Rates & Barrels - Live From First Pitch Arizona 2024!

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Eno and DVR are live at First Pitch Arizona. Max Bay, parent of Stuff+ joins the show to discuss a few changes with the latest update to the model. Danny Kirwin and Cooper Adams from the Red Sox organization stop by to discuss their path as undrafted college players into Boston's system and into the Arizona Fall League. Plus, Eno and DVR discuss a few of the biggest surprises relative to the Stuff+ model in 2024, and their preferred roster construction strategies as the 2025 fantasy baseball draft season gets underway. Rundown 1:02 Is DIPS Theory Dead? 9:46 Looking Beyond the Projections & Models for an Edge 11:56 Predicting the Next Iteration of Changes to Stuff+ 18:59 Danny Kirwin & Cooper Adams Join the Show 23:31 How Did Tread Help Danny & Cooper Make the Leap From College to Signing with Boston? 29:26 Unique Challenges in the Arizona Fall League 34:06 The Biggest Movers in the Updated Stuff+ Model 43:03 What Is Your Ideal Roster Construction Approach as Draft Season Begins? 60:29 Considerations for Players Returning From Second Tommy John Surgery Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper email: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Christine, have you ever bought something and thought, wow, this product actually made my life better? Totally. And usually I find those products through Wirecutter. Yeah, but you work here. Yeah, that's true. I do. We both do.

We're the hosts of the Wirecutter show from the New York Times. It's our job to research, test, and vet products, and then recommend our favorites. For instance, Kyra, I think you've slept on what, like 40 mattresses? Yep. And Christine, you've tested everything from blenders to linen sheets. Oh, I love linen sheets. And we're bringing all of this expertise to The Wirecutter Show. Each week, we'll talk to someone from our team of 140 journalists about the very best product picks in every category. Plus tips, tricks, and hacks that go beyond the

products because we don't just want to recommend great gear. We want to solve your everyday problems. And trust me, we have the expertise to do just that. Listen to The Wirecutter Show hosted by me, Kyra Blackwell, and me, Christine Cier-Clicette, available wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, live from First Pitch, Arizona. Woohoo! Derrick Van Riper, Eno Saris, and a man who was introduced as the smartest person in the room before he walked in.

This is Max Bay down here to our left. Parent of stuff plus. I didn't think Max was a real person until yesterday. At least I wasn't convinced until I actually met him. I thought he was a person Eno made up. So I'm relieved that Max is actually a real person and not an imaginary friend. Max, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I am AI generated. You have more normal hands than every AI image I've ever seen of a person. I'm hiding this unnormal hand over here. The claw. A lot of ground to cover today. We're going to have some players joining us

in just a little while. But one of the topics we wanted to get to today is the death of dips theory. Is dips theory dead? Well, one of the fascinating things from our model change, the stuff revamp that we were talking about yesterday, was that there was a way to predict batted ball outcomes just using the shapes of the pitches.

And it was fairly reliable, predictive, like just it was kind of an amazing moment in the making of this model. And we've long had this dips theory, defense independent pitching, which is that you know basically batting average on balls and play across the league is like 290 ish every year and so that suggests that pitchers don't really have control over what happens on balls and play. Well these two things seem to be at loggerheads to some extent. So you're saying pitchers don't have control over you know what happens on balls and play. This is something that pitchers have always said no you're wrong about. This is something that I think intuitively when we watch

the game we think well they can control ground balls and fly balls and you know couldn't they control some of what's happening on the field with their pitches? And so now you know I have this this grand statement and maybe I'll write about it but I have this grand statement, and maybe I'll write about it, but I have this grand statement, which is, Dips is dead. Now, if I said Dips is dead to you, and then I made you, on a scale of one to 10, sort of judge the truthiness of that statement,

where 10 is, oh yeah, put a gravestone on it, and one was, nah, you're up your own butt here what which one is it it's somewhere between a four and a five oh right in the middle love it probabilistic thinking I'm not gonna get you to say a ten or a one for sure no you're not but you know I also don't think it will ever be 10. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. You know, what is it, like if you have that graph that says that shapes are affecting balls in play and you can use shapes to predict outcomes

like homers and singles, what is keeping you from saying that dips is dead? It all has to do with the variance of outcomes and how quickly you can converge on an estimate for a player's future performance. There are certain things that converge really quickly. Whiff rates converge really quickly, specifically on fastballs. There are things that take longer to understand, like a pitcher's command, and things that have historically taken a really long time if you're just looking at the outcomes.

And that's the events on balls in play. So basically, more time, more samples required to understand the quote-unquote true talent for each one of those things. Right. So there's fewer balls in play, and there's a bunch of noise in modeling balls in play. Fewer samples, and even if you had the same number

of samples, more variance. And you can't say this player necessarily has exactly this home run rate, it's a curve. Right around your estimate. But you're also not surprised if I tell you that Jordan Rosenblum has been making projections off of Stuff Plus was telling me that adding Stuff Plus moved the needle the most on home run and BABIP projections

and that our projection system performed better than most projection systems when it came to BABIP projections and that our projection system performed better than most projection systems when it came to BABIP and home runs. We had a bigger spread than most projection systems on BABIP projections and home run projections. That doesn't surprise you. No. Yeah, and that's sort of the link. We can get better, we have gotten better a little bit.

Yeah, no, I think critically, can get better, we have gotten better a little bit. Yeah, no I think critically the gap we were trying to bridge was between making a prediction about a player based on the actual events, home runs, ground balls, etc. What they've given up in the past. Exactly. And making a prediction about what you would expect they would do given other things upstream of that. Like the pitch shapes, maybe their plate location tendencies, things like that.

And what I think we now are capable of doing is starting to make some claims with some air bars, essentially, about what sort of added ball events you're gonna see without as many, without having to have as many real world samples. So when I say is dips dead, it's like no, because it's a really, really powerful way of predicting the future performance of a slayer.

Strikeouts minus walks are still like one of the most powerful things you can look at. Yeah. And in fact, stuff plus beats strikeouts minus walks for like 400 pitches, and then you might as well just use strikeouts minus walks. So it's dead, that's true, right? Exactly. And that's the thing. I think that what you're doing is creeping up on the true talent, the real true talent.

