Rates & Barrels - Kim Ng breaks a major barrier, evaluating strengths and weaknesses after a season, and reconsidering stolen bases in fantasy baseball

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Eno and DVR discuss Kim Ng's rise to become the general manager of the Marlins, before sharing their evaluation process after a season, a push to remove or modify stolen bases as a common fantasy baseball category, and what we can glean from teams' on-field decisions.  Rundown 1:15 Kim Ng Hired as GM of Marlins 7:13 Self Evaluation After a Season 21:42 Re-Tracing Your Draft Day Steps 33:32 Reconsidering Stolen Bases as a Category 43:24 Looking for Team Evaluations in Decision-Making Process Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic for just $1/month: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So let's be clear. When it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents electronically? Mm-hmm. The answer is FedEx. Okay. But what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments? How do I find all the... Also FedEx. Impressive. Is there a regulatory specialist I can ask about? FedEx. Oh. But let's say that... FedEx.

What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Friday, November 13th, 2020. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, the Marlins have made a groundbreaking hire. Kim Eng has been hired to be their next GM. We'll talk about that. And then a whole host of fantasy topics, a lot of great questions that have come in, looking at self-evaluation. What do you do coming out of a fantasy season that kind of helps you going forward?

We'll talk about some real life versus some fantasy value related problems that come up with 5x5 and some possible changes. There have been some recent pleas in my emails to lead a push to remove stolen bases from our game. So we'll dig into that a little bit as well. And we'll talk about ways we can search for meaning in decisions that teams make with things like their batting order, the order in which they use relievers, the order in which they line up starters to begin the season. So whole different mess of topics over the course of the next hour or so. But you know, Kim Ng is finally a GM.

And I say that because I kid you not, for at least the last 10 years, any offseason where we had GM openings, she would be one of those candidates who was considered a favorite. And yet every time, someone else would get hired. And the Marlins, they they went ahead they made the move and I'm so happy to see this because it's groundbreaking in men's sports in North America this goes beyond baseball too to have a woman in the GM chair for any men's sports team it blows my mind it took this long to happen, but Kim Eng is extremely deserving

and I'm just so happy to see it. Yeah, I mean, baseball is a sport where almost no GM played the sport at a high level. And then baseball is an interesting situation where you can't even use that as a barrier really because there isn't really like woman

baseball. You know what I mean? They're all pushed towards softball. So Kim Ing was a softball star. How relevant is that? I don't know. The rest of the league is hiring based on analytics experience and MBAs and stuff like that. She's got all that

part of the resume down. She beat Scott Boris in an arbitration case, which is kind of a bit of lore for you. That's a pretty rare thing. And then another thing that's cool about her and that's specific to the Marlins is that she's been spending the last few years with the MLB commissioner's office working on pipelines to new markets like Brazil,

China, Mexico, and India. Mexico is maybe not the newest, but she's helped clean up a lot of the corruption that was in the pipeline between Mexico and America. There should be more Mexican-American players. The problem is that there are just these arcane league structures and corruption, and she's cut through a fair amount of that and changed some of the rules down there. And I think Miami, having a bunch of Mexican players would be kind of a cool thing. Maybe bringing some Brazilian players in so that Jan Gomes is not the only dude out there. And maybe another million-dollar arm situation with some guys from India. So, I don't know.

It would be cool to see the Marlins take more advantage of that. I feel like they haven't established an identity, you know, in terms of attracting new talent. Like, what have they done really well in terms of drafting? They haven't done that well in acquiring. Michael Hill made a lot of trades, but you're looking at all the players he traded for, and I can't sort of point to a guy and be like, well, they got Isan Diaz.

Who's their, like, Brian Anderson was a draft, I think, right? He was one of their own prospects. That's their best player, Brian Anderson was a draft, I think, right? He was one of their own prospects. So that's their best player, their best position player at least. Their best pitchers were all traded for. Maybe Pablo Lopez was a draft. But, you know, they're looking for an identity, and she can give it to them.

Yeah, I mean, you go back and look at some of the stops. She was an assistant GM in 1998 with the Yankees. 1998! She has 30 years experience working in baseball. And again, the opportunity finally came through.

So happy for Kim. As far as I know, no DUIs either. Right, yeah. I mean, the flyby on that is, yes, look at what's happening with Tony La Russa. Look at what he's done. Look at the opportunity he gets after 10 years of not being in the dugout. And then look at how much harder Kim Eng had to work to get her first GM opportunity. That's just mind-blowing.

And you see it. If you look at Twitter today, you will see effusive praise from people that have worked with Kim Eng. It's all over. Ned Coletti, who was hired over her to be the GM of the Dodgers back in 2005, he kept her as an assistant. He was one of the people that immediately said, this is well-deserved. Long overdue is the refrain we keep hearing so again a great day for baseball obviously just an awesome story and i think it's really kind of changed a lot about how people are thinking about the marlins like the the sherman jeter marlins and now the kim ang marlins

are not the jeffrey loria fire sale marlins that we grew accustomed to for the first 20 or so years of the franchise's existence. Yeah, yeah, long overdue. And I feel like one thing that's cool about this is that hopefully it signals some, you know, some of the beating back of the toxic work environment that used to exist within baseball pretty pervasively. My first couple of looks into how front offices were with each other, you know, sort of behind the scenes, how they talked with each other and how people were treated, I came away with a really negative feeling about how women would be treated and how misogynistic the culture was and stuff like that. So I'm feeling more and more, the more that I get looks into the modern, you know,

