Rates & Barrels - Late starting pitchers to target and actual starting pitcher sleepers!

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Eno and DVR move on to Part 3 of their Starting Pitcher Preview and focus on their favorite late-round pitching sleepers, before discussing several of your late-round targets and pitchers of interest.  Rundown 2:59 What’s Next for Tarik Skubal? 11:26 Banking on a Rebound From Josh Lindblom 15:44 Which Luke Weaver Will Show Up in 2021? 18:49 Should We Have Interest In J.T. Brubaker? 24:26 Current Interest in Cal Quantrill 30:10 Late Late Options 36:59 Tejay Antone's Improvement in the Cincinnati System 39:56 Is There Another Level For Justus Sheffield? 43:52 Looking for the Next Kevin Gausman in San Francisco 52:02 Any Interest Elieser Hernández? 56:25 Pocket Aces — Yay or Nay? 64:12 Quality of Stuff vs. Command Late 69:36 Brailyn Marquez's Path to the Cubs' Rotation 71:16 Best-Case Scenario for Severino, Syndergaard & Sale 83:30 Spring News Updates Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic for just $3.99/month to start: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's Wednesday, February 17th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris on this episode. It's part three of our starting pitcher preview. So this is the late pitchers we like episode with a lot of great questions that came in on Twitter. So we're going to get through as many of those questions, talk about as many pitchers that you want to hear about as we possibly can. If you are watching this show on YouTube, hello, little visual confirmation for you there. Hit the like button on this video. Be sure to subscribe and of course, tell a friend if you think they would like this show as well. You know, how's it going for you on this Wednesday? It's good. It's good. I'm excited for warmer weather sometime in the future.

And I have it so easy, too. It's so easy. Look, my wife and I are like shivering. We had an anniversary dinner and we ate outside at a restaurant. For Palo Alto, it was pretty cold. It was like 48 or something and we just huddled over a over a little fake fire and and had some cuban food it was it was it was it was good it was good to get out of the house it was good to pretend like things were

normal even though once we got out there we're like this is really not normal well i'm glad you had a meal outside i'm sorry really really happy for you and i'm glad you had a nice meal for your anniversary but that's about where it ends for me i'm sorry no sympathy i'm sorry you had to wear a sweatshirt or a sweater it's a tough tough break for you oh i know hey i'm laughing i I do really feel badly. Paul Spohr is in Austin, and the situation in Texas is not good. And so I hope that everybody listening has power and heat and is doing okay. Yeah, it's much worse than I realized when I first heard about the story.

I was like, okay, the power is out. It'll come back on in a couple of hours. And it's been a couple of days for a lot of our friends out there. So hang in there. Hopefully things get better for you soon. We're definitely thinking about you if you're dealing with those conditions right now. Very scary stuff going on in Texas. Let's get to some of the late pitchers that we really like.

We'll talk about guys we like first and then get to those questions that I mentioned up top. I want to start kind of in the 300 range in terms of ADP. So we're talking about truly late round pitchers. If we're in a 12-team league, the last couple pitchers on your roster. If we're in a 15-team league, maybe more of like your SP6, SP7 types. But definitely guys that are going to make a mixed league impact in our opinion, even if they're being drafted as sort of fringy pitchers right now. I am still a believer in Tarek Skubal, and I think part of the appeal is that, at a bare minimum,

I think we're going to get a lot of strikeouts. I think his hold on a rotation spot is relatively safe. Even if he were to get optioned to begin the season, I don't think he'd stay at AAA for very long. I think the Tigers want to see the next stage of his development happen in Detroit. The major concern or the biggest concern in the profile is going to be command. But I think there's a kind of a philosophical approach that we've talked about on this show before where when you get to this range of the draft, you can take on some command risk. You can take on someone that's in the high 80s or low 90s with their command plus score,

especially when you're looking at someone that can be well above average with strikeout rate and possibly someone that can put all the pieces together and be better in the ratios than the projections would lead us to believe. Yeah, I'm struggling with the fact that he ended up with a below average stuff score. And that doesn't really line up with my lived experience of watching him. line up with my lived experience of watching him um i guess what i'm seeing is uh the fastball doesn't really have uh much ride um the change up doesn't have much movement it does have a good velocity gap um and then i guess the curve is pretty slow actually at 76 miles an hour And even though it has a large where it has a large gap a large break. I Think maybe the curve is not good. He threw 46 of them and didn't get he got 8% whips. That's below average

Maybe it's a pitch he can use to get a grounder. But even there he got zero grounders on it So let's take the curve aside. Let's say the curve is not that good. Still looks like he has a good change-up slider mix. Got 15% whiffs on the foreseam, so maybe the ride isn't that big a deal. I don't know. I don't know. What do you think?

Like, I think... Three-pitch lefty, man. And 95 miles an hour. Yeah. Yes. I think you can get by with suboptimal movement and suboptimal ride when you have that velo. And I guess because he's only 24, I'm not worried about the velo dipping. I think we're at the beginning of the career.

So I tend to be a little more optimistic here. I would say that his projections are pretty good. I believe he's a 75th ranked pitcher by the bat. ADP has him at 84th, and I have a big up question mark next to him in my rankings. I would also say that stuff is not infallible. If you followed along, you've noticed that I've worked with driveline for a stuff number. I've worked with Ethan Moore for a stuff number and he's revamped it while we work together. And so it's not that it's not such a refined stat that has gone through so

many iterations that we feel strongly about it. Like war, for example, has, you know, three different versions at least and has gone through a unification, a replacement level that changed everybody's War a little bit,

has added framing, added pop-ups, stuff like that. So the stats are often more living and breathing than people want to give them credit. So I did have have scuba really low just because i couldn't you know the command wasn't there and the stuff number wasn't there and i couldn't really make the argument but just looking like watching him pitch and looking at uh the numbers in a raw form i think that um i'm gonna move him up. It's way too low at 150. I think he belongs at least in the sort of 115s,

at least where, you know, there's TJ Antone, you know, Trevor Williams, Griffin Canning. He's got to be at least there. And, you know, 84 on the ADP, I guess so. But, you know, on the ADP I guess so but you know in my 84 I've got some veterans that are that are to have things that speak for them Zach Eflin is around there Brad Keller is the seam shifted weight god Jay Happ Jose Quintana Mitch Keller like Mitch Keller seems like Scooble but he's hopefully made a couple adjustments already.

You know what I mean? He's dealt with some of the growing pains, yeah. I mean, that's possible for sure. And his stuff number is a 110 next to a very similar command number. So after Dane Dunning, Nate Pearson, okay. He should be maybe next to Nate Pearson. And Nate Pearson is at 88 in mind. So I'll push him into the back end of the top 100, I think.

Yeah, so I've got Pearson, Howard, Casey Mize, Mitch Keller, Michael Kopech, who has to drop a little bit because they're going to manage his innings pretty carefully. Yeah, I saw the tweet from James Feagan, covers the White Sox for the Athletic, that they're going to try and handle Kopech the way the Dodgers have handled Julio Urias. Someone was quick to point out that all but one of Urias' regular season appearances last year were starts. I took that

information from Han as more of a 2019-2020 usage. I think about the postseason and how Urias came out of the pen. I think that's more likely what we're going to see. I don't think it was some sort of code that, no, he's actually going to start. We're just going to make him earn it. I think it's going to be a flexible role since he opted out of 2020. But I've got a couple of the guys in that range that are part of this conversation, though, too. Scooble, Kopech, Turnbull, Dylan Cease.

I have those guys all lumped together in the 80s. Yeah, and that's your upside grab play. That's where I've got Dean Kramer as an example. Albert Alzalea, who I think actually I have a down arrow on him too. Just because now it looks like Alzalea and Mills are fighting for the last rotation spot in Chicago. But yeah, Dunning, Keller, kramer uh copec yeah uh i i that's a place i like to put players like this and if you're looking like for a rubric um there this this area uh the sort of 80 to 100 area has a lot of really terrible command scores but a lot of really good uh

stuff scores and i think you know all things being equal, you want both. But at some point in the process, you have to make a guess in one direction or the other and just make a leap. And I think that it's not necessarily that these pitchers, and I'm going to look into how command ages. That's written down here on my little Post-it notes. You know, that's how I, that's how I work. I have just a bunch of papers with things on them, words on them. One says command aging.