When we say true talent, you're making projections. Really what you're doing is an estimate of true talent. And you're creeping up, I think, closer towards the real true talent with the estimate. And so that's what I think that this way of estimating the future Ratted Ball events, that's what this is doing. All right, so as someone who builds models, builds projections, and someone who obviously

trusts those models and projections, when do you push back on the results, even after you revamp something? Like a big revamp is a big, because you'll see some significant changes once you get a look at the new stuff numbers that are coming out. When do you see something go, I don't even agree with that, as far as tactically making decisions. A real world example is if you turn your GPS on to come to the hotel, and it brings you right here, but some of the roads are closed because they're blocked off,

and all that, you don't just drive through the barriers. You have to make of make a decision against what your GPS tells you. I think projections and models are sort of similar in that regard. Yeah, no question. I think whenever you're building this sort of stuff, you should humble yourself and understand

that you're not making a perfect product, that there are going to be strengths and weaknesses. And for as long as I've been doing this sort of modeling, change-ups have been the most challenging pitch type to converge on. Like when you make a prediction about change-up, you are less confident than you are about the quality of a change-up with a less stuff model, less confident than you are with like a four seamer, for example. But that wasn't something I knew right off the bat. So it takes kind of like marinating in the data

for a little bit to say that is weird. That prediction is strange and seeing which sort of domains of its predictions are more dubious than others. And what I think is a challenge with this sort of modeling in particular is it's like a stack of black boxes. You don't know why it's making the predictions it does. I've talked about this before, but like my dream

would be to have a fully mechanistic, like parametric model where we understand at each level of its predictions. What is affecting each of them? Yes, yes, because the relationships are... This guy's stuff is bad because of these inputs here. Yeah, and that was one of the motivations for me for making the dynamic dead zone. It was just a small piece in a much larger project, but that is something I would like to do.

In the meantime, these models are really powerful. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks is, yeah, sometimes there are weaknesses there. And it takes a little bit of time to kind of expose what they are. But yeah, you got to search for them. You got to look. If you see something bad, tell me.

Tell us. Actually, tell Eno. Tell Eno. Well, so I ruled out this kind of harebrained idea on one of our shows, I don't know, over a year ago now. And we called it LODEM, which is model spelled backwards and incorrectly. We didn't do that on purpose.

But it sort of leans into the idea of being a little bit different, right? Because if you look around this room, how many people in this room use a set of projections, either public facing ones or ones they make themselves, to draft their teams? Projections are great. I'm never going to tell you not to use them.

Wait, who doesn't? Does anyone not use projections? That's awesome. That's full load them. Yeah, but there's an advantage to being different in the crowd when we're all looking at similar numbers. And I think that's where I started thinking about how playing time is projected

and a lot of those inputs coming from the same place. And if you can find an edge, if you can find an area where a model or a projection has not been fully refined, and that's the case with I think every model and projection that exists, even though they keep getting better and better, that's where you can develop an edge as a player. So some of that's just trusting your eyes, trusting things you see, right? Like you actually have to go kind of old school, kind of analog with some of your own analysis. It's kind of taking a leap in some ways, but that's kind of what building the system is in the first place.

Like, you don't know your right until you can back test it for a few years. Yeah, I do think that if I were to have entered this space with zero baseball context, I would have produced a worse product. There is some decisions to be made, human decisions to be made about which features, or in other words which pitch attributes, are worthwhile including in your predictor set when making estimates about the quality of a pitch.

So you have to train these models on a set of predictor variables and how they mix together and make a prediction. If somebody with zero baseball experience and zero interest in asking anybody with baseball experience were to put one of these things together, God knows what they'd put.

And so I think part of it is just like watching the game, seeing, reading what's been done. And so much of that is what influenced what went in here. And so yeah, what I'd say is like you definitely can't just throw it all at the machine and try to let it all figure it out. There's some baseball wisdom that has to go here. We tackled some of the problems that were in Stuff Plus and we've solved some of the problems that were in Stuff Plus,

and we've solved some of them, hopefully. One was multiple fastballs were a problem. Now we just use fastball velocity as an anchor to solve that. We now have arm angle in there, so that's something that might have been a problem. We have a better seam-shifted wake model now. There's a lot of things that we've changed to make better. What do you think is not in it still?

And what do you think is left to put in in the future and out there still? I mean, you talked about the sort of mechanistic style. We've talked about the interaction between specific batters instead of generic batters and stuff. But what else do you think when you survey the research that's out there, you think about what we could do in the future, I'm gonna take notes

because I'm gonna lose you like tomorrow. So. Oh man, that's a good question. And it is a funny one to answer because I just finished this. What's next? What didn't you have that you had in the thing you just built? But yeah, I mean, certainly putting this together, there were compromises or things I decided

not to advance because they would take too long to organize, take too long to put together. I mean, I'm speaking sort of generally, like maybe something along the lines of like how an arsenal fits together beyond just the actual shapes of the pitches. Yeah, yeah, so there is some representation of arsenal here, but yeah, I think you are touching on something that is sort of like at the bleeding edge of this pitch modeling world,

however big or small it is. The representation of pitches in terms of how they interact with each other, in terms of how they look as a collection of pitches to the batter, how confusing they are, how similar they look, how dissimilar they look, all that. That is like an active area of research.

There has been some very good work by the folks over at DriveLine and beyond in sort of touching this space where basically what you're doing is representing all of the various pitches as distributions in space. Not like outer space, but distributions in space as they travel towards the strike zone. And how much do they overlap? That's basically the representation there. And I think that there's value there. But the way specifically that you model that is it's a challenging project that I think can give you a little extra juice, but if you do it wrong, it will

set you astray and add a whole lot of noise to your model. That is absolutely something worth doing. And then of course, this is against the generic batter. What you ideally would like to do when you're making predictions about a specific game, for example, is be able to model a matchup between that pitcher and a batter, or a pitcher and a series of batters in a lineup.

And this model has- This team has a bunch of flat swings. You happen to throw a riding force hammer. Normally that's a good thing. And across baseball, you'd have a good high stuff plus. But, oh sorry, Nick Pavetta, you're facing the flat swinging pirates. And everyone's like, oh, that's a good matchup.