front office, I feel more inclusiveness, more of a priority on inclusiveness and less of the sort of old ideas of let's sit around and make jokes until the wee hours of the morning. So I applaud it from a lot of different directions. The culture shift is long overdue as well. I'm glad we're beginning to see that happen around the league. Let's talk about some other things that were on our mind this week. The question that came in in recent weeks that I want to start with today was a self-evaluation question from Isaac. He wrote very open-endedly, do you have any particular tips or tricks for end-of-season self-evaluation

and debriefing on how your teams did? So, you know, I'll throw it to you first. After you get through a season, do you have a process in place to sort of look back and figure out what went right and what went wrong? I do. I first of all, just sort of count how I did, you know, look at my finishes, look at my wins, look at my losses um a lot of my leagues are dynasty so you have to kind of do that where are we in the wind curve are we selling are we buying this offseason so you have to do that naturally but even a redraft especially something like al labor i want to win it i want to win it i want to learn from last year and i want to win next year and so i always do a kind of look around the league look at the standings look my team, look at what I did right and what I did wrong.

The two things I would caution, and I guess the one thing I would caution, is overlearning from one year or one team. And especially I would caution that after this season, sometimes things just don't go right. season, sometimes things just don't go right. Sometimes you just had a bunch of injuries on one team and, you know, there is enough chaos in injury prediction that I wouldn't just go from that and say next year, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you know, draft a single person who's been injured in the last two years. Like that I think would be kind of overlearning from your situation. But over time, my finishes in AL Labor, for example, have gotten better. Last year, I finished second. And what I've just generally realized is I have to put a little bit more investment in my pitching. And every year, I tweak that, the shape of my pitching staff,

because it's ironic. I mean, I feel like I can do pitching really well, so I don't put a lot of money into it. And then, you know, I think my projections are good and I'm good at playing time. So my teams are always amazing at like home runs, RBI, um, runs. And, um, you know, I, so recently I've, I've realized I need to do more investment in stolen bases, um, and more in pitching. And, um, that's why I almost got there this year. And, uh, you know, Severino, was it Severino this year or last year? Severino was hurt this year. Yeah. So if Severino had been healthy, I think I would have won this year. So, um, and again, I'm not going to try and not do a single thing on injury, but one of the things I might learn from that is let me put injury in my rankings just so that I can see the flag. You know, I think the flag on Severino would have been yellow

or red even, even before his injury this year. And that might have helped me pick somebody else near the top there. Yeah, I think that's a good starting point too, when you get to look at all those things together and figure out like, okay, what's the tactical adjustment to building rankings or evaluating players? I think it's almost more about that for me than it is about changing the way I draft or actually go through an auction. I think you can get kind of caught up in an individual strategy that worked in a particular year. And what I mean by that is if you were to go back-to-back aces in a snake draft and then get closers early and you won that year, you might be too married to that strategy. If you did that and took 13th out of 15

teams, you might throw that entire strategy out and that's not the way you want to play. I think every season is unique. Every approach can be viable. Most approaches can be viable with the right players. That's an old Gene McCaffrey line. Any strategy could work with the right players. And to a large extent, I believe that's true. So I think it kind of cuts both ways. You can almost get caught up in success and try to replicate it. We talked back during Labor Weekend. I was looking at the team that I had last season and what went right, what went wrong.

And one thing that went wrong was that I spent too much on closers. I had, I think, Corey Knable and Kenley Jansen in 2019. And I came back. That's like 38 bucks or something. Right, yeah. You and I talked about that. So the night before the auction, we're talking about this.

Yeah, I'm probably not going to do that again. I go to the table the next day and I come away with Josh Hader and Kenley Jansen. Literally two guys from the same teams, one exact same guy. And yet it's like, huh. I just said this probably wasn't the best thing to do. But you did win the year you had the Knavel in.

Right, and maybe that's not the only reason why I did that, but I don't think I didn't win because I had that much tied up in relievers. I won despite it. I won because I did other things right. I won because of all the stuff we talked about after the season a year ago. I won because Howie Kendrick was a reserve on that team and Kevin Newman was a reserve on that team. I won because my $1 and $3 players were good and because my $9 to $19 guys were solid. I had a bunch of Schwarbers and David Peraltas and I made a few pickups.

Aristides Aquino was a great late season pickup, especially in NL only. So I think you have to kind of drill into all these different facets of your roster, regardless of whether you did well or whether you did poorly. Because I think you can trick yourself into thinking you failed because of X when you may have failed because of Y and Z, or you were successful because of X, but you were successful because of Y and Z. have failed because of Y and Z, or you were successful because of X, but you were successful because of Y and Z. That's really astute. I like that because I was just looking at my BARF standings, Bay Area Roto Fantasy, the league I took over for Laura Michaels, rest in peace. And I was trying to see what is my lesson. So my first three picks were Trout. It might have been a Trout, Jordan, Devers.

I had like first pick, I think, or second pick. So those two were really close. Devers and Jordan were really close. And then I came back with like Moustakas Muncy, right? And it's OBP League. And I thought, man, I am an OBP stud. Trout's going to steal me enough bases to make this work. Devers is going to steal bases. Well, Devers stole zero bases. Trout stole one base. Jordan Alvarez went down with injury. Moustakas stole one base.