Anyway, I want to look at that, but I think that command can actually be affected by like, let's say Scooble stops throwing his curveball because he can't command it and doesn't get good results. Then his overall command score is going to look better. His overall command might be about the same. I think that there are some things that could be done. Like Mitch Keller, maybe he

starts throwing a cutter and he can command that pitch and things still fall in line from there. I'll bet on stuff in this sort of 80 to 100 and though school doesn't have the same stuff number um just sort of eyeballing it i think he probably there's something we're missing there and i think the results as he cruised through the minors to get you even more excited we don't usually see the big league debut last year a a 563 ERA,

but a 122 whip, pretty good number in terms of the zone contact rate too. Scooble can throw pitches in the zone and not get hit frequently. The problem last year was that he had a major home run issue. He's never really had a home run issue in the minors before. I think some of that is a little bit misleading because I think he's just overpowering for high A and double A type hitters, right? So it doesn't mean he won't go through an adjustment phase, but I think there's quite a bit here to like despite the ugly ERA that we saw from Scooble in the debut. Josh Lindblom is another guy that goes well after pick 300 that I increasingly want to move up in my rankings. A.388 FIP last year against that.516 whip, similar to Scooble, a.128 whip,

so not really that bad in that category. Called strikes and whiffs, the CSW really good at 30.1%, and a very deep arsenal of pitches. We still, at this time, don't know which ballparks are adding cubidors for this season. I wonder if Miller Park is actually one of the parks that might do that, though, given how homer-friendly that park tends to play.

Obviously, it's a speculative sort of thing to even consider upgrading Brewers pitchers based on the possibility that they are one of those teams, but I think the arsenal, the command not being that bad, and the fact that Lindblom was showing a few little flashes late in the year

of maybe turning things around, those all give me some hope that his second season in Milwaukee will actually be a pretty good one. Yeah. I'm reminded a little bit of what it was like for Merrill Kelly to come back over from Korea. And I think he had to relearn the strike zone. The strike zone is different there than it is here.

He had to start throwing harder. I think with Lindblom, I'm not sure what the adjustment will be, but I do like that he has so many pitches. And I think that the tweak could come with any one of those pitches. It's a little bit like a more veteran turnbull situation. I mean, he legit shows up at Brooks as throwing one, two, three, four, five,

six pitches more than 8% of the time. Even if you combine the changeup and the splitter, that's a legit 5-pitch mix. So I have some confidence that he can find his way out of this. And I have been looking at his rankings. Where do you have him? I've got him outside my top 100 in the last published version. He's going to probably jump up into that 90 range, though. And again, we're talking about an ADP around 400.

A good cheap strikeouts play at the very least. Maybe the other thing that's getting me excited about Lindblom, too, he had a thread back in January from his own Twitter account, and he was explaining that one of his goals during the off season was to increase the spin efficiency on his fastball because the efficiency wasn't good for what he's trying to do with that pitch. So he put a video up, he had some stuff with the Rapsodo machine. I mean, it's just being excited because it looks like someone who has a good idea of what might've gone wrong last year and is at least taking some pretty active and seemingly smart steps to correcting that problem. The price is so low.

It's like you draft him. If it's not working out, an easy cut. You're drafting him with the expectation that you're going to sit him in tough matchups until he gives you a reason not to anyway. I think that's the other key here. You're talking about someone who goes in for two start weeks, in for decent matchups, and gets pulled for more difficult spots yeah that thing that we

call kind of like a bench streamer where you have him on your bench but you use him um judiciously i would say that the traditional metric like now traditional metric agreement form is actually fairly strong he had a really good strikeout minus walk rate which is kind of useful in small samples and then the stuff that's not useful all went in the wrong direction his babbitt was bad his strand rate was bad um you know so there's certain things that do speak well of of his candidacy you know his whip was good i you know one of the first things i ever did in in in fantasy was just to look at guys who had good whips and bad ERAs and buy those guys. It works. It actually can work really well. And the other bump for the Brewers pitching staff, we don't know about the humidor. We do know the defense should be better, right? I mean,

you put Colton Wong in at second base and move Keston Hero to first base. You go from one of the worst defensive players at that position to one of the best, and you get Lorenzo Kane back in the outfield and center. I think that goes a long way towards helping the entire staff as well. If you need another reason to get on board with Lindblom as a late, late target, I'll share three for now. My third one is Luke Weaver,

and there's some injury risk because he had the forearm strain in 2019. I think there's some similarities to Lindblom where you have a guy that's really dialed in to what he needs to do to possibly put all the pieces together. And I don't know what it is about this Arizona team. Maybe I just like them a little more than most people do. I don't really understand why. Weaver's still 27, even in the shortened season.

The K rate was decent. It wasn't off the charts good or anything like that. But the home run issue we saw from him last year was really the worst it's ever been since his debut in 2016, so I don't think that's necessarily his true talent home run rate. He was at 1.73 homers per nine. Not really expecting that to be who Luke Weaver is going forward either. If you split the difference between 19 and 20, you probably do get ratios close to the projections. The bats got him at 471 for the ERA and 135 for the whip. Maybe it's the 294 and 107 in 2019 that are playing tricks on me, you know, but I'm taking the chance on Luke Weaver as one of my last pitchers, because even though there's health risk, I think the command is good and the arsenal looks deep enough for him to possibly turn the lineup over three times. Yeah, the command is good. And

I think that his stuff number on my rankings is a little bit of something that's in flux. If you look at his monthly velocities, he lost a tick right before he got hurt. He lost a tick on all of his pitches, so that will affect his stuff number there, his overall stuff number. He also lost vertical movement on his fastball. His cutter started dropping more. He lost a drop on his curveball. So I would just assume, without without knowing that these are kind of injury related things you know um and if you're looking at the overall numbers one thing that is interesting about him is that his foreseam doesn't look like it has great ride but he's a real drop and drive

guy and so his foreseam actually does have a good vertical approach angle basically um and what that's saying is like because he drops down so low and then has a little bit of ride uh the pitch looks like it rides more because the release point's lower and so it comes across the plate um at an angle that's difficult for especially for low ball hitters to hit so that combination of sort of drop and drive a little bit of ride and then that devastating change up i think is just a really good foundation. Worst case scenario, he kind of goes through some Michael Waka issues. I think there's a similar picture there.

But Michael Waka also gave us a couple good years, and Weaver is young enough where you say, I think the cutter, he'll figure out the cutter, and then we'll have a legit three-pitch situation here. And the curve has been going up and down. So I think there's still a chance that with the right amount of health and the right amount of normal ramp-up to the season, that we could see something good out of Luke Weaver.

Let's get a few from you, later pitchers that you've been targeting or going to target as more drafts unfold. I know you've had at least one in the books already, but who else sort of catches your eye in this range? I like to take some bets that are against my own grain and sort of against the grain of what I'm seeing in drafts. And so, you know, JT Brewbreaker, uh, represents to me, um, you know, along with Alec Mills, um, a kind of play at maybe finding the next Kyle Hendricks. Um, these are guys that don't have standout velocity, but they have many pitches. Um, and they seem to really know how to put the ball where they want to. There are guys that have, Brubaker has 112 command plus, Alec Mills has 114,

and they have slightly better stuff than Zach Eflin, who has a similar command number. They're also a little bit younger, so it's like the promise, right? The upside. We're not supposed to say that word anymore. So yeah, Brubaker's a guy a guy for me also i want to point out

that um that uh command i'm not saying that like the work that i did uh was definitive um and um we did some cool stuff where we looked at what command and stuff um predicted and one of the things we looked at was that command was better than stuff at predicting how many innings per appearance. So basically, I've talked about this on the podcast before, but the command was good at telling who would be a starter. So what I see with Brubaker that's very interesting is I see a very high floor, a very high likelihood he's a starter all year,

a high likelihood that the team doesn't necessarily feel like they need to massage his innings so much. It's not a Michael Kopech situation. Nobody probably thinks that JT Brubaker is going to turn into their ace. And they probably feel like they need to get some innings out of somebody, and Brubaker looks like the guy who's set up to do it, which means he's a really good bench uh guy to have in leagues where we're all going to be chasing innings all year and so to have a guy who's going to pitch in Pittsburgh against you know other offenses that may not be great um you know and and you know pitch in St. Louis. So I feel like Brubaker's a really good guy to have on your bench in that same way that you were talking about

where you might use Lindblom in the right matchups. I think Brubaker's matchups might honestly be easier to spot. At home against most offenses, in St. Louis against them, don't pitch him in Milwaukee sort of view. What kind of K rate do you think we're getting from Brubaker? I mean, the stuff situation suggests that, and that is the risk, I think, with going with command over stuff, guys, is that you're attacking the sort of walk rate component,

and strikeouts are still a stat that we were all chasing. But, you know, in terms of K-9, I'm going to take the over on the projected 7.7s that they've got. A lot of those I think are just reaching back to A-ball in 2018 strikeout rates. I don't know. If you look at his minor leagues, the strikeout rates. I don't know. If you look at his minor leagues,

the strikeout rate for Brubaker is up and down. Just pretty wildly oscillating. I'm going to say sort of like 8.5-9. That's pretty good. If he ends up getting up into that range, I think he can be pretty happy. Basically, free at the end of drafts. I'm with you on the opportunity, too, because

behind Mitch Keller and JT Brubaker, Roto-Wire have those guys 1-2. They have Brault, Chad Kuhl, Tyler Anderson. I mean, there's no one there that's totally locked in. There's not really a prospect knocking on the door to take a spot just yet. Their pitching's just not there depth-wise. So I think there's a lot of wiggle room