And then it's like, whoops, no, actually, their bat paths all lined up exactly to smash him. Yeah, or like, this is in Seattle versus Great American Ballpark. And I think that, so those things are attainable. We're separated from one degree with a model like this, but adding that extra degree is the trick and is something that I think would be worthwhile

pursuing at some point in the not too distant future. What's new in this rollout? What are the biggest changes that you saw that were very impactful? Man, a lot was new. So I would say that the biggest overall change is that we had one model trying to make all of the predictions.

It was trying to tell us what an up would do. It was telling us whether the batter would swing. It was telling us if they did hit the ball, whether it would be a home run or whatever. It was quite a lot for one model to do. So what we did is we broke up the model into a bunch of component modules. There was basically a swing model, an up model,

a contact model. If you did make contact, what was your exit velocity and launch angle? If you did, and given your exit velocity and launch angle, what sort of outcomes would we expect? And by breaking it up, we took a lot of the weight off of an individual model and distributed it over a bunch and it made better predictions overall.

But in terms of the features like the philosophy on some level of how we organized it, one of the big changes, this is something Eno mentioned, it is important when you throw a secondary pitch to know what sort of fastball that pitcher also has. But what I've found is that it is not particularly meaningful to know what the shape of that fastball is in terms of break. Your secondary pitch relative to that break is not that important. That's actually almost not important at all.

Does that have to go in the face of tunneling? Sort of, but when you're tunneling, are you tunneling against the pitch you have or the pitch they expect you to have? Yeah. So anyway, so anyway, so now we're just anchoring to fastball velocity. And the idea there is that the harder you can throw,

the earlier the batter has to start their swing. And so controlling for the quality of the secondary pitch, if you make the fastball faster, the secondary pitch batter has to start their swing. And so controlling for the quality of the secondary pitch, if you make the fastball faster, the secondary pitch is going to be better. Or if the fastball is slower, the secondary pitch is going to be worse. Because they have more time to observe it. We also are representing arm angle explicitly. We have the shoulder position and the release position, basically drawing a line out to

that. And I wish I had a plot here to show you guys, but instead of having axis deviation, so the spin angle and then say the movement angle, if they're different, that's a seam-shifted wake effect. Instead of representing it that way, what I'm doing is decomposing the angles into coordinates in space,

and basically saying how close are these two points in space. This matters because axis deviation can be really huge for gyro balls that have like no break, you can have, they're really close in space, but one's here, one's way over here, if that makes sense. But it's not important, like a gyro is not

really a seam-shifted wake. Having a 180 degree axis deviation for pitches that are right next to each other in break space is yeah yeah meaningless. And so yeah, now we're basically telling the model that it's meaningless upstream of and it doesn't have to make that decision. Sorry to cut you off a little bit. We got our guests here.

So I'm out. Yeah, you're out. Thanks, Max. Thanks, guys. Everybody Max Payne. Max Bay. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter Fairs include beer, wine, and snacks and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with

no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. All right, we got Cooper Adams and Danny Kerwin from the Red Sox. Oh, sorry, the, what are you guys? The Solar Sox. Solar Sox.

Skill Sox. There's a microphone right there you guys can share. I think the fall league to me is the strangest thing. You all come from all these different backgrounds and put on, like, you guys wear, you wear your own jersey. Like you wear a Red Sox jersey while you're here. Yeah, and you play for the Red Sox. There used to be this super fan that would be like, go,

Saguaros. But everybody else is Susan, yeah. But everybody else is mostly there. Like there are scouts watching you, basically. That's all you got. And enthusiasts. Tell me a little bit about the Arizona Fall League experience. Does this remind you back in the day of maybe travel ball

and like you know getting together with players that you would normally play against in local baseball? Yeah for sure. Coming out here and playing with these guys that we're playing with it's like a super team and it's a lot of fun playing with these guys. You don't get a chance to do this in the normal season, so definitely taking it all in. Yeah, no, it's basically the coolest experience that I've been a part of. You have a bunch of guys that you might see on TV or see around baseball and being able to call them teammates even for you know

short month and month and a half is yeah quite an experience. I mean you guys are in the middle of a year dude like this is a crazy year for you all both you all undrafted. Were you both teammates in high A too? No different living different levels? Yeah no no okay but but both undrafted, both pitched good innings this year, you know, for the Red Sox. Tell me a little bit about how you got noticed. Like, Cooper, I think you kind of have an interesting story there where, you know,

you were, you know, like, was it like you got spotted on social media type deal? Like, you know, it was, tell me about how you guys got the Red Sox attention. Yeah, for me, I came out of college throwing around 89, 92. Wasn't really good enough to get drafted or signed, especially after my senior year.

So I went down to Charlotte, North Carolina, Tread Athletics, and just trained there, and got ready for a pro day that they had, and end up throwing 95, 96. Was Tyler your guy? No, I had my coach was Sam Eddies. He's actually with the Royals now. But yeah, he was great and end up throwing 95, 96

in front of a bunch of scouts. And then obviously, I think Tred put it on Twitter. And that's when it kind of just started going a little bit and got a call from the Red Sox the following Saturday after the pro day. That's awesome. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah so my road here was definitely not a straight one. In 23, I was an All-American at Ryder as a closer, and I thought something may happen there. Nothing ended up happening in the draft, nothing after the draft,

so I played in the draft league that summer and just continued to play there. And then I went to Tread in November until January. Yeah, so I met Cooper at Tread. Yeah, yeah. And so I was to Tread in November until January. Oh, no trick. Awesome. Yeah, so I met Cooper at Tread. And so I was there for three months. I think I was top in 95, like a couple times in college. And then at Tread, I topped 97.7 and just felt like I had mechanics down at that point.

Nice. So I left Tread, ended up volunteer coaching at Ryder in the beginning of this year. So I had a volunteer coach there for 17 games. And then I was getting ready for my Indie Ball season. I was going to go play in Oakland for the Ballers. And I went back to Tread, trained there a little bit. They did some social media posts and I ended up getting a call from the Red Sox after one of my lives there.