And Muncy and Moustakas were okay, but they gave me a collective sort of 335 OBP. I wasn't necessarily an OBP monster. And there's a couple things I could have learned from this. A, I waited too long to buy a starting pitcher, right? That's definitely, if you're going that far down, my first starting pitcher was Charlie Morton. So maybe that's what you could learn. And I think that is something to learn here.

B, I didn't focus on steals, but I got Trent Grisham later. I had other guys. I did okay in steals in the end. I don't know if it was too bad there. C, I think I'm going to, and this is the one I think is really the thing to learn. I think I don't want picks around the turn.

You know, what's that called when you turn in your preferences for where you want to draft? Oh, KDS. KDS. I didn't pay attention to the KDS and just basically gave them beginning, end, and then middle. Actually, I think you want the middle and you don't want the beginning and the end. And there's actually research by Ariel Cohen that suggests that this is true. And the reason is if you're on the ends, you can't react to a run. And you can think, oh, there's six closers left. I'm going to get a third baseman. You know, I'm going to get Max Muncy because there's six closers left. And by the time, you know, those 30 picks go, all six closers could be gone super easily.

And you'd be like, whoops, now Charlie Morton is my starting pitcher. That's exactly how it happened. I was like, ooh, I love getting Muncy Moose here. There's so many starting pitchers I love. And then they all went away. And I was like, oh, I guess Charlie Morton is my ace. So there's different things to learn, but don't overlearn any one aspect of it. Don't go and buy Malik Smith in the third round because you didn't have steals. But I think in this case,

all of it would have gone smoother if I'd had a middle situation and if i had maybe invested a little bit more in starting pitching right and i think as an example you know if i looked at all my teams and some people don't have the luxury of playing in five plus leagues every year right so you played one maybe two so you only have that limited about that one that one team yeah right yeah i mean for me i'm like okay i was lighting steals across the board this year why was i lighting steals oh the pattern was i was waiting to get steals and the players that i was waiting on to get steals they lost their jobs so maybe i have to emphasize guys who play up the middle are good defenders who have some speed with their power they have speed to go with something else and they're at least going to have playing time like you don't want to chase speed for guys that

don't have secure playing time maybe that's the sort of tactical adjustment i mean i think those are the types of things that you want to do is sort of figure out process wise was there a common thread with the the pitchers you took a chance on late or even with the ones you drafted early if you had pitchers you drafted early that busted you know if you went I don't know, Morton, and was there another pitcher in that range who wasn't good from last season, kind of in that 75 to 90 range? If you waited on pitching and you tried to double tap with two guys in that range and it didn't work, did it not work because of those two guys specifically? Or did it not work because you simply weren't getting enough

strikeouts because the guys drafted ahead of them are afforded the opportunity for more innings, or they had a little bit less injury risk, or, you know, there's, there's probably a why behind all of the, what went right and what went wrong and kind of drilling into that. That's what I try to do as part of my self evaluationevaluation of what my teams were doing and what they weren't doing. So it's not always a wholesale adjustment. I think rarely is it a wholesale adjustment at this point. I've been playing for almost 20 years. So could I have a complete crap year and have to change more things than usual? Yeah, that's totally possible. Could I have an amazing year where I win everything? I

guess that's possible too. But even if that happened, I don't think I would sit back and go, everything I did was perfect, so I'm just going to do that again. That doesn't work. It's a different board every year. Circling back though to your point about KDS and where you want to draft, I think Ariel's research is really interesting, but I think there's an advantage of being on the wheel. I don't think it's necessarily going to be borne out in math over the long run, but I think the advantage, while you are concerned about missing out on a run, you're worried about all the saves going away, you're worried about all the speedsters going away at a certain point, building a team, two players at a time, where you're making two decisions back to back, while everybody else has to sit there except for the person on the other end and build it one piece at a time, to me that's easier. It's easier to see the target, to see what you're aiming for, and to get there because you can say, okay, we're getting a little light on speed, so I should address it here because there's going to be 28 picks before my next one.

So I'm definitely going to get some speed. And the other thing that looks like it might run out is save. So I'm going to go ahead and take a closer here. I think what it takes, though, is it takes a willingness to say, ADP doesn't matter. Group think is not that important. I can be the early pick.

I can be the min pick on this player. And I'm not saying min pick somebody by 50. Don't be four rounds early, but it's okay if you set the min pick, especially if you're on an end, because you need to get the categories, the targets, you need to reach what you need to reach. And it takes discipline. Some people can't play that way. I just think for me, the way my brain is wired, I tend to thrive when I have a wheel and I feel like I'm more susceptible to chasing things that I shouldn't chase when I'm stuck in the middle. One toggle that I'm hearing in my head when I'm listening to you is about aggressiveness versus defensiveness or sort of aggressiveness about setting the market versus focusing on your own team and doing and addressing

needs sort of deal. And the reason I bring that up is because I think maybe at one point I thought if I get Moustakis and Muncy, I can create like a second base run or I get two of the last good second basemen on the market. And they also have multi-position eligibility. So that'll be good for like the COVID environment. Ended up being useful actually, because I ended up having to deal with Moustakas being gone, you know? But, you know, you can get into trouble, I think, at the wheel sometimes being like,

I'm going to create a closer run by taking two closers when you're like, maybe I just needed one closer. Yeah. I don't know what I thought I was going to do to these other teams. Sometimes I think if you do focus on your own needs, there probably was a pick that I could have made that had more speed than Muncy and Moustakis where I took them. Or maybe that's where I should have taken some pictures and thought about that earlier.

