things up for this episode of rates and barrels. We are back with you on Thursday.

Thanks for listening.