for all of those starters. So if you like any of them, if you like Brault or you like Kuhl for really deep leagues, I think there's a chance that they get plenty of work as well. I like those other two guys too, but one thing that we've seen

in the usage of them is, you know, kind of three and four inning starts. And I don't think that's necessarily because they're babying them for the future or anything I think it's because of their arsenal and their shortcomings Brolt's best pitches is fastball I don't know that he has the number of secondary pitches that you want to turn a lineup over a bunch and um uh the case with Kula is like he's basically a fastball breaking ball guy

so I think he has the same problem turning over lineups i think in some ways the pirates are mimicking the rays uh with those two guys where they're like hey we're cool with them we're gonna get four innings from them that's fine you know we'll figure out the other five um so but i i'm interested in both of them because you know one tiny little tweak both those guys like if bro bro found a found a better secondary i think uh he could take off and if cool you know uh either glass nowed it or uh or added a pitch like those two i would really you know jason collette always has the um the new pitch tracker like i'd be listening on those two uh if there was a new pitch yeah can, can't rule it out either. The way Pittsburgh approaches pitching is a little bit different now

than it was just a few years ago. We saw that a bit with Joe Musgrove and some things he was doing with his approach, I think in 2019 and a little bit in 2020 as well. Cal Quantrill is a name that I wanted to bring up here because I know you've been interested in him in the past. In Cleveland, it looks like there's a really good chance he opens the year as the number five starter.

I think there is some injury risk in that rotation. So if you believe in Logan Allen, it may not take that long for Allen to get his opportunity in Cleveland. But for me, there is kind of a clear gap in pure skills between Quantrill and Allen. What kind of ceiling do you think Cal Quantrill brings to the table? And does he sort of fit into this bucket of guys in that 300 to 400 range that you actually do want to stash away on your bench because you think there is enough ceiling for him to make a pretty big impact in a mixed league this season? I mean, I 100% think that he's got the job over Allen. And I do want to see where his velo will sit when he's a starter. He's been pushing the velo up more, but he's also been pitching fewer innings for start. So if he can hold 94 plus,

and maybe he can for his first two seasons, Remember how Carlos Carrasco went into the pen and then came out and basically just kept his high velocity. I think that they could be doing something similar with Quantrill where they're like, Hey, push that velocity, push that velocity. Now,

when we get you starting, try to keep that velocity. Yeah. And if that's the case, then I could see him performing on the upper end of his projections, getting that same sort of eight and a half strikeouts per nine mid twos walk rate, kind of brew breaker ish, but in a slightly different approach. Cleveland, I think Quantrill could be a guy who starts fast and may be a guy to sell early in the season

because it's a weird stuff command profile where he's basically league average in both. Not a lot of people who are like that. Other guys that kind of pop up that aren't necessarily the same pitcher but have

similar stuff is like Joe Musgrove. That makes me want to just drop the old eat this, not that. Take Cal Quantrill. Don't pay the premium for Joe Musgrove in San Diego. Jordan Montgomery. I like him too. Jordan Montgomery is going in the 60s

and Cal Quantrill is going in the 60s and Kyle Quantrill is going in the 116 range. And I have Quantrill ahead of Jordan Montgomery. So, I don't know. I think that Kyle Quantrill is a very interesting lower ceiling because Brubaker has that standout command, right? And if he

just makes it, if he puts it all together, then that's there's nothing standout about Quantrill, except for his situation. In fact, actually, Savali, I think, is a good comp. And probably an even better sort of ethos, not that, because Musgrove maybe has one extra level above those two guys or a half level above those guys. There is a reasonable price gap, though, between Savali and Quantrill. And I think the thing with Quantrill that might sneak past some people is that velo that you mentioned.

And even as a starter with the Padres in 2019, averaged 94.5 on the fastball. So I think he can hold that little extra tick that we saw last year. At least it's not impossible. As far as the secondaries go, I mean, it's fastball, slider, occasional changeup. We saw more changeups from Quantrill during his time in San Diego than we did in 2020. Do you trust the third pitch enough to say that he's got three he can lean on, or are you a little worried that he's more of a two-pitch guy?

No, I actually trust it. One of the things that's interesting about his development is that the change-up came first you know um and for his career the change-up has average whiffs and uh has done well and um the slider came second and he always thought it didn't have great shape he doesn doesn't love the shape. He's talked to me about it in great detail. But as he's thrown it more, he's gotten better command. And one of the things that we found when we did command versus stuff was that command was more important than stuff on sliders. So as I see it, he's got two strike throwing pitches in the four-seam and slider, and he's got one action pitch in the change um well i guess the sinker he's gone to the sinker more but any case the fastball and the uh

the fastball and the slider are strikes uh more often and the change up is an action pitch a whiff pitch so um you know that's a little bit borderline still you kind of want to have two action pitches you know um but just by command alone he's gotten a 16% whiff rate on the slider of his career and that's above average so uh i i i you know i don't know that the indians have gotten their full hands into him. They are famously really great at game day preparation. Can they coax the most out of this 3-4 pitch mix? I would say I give every Indian a slight boost up because of what they've done in the past. Again, we're talking about this range

where you can afford to miss, you can afford to be wrong, and if you get lucky or if you find someone that ends up sticking on your roster all year, you're getting a difference maker at a buck or two in an auction or one of your very last picks in a mixed league. Let me give late game, late sort of really deep league uh guys like a three-pack here um the guys that i find interesting that i didn't even rank in the top 130 um and i just want to point out that thomas hatch uh you know he's a great stuff number 118 stuff that

part of that was achieved as a as a reliever and so we're gonna have to see uh where hatch sits uh they're going to keep him stretched out they're going to keep him and julian merriweather stretched out in toronto um i think internally i get the sense that uh you know merriweather is slightly ahead, uh, hatch has the benefit of having a full arsenal, uh, at least four pitches and, um, you know, this great stuff number that, that, that goes along with it. Um, I think that, uh, I have hatch ahead of Merriweather. Um, and that's meaningful because I'm pretty sure that the blue Jays will need at least one of those guys for a significant amount of starts. I mean, we're talking about Ryu, Ray, Roark, Pearson, who has had injury concerns and maybe not established himself 100% as a major league starter.

Steven Matz, who may not be any good and is also hurt all the time. And then Ross Stripling, who needs to kind of figure some stuff out with a slider and get something back to get back in. Trent Thornton. So it's a little bit of a grab bag there where I think Merriweather and Hatch could slide in there. And at the very least, if Hatch, if either of them ends up in the bullpen, if Yates is hurt at all or just takes a step back because of the surgery, they could be closers.

I mean, I think Hatch and Merriweather are my favorite non-Romano Yates characters. So if you're talking about a deep league where you want to have an extra arm around that could end up closing, could end up starting, Hatch is my guy for you. The other two guys I know a little bit less about, or actually I know a lot about Logan Webb. His stuff number is only slightly above average. Command number is slightly below average. But there's something there in this ever-evolving ability

to use his four pitches better. He came in as a sink or change guy, and he's trying to kind of add the four seam and breaking balls in a way where he'll, you know, and there's that kind of has four pitches, has decent command, could tweak something and pop. He's a seam shifted waker and a spin mirror guy. So I think there's something there for Logan Webb. And I think that Park will play a little bit more pitch friendly this year because I think they're going there for Logan Webb. I think that Park will play a little bit more pitch-friendly this year because I think they're going to take the tarps out from the alleyways.

Then the last one is Kyle Cody. Here's a guy I don't know much about. I just like his stuff number. I'm just going to be honest. I think that any Texas Rangers starter has a chance. He was sitting 95 with good ride and two good secondaries in the changeup and slider. And I think the opportunity is there for him in Texas. I think the Rangers are going to kind of sift through players

and kind of see who's going to stick around for the future. Cody is listed on Fangraphs as the seventh pitcher, but he's behind guys like Allard, Fulte-Navitz, Arihara. All three of those guys could go in either direction fairly quickly. Yeah, and there was a question. This will be the first of the questions we take. Actually, Kyle Cody came up twice. And the question came from Taylor.