So, yeah, again, just don't overlearn. Try to look at what the try to like come. I would see this. Try to come up with three reasons why you lost and three things you did good. You know, three things you did well and three things you didn't do well. And don't try to hyper-focus on one of the things you did wrong because you probably did more than one thing wrong. Yeah. You should look back at the draft board or auction board, kind of see. It's easier to get back into the mindset. I think my recall is pretty good, but my recall of how every single pick in my online championship went back in July, it's not perfect.

So I've got to bring up the board. I've got to look at it. And I'll remember when I start looking at it. Actually, I was kind of torn between these two players. I was thinking about speed versus getting another starting pitcher, and it went wrong. And if I had done it this way, there were these options here. and if I had done it this way, there were these options here. Kind of seeing where value came from in the league that you played in,

I think that helps you get a better sense of where you might find it in the future as well. So I think looking back at the results, I find that to be one of the first things I do that has a lot of value just because it helps me sort of refresh what I was thinking when I put the team together in the first place. You still want to look back through the season and see what happened along the way there too. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton bike, bike plus, tread, row, guide, or app. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from

the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton bike or bike plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access membership separate. Terms apply. Thank you for making that point. I brought the board up. I got it. So I had second pick and I did Trout, right? So I did Devers Yordanordan, which would, of course, put me behind on speed, but I thought I had some from Trout, right? Then I did Muncie-Morton, right? So I didn't do Muncie-Moustakis. I wasn't getting too crazy. I did Muncie-Morton because I was like, I need a pitcher,

but, you know, this guy's going to pick before me, but he already took pitchers, so I'll take Muncie first, and then on the way back, I'll take Morton. That's what I did. And then the next time through, I took Moustakas Carrasco. So I was actually playing with this guy that was stuck behind me. I knew that he had pitchers. And so I knew that I could take Morton and Carrasco. So that part actually worked out okay. You know, Morton and Carrasco were okay in the end. Neither one was like an ace is ace, but they were okay. Here's where I, and then I took Hunter Ryu in the ninth. So like my first

three pitchers were okay. I think that wasn't necessarily how bad I was. Let me tell you who I took in between to deal with my steals problem and my first closer. Oscar Mercado, Emilio Pagan, Lorenzo Cain.

One of those guys opted out. So I think you can say, well, stuff happens. That's as fluky as a season-ending injury. Oscar Mercado was a little bit more Billy Hamilton than we realized. There is something to learn there. He didn't hit the ball hard. He wasn't really a good hitter. So that's one.

And then Emilio Pagan, you know know I think he's an obvious closer too and I did lose out on the closer there was uh before I picked Emilio Pagan I thought I'll take Hyunjin Ryu because I need a starter and then um I and then it went Hand, Hendrix, Neris, Jansen, Giles and so I I was like, oh, I guess Pagan. So there was a little bit of missing out on a run. I believe that can happen in the middle. And I think what it can do is it can lead you to take a player who should not go there. Legitimate FOMO.

There's FOMO that we talk about randomly that we're laughing about, but that's actual FOMO causing you to choose a player who carries a lot more risk than a player you should draft at that point in time. But you're so glued to that run of closers that just happened that you talk yourself in the moment and say, oh, if I don't get Emilio Pagan right now, I'm not going to have a closer with good ratios. And you end up drafting a guy that is stable with those skills, but definitely was not stable with that actual role yet. And that draft was pretty early, right? You guys do the barf draft pretty early.

Yeah. In fact, we did this before COVID. And then we debated if we were going to redraft it or what we're going to do. So we just decided to keep the team. So I want to talk about Oscar Mercado just for a second, because I think this is part of retracing your steps. You see a player you didn't hit on that really hurts you because you needed those steals. And the question I would ask is, should you have seen what happened to Oscar Mercado in 2020 coming? If we go back to 2019, I go to the baseball savant page. Sprint speed, 98th percentile.

Outs above average, which I think for a center fielder is really important. 88th percentile. Okay, so we have a good defender who runs well. You mentioned the power not being safe that was there that was on display there was blue ink 25th percentile in average exit velocity 18th percentile in barrel percentage yeah that's a red flag and in this case the red flag is blue it's a it's an icy cold beer that you know and I don't really want to drink unless we have to drink that exact beer. So there were warning signs with Mercado.

And I wonder, and I liked them too. I wonder if it was easy to get caught up in the price relative to need. And to just see only the possibility that he'd get you 20 steals with ease. And to look right past the possibility that he wouldn't hit enough to keep his job. Like that, that's probably the path. I don't think it's obvious because plenty of smart people like just take me out of the equation. There are plenty of smart people who liked Oscar Mercado at that price. That's what the market put him at. I just, I didn't see,

I think the other thing I saw with Cleveland, I didn't see anybody else on that depth chart who was reasonably going to take his job. They were so weak in the outfield with depth. I didn't think there was a lot of internal pressure on him, even if he did go into a slump. But outfield is kind of like the second base of the out of the team the outfield is the second base of the team um you just find them

you know what i mean most teams don't there's not a lot of trades there's fewer trades with outfielders involved uh because teams just feel like they can find them they don't have to trade for them you know there's notable exceptions like the Cardinals keep trading them away and the Indians keep trading for them. They actually even lined up on the Mercado trade. But I'm trying to find someone that's like that this year.