Yeah. So crazy. Social media played a role for both of you guys. I love that. Tell me a little bit about the work at Tread and how that continues or dovetails into your work with the Red Sox. So what were some of the big mechanical advancements

that you made at Tread that sort of unlocked that extra juice? Yeah, so Tread does a great job of finding kind of your constraints and so there's a bunch of stretches you could say they're more complex but so if I'm tight in my hips, tight in my shoulder you know they give you some... And these are sort of like dynamic stretches, dynamic sort of moving stretches like... Yeah stuff I would never know unless I went to tread and if we stumbled in on you like doing them and be like what are you doing? A couple of them were a little funny looking but they definitely helped. I can't thank tread enough for what they've done for me to this point. That's cool. Yeah for me I was a big guy that I would load into my knee and kind of extend out so I just

I couldn't rotate really well and just be all upper body. Loading into your back knee? Yeah, loading into my back knee. And that just didn't leave you flexible? Yeah, no, and just couldn't, you know, properly get into my hip and be able to rotate out of it. So do you stand taller now? Yeah, well it was kind of a whole process.

I started basically from after college to now just going through my mechanics and focusing on sitting into my hip more. And as that got better, then obviously the VLO started going. Oh, so like loading more on the hip instead of the knee? Yeah so not necessarily standing taller more where you're thinking. Yeah where I'm you know thinking about sitting into and that gave me you know better chance to be able to rotate better and then obviously save my arm too so I wasn't you know blowing out.

Doing everything with the top you want to do a lot down here. How does that you know was it you know do they play nice treading the Red Sox like do they interact with each other and like do your coaches interact with tread or or the Red Sox saying things that are just sound similar and or are you now working on sort of the finishing touches now it's about pitch design and dialing in some of your secondaries as opposed to the sort of bigger stuff you did with Tread. Yeah, I think right now most of the stuff that Tread

and the Red Sox say are very similar, especially right now with like pitch design stuff. I know, you know, I talk with my coach about it now, and they have kind of the same thing that they're going at. So yeah, they're both really just great resources to have. What's the sort of pitch you're trying to dial in while you're down here? Well, right now I'm adding in a new curveball.

Almost like it's like what the baseball world is now calling like a death ball so I'm trying to get that in and I've been working with obviously with my coach at tread and also with the Red Sox trying so that's like a straight curveball like a power curveball that you're killing the sideways on right like you want it to not have sideways. What is, is that a thing that comes out of the grip? Yeah it's um, they actually a lot, the way they described it to me was like, it's like a gyro slider that moves like this and go straight down. So it kind of just looks like a fastball and just boom. So it's

hard for a hitter to pick up and a lot of it's just you know grip and how you throw it Because I'm more of a pronator not a supinator So like I'm able to kind of get through that a little bit better than verse You know with Danny, Danny's more of a supinator. He's able to you know, sweep the ball out really well Yeah, Danny, what are you working on pitch design pitch wise while you're down here? Yeah, so about a week before coming here. I changed my sweeper grip I added a little bit of a spike to the pointer there and while you're down here? Yeah, so about a week before coming here, I changed my sweeper grip. I added a little bit of a spike to the pointer there

and I've been getting an extra probably three or four inches of horizontal from doing that. Nice, what does it sit? It sits probably 16 now, I think before it would be like a little bit of an ish. 82. Nice. Yeah.

So this is to get you like a real outpitch against same-handed guys. I'll use it to lefties too, but yeah it's probably better to righties. And is that one of the primary things you're trying to just dial in while you're down here? Yeah it's a big goal of mine is to get that to 15 every time. The Velo obviously if we can increase the VLO it's better but. Right nice. You know you know normally you're here for innings there's a lot of guys here that are hurt and that were hurt during the year and didn't put up the innings. You guys did pretty good innings totals. Is it more about continuing this

this work of refining your stuff or what what is your personal, larger goal for why you're here? I think we're here probably just to give them more of like a chance to see you. A chance to see you just because we're new. Yeah, this is our first year. Just a chance for them to see us more. Anything that you're doing to enjoy it while you're down here playing golf with the guys? Or what is an off day? Usually an off day maybe we'll golf. Usually the Red

Sox guys we're all together in the same part when we hang out a bunch we're pretty active. I won't hang out by the pool or whatever but uh yeah we like to hang out. Are you exhausted? I mean this has got to be the longest year season of your of your life. Oh yeah, no for sure it's uh you hit a point where you're just like yeah it's it's been a long a long season but it's nice being out here nice weather obviously like I said being able to play with different guys that you haven't played with before it's just a cool experience overall so it makes it makes it worth it even if it has been a long season. How does the the day-to-day information you get in the fall league for a scouting

report compared to what you're getting in season for full season minor leagues? It just seems like because of the way this league is made it's just a tricky league to navigate the opposing hitters. It's very different because obviously I think in with with us during a regular season we're you know picking out hitters that we're going to attack, and we have a usual scouting report and stuff like that. Right now, it's kind of just go play to your strengths. There really isn't much of a scouting report.

It's just go out there and show what you have and do well. Start to pick up on tendencies, because it's a six-team league. You see guys a lot. Yeah, for sure. You can get clues from hitters just from when they step in the box so any clue I can get from I'll take it yeah there was a Pedro Martinez thing where he says their practice swing when they step over the plate is actually where they want the ball I think about that every time I see Pete Alonso Pete Alonso steps to the plate and he's like, right there.

Right there. Give me a tune. Right there. Ha ha ha ha. Got any other cues you're looking for like that? Oh, yeah, for sure. It depends where they stand in the box, how high their hands are, kind of their stance.

The higher hand's more of a scoopy swing, you think? Yeah, I'll go in on them if their hands are high probably. Yeah that's interesting. Have you found anyone that shows you something to get you to get you know give them a certain pitch like they show high hands and they drop or they do something unusual? No I don't think I don't think they're trying to trick me or anything. I just I just throw you know to my strengths and I'm confident that it'll work out. Your fastball jumps on people, right? A little bit. Hopefully.

What kind of characteristics does it have? Is it a ride ball or is it more of a...? So I throw a sinker in a fore seam. We'll go fore seams to lefties or up to righties and lefties and then sinkers into righties. Which one do you like better? Which one's your... I like them both. Yeah, Cooper, I think, Cooper, I've got something here about your four seam jumping on pitchers, jumping on hitters. Is that, did you like your four seam that has good ride or is that unexpected given your slot or is there something there?