Am I crazy for thinking the Rangers have an interesting rotation also related to what do you think of Kyle Cody, Mike Fulton, Evich, and Kohei Ariharas? We've basically answered Taylor's question on Kyle Cody. I think he fits as a really deep, like a draft and hold or AL only end game slash reserve pick. Fulty, if he's got the Velo back, I mean, I think he's flawed even with the Velo, but definitely good enough to be back on the mixed league radar if everything looks good

from that perspective this spring. Yeah. One year, $2 million contract. dollar contract uh you know what he didn't get was uh a deal on the level of um you know paxton or or any of the other guys that we need to see something from you know what i mean health-wise um and i also just think that his upside uh if he's all healthy again is probably in the fours era wise again because we only have that really that one season where it all came together for folty um so to me when i look at that uh that rangers staff he's the soft spot for me i think uh that's the that's the easy way in for cody and then cody just it looks like he uh missed 2019 to injury i think there's a little bit of just the unfortunate shape of a career with respect to COVID. Imagine you miss all of 2019 for injury,

you come back, and then you don't even have the minor leagues again. I think that the projection systems are therefore putting too much weight on the 22 innings that he's done in the major leagues because his strikeout rates and whiff rates before 2019 were all really good. So, you know, pair that with his good stuff number and you have some reason for optimism. Yeah, I would put Cody in the Thomas Hatch bin for sure, though, in terms of the types of leagues where I'm thinking about those guys. Maybe closer to getting in, though, right? Yeah, I would say fewer options to take a spot in that rotation.

I think the difference for me, you mentioned Hatch maybe ending up in the pen. If Yates isn't healthy, saves are a possibility there. Cody won't have that. He'll go back to the minors or something. I like the idea of being able to back into some saves with a guy that doesn't work out as a starter. There's going to be a few of those that we get to over the course of this episode.

I think, for the sake of Taylor's first question, no, you're not crazy if you think the Rangers have an interesting rotation. For the limited resources they've spent to build their starting rotation, they at least have some interesting names in there with some pretty interesting skills. And the park playing very pitcher-friendly

in the early days of its existence also makes that more interesting. Yeah. Could be a really tough place to score runs, which is great for the entire staff. Thanks a lot for the question, Taylor. Let's get to this question from Steve G. There's two Steve Gs that weigh in on a lot of

our shows. We appreciate both of them. Hey, Steve G's. Steve G 2.0, Steve Gisoul. Who is the best late round sleeper starting pitcher and why is it TJ Antone? Yeah, I tried not to. I saw that on the rundown. I tried not to step on myself by mentioning him too early. I absolutely like him. He's one of the three people in the minor leagues that added the most spin year over year. That's something I got from a source. So his stuff took a leap forward, and I think that will probably mean some sort of disconnect between his minor league stats and what could be his upside going forward. So you see that much better whiff rate and strikeout rate than he ever had in the minors last year. And you could say it's just fluke, but you could also understand that he went from starting games to relieving, and then he also had this massive spin rate increase. So I like him. I think that he belongs a little bit more in the kind of hatch conversation because I also like Michael Lorenzen, and I think Michael Lorenzen is in the rotation. Basically, what you're rooting for is either injury or Wade Miley to not get it back together again.

I guess that's doable. That's possible. I think with TJ Antone, he's probably not a mixed-league dart for me until later in draft season. Again, draft and hold its own things. It's 50 rounds. But if he has a good spring, he could absolutely be a guy that's in that ADP 400 range. And I think the changes to his stuff are kind of breaking the previous scouting reports. He's definitely more of a pop-up sort of guy.

So on the watch list for sure. And definitely kind of qualifies as a sleeper in the truer sense. Yeah, I have him with some interesting kind of six starter, uh, sleeper types, uh, Corbin Martin, uh, coming off injury, he'll be probably fifth or sixth in the Arizona rotation. Um, and I always liked his stuff. Um, uh, Luis Patino, uh, is right there where we don't just don't know his role and how many innings he'll get uh this year um you know uh like i guess a kyle right he's close to i would have him above all those i do have him above all those uh but it is uh in that sort of 115 to 120 range where we don't know that he has a role yet. And that's, that's going to be important because you're going to be chasing innings all

year. And so role does matter. There's going to be a significant amount of movement in these rankings when we start understanding who's in the rotation and who's not. Yeah. The difference between pitchers in the 75 to 90 range versus the 100 to 120 range oftentimes is just role. And when that opportunity is going to be there.

Brandon Champion wants to know, anything there with Justice Sheffield? I remember watching Sheffield in the Fall League a few years ago. It was when he was still a Yankees prospect. Had three pitches at the time. Not like oversized or anything like that, where you looked at him and said, definitely going to be a great long-term starter.

But I thought he looked good when I saw him back in the fall league. That's always sort of stuck with me. I think that was the first year they were messing with the pitch clock. He had a couple of times where the pitch clock ran out, didn't seem to get rattled or anything like that. So just see like a guy that was in control out there with three pitches. And it hasn't clicked for him yet at the big league level you look at the scouting grades a couple of above average pitchers pitches with the fastball and the slider a decent change up command was always the question a 358 era last year in a 130 whip in the shortened season definitely looks pretty good on the surface underlying numbers we see improvements with

the walk rate a slight dip in k, and a really nice home run rate. Whether or not he's going to be above average at controlling homers, I think, is a pretty big question to answer as we try and figure out what his future looks like. One thing that's interesting about him is that he's a pitch mix change guy. He's a pitch mix change guy. And those always are interesting to me when they kind of go hand in glove with a change in performance. So he gave up on the fourth seam that he'd been trying to throw and went completely to the sinker in 2020. And, you know, there's reasons why in this league you want people to throw the four seam. I wonder if, you know, the big thing for him is unlocking a few more Ks while retaining the ability

to suppress homers. I mean, if he can get that to an eight and a half, you know, you know, strikeouts per nine kind of situation and also keep the home run rate under one, then he's going to blow by all his projections and be kind of a low fours guy and be very useful in most leagues. So Sheffield for me is, the added upside is,

what if he brings the four seam back? And not as a foundational sort of strike pitch, but as an action pitch. What if he brings the four seam back as a more occasional high in the zone for whiffs an action pitch? What if he brings the foreseeing back as a more occasional high in the zone for whiffs kind of pitch? That's the last kind of piece of upside I think that he has left. So if he clicks, I think my prediction is that's why. If not, I think you've got sort of a mid fours guy who will hopefully not give up as many homers, may give up a few more

hits, have a kind of not exciting whip, but be an AL only, useful in AL only for sure. I added it all up together and he still made my top 80. So I'm fairly into him. I think I might've dinged him a little bit because of the six-man rotation and how that's going to impact his workload. I had him in the 110 to 120 range, kind of like Jose Quintana at this point. But I think the difference is with Sheffield, there could be an up arrow. There could be improvement. With Quintana, it's more just holding on and trying to give you quality outings

and just maintain low to mid fours ERAs. Sheffield, I think, could get you into the high threes over a full season with kind of a league average sort of whip. I mean, in the zone, he's going to get hit a lot, but he does get a lot of ground balls. And I guess I'm more optimistic, not expecting the home run rate we saw in the shortened season, but I'm a little more optimistic than I am with most pitchers that he's going to be okay at suppressing home runs, and that helps to offset the limited Ks that I'm expecting from Justice Sheffield. So fine as a late flyer, but I don't think he has a crazy high ceiling. I think he's just a really nice mid-rotation starter if it all comes together. John Hagelin wants to know, can Anthony Descafani pull a Kevin Gossman in San Francisco? I definitely got dinged up by Descafani a few times

in NL Labor. In that league, of course, guys are locked into your active lineup unless they go on the IL or get sent down or you cut them. Chase Anderson. Yeah. See, there's one in each league all the time, right? Everybody's got somebody. I mean, the park, as you mentioned before, it wasn't as pitcher-friendly as it had been in the past. It's still pitcher-friendly. It's still a good place to be. It's still a place where you're going to err on the side of starting someone who's decent at home.

Does Anthony Discovani in San Francisco get you a little bit excited? Because, I mean, Cincinnati's a place where home run rates get blown blown up and San Francisco is one of those places where they get suppressed pretty good. So that alone, I think, could swing the ratios a bit. Shades of Yvonne Nova to Pittsburgh. No, that's a good way to get me off the scent. Well, I mean, it did work for a couple of years, right? One thing that is a little bit different for Gossman is that Gossman was seeing a bit of a velocity renaissance before he got to San Francisco. I don't really see that in Discofani's profile,

although he was still throwing 95, so that's good. One thing I will point out is at choice underscore fielder had a list of pitchers that would see the most benefit from the dead and ball, and Discofani was number one. So that's just the dead and ball. So if you take

the dead and ball and add the park to it, maybe we're looking at 1.1 homers per nine. The last time he looking at 1.1 homers per nine the last time he gave up 1.1 homers for nine he had a 3.2 adr ray for the reds so maybe you know um who are the other reclamation projects that you know the giants are doing this now yeah they got a couple i mean aaron sanchez just landed there anthony gialddi wanted to know for super, super late. I mean, I would say Aaron Sanchez kind of has some of the same appeal of a lot of the guys we've talked about, kind of similar to TJ Anton, where depending on how he looks this spring,

he goes from draft and hold flyer in the last 10 rounds to someone I would think about at the very end of like a 15-team mixed league because Aaron Sanchez, the problem's never been stuff. And we saw the curveball usage change when he got traded to Houston, got hurt really soon after that happened. Kind of a guy we've forgotten about a little bit in some ways.