Miles Straw comes to mind. He's projected for 26 stolen bases with a.338 slugging. I could see the Astros, even if they go into the season with him at a position finding a way to replace him pretty quickly um i think he's more obvious than mercato right yeah people are gonna fall into that trap i think the victor robles might be there but he has more power i think demonstrated power than mercato so far leoti taver Tavares. Oh, Leoti is okay.

Yeah, Leoti. He is a risk. Leoti has a lot of similarities. They've done so long there. Put this one in the time capsule. This is what I think right now. And a year from now, we're talking about Leoti being a bust.

I think that Leoti Tavares is the only true quality center fielder the Rangers have that's anywhere near big league ready. So I think that stabilizes playing time. I don't think Solak is a quality center fielder, but there are teams that run out non-quality defenders at positions. It's true, and the Rangers are absolutely one of them. I've done that before.

So then, learning from Mercado a little bit, what would cause that to happen? I don't know. Maybe Tavares isn't hitting the ball very hard, and he's under 200 with his average, and his OBP is low, and there's no power. Well, there's Blue Ink. There's the XBA, the X-Slug, and the 26th and 23rd percentile. There's a 39th percentile barrel rate.

I think he's very close. I think we didn't think so. We didn't think Mercado was like Leote Tavares, but they're very close. They are very close. I think we didn't think so. We didn't think Mercado was like Leote Tavares, but they're very close. They are very close. A key difference, one key difference, Tavares is a bit younger. So to me, the chances that he's a finished product are much lower. So I think that's in there. The Rangers are not.

We don't know. They might not be competitive. So they may keep him in there for a year. I mean, they certainly don't look like a frontrunner in that division. So they can wait a little longer if it's not going well. Cleveland, with pressure from other teams in that division, didn't have that luxury. That's true of like a Victor Reyes, probably true. A two who I think is similar.

All right, let's do the same thing with Victor Reyes. So Leote Tavares is similar. All right. Let's do the same thing with Victor Reyes. So Leote Tavares is risky. Is he draftable in that range? I think, I mean, it's always about price, right? If Leote Tavares gets as much helium as Oscar Mercado got, because I took him in barf. I took Oscar Mercado in a, I think it's a 15 team league. I took him in the 8th.

And that's too early. That's about 100 picks earlier than Tavares is going in early drafts so far, but a lot can change between now and March. I took Trent Grisham in the 20th and Kevin Kiermaier in the 22nd. If we're talking about Leote Tavares or Victor Reyes in the 22nd, I'm good. I mean, Kevin Kiermaier could have been hurt all year. I took Harrison Bader the next pick. He didn't do anything for me.

All right. Maybe a lesson learned, though, from Oscar Mercado as it applies to Leote Tavares. Don't let a guy with no power slip into your top 10 rounds. Right. Around pick 200, I think you can be a little more aggressive in those spots. Yeah, you can try to find that cheap speed there. Those are like $2 to $5 players in auctions, right?

Where are you willing to take on those flaws? You shouldn't take those flaws in the 100 to 150 range. In the 200 plus range, it's a little more palatable. And I don't think i don't think that adalberto monacy counts here because he does have legit power it's not it's not a question of power it's just a question of contact really that's about the only question so it's a red flag on monacy but it's not a bunch of red flags you know like if we're thinking about this in the red yellow green flags thing monacy has a bunch of green flags and one red flag there's a strange thing that i've come to believe with drafts and auctions and i don't know

how to prove it and maybe you can't i'm not sure i feel like you kind of win and lose in the middle third of the draft in the auction like you you win by connecting on a bunch of players that are future early rounders, and you lose by ending up with too many Mercados, which is probably an oversimplification of fantasy baseball as a whole. But I don't know. When I look back at teams, I see the guys that I crushed on in that range. I mean, like in Tout Wars, Luke Voigt for nine bucks. Like that was a huge. Oh, yeah. Voigt was on this team, and I took him in the 14th.

That's a league-changing maneuver, a team-changing sort of maneuver. Kyle Tucker was in that range. I mean, you're right. I lost this in the 8th to 12th round. I lost this with Mercado, Pagan, Kane. I mean, that was almost it. Michael Givens is my second closer.

Boom. That's the middle rounds. My late rounds were good. Trent Grisham. Even Kiermaier. Turnbull. Presley. There were some good players in my late rounds.

And my early rounds were pretty good too except for Jordan Alvarez. So, yeah. I could get on board with that. I wonder if there's a way to study that. You could lose a draft or an auction other places. You could absolutely screw up the beginning so badly that the middle doesn't matter. That's possible.

But if we're assuming a room full of players that generally know what they're doing, that's where I feel like you get more separation is in that middle third of the draft and of the auction. So thank you very much for that question. It inspired a lot of spirited discussion. We really appreciate that. That one came from Isaac.

Let's get to the next question that came in. This one came from Ty, and he wrote us an email explaining how his league has changed a bit over time. It's five by five. They've made the switch from average to OBP and trying to find ways to make things more closely mirror what's happening in real baseball.