Yeah, definitely definitely unexpected. I was always thought I was a sinker guy Because of your slot. Yeah because of my slot and I get a good amount of run But especially when I throw up in the zone, I'm kind of that like ride run guy So it's like I'll get get a good amount of run on it But especially when I throw up in the zone. I've heard some guys say that they want to have the same number for ride and run. Yeah.

You ever have a goal like that? Yeah, I'm usually trying to get it around, if I can, like 15-15, 16-16. Interesting. Have it where it plays well up, but also can play well low in the zone as well. So one last thing about how the competitors of the Fall League and how weird this is, it's like the developmental league,

but you're playing games. But the results don't matter. I mean, there's nobody tracking who won the game. So when you're up on the mound in these situations, are you like, how on the sort of, you know, I'm trying to get this batter out versus I'm trying to get 16-16. Where on the continuum are you down here?

I mean, even in a minor league game, you're like, at least I have my Red Sox jersey on with Red Sox teammates, and we probably want to win this game. I mean, all things considered here, it's just even weirder. So you think it's almost like a glorified bullpen session, where you're trying to hit those numbers? Or are you mostly thinking about getting batters out? I think mostly when you step on the mound,

it's just time to compete. And then after, you can look through the numbers and obviously in bullpens work on that stuff. But yeah when when it's game time, you're on the mound No matter if it's in the fall league doesn't have season. It doesn't matter. I want to get that guy on p-time. Yeah To go off of what you're saying, I think In terms of like winning games, I think we have a good clubhouse and we want to win this thing So we are in it to win games, but everyone go out there do their job like you said when you get on the mound it's compete time and that's how we feel.

Cool. Yeah thanks thanks guys thank you so much for coming and giving us some insight. Thank you guys. Where to go from here? Now, we have some practical applications of some things we were just talking about a little while ago with Max, right? You have the new stuff numbers, you talked about them a little bit yesterday. Who were the biggest movers on that list?

Because there were a couple things that were counterintuitive to me. Like if you looked at the stuff numbers for Tarek Skubal this year, they didn't line up at all with the results. Kind of like, wait, 103 stuff plus, this guy is going to win the Cy Young. You watch him, he's phenomenal.

He does everything you could want in an ace. I know he's one of the big movers, but who else got a bump with the new model? Paul Skeens and Garrett Crochet were huge movers. And I think that a 102 stuff plus didn't make a lot of sense for Paul Skeens if you watched him. You're just like, no, 102 is the miles per hour on that fastball.

That's not his Stuff Plus. So he's up. I'm happy to see somebody like Shota Imanaga be a riser, considering he throws us a rise ball, it's fun. You know, there was guys that went up, but it doesn't matter they went up. I mean, like Chris Flexon went from a 56 to a 78. Doesn't matter.

Still what you're looking for. Still one of the worst numbers in there. But I'm happy to see Ranger Suarez go up. You'll see, specifically I think some guys with interesting fastballs that might have not been captured by the old model. I'm happy to see someone like Spencer Arrageddy go up. And I think that has to do with the fact

that Arrageddy's cutter is actually a slider. Our old model used to have like a fastball model and used to put Arrogati's cutter in with the fastballs. And we knew a guy that had that strikeout rate couldn't have like a 90 stuff plus. It didn't make sense. So now he profiles, according to the model, more like the high stuff plus low command guy that he is.

And that's a fun thing to bet on. It makes him, I think, somebody that qualifies as a quote, unquote, sleeper for the coming year. There were some fallers in here, too. And some of them are surprising. I thought Ranel Blanco might be someone that would get a little bump with a new model because you see a 94 stuff plus, but you get a sub 3 ERA,

you get a whip below 1.1. He was great throughout the year. His number went down. I'm just curious, because Blanco strikes me as a lowdom sort of guy. The models don't like him. The projections probably aren't going to like him either. Jackson's not going to like him.

So this could be an opportunity there. If you believe in Ronel Blanco, you're getting him after pick 200 right now, what do you think it is about him that is not grading him favorably? Hmm. The easy answer is change up first guy. Maybe we're just wrong about the change up.

But I thought that the model was just wrong about Brian Baio forever for the similar reasons. I was like, that's a plus change up. And we're still kind of waiting for the Brian Baio breakout. So you know if you want to put Brian Bayo and Ranelle Blanco together and pick one just because you think the model just misses on change-ups and these guys have excellent change-up and screw you stuff plus then I say do it you know that's that's the spirit of Lodum is Lodum is not this guy really sucks I should pick him it's more like

you know some things say he sucks something says good and I'm gonna focus on the good stuff because there's such a low price on him so if Blanco goes ahead of Bayo whoever goes lower I'll take a share. So another specific example of something I look for is an unusually bad trait in a player that's getting good results. So if I look at a stat-cast page and I see the blue lollipops, bad extension, just any one thing

that people get a little worried about, I kind of pounce on those players because I don't think one odd or bad trait necessarily means you're bad. Part of what makes you good might be that you're different. You might get more out of your fastball because you have short extensions so it rides differently. There could be something about that that is breaking expectations. So I always try to keep that in mind as weird being good.

Bailey Ober doesn't perform well in the model by stuff, he does by location, right? So is it just the command guy that's always gonna give up homers? Is that a safe assumption? Because I see those ratios and I just think he's really safe every year for a sub-4 ERA and a much much better than league average whip. Yeah I think he kind of reminds me, I think this is right, like Ted Lilly was this guy that had like a good whip, a high ERA, and a high strikeout rate. And that's sort of, I sort of think of Ted Lilly,

where it's like. Dave Bush? Yeah. How many years did we chase Dave Bush back in the day, like expecting the big breakout, only for home runs to just crater it every time? I don't think a guy with that stuff is going to jump into, you know, top 15 space. I don't think a guy with that stuff is going to jump into top 15 space.

I don't think Bailey Ober, I think this is Bailey Ober. He's going to continue doing this, continue to have good stretches, but also continue to have a 1.2, 1.3 home run per nine. One of the things we have learned is that stuff plus one of the biggest things that will move is your home run projection. So you can like Bailey Ober, but just know that there will be.