I mean, if the velo is there this spring, I'm excited. I was always excited about Aaron Sanchez getting an opportunity outside of the AL East. Now he gets one possibly in San Francisco. Yeah. And apparently he already hit a 80, a 98. That's nuts. But the other appeal here too, if for some reason it doesn't work for him as a starter, that is one of the most wide open closer situations possible. And I think we've seen San Francisco with Farhan Zayedi

take a starter and say, all right, it's not working as a starter anymore. Let's go to the late innings. And I could see him being a right-handed sort of Pomerantz where he comes in and he is just electric working in short relief closing out games. And if you want to say, oh, he hit 98, I don't care. That's just one number. Dude has not hit 98 in a major league game uh

since 2017 yeah so uh you know i think that aaron sanchez is a little bit like that thomas hatch situation but um you can't use that expression anymore on steroids right no no not a good expression it's a retail version of that, right? I don't know. It's a, it's a little bit more exciting version of the hatch situation where, yeah, I think he could end up being useful in one or two, one of two different ways. And if he's, you know, 2017, it was a long time ago in 2016, he actually had, you know, stats you won on your team. 2016, he actually had stats you won on your team. So I'm cautiously optimistic about it.

He wasn't in my rankings. I'm kind of trying to imagine where I'd put him now. I had Discofani at 128. I think I'd put him Sanchez above. I think I'd put him into maybe Lindblom territory in the 110s maybe below that, maybe in the TJ Anton Domingo German, kind of 118-119 situation I think he makes the top 130 at least is my initial reaction to that signing

and having that number, that one piece of information makes me a little bit more excited than with Discofani, where I think that it might be interesting to hear, um, you know, pitching coach speak in the, in the spring. I'd love to hear, uh, someone give an interview, you know, Andrew Bagley gives an interview with, with Discofani about how he's going to get it all back. And I'd love to kind of try to read between the lines about like what pitch he's going to turf and what pitch he's going to add and that sort of deal um but uh you know like Cueto I'll have uh above Discofani but just because I think he's steady

eddy boring uh useful half the time kind of deal uh Gossman way ahead. Discofani, Wood. Wood and Webb. You know, what did I have? Webb. I have Webb 137. And I have Wood 141. They're all kind of interesting with the park. But I wouldn't push Discofani to Gossman territories.

Not present Gossman, but like even how excited i was that's a little bit more like sanchez i'm a little bit more sanchez excited like i was when i heard that gossman was going to san francisco yeah it's just like the style of the the giants front office in terms of the types of players they go after i think they they're taking shots in the right places on the right types of profiles. And if they hit, it's going to help them via trade, or it's at least going to get them through the season and kind of, I don't know, make them at least fun to watch. That's kind of nice to have that option. And also, I think they're using a strategy that works for their park, right? Instead of lamenting, you know, I think the last regime did a little bit near the end of their tenure, did a little bit of lamenting like, oh, we can't land the big hitters anymore. We can't land the big fish because, A, the can give a person a bonus when they're not playing.

Part of why Bauer got such a huge bonus on his contract, a $10 million bonus, is that he can, I think, get the bonus when he's living somewhere else and then move to L.A. to play and get a lower base salary. So there's ways to kind of structure deals to help people get around taxes. So I don't think that's it. I think they were changing the park a little bit to make it more attractive to the next Giancarlo Stanton, who famously refused to go there. Bryce Harper, they were close on. But instead of sort of crying about it, they've sort of, they try to make it a little bit more, play a little bit more fair

and then also take advantage of it. Where do you want to sign if you're Drew Smiley? Where do you want to sign if you're Kevin Goss? Where do you want to sign if you're Aaron Sanchez? Where do you want to sign if you're Alex Wood? You know what I mean? You want to sign in San Francisco as a pitcher on that bounce back situation.

And so they just, they look for a velo. I think a lot of times I've heard Farhan say before that, like, once you see a certain velo from somebody, you can, that's in there. You, you can, that sort of describes their max velo describes what they can do later. And so, you know, as soon as they saw him hit 98, I'm sure they, they had a contract ready for him yeah some nice flyers there for all of those reasons in the back of that san francisco rotation we talked a lot about the marlins top three starters i believe it was back on part

one of our starting picture preview had a question for michael waterloo wasn't even a question it was eliezer it was just just that. That was the whole tweet. Exclamation. Six starts from him last year. Good K rate, great walk rate. I mean, everything on paper looked really good. Problem, of course, it was only 25 and two-thirds innings, but we saw it in 2019 for some stretches, a 124 whip against the 503 ERA. If you were a believer, you were talking yourself into maybe a low fours ERA. I think it's possible. I look at Eliezer Hernandez and the swinging strike rate in each of the last two seasons backs up the Ks. The stuff is different, to put it mildly. It's not premium velocity, right? It's the very funky slider that I think gets a lot of the whiffs that he gets.

the very funky slider that I think gets a lot of the whiffs that he gets. So is this real? Is this sustainable? And is this a skill set that we should trust? Because he's going a little earlier than a lot of the guys we're talking about. Eliezer Hernandez kind of goes in that pick 250 range. So clustered up there with James Paxton, who I end up with all the time, and Ryan Yarbrough, and Brady Singer, a spot where it's sort of choose your own adventure at that point in terms of what you're really looking for as you round out your staff. Yeah, I just, I have a worry that he is more use Merrill petite than a really great starter. Part of why I say that is that that pitch is so weird.

It's it's got curve ball movement. It's got curveball velocity and cutter movement. I've never seen a pitch like that. I have a feeling that it's surprising and at first very hard to time and then gets easier to time once you see it more. And part of my evidence for that is, well, very few people have seen him more than 10 times. of my evidence for that is, well, very few people have seen him more than 10 times. In his career, only 3, 6, 9, 10 batters have seen him, have had 10 plate appearances against him or more. And they're almost all Braves. And of the guys that have seen him that many times, only Trey Turner, Ozzy Alves, and Ender Enciarte

have an OPS under 900 against him. So, 10 guys. And if you want to count Ozuna, who has 9 plate appearances, you've got 11 guys that would basically average somewhere around a 1,000 OPS. And then when you start looking at guys who've seen him, one, two, three, four, five times, the numbers look a little better. And so I think, you know, he's, he's really hard to time up if you've never seen him before. And then he gets

easier, the more you see him. We just had a season where he just kept seeing the same teams over and over again. And now we're going to have a full season in front of us. I mean, it's a long-winded way of saying I don't believe. It's such a weird pitch that I think it's a trick pitch. I don't believe in him. It's fun, but I think the really high home run rate is deserved when you're talking about the velocity and just the overall mix that he's dealing with so it's going to make the ratios very volatile i mean especially

that era the bats got him at pretty much a two pitch pitcher right and what if you throw like a really slow cutter at a lefty like what's gonna happen there maybe eventually you give up a lot of homers yeah i think he's a little expensive for what he is. If he were going in the 400s, he'd be draftable maybe as a streamer for deeper mixed leagues. But in the 250 range, I'm just out. I'm glad people like him. I've got him in a keeper league, so maybe I can deal him away. In a real-life sense, I love it.

I love watching him pitch and just being like, what? If you haven't ever seen it, you have to go see it. Watch his breaking ball. It's very strange looking. It's very noticeable to the eye. You're like, that is super slow and it didn't do anything. And yet it worked. I love it.

But how long will it work? Yeah yeah that's where the concerns come in for me thanks a lot for the uh the prompt we'll call it wasn't really a question but thanks for the prompt michael got a strategy question here from richard sands group think and conventional wisdom is to go heavy on starting pitching early in drafts pocket aces or leave the first three rounds with two starters how do you guys like this strategy if you early in drafts, pocket aces, or leave the first three rounds with two starters. How do you guys like this strategy? Have you had any drafts yet where you did or did not do this? I think we talked about it briefly on a recent episode. You, I believe, are more on the side of making a point to get a couple of starters early. Is it two in

the first three rounds or is it more like two in the first four, two in the first five? I think there's a variance there. Like two in the first five seems pretty normal. Whereas two in the first three is more aggressive. And as Richard alludes to, it is becoming a bit more popular. Yeah, I can't do it, man. I can't do it. Like I said, I exclaimed an utterance of despair for pitchers into my rankings this year. And so

I just you know, you're gonna get, you want me to like use two of my first four picks to make sure I get you Darvish as my second pitcher when you know, I feel like I

could get Jack Flaherty in the next round or Zach Gallin in the next round. I saw a drawing from Chris Towers that I agreed with. It was a drawing where he had the top three or four as a tier and then the next sort of 15 as a tier i don't think there are pocket aces is my point i don't think there are enough aces for people to have pocket aces um i i just there's so many question marks that just start popping up if it's you know bauer and g lito's command plus if it's darvish's injury uh percentile um if it's jack flaherty's and aaron nola's up and down seasons in the past couple of seasons uh if it's max scherzer's back clayton kershaw's back i'd like to pause there i guess all of it uh but um you know i i don't see i don't

see the opportunity there for pocket aces i want to I want to have three bats and an arm in my first four rounds. Yeah, I'm looking at the labor mixed draft grid that went down on Tuesday night. And it looks like two teams did go pocket aces. Jeff Erickson from Rotowire had the eighth overall pick. He went Cole. DeGrom went seventh to Joe Pizapia, just for reference. So Cole was the second pitcher off the board. He got Lucas Giolito coming back through in the middle of round two.