They made a change a while back to take out saves but put it in as saves plus holds. The question that Ty had for us was more of an idea. He wants to know, should he try to change the steals category in his league to steals plus doubles and triples? And as he writes, it keeps the speed element,

doesn't overlap the other categories, at least not directly, and doesn't overrate a statistic that isn't that valued in real life. Really fast guys that steal 40 plus bases are still king because you're not likely to make up a 40 stolen base versus zero stolen base difference by someone hitting 40 doubles versus zero steals, but it also softens the need to reach for a Malik Smith or Adalbertal Mondesi for fear of being left out on a category. And he's wondering if any sites

allow a modification on a category stat like this. I can answer that simple part first. I'm 99% sure Fantrax can do it. A lot of the smaller sites have some different ways to just make your own category. I think Rotowire has that sort of flexibility as well. If they don't have it already, they might be able to make it. If you pay for CBS, they'll do a lot of things for you. CBS is the king of customization once you pay for your league. So you've got some options to implement this or something like it.

But, you know, you were working on some numbers a little earlier, kind of looking at does this have the intended effect? Is steals plus doubles and triples a good substitute for straight steals? Yeah, I did just a leaderboard of this stat. And Adalberto Mondesi's first, so you're right. Just stealing a bunch of bases is a good way to be at the top. Trevor Story, Trey Turner, Jose Ramirez, I like it so far, Kyle Tucker. And then there's Freddie Freeman, which is interesting.

And he represents a type of player that gets an additional boost in this metric that does not come from speed. So here are the guys with very few stolen bases that are still in the top 25 by doubles plus triples with stolen bases. Freddie Freeman is sixth with two stolen bases. Dominic Smith was 12th in this category with two stolen bases. Dominic Smith is 12th in this category, was 12th in this category, was zero stolen bases. Jake Cronenworth was 17th in this with three stolen bases. And Cesar Hernandez was 24th.

Mike Yastrzemski was 23rd. I mean, Mike Yastrzemski had two stolen bases and Cesar Hernandez had zero. Christian Walker was 25th. So it definitely rewards guys who hit a bunch of doubles. And the one thing I don't like about triples is that they're noisy. You have Kyle Tucker fifth on this list because he had six triples. However, you pointed out you're just counting doubles and triples. So even if the triples were noisy, they were probably at least doubles. They were kind of fluky doubles is how you put it. Right. I would never use triples as a standalone roto category.

I know there's some things that are like, we're 12 by 12 and triples is a category. And I just shake my head. I'm like, don't do that. Don't do that. But yeah, I don't think you – including them as part of this stat, if those extra bounces off an angled wall didn't happen, those hits would have been doubles anyway. But my larger point is just you'll reward some doubles hitters that don't have speed.

So I don't know. Is that worse than rewarding Malik Smith's types or Leote Tavares' types? I don't know. And I would point out that one thing is when you do have a guy who steals a lot and maybe their power isn't there, it usually means they're like a plus-plus defender. And that's an interesting thing to reward basically in fantasy sports to think about is is leote taveras a good enough defender and center to make up for his other flaws um that's a question that is a real life question it's a real life question the rangers will have to think

about you know so that's an interesting fantasy question it's we just spent a bunch of time talking about mercato leota taveras and and and Victor Reyes. So I wouldn't say that the discussion around steals is totally morally bereft. It's not totally dirty. It's a real thing. But I also understand the idea of trying to get it out. I mean, I think you had a better solution, maybe. Yeah, I mean, you could do net stolen bases as one alternative. No, the other one, I like it better. The extra bases? as uh one alternative the other one i like it

better the extra bases no what was the other one take it out oh yeah that wasn't my idea i received an email from a listener who will remain anonymous uh he suggested that you just get rid of steals entirely you can go back to a fourx4 if you wanted to. I guess apparently that's like the original Roto because I don't know who has a 4x4 and I was kind of making fun of it, but I think Ron Chandler was talking about 4x4 was like the first thing. 4x4 was original. I don't think it was steals that weren't included. It was Ks. Yeah, Ks were the pitching stat that they didn't have, but think about how few strikeouts there actually were back then. The one thing I really knew this was true,

but you realize it more, those retro drafts we were doing back when everything was on hold in May and that part of the year, the crazy thing was when you go back and draft in 1982, a good strikeout rate was like 6Ks per nine. Now, if you had a starter doing that, it'd be likely that that's probably your worst starter. So I understand why strikeouts were not included for pitchers back when rotisserie baseball was created. Steals were a much bigger part of the game at that time. I think it was run score on the hitting side that was the category that they didn't use originally, that they started to use as the game became a five by five sort of game. This comes up all the time. And

I think you can make reasonable adjustments to your league. And I think the key is to have a nice dialogue with people in your league about those changes. What are your goals? I think dialogue with people in your league about those changes. What are your goals? I think, to Ty's point, his modification does what he wants it to do. To your point, I don't think chasing steals is completely devoid of value. The other example would be someone like Dylan Moore. Aside from wondering, is he good enough defensively to play somewhere? Is he a good enough hitter to stay in the lineup? Is he going to be efficient enough to keep stealing bases? I think that's a fun question to answer. It's not perfect.

It's not managing a team. It's not running a real baseball team, but it's still a thought-provoking exercise that I find enjoyable. Some people, including our anonymous friend, is saying, no, finding steals is not enjoyable. I hate finding steals.