And especially if you're in like, I'm in leagues where home runs by the pitcher count as a separate thing. Like that's, you've got to know that Bailey Ober is not going to do you right there. How long do you wait when the model or the projection continues to give you something really good and the results don't follow. I know this is a Graham Ashcraft question. Because I think where we're always comfortable taking shots

even if we are still using relatively new tools is late in our drafts and auctions, right? We're not worried about those last few picks. We're not worried about those last couple of dollars. We're thinking about what could go right, but we still want to hit on those darts and if you miss two or three times and model keeps saying no no keep throwing that dart, when do you just say okay something's just not right here? Well I'm happy to announce that the new model doesn't like Graham Ashcraft. Thank you! I mean a hundred stuff plus but you know this comes with bad command and it's a badly put together arsenal where basically he has one pitch he can use against lefties and one pitch he can use against righties.

So he's not a two-pitch pitcher. He's a one-pitch pitcher. I think that's so you start to see flaws like that, you can be like, OK, I'm going to chill out on this. But I was thinking about Bobby Miller earlier, and I think last year I said I wanted to crack him open and rub him all over my chest. Yeah you said that. Which is probably one of the weirder things I've said. Also one of the most spectacular misses on a calling of

sleeper and I feel badly about it too because he was expensive but today we were just hearing about Hunter Brown. And I was like, oh, god, I'm getting Bobby Miller vibes here. Because Hunter Brown, inconsistent command that the model thought was better than people who watched him and the scouts said, right? And Hunter Brown had all the pieces and stuff. Plus said, you have all the pieces.

And then it took him sort of figuring out how to put them together. And that's sort of what I see Bobby Miller's in this phase where like he's I've optimized all my pitches by the model but I have zero soft skills I have no idea what I'm doing on the mound I have no idea how to put these things together and I think you know just give him another try another year without you know an injury at the beginning of the season that affects his command.

And I think Bobby Miller could have a Hunter Brown-esque career where it could even be a sinker. Like, honestly, he could throw an extra fastball that he doesn't throw right now, and it could all just sort of lock into place. So Bobby Miller, still in on Graham Ashcraft. Next closer for the Reds, I think. Yeah, that would be great, especially at a near zero

sort of price. Bobby Miller, the earliest he's gone, any drafts that the NFBC's done since October, has picked 217. So that's a pretty nice start to drill. That's the right price. So I got to pick my closers from down there, my sleepers from down there, as opposed to where he was going last year as the 12th pitcher in the draft or so.

I feel really bad about that. He was going really early by the end of draft season. It was kind of ridiculous. He actually priced me out. I was like, oh, I love him. And I had one share of him last year. You hyped a guy. The market changed.

And then everybody had him because you hyped him. And then I was like, oh, no, I'm not paying those prices. Brutal. Pretty brutal. I want to talk a little bit about just the current landscape we're in for run environment and the optimal roster construction strategies. There's a ton of ways to build a roster.

But how do you want to build a roster right now? Thinking about things like average falling five points league wide again. Back down to 243 after a year at 248, we thought maybe the shift restrictions would hold and we'd have more batting average in the pool. We don't. Teams figured it out pretty quickly.

Steals per game nudged up a little bit more, from 0.72 per team game in 2023 to 0.74. Maybe we've sort of hit that new plateau for how much teams want to run for context that was down to 0.72 per team game in 2023 to 0.74. Maybe we've sort of hit that new plateau for how much teams want to run for context that was down to 0.51 before the rule changes in 2022. So what do you want to do factoring in what things are like right now? There's an abundance of steals.

Power's a little harder to come by. Average can be tricky as well. What's your first choice configuration if everything falls your way in a draft? I think you want to invest in the things that are more scarce. So in 2019, with the rabbit ball, if you'd known ahead of time,

which that was kind of hard to predict, but let's say you knew before 2019 happened that this was gonna be a huge run scoring environment, then I think you would want to invest in the best starting pitchers at the top because the bottom ones just got blasted that year. There were five ERAs on people late in the season. So I think in this case, and there's plenty of different ways to build teams. I'm not trying to be prescriptive for everybody, but I think if I'm interacting with the current run environment, with the current game,

I'm gonna devalue steals to some extent, because I'm gonna feel like the number of 30 steel guys is higher, and I'm gonna focus on home runs and batting average, because those things are scarcer now relative to steals. So as I'm building, I want my guys to have good, you know, Yordan Alvarez type, you know, Freddie Freeman type, you know, good batting average,

good power at the beginning. I like being mostly five categories as long as possible, but the emphasis doesn't, I'll take some 10 and 15 steals early knowing that I can probably get a 30 steal guy later. So that's how I think on the hitting side. On the pitching side, given all the injuries and our difficulty predicting injuries,

I'm just going to devalue pitchers generally and kind of sit on pitching. And then very specifically for closers, I hate the price on these closers. And I think most of these closers have question marks to me. I mean, we just saw Emmanuel Classe. You have this listed here.

Emmanuel Classe is number one, right? We just saw him explode and he's, I think, 30. Devin Williams is 30. Josh Hader is 30. Edwin Diaz has years where he just can't find the plate. Mason Miller is hurt all the time. I'm start to be interested right around Ryan Halsley I guess. Where maybe I could say he's gonna let's have a healthy year from him. He's young, he's got great stuff, he's probably gonna be the closer all year, so like I think that's where I get interested again. If I knew that Felix Bautista was throwing and you know what I knew his Velo was, then I then I could get in on that. So I'm getting one of the the late circles of

trust closers and you know one little thing that I sort of locked in I was watching Stephen Goodwin's really excellent presentation on the NFC and like what people who won the overall like what they did and how they how they went through the year and I it sort of locked into place something for me which is whatever your strategy is in the draft, you should really know what your strengths are in FAB. You should really know what your strengths are during the year in terms of pickups

and cater your draft strategy to your auction strategy. If you know that you're really good at adding strikeouts all the way through the year, then maybe you should actually devalue starters in your draft, because you know, I can always add strikeouts, you know? Maybe you should go for a George Kirby type, because you're like, that's gonna,

he's gonna keep my ratios good, you know? And I can add strikeouts to that on the wire. So I feel very confident that I can add saves on the wire every year. So I'm just gonna get one of the Circle of Trust guys, one hopefully Robert Suarez type, Stealth Plus is really excellent for relievers, one late, maybe a bench closer that sort of represents

the sort of a rolling place where I'm prospecting on saves that if he's not the closer week one, I drop him and I pick up somebody else who I think Will be the closer by week six You know and that's sort of my sort of way of thinking of dovetailing my draft strategy with my FAAB Yeah, I think it is really important to know your own tendencies as a player that that kind of to work backwards What do I or even think about how your league works? I mean if you're in a 15 team league