That's two of the top five on some boards, so that sort of scratches the itch. Shane Bieber and Walker Bueller to Dr. Roto. He was drafted on the 10 spot. He was the other manager who did that. That actually would be pocket aces for me. I don't have Giolito in the top five, i have bieber and bueller in the top five so uh that's pretty pretty legendary i guess um what is whatever is whatever his best three bats so he went five straight hitters after going bieber bueller he went whit merrifield in the third lou Luis Robert in the fourth, Keston Hira in the fifth, Austin Meadows in the sixth,

and Matt Olsen in the seventh. Dude, he could come out of that with like a 230 batting average. Yeah, that's definitely possible. I mean, Olsen for sure is going to be lower end of the scale for average. Robert's got a lot of risk. Merrifield's a high volume, good average guy,

so there's a little bit of a foundation there. And Kestin Hira, I want him to be great, but he's priced down for a reason. I think in the fifth-sixth round, I think that's totally fine. I'm looking at the picks that went just before those turns. Starling Marte went one pick before Doc took Merrifield. If Marte were still there, I would have taken Marte over Merrifield. I just think Starling Marte

is a slightly better player. If you don't worry as much about steals... You wouldn't have the same batting average risk, yeah. Right. If you flip Merrifield for Springer and you take... You could win a Rosarino over

Luis Robert. I don't know about that. That's a tough call to make, too. I think because of the batting average risk, a Rosarena over Robert is something I would increasingly consider if I'm taking one of those guys in that fourth-round range. I guess the way it came together doesn't make me all that excited about it, but every draft is going to be different, and then auctions, of course, are a totally different animal, too.

Yeah, I think I would like to make the caveat that in an auction i could see especially in the nl i think i could see going for pocket aces where you basically build a rotation that's two uh two thirty five dollar pitchers and then you take a real long break on pitching and you buy a bunch of five dollar pitchers i mean what do you? I mean, what do you have for a pitching auction usually for your budget? You usually have like $85? Is that what I'm thinking right? I think I go a little higher than most on my pitching budget. I think I go 85, 90, even sometimes close to 100. It depends on what I'm going to do with some of my bottom hitter spots. So in labor, where I feel like I can often get a couple of prospects

for $3 or less on the hitting side, that opens up a little extra cash for me to spend more, either to get a second ace or to go a little heavier with what I'm spending on my second, third, and fourth pitcher or to spend up for two closers instead of one. Probably not spending up for two closers this year. I said that last year and did it anyway. But this year, especially it's, it's such a nightmare. You'll have to go to 90 probably if you want to do the pocket aces, cause you're

going to go 35, 35 on a, if you like, it's usually around 35, right? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's usually an ace. So even if you go sort of 30, 35, now you've got $65 on your top two pitchers. You kind of want to have at least one good closer. So 65 plus 15, now you're already at 80, and you have six more pitchers to buy. So, I mean, you're going to be sacrificing something. I'm comfortable with pocket aces in certain situations. I think auctions, I'm more comfortable than doing that if I'm on one of the ends of a draft this year. I think where Jeff and Doc were positioned at eighth and 10th, if you're in the middle third of a 15-team draft, that's a spot where I'm a little more comfortable going that route. I'm not in love with the way Doc's team came together. It's not a shot at him. We just

like different players. And again, you're left with choices that you're left with because of what people around you do. I wonder how he feels about that team. Right. My reaction was not so much that I hate the team or hate the strategy. It's just that you make sacrifices. You're making a sacrifice. If you took even one hitter in the top two rounds, you would have had a higher batting average on that hitter.

You would have had more of a five. You might have gotten a five category guy that gives you some steals so that you can take Springer over over Merrifield, that sort of deal. You know what I mean? So, you know, there's always a give and take. The way that I would see two auctions, two aces in an auction that I would really like is the shallower leagues, 10 and 12 team leagues. Then I like it better because then the floor is higher,

so your $1 pitchers, a lot of them might be fine. They might be interesting. And so you get those two aces, and then you say, I'm going to get a bunch of $1 and $2 guys later, and I like that. But if you're talking about AL only, a $1 pitcher in AL only is like a middle reliever who probably won't get saves and probably won't get wins. Yeah.

The more shallow the league, the more aggressive I'd be spending up on those aces because, as you mentioned, you can turn those bottom roster spots. You can find plenty of pitching on the wire in a 10 or a 12-team mixed league. That becomes more difficult once you get to those deeper formats. Jim Liu had a question about quality of stuff versus command after the top 100. How do you think about pitchers who have plus quality of stuff with bad command plus and vice versa? A couple examples, Kyle Cody, who we talked about earlier, versus Trevor Williams or LJ Newsome versus Luis Garcia, the Astro. So, I mean, I think at that point, it's just sort of, uh, I know I'm getting a flawed picture. I I'm not, I'm not necessarily worried about having too many guys that are stuff over command that late because the probability of those players sticking on my

roster all season are really low in mixed leagues. So I guess I'd probably air a little more on quality of stuff over command because I feel like the command guys bring plenty of start to start risk anyway, even though their floors are relatively safer. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think that, uh, also what you're looking for in a starter when you're picking that low is the ceiling. And I think the quality of stuff better describes ceiling and command better describes floor and so if i'm picking low um do i really want to pick austin voth who like has good command and maybe has a role uh but he's kind of shown us the stuff isn't there or do i rather have

luis garcia who maybe doesn't have the role but if he he does get the role, if he does have a good spring, or if he does show some better command, could really pop. So I think I'd rather have Julian Merriweather, Luis Garcia, and have all these guys rank slightly ahead of all the guys with command. I'd rather have, who's another good example, even a Bryce Wilson, he has a good command number, a good stuff number. So that's, that's what my bias was, is on the stuff side, except for Ben Bramer, dude, I have to give him a shout out. I put him at 197 just because I don't even know what his role is. And also, I was really surprised to see that he has a 118 stuff number

because I think his fastball average is 87. That's sort of like the Cubs stuff we've been talking about, right? It's not all about the velo. Yeah, no. I mean, it has very interesting. Like, he has good ride. The changeup has good movement and a good velocity gap. And the curve looks like it's a quality curve.

But I don't know about a 118 stuff number. That just really surprised me. I didn't know if I quite believed it. So he snuck into my top 200 when he otherwise wouldn't have made it anywhere close i think you know the other way i would look at this i think the plus quality of stuff guys late they're not available in spades whereas like command guys are pretty readily available it's sort of like how every team has mashing non-positional corner infield guy like a like a first base dh type that can hit but can't really play defense.

Every team's got a guy or two guys like that in their system. I think every team's got someone who can come out and throw strikes if they need to just bring somebody up to chew up some innings. And not every team has the plus quality of stuff guy that could become a number two starter if everything clicks. And I think it's just the scarcity of what you're looking at that leads me to throw those late darts on the stuff guys instead of the plus command guys. Yeah, yeah. Any interest in Matt Shoemaker, by the way? He

ended up with the Twins after we recorded our last episode. I mean, his injury track record is brutal. When he's been out there the last four years, the ratio has been pretty good. And Minnesota is one of those teams that we do tend to trust in terms of the pitching decisions they're making with the current regime. Is there anything more than a late flyer there, though? Yeah, I think that he's a good deep league play. I think that your DL situation matters a lot. I think he's not so great a play in NFBC where you've got to hold him on your roster. You've got to have a space for him.

But there are a lot of teams now, increasingly, I think, that have unlimited DL. And in that case, I kind of like him. It's kind of like the major leagues have unlimited DL, and if you look at the Rays strategy they obviously just got a lot of people that will either pitch well or be on the DL and that allows them to

have the ultimate roster flexibility that they're looking for in the form of phantom DL stints and oh my hamstring is barking today. So I feel like Shoemaker is the same thing where when he's healthy, yeah, I'm super interested in him. When he's not, it all depends on what your DL situation

is like. So maybe a DFS play, maybe AL only with unlimited DL, maybe a draft and hold. But even then, draft and hold, you kind of want innings. You kind of want to be like, I think this guy's going to pitch 100 innings. I can't say that for Shoemaker. A little bit like Rich Hill. Yeah, a bit like Rich Hill at this point and maybe with a lower strikeout rate too,

so that really limits the appeal, but useful for deeper mixed leagues, anything beyond that. Question from Guillermo, Braylon Marquez, is he truly in the mix for a rotation spot? I mean, I think he was maybe until they added Jake Arrieta, and now it's more of a, let's see what happens. The upper levels of the minor leagues make a lot of sense for him, mostly because he topped out at high A in 2019. So I think Marquez could move relatively quickly. They don't have a ton of high ceiling young starters in the mix. If Albert Alzalea gets sent down, he's the first guy up if he doesn't win a spot of his own.