Steals are stupid. I get that. I totally get that. These are real-life questions. The Mariners will have to consider whether or not they're going to give Dylan Moore the green light if he's going to steal 12 and get caught five times. My estimation is that they will not. He will run less on a per-plate appearance basis. He will run less. On a per-plate appearance basis,

he will run less than he did in 2020 going forward. I don't want to get rid of steals. I play five by five. I know it's not perfect. The comparison I always make is old NES games, specifically Tecmo Super Bowl. It's not the best football game that was ever made. It's just not.

I go to this all the time. It has flaws, but there are people that have played that game for 30 years. They have big tournaments for this, and it's still fun because there are so many tactical combinations and things you can do, and I think that same sort of game theory,

that applies to 5x5. So you can tweak the categories. It's still fun. At the root, you're still trying to solve a similar puzzle. So, you know, the number of pieces, the difficulty of the puzzle, what the puzzle

actually is when you put it together, that's all fine. You can change it as much as you want. I think if you kind of go down the pathway that you're going with the stone-based thing, you might end up at points just because it's easy it's easier in like a saber points or linear weights type environment to just be like okay we kind of know what these things are worth why don't we just chase the most

valuable players in baseball like the most valuable real life players because we can add up the linear value the linear weight value for each event that happens on the field um and we can just uh put that one number on i for a lot of reasons don't like those leagues because it reduces players to one number and then uh trading just becomes absolutely horrific i mean i hate trading in points leagues i can't stand it yeah i don't want to play points myself. If you enjoy playing points, play points. It's fine. It's okay. To me, that's a different sort of challenge.

Distilling everything down to one number, it makes fantasy baseball more like fantasy football. The things that make fantasy baseball different are what I like about fantasy baseball more than fantasy football as it is. If there was rotisserie fantasy football people wanted to play, I'd probably

like that more than the traditional head-to-head point fantasy football. But I am a weirdo. So... And maybe you are too. Maybe. Maybe we're all weirdos. Thanks a lot for the question, Ty.

Let's go to our next question. This one comes from John. He writes, with people talking about how do we miss Bieber? Should we factor coaching choices more? Bieber opened the season for Cleveland, so we may not have had Bieber over Flaherty, but we should have had him over Clevenger. Just thinking about how we were looking at the Cleveland pitchers against each other, it made me think watching the Dodgers. Should we have Max Muncy over Bellinger? They wanted Muncy higher in the lineup. So should we do that in our rankings? Thanks, John.

Oh, I see what he's saying. I thought that was weird too in the postseason, to be honest. I don't know if we even really talked about it. I mean, these episodes that we did with Britt in October. But I got to a point where I'm like, yeah, they're both lefties in the Dodgers secret sauce. Max Muncy's the better hitter to have in that spot. Maybe it doesn't matter

that much, but we're talking about the World Series. We're talking about games that matter as much as any baseball games can matter. There should be a preference. There should be a reason for who hits fourth and who hits sixth. I think you got to be very careful reading into lineup construction or especially rotation order as it pertains to how teams value players.

I don't think it's completely meaningless, but I think it can steer you in the wrong direction more times than it can help you. Here with the Dodgers, a ready-made example of how we could have been stored steered wrong austin barnes is their postseason catcher remember they just kept using yasmani grandal less and less and it had a little bit more to do with maybe the run environment in the postseason. They were just, maybe they were sure that it was going to be lower, and so a passed ball, you know, Grundahl's not good at defense in that way. You know, I think that they had different reasons for it.

There also could be stuff that we don't know. Bellinger's not healthy, and Muncy is or something, you know, and they're just like, right now now his oblique is hurting or something. We're not going to report this out. Uh, but that's why he's here or a secret sauce that says, you know, that is predictive in short samples,

but not for full seasons. Like next year, Bellinger might be leading off to start the year. I mean, I like even with what they did in the post season. So, um, there are ways to learn it, though. I think the easiest way to learn from coaching decisions is in the bullpen.

The hierarchy of how relievers are used or the situations in which they're used? Yeah, like, for example, I wouldn't necessarily project Nick Anderson to have the most saves on the raise next year. No. In fact, I would revert project Nick Anderson to have the most saves on the Rays next year. No. In fact, I would revert back to the more recent refrain of, well, I don't know if we can project anyone for more than 10 saves on the Rays over a full season. And they've given us multiple years of proof of why we shouldn't. So I don't think that's necessarily cowardice or a mistake mistake or anything but it is interesting when you think about kenley jansen so with kenley we started to see a change in how they were using him in times

where it mattered more in the postseason it broke in a way where he kind of found the extra ticks again and ended up being helpful again by the end of the postseason. But now that they've won their title, I wonder if that changes their thinking with how they use Jansen. I think he's also finally getting to the final year of his contract too. So maybe that changes something. Use him as a closer to make him like the Dodger closer for that dynasty. He was the guy all along, and we don't know what you're talking about. He never lost the role. He was always the't know what you're talking about he he never lost

the role he was always the closer well well i'm pretty sure he wasn't for a little bit no no he he was always the closer i mean that's what the that's what some of the books will say yeah exactly the closer on all the great dodgers themes and that's mostly true that's just not not perfectly true but anyway i mean i do know that Derek Carty had a series of investigations for what works to predict closers, save situations, closer role changes, that sort of deal. And most of the stuff did not work. There's a slight effect for velocity and strikeout rate.