There's just not that much starting pitching to go around. If you're playing in a 10 or a 12, that's completely different. And I think that shapes the types of pitchers that you're interested in. It shapes the risk tolerance you have as you kind of build the foundation of your team. To your point on the elite closers this year,

for a couple of years, I wanted to, especially in these early draft and hold leagues, for those of you who do those, I wanted two elite closers because I wanted a 35% strikeout rate from two of those relievers. And I wanted elite ratios. Plus, I wanted the shot at 75 to 80 saves, even if I was only going to write 60 down

for a total projection for those two. But I think the combination of that core starting to age, the creep on the price a little bit, and then even Classe in particular, for as electric as his stuff is, the K's aren't there. You need that boost in that category, I think, to justify paying the premium price for those elite, elite closers.

So I think I've kind of shifted away from the double tap two closers. Don't worry about saves to a mode much more like you. I do think the stuff model in particular, it's one of my favorite applications, is just speculating on relievers. Because the cream does always rise in the bullpen. I mean, I think it pointed us to Luke Weaver,

long before Luke Weaver was getting saves for the Yankees. I think that was kind of a big one this year. Even in Miami, Kelvin Fauché, Jesus Tanoko, like there's some interesting names that pop in there that could end up getting 20 or 25 saves in the right situations. Yeah, and I think it makes sense. We were just talking about, like there's some interesting names that pop in there that could end up getting 20 or 25 saves in the right situations. Yeah and I think it makes sense, we were just talking about like what are the things that are not in the stuff plus model that and a lot of those were sort of soft skills putting

things together making an arsenal fit and that's just not as important for reliever. It's if you're looking at reliever you're just like how hard you throw, how good is your is your crap you? So I think it's really the best way to use it. And you can also, thanks to Fangraphs now, you can add the game logs. So you can kind of do something where you do a time split. And you're like, who has the best stuff plus over the last 30 days in the bullpen?

And you can do an easy sort like that and do it among relievers and just be like, oh crap. What is going on with Luke Weaver? I had chairs this year where we just picked them up for a couple bucks early on because it's like something something's going on with the hood so you know one of the things I also like to do is you know instead of the Bobby Miller types I'm gonna you know focus on using you know stuff plus using the model to identify late starting pitcher sleepers. And I think some of the guys that pop for me, I mentioned on Sleeper on the Bus the other day, Jose Soriano, the model likes him even

better now. I like Sean Burke on the white socks. It's above-average stuff and I think the command has come to a place where it'll work. It may not get you wins, but I think it'll work. So those are a couple of names. Do you like any of the players on our sheet that we're looking at here that's sort of 100 plus guys that you're looking at as possible sleepers in your leagues next year?

Yeah. Well, one guy that I liked as a possible weight for an SP1 until I saw the updated number is Jared Jones. I think we talked about him on one of our more recent episodes. And I think a 106 stuff plus is still good. It's still good, but I think. Maybe it represents a little better what his stuff is like.

Yeah, I think it's more fair. You can still be a top five or top 10 pitcher with a 106 stuff plus number But I think I was looking at Jared Jones previously as someone that could be the best pitcher in the pool Based on what the model had and what he was doing to begin last season So I've kind of cooled off of that a little bit even though I still like him I'm just gonna be building teams with him on them a little bit differently I was looking at you know one guy that I thought was pretty good by the model last year for stuff, he dropped in the update, was Mackenzie Gore.

And I don't know if that's a pedigree thing, or I'm just hanging on the player he's supposed to be and dismissing the skills flaws that we continue to see. But why hasn't it clicked for Mackenzie Gore? Because there's a part of me that still wants to take that chance. You know, I put him in a class. It's a weird class, because I think kind of Todd Bradley's in it but they're very different player people but

there are pitchers where their best pitches are fastball and they don't ever really develop a good secondary and that keeps them interesting to us because the fastball is still the most thrown pitch and I think it ends up making them traps sometimes because we're like no the, the fastball's good. I'm like, I don't know how many times I'm going to draft Taj Bradley. I'll just keep doing it. And he may never have a good secondary pitch.

And I don't know. I'll just keep losing on Taj Bradley. But I feel the same might be happening with Gore, where you have inconsistent command, inconsistent secondaries, and just a really good fastball. I think we call people like Taj Bradley, we call him like the Nick Pivetta All Stars. Yeah.

We keep finding reasons to believe, only to be tricked yet again. I'm glad Nick Pollack mentioned Gavin Williams. He kind of stands out to me. And I think what's interesting is he got a bump with the new model. But more importantly, the numbers he put up this year were coming off of a pretty flukkey injury in the spring, too.

So that might not even be even with the increase. He threw harder over the course of the season. Yeah. What we're seeing from 2024 might not even be the actual ceiling yet. It might just be getting back to being healthy. So I think Gavin Williams, Nick and I are going to be battling for him, I think,

any leagues we're in together. Yeah, that's a good call. I like that. My boy Randy Vazquez is still above average stuff in the model. Well? Still has all these pitches, still looks in a vacuum like he should be a good pitcher.

And then he gets out there and pitches. She's like, what is happening here? But maybe that's field, maybe that's game planning, maybe that's sequencing. There could be something with him. There could be something with the organization. There could be a few different barriers. I have a lot of respect for Ruben Nieve, though.