But Braylon Marquez, I think Keeper Leagues, Dynasty Leagues, and maybe one of your last reserve picks in an NL-only league? Yeah, I just think, yeah, Alzalea and Mills are going to fight it out for the fifth spot. And then you're waiting for, I guess, a fairly inevitable injury to Jake Arrieta and or Trevor Williams to slide in there. I like how Fangraphs has Mills ahead of Arrieta and Williams. Yes, I'm with you. They could go bulk with someone like Trevor Williams

if they felt like one of the young starters was ready. I don't think that would be out of the question. Oh, kind of shift them into a three-inning role or something? Two or three-inning role, yeah. Just say, yeah, we got you there. we'll start using one of these yeah yeah he's he's still

let's remember some guys tyson miller i don't remember him um yeah braylon marquez yeah i think he'll pitch major league innings this year, if that's the question. I can't predict beyond that. The other question that Guillermo sent us, which I think is just a good broad question anyway, best case scenario for Luis Severino's return this year, I think we could put Chris Sale and Noah Sindergaard in this conversation too. Your league has to have IL spots if you're going to draft them. Maybe in an AL only or NL only league,

you could stash those guys away. Virtually impossible in the NFBC format. Just to nurse those guys for two months, it's just going to be awful. It just doesn't work. I've got them kind of buried in my rankings, even though I think they're all really good pitchers and I hope they all make it back completely healthy.

I just see 2022 being where the interest lies. So if you're not playing for this season at a keeper or dynasty league, and you can get them either cheaply in the auction or via trade, I think that actually makes sense for pretty much that entire group. I've been seeing that happen in my keeper leagues too. So that's definitely a strategy. And it does speak also to a weak point of all rankings, which is that not only will there be sort of an inherent bias in the ranker to the games that he plays, but there will be a structural bias based on, you know, how that ranking interacts with the structure of your league.

So what I'm saying is basically I ranked those players as I saw in kind of NFBC kind of format, you know? But in Yahoo, where you're more likely to have like five DL spots or three is at least the default, they would go up. They'd go up. And I don't really know how to reflect that other than to show you

the injury percentile. And so therefore, if you are in a league with more DL spots, I would mentally move anybody with a red flag and the injury percentile up. Because they become

a little bit more interesting to you because you can stash them when they're hurt yeah i think the timetable for all those guys is sort of similar we're looking at generally 14 or so months for most guys to get back from tommy john that probably means june is the best case scenario for four is like trying to get out in front of it and and trying to push this team but at the same time the team also signed a lot of depth pieces, right? And traded for. So they'll say, hey, we want you healthy. And we'd rather have two more starts from Jordan Yamamoto, who's whatever,

than to push you and have you have a setback. So I think in the end, the team will win out and he'll come back in May or June. May would be the earliest for me. Yeah, but just speaking candidly about how my own rankings are set up, I've got Sale, Severino, and Cinderguard in that order at 98, 99, and 100 because I'm thinking about leagues with no IL spots

and they're almost undraftable in those formats, which maybe they should even be lower if they're truly undraftable. It's hard to account for the differences in league structure with a set of rankings like that. Nick Sackett, really good NFBC player, chimes in, Bumgarner and Michaelis, please. And he includes a request for Brian Slack, who he teams up with in the NFBC,

to earmuff it for the answer. So Brian, if you could earmuff it for the next minute or two, we'll get this answer out there for Nick. Bumgarner's one of those guys, you know, that I've given up on, but if innings are important, he will get innings.

Like, that's pretty clear. Unless he breaks and goes on the IL, Madison Bumgarner will get innings. The home park is also playing with the humidor, is playing much friendlier. Yeah, they put that in a couple of years ago. That's been one of those things that if you are stuck to five years ago. Playing at home starts, I guess. Yeah, exactly.

So that's one key. I mean, I've got him wow man the projection systems the bat just buried bum garner a 533 era and a 137 whip it's so sad i don't know i wanted to be good it really did k ray okay here's the thing though here's the case for madison bum garner combined 2019 and 2020 numbers mad Madison Bumgarner has a 118 whip. He probably should be in my top 100. He probably is more draftable than those broken aces that we just talked about. 249 in the third inning is combined over the two seasons. 22.5% K rate passable. The whip's good because the walk rate's good. 5.4% walk rate during that span.

Little bit of a home run issue. I don't think that's going to go away even with the humidor, even with that park. But we're talking about an innings eater that's more comparable probably to, I would say. I just moved him to next to Kyle Gibson. Oh, you're appeasing Justin Mason by bringing up Kyle Gibson on this episode. I would love to hear, honestly, I would love to hear a Velocity update in the spring from Bumgarner before I drafted him.

You don't want to necessarily just bet against Madison Bumgarner, right? I mean, he's the kind of guy that could come back stronger and throwing harder and ready to go. He's the kind of guy that could come back stronger and throwing harder and ready to go. So draftable in a 15-team mixed league despite my very aggressively low rank, which was only further justified by the Bats' terrible projection for Bumgarner. Maybe there's still something left in that tank. Who's the other one? Myles Michaelis. I actually have him fairly high.

I think I have him a couple spots ahead of consensus. The projection on Michaelis is good. Top 86th ranked projection by the bat. The park is good. He's a bit more of a command first guy, but

his command stuff numbers look about the same as Luke Weaver's, which is where I have him. Just outside the top 100. The injury percentile number next to him, 38 percentile, does not reflect the reality of the situation, though. I think coming off of a strained forearm that basically cost him most of last season, I would mentally tick that up, and that's part of why he didn't go any higher.

I had initially buried Michaelis because he's coming off of a flexor tendon surgery they had last year. They even had the surgery. Yeah, it wasn't had the surgery, but he is full go to begin spring training. Those are the kinds of updates we're getting right now. And that does make a pretty big difference. I just want to know that he was even healthy enough to start pitching at the beginning of the season right now that we

have that green light i mean i think he and bum garner do fit in the same conversation innings and i think i actually prefer michaelis to bum garner based on what we know right now i think michael is very safely in that st louis rotation just as bum Bumgarner is safely in Arizona's rotation. Here's the fun fact on Michaelis. Career ERA in the big leagues, 382. Career whip, 120. And I think he's still closer to that level than Bumgarner is to his previous greatness. That's fairly obvious, I think, at this point.

So hopefully Brian's slack time will be earmuffing just right. But you can see Brian just looking at... Yeah. And you can see it by the velocity numbers, right? He's closer to his peak velocity than Bumgarner is. We also made Yancey Eaton happy with a little Kyle Gibson talk in passing there. He's here for a Rick Porcello and Kyle Gibson talk.

Threw some shade at Kyle Gibson. Just sort of hit and run yeah well if you know if we talk to justin at some point he can hype up kyle gibson i'm not gonna do that we talked about ranger starters and didn't even really mention him earlier in the show i do think that that that group speaks to what you were saying about sort of having strike throwers at the at your disposal right um here's some guys that are ranked near him that are kind of command uh first guys kyle gibson martin perez john lester jose urania like uh these are alex wood you know uh these are eminently gettable guys uh in in the

big leagues uh which means that they're not scarce at all in fantasy leagues skills went in the big leagues, which means that they're not scarce at all in fantasy leagues. Skills went in the wrong direction sort of across the board in the shortened season, but the Frankenstein numbers are a little bit better if you're looking for a reason for some optimism on Kyle Gibson. Weird to me that Rick Porcello's not just in camp with somebody

given the need for innings. He's third in innings over the last five seasons. That alone should garner a look from someone. It doesn't mean I want him on my fantasy team, but just kind of weird that no one so far, maybe he'll sign in the time after this podcast comes out. And the last question from this section comes from Delirious. Matt Moore, yes or no, is he worth the late gamble? I think we talked about him when he was coming back over from a season in Japan. I thought Matt Moore was pretty interesting last offseason. He had an injury short in 2019 with the Tigers.

Looked good in a couple of starts. Didn't allow a run in 10 innings. Very small sample. What kind of league would I draft him in? Draft and hold only and maybe NL only too. I mean, I don't like that he landed in Philadelphia because it's not a home park where you want to use fringy starters. So that's a big part of what's working against Matt Moore,

even though I think he's a pretty fun dart throw for the Phillies. Yeah, I snuck in a question into the Zoom about what he'd done to um improve himself in japan and um i got a big nothing burger of an answer honestly i it was uh i don't know if he you had to be prepared for that um i don't know he just said something about working together with his pitching coach you know i think that we had a more prepared story when lynn blom kelly uh when those guys came back you know and i don't know if it's if that's meaningful but i think it probably is because uh they had something they had to say that'd be like this is what's different about me

now uh with matt moore it's just like i'm a year older what did you do for the last year? And the competition was easier over there. Yeah, it's not really exciting. Hey, I worked on spin efficiency. I added a pitch. I became more confident in my curveball. Make something up for our sake.