And then the number one thing is role. And who determines role? The coaching staff. So you have to consider role there. I think lineup changes might just be matchup stuff, might just be recent health stuff. I'm not sure that I'm going to... I'm not sure I'm going to ding Bellinger next year.

I think it was a lost year, and I'm willing to take Bellinger in the second round. And I think I'll laugh all the way to the bank. It's interesting because if you look at a leaderboard from the last three seasons, I've talked a lot about combining the last two as I've tried to put rankings together, and they're coming out Monday.

Cody Bellinger has a 137 WRC plus since the start of 2018. It's a 276, 369, 535 line. Max Muncy has a 138 WRC plus. So yes, that's one unit higher. A 244, 372, 516 line. They are very similar in terms of homers. Bellinger, 84cie 82 uh walk rate actually favors muncie 15.8 to 12.6 k rating average most of us play with favors bellinger yeah so for our

purposes cody bellinger's the better player and he steals some bases too which once he'll get you a hand maybe a handful over a full season but that season, but you're kind of happy with a handful, and you're probably not going to get any. So I think that's part of why we think, as a fantasy community, that Bellinger's a better player. The thing I would wonder about from more of a lineup construction standpoint is if you're looking at two players whose on-base percentage and slugging percentages are pretty comparable, do you want the guy who puts more balls in play hitting higher or lower? Or does that not even factor into how you break the tie? No, I think you want higher OBP, higher, and more balls in play lower. Right.

More balls in play lower means the guys that have similar OBP. If Muncy is getting on base just as much as Bellinger, and Bellinger puts more balls in play. You want Bellinger after Muncy. You want Bellinger after Muncy. So the Dodgers are doing it right. It doesn't necessarily mean that Muncy's the better hitter of the two indefinitely. It just means that

based on those two guys being almost identical, their differences sort of support their lineup being constructed that way yeah and the lineup stuff is interesting but the difference between one lineup slot and the next is 17 plate appearances over the course of a full season so you know if he ends up too lower than muncie that would be 30 plate appearances for a full season and that would be totally negated by all the times Muncy sits against a lefty or for injury or because uh some positional thing because his defense isn't as good

so I wouldn't project uh Muncy for more plate appearances either as far as the order of starters in the rotation and this is something that I think teams try to map out from the time that the spring training schedule begins. There's a big calendar board and they're trying to make sure that everybody lines up with the days they throw in the spring to end up on track for how they want to begin the season. All it takes is a minor injury along the way in spring training to sort of shake up that order a little bit and you change your plans and your two becomes your one or your three becomes your one just because of how those types of things play out so do you see any anything you want to read into with how teams order their starters i mean if they were all completely healthy the entire time i could see maybe using it to break a tie

but usually there's some sort of guy rolled an ankle, guy missed the day of throwing because he had to go do something on his off day. You know, all these little things can shake it up. Walker Bueller buying some blisters, yeah. And that messes the whole thing up. Like, I think the guy that I'm thinking about right now is Julio Urias, right?

They didn't treat him as a top three starter necessarily they kind of kept using him at the end and yet wasn't he on the mound when they won yeah yeah he was he threw the last pitch so like he's still pretty important to them and i think he's a great pick next year so i'm not i'm not gonna denigrate him for them using him after Gonsolin a couple times. No, because again, that's more specific to matchups and what you're trying to get the other team to do with their lineup and the flexibility you want to have to go certain ways in certain events. They had days of rest.

I think it is worth thinking about. I think it is mostly worth thinking about in the bullpen. Yeah, so bullpen, one. Batting order, probably a little more important than rotation order, but both quite a bit less important than bullpen. And I think, as we've learned in recent years, it's leverage. It's the difficulty of the situation that i think gives us an insight as to how good a team thinks any one of its relievers actually are i think pretty much every team is now looking at

oh the two three and four hitters are coming up in the seventh let's use our best reliever here they were getting much closer to that being the norm than we were even just a couple years ago which i guess would be an argument that they still thought Nick Anderson was one of their best relievers, but it's pretty obvious that Fairbanks was much better and Castillo. And I think this is where it's the old hammer and chisel that we've talked about on the show. I think the numbers that lead you to believe that Nick Anderson is the best reliever in the Rays bullpen, those come from a longer window of time. Those are easier to understand. They're easier to work with.

The chisel, the fine-tuning, the adjustment, figuring out when he's not that guy anymore, that's the hard part. hard part. That's where it kind of swings back to trusting your eyes or having something in your numbers on a granular level that you trust as an indication that things are not quite where they are. Pitch velocity. Right, right. Those are huge, huge, huge. If I was doing DFS, I would be all over pitch movement and pitch velocity. Yeah, maybe we'll work on that a little bit in 2021, at least behind the scenes and tinker a little bit because I've got some interest in that. But yeah, a lot of great questions.

Thank you for that one, John. I think that's going to do it. I think that's everything we needed to get to on today's episode. So a lot of theory, a lot of fun stuff. If you have questions for us, reach out. Rates and Barrels at TheAthletic.com. If you don't already have a subscription you should get one they're one dollar a week theathletic.com slash rates and barrels is

the link to get that offer on twitter he is at enoceris i'm at derrick van riper we are back with you on monday thanks for listening Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.