When he came back over, Miklas was like, you know, improve my command and improve my breaking ball. Yeah, that's probably a no for me in most circumstances if he's worth the late gamble. But again, ultra deep leagues, stranger things have happened. Is he even in the rotation? Not necessarily.

I think he could end up being in the pen really. Maybe they're playing him that way. Like, you know, okay. Fangraphs has him in the rotation over Spencer Howard. I mean, that's a hard no. It's got to be Moore versus Chase Anderson for the fifth starter spot with Nola, Wheeler, Eflin, and Howard as the first four.

And Velazquez out is what you're saying. Velazquez, I've been trying to put Vince Velazquez in the bullpen permanently for about three years. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that.

And it's not like last year really spoke that well for him in terms of starting. We have a really important decision to make. We're 84 minutes in on this pod. We haven't talked about pitching prospects yet. We haven't talked about sparps yet. So we either extend part three into a part four, or we run through those sections now and have the longest pod we've ever had. No, no, no, we can't do that. We have to, we have to pull it together. I would say that,

um, we should do like a strategy, uh, fill in the blank, uh, pod where we can, um, talk about, uh, different strategies, maybe different weird strategies, different things, punting, stuff like that, auction strategies. We can throw in SPRP because that's a strategy thing where you're trying to fit either holds into your starting rotation or blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, let's put those guys off. Did we talk about all the news of the day?

Let's see. Did we talk about all the news of the day? What news see. Did we talk about all the news of the day? What news was there? Let's see. Sean Murphy had a collapsed lung. He's expected to be back in spring training at some point before opening day. So that's one. I think you give him a slight downgrade, like a round or two,

a couple spots in your catcher rankings just because delayed start. He could open the year on the IL. That's at least a possibility. I guess so. They say he's fine, though. Montas has COVID. How much do you download, grade somebody for that? It really affected some people.

Eduardo Rodriguez lost the whole year, but some other people, it didn't matter to them so much. Then you have this set against his season where he recovered the slider eventually and got more drop on the slider and got more velocity on it and went from eight percent whiffs like 20 percent whiffs over the course of

the season what if he takes a step back velocity wise because of the covid i'm tempted to drop him a couple spots in the pitching rankings i mean it's just it seems ugly and gross and dirty and i hate having this conversation but i think of it this way it's just it's lost time if you miss time in spring training i mean again anybody with that virus we just hope they recover and come back and are healthy but if you you tear up a hamstring and you're out for a month in spring training you get downgraded for that too it's just an absence that impacts the start of your season so it's the unfortunate part of ranking players and a pandemic right it's just part of how it works so i would lower him a little bit just because of the possibility that he's not fully stretched out by the time the season starts uh garrett crochet a reliever we expected that

so that's you know not big news nick magical likely to be back in march he had shoulder surgery i believe it was yeah he's expected to play in spring games in early march so we'll see how that happens there's like a little bit of a detail i thought was funny was uh the last thing the last step before he can playing games is he needs to do some controlled diving i don't know why that's funny it's, I can imagine, it's like kind of a mattress. Or you can dive into a pile of snow. Head first dive with a sled. Did that once in college.

Or is it like they put them on like a hammock and they're just like, pretend you're diving. Yeah. Yeah, trampoline dives. But yeah, that was pretty much it for news. There was a trade early in the morning. Oh, there was actually one other news item that I just saw. Thank you to Rotowire for pulling all the news together because there's so much of it flying by on Twitter right now.

It's very hard to track it. Denelson Lemaitre is on schedule with his throwing program. So, yeah, some good news on Denelson Lemaitre when everybody keeps dropping him. How do you rank that against full go from Myles Mikolas? Is that a full go? I don't think that's a full go.

On track with the throwing program is like everything's okay still kind of. If he were on track with no restrictions. Yeah. Yeah, the words chosen mean something. His throwing program not like no restrictions. Yeah. Yeah, the words chosen mean something. His throwing program, not like everyone's, not like he's ready to make his first start.

There was a trade that broke really early Wednesday morning. How about this one? Well, there's two trades, actually. Ronaldo Hernandez, the catching prospect for the Rays, ends up in Boston. So, Chaim Blum going after a prospect in the Rays system. Jeffrey Springs and Chris Maza go to Tampa Bay. I didn't see anything to get excited about with either of those guys.

Did that trade do anything for you when you saw that this morning? I raised an eyebrow at the Chris Maza situation. He's like a sinker guy, and it's not like a turbo sinker. You're not talking about a Jose Alvarado replacement. It's a 92-mile-an-hour sinker. So, you know, maybe this is just like an innings play, you know, because they are having, you know, like even with their whole like, let's go out and sign every broken veteran that we can find strategy.

Like if I was going to predict the league leaders, the raised leaders in innings, I'd say Glasnow around 140, Yarborough around 125, maybe flip those. Yarborough around 125, maybe flip those. And then I had Fleming with like 80, with maybe a little bit more, maybe 90, 100. And then the rest of those guys tied at 80. And they need to get to 750 innings from their starters somehow. And at some point, even that bullpen, you need to have some guys some guys are gonna throw 60 and just be able to throw 60 so maybe they just saw in mountain is Mazza have options left yes he probably does I would guess that he does cuz yeah they

moved John Curtis away and they raised are doing all sorts of little shuffle he has one option left it's big and bold there at the top. They brought him on just so they can up and down him. That's what happened there. He's on the taxi squad now. All right. Jordan Hicks likely back as the full-time closer in St. Louis. This is according to Derek Gould of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

He, of course, was coming off Tommy John surgery and ended up opting out of 2020 for health reasons. It's interesting. I've been going after Giovanni Gallegos mostly because I feel like even if Gallegos doesn't close, he's rosterable in some of the deeper leagues out there as just a high leverage reliever with good ratios and a good strikeout rate. But some clarity on that St. Louis situation would be nice because if Jordan Hicksicks is really the guy i think you can probably argue him up as high as probably a top 12 or top 15 closer to start the season yeah now do the braves or the padres mark melanson ended up there since we last spoke like that's

that's getting worse by the day i think it's for me but i i don't think i can pick the uh the braids closer right now i still think it's will smith but yeah not a lot of confidence in that travis shaw's back with the brewers i mean they were silver medalists for justin turner like we said the other day so they bring back an old friend had some success there a few years ago given the way way things played out for Shaw at the end of his time in Milwaukee. And he wasn't bad last year, but my expectations are minimal at this point. If it works, it's a nice story. If it doesn't, it's not a big deal.

Six homers in 50 games for the Jays last year, a 92 WRC plus. This is a guy that was about 20% better than league average when he hit 30 home runs and back-to-back seasons in 17 and 18. So I kind of think he's more of a part-time player at this point based on the contract they gave him and the flexibility they have with some other infielders on the depth chart now that they didn't have two years ago. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that are there's a lot of spots on that uh team that are kind of up in the air i would say that i count shortstop as one of them so shortstop and third and first well i guess just hero it's not really up and up into debate is it

first is good now first is covered with hereira. So anyway, shortstop and third. And then I think they would actually benefit from having a DH because I think Vogelbach is a major league bat and they've got him cheap. So Urias could end up playing short next to Shaw or Arcia could end up playing short next to Urias. There's still a lot of ways it could play out.

How do you peg that? I think Urias is eventually the shortstop. Oh, you do? I think he's eventually the shortstop. I don't know if he wins the job, but I see Arcea finishing this year as the super utility guy. He's got a great arm. He's got enough range at short where he can play other positions.

He doesn't hit a ton, but he's... We had the email about two weeks ago. He's getting better. If the bat steps back at all, I think he loses his job. I mean, you have to. There's a certain amount. I think that was what Zimmerman was saying, like a 650 OPS. And if you look at what Arcea has done, he's hit 650 twice in his career. So if he falls below 650 again, I think he could lose that job no matter how good his defense is. I'm with you. All right, I think that was all the news. We tried to get through as much of it as we could at the end of this episode.

If you enjoy this show, we'd appreciate it if you took a moment to leave us a nice rating and review. If you'd like to sign up for The Athletic, you can get a subscription at $3.99 a month to start at theathletic.com. Slash rates and barrels on Twitter. He's at Eno Saris. I'm at Derekrick van riper you check out all of our rankings got the draft kit rolling out next week we're about one week away from the launch of our fantasy baseball draft kit so we've got that to look forward to as well thanks for listening to rates and barrels we are back with you on friday thanks for listening Thank you.