I don't know. Right. That's surprising in San Diego, especially in that park, too. I mean, you can't even just confidently stream at home yet. And it doesn't quite add up. He's going to be so cheap, though. You could take the chance to see what you get for a start or two and just cut bait if it doesn't quite add up. He's going to be so cheap though, you could take the chance to see what you get for a starter, too, and just cut bait if it doesn't work. One other roster construction question I had for you,

because I mentioned before I like to previously double tap elite closers, and I'm not doing that. I feel like I've replaced that with trying to get two very good catchers. Because I think the playing time drop off at catcher is really sharp and the difference you get in the counting stats is pretty massive. So you know this year I think there are currently six catchers inside the top 100 by early ADP. William

Contreras goes really early. I love William Contreras. I don't know if I'm drafting him you know in the early part of round three. But you have this Yainer Diaz, Adley Rutchman toss up kind of in the pick 60 range. I think Adley played most of this year hurt. That's my explanation for why he wasn't quite as good as he was a year ago. And then you get a shot at some power with like Sal Perez, Will Smith, and Cal Raleigh, all kind of in that pick 90 to 100 range. I generally want to get one between Diaz and Raleigh, like one of those five, and then

one more before we get to a major ADP cliff. There's a cluster of Logan Ohapi, Wilson Contreras, JT Riamuto, Shea Lang Alliers, Tyler Stevenson, and Francisco Alvarez. So my goal is really two out of that top 12, kind of bucketed, one from the top tier, and then one from that second tier. Yeah, I mean, in two catcher leagues,

the second catcher, if you go cheap on him, is I think it's a little bit like the conversation we're having earlier about how Kevin Gossman could actually be a negative for your team because he just was going to pitch so much and then not be that great. That's how I think about second catchers sometimes. Man, I almost don't want you to play. I've taken like zeros for a couple weeks in catcher, in two catcher leagues from like an injured guy

just because I didn't want to pick up who was on the wire. So I kind of like that idea. I tend to think of it as more of like shelves where you know I want to get the sometimes you'll be in a league in these two catcher leagues where someone is really hitting the two catcher strategy hard and they can create a run early on where everyone's like oh god we're taking our catchers now and then there's like you know two rounds where there's like five catchers go and I try to just actually get go wait two rounds like you don't actually have to participate in the run you guys just have to identify

the best one that's not in that run and then you then you can actually wait sometimes a couple rounds and get them later but least least like least lowest cost acceptable Is that kind of where I want to shop? Yeah And I think even if you want to early catchers it might not break that way in a snake draft So you do have to have that next tier tier three tier four guys identified as guys that could play as much as the the players Going ahead of them. I've mentioned Sean Murphy recently as someone that I think is going way too cheap. He sort of makes sense

There's only one 126 yeah, like I'd feel like I didn't have to participate in all that hubbub at the top if I got him He'd be my find one one catcher and then I just don't I don't think I want to go Like any lower than Gabriel Moreno. That's a big shift. That's a big one for me. Between Gabriel Moreno, next is Connor Wong, Ryan Jeffers. I mean, maybe Sean Murphy, but I think he gets really ugly after that. Yeah, so I'm trying to avoid the bottom end of that corner of the player pool.

You said you're waiting on pitching, maybe trying to get one starter, one closer earlier. You're not going to do the extreme. I know Dalton Del Don from Yahoo will just build the full on yellow brick road, just go like seven or eight pitchers in a row, and then figure out hitting. And I like it in the sense that it's different.

No one else is building teams like that. If you're in any sort of league that has an overall component, you're going to have a completely different build than anybody else in the contest. That could be kind of valuable to you later. But you wouldn't advise pulling that off in this landscape where pictures are just breaking at such an extraordinary rate?

You know, I think we actually, there's, Jeff Zimmerman will publish some numbers on this, but I think we're OK at spotting the A's health-wise, like spotting the really good. We're not that good at differentiating between a guy who has a little bit of risk, health risk, and a lot of health risk. Those guys kind of just bounce around. So what I want to do is what I think is scarce is a healthy pitcher with 180 innings.

That's what I think is scarce. Not almost as much how well they do. So like I want to focus on getting my first pitcher to have an A health grade. That's what I want. I can go shopping in the you the Tyler Glassnow-esque bucket later. Blake Snell as my number two is fine. But he can't be my number one. So I don't mind the sort of Logan Webb types. I would maybe want to jump into that top five where Kirby, Castillo, Wheeler, and Burns, you know,

one of the things we like about them is they probably all have A health grades. And so that's something that I will be prioritizing with my first pitcher. And then I'm going to really try to hit hard. I am going to have a mini Yellow Brick Road. I did this last year in the main, and it treated us well, where I'm going to try and shop liberally in the,

you know, by ADP right now in the hundreds. There's like a Michael King 100, or that's last year's ADP? That would be old ADP, yeah. Give me the new year ADP. So last year's Michael King, that'd be really nice to buy. Yeah, Michael King's going at pick 72 now. So it's changed. Yeah, but I think right around here.

So you've got Logan Webb here at 99, Zach Gallin at 99, Grayson Rodriguez at the same spot, Hunter Brown. I think this is where I'd like to start shopping again. So I want to get as many batters as possible early and then do a mini Yellow brick road in the 40s, because then there's a big shift after the top 50 starting pitchers, again, back to people who are only gonna be useful

in certain situations. So that's why I really wanna hit that sort of SP 35 through SP 50 really hard, and get as many of those guys as I think is possible. So I have options on my team. My lizard brain sees names like Jacob DeGrom and Shane McClanahan at relative values compared to what they used to go for when they were healthy.

And I get so excited, even though I know I shouldn't, because it's two Tommy Johns. And I think we're going to start to have a larger group of players that have had multiple Tommy Johns, or at least a Tommy John and a brace surgery like Spencer Streiter. They look like great values on paper. Is there anything for you that's instructive about the long road for Walker Bueller to finally start pitching really well

in October? I mean, if you looked at Walker Bueller's track record and his price and what you could have done on drafts last year to get him, it would look like a nice bargain. And that was an easy cut eventually, because he was just not available. He wasn't pitching well. But do you chase these guys coming off of multiple TJs,

getting that slight discount? I mean, deGroms going in the pick 30 range, McClanahan around pick 100. They're both electric, but the health grade has to be at least until they prove they're totally healthy. I can't do it. The thing that I was saying was a little bit like batting. I was not robusting.

A little bit like batting average. It's like, if you take a bad health guy, it's like taking a bad batting average early. Then you can't pick certain guys that you you wanna pick later unless you punt, right? And punting inning is not a good idea. That just doesn't work. So I think it's just hard to build with that. Because let's say you do that and you pick Jake DeGrom,

then you have to prioritize health and innings later on where they don't exist. So then you lean into injury and you'd like, I had one DC where I was like, oh, all the injury guys are falling. I'm just gonna take them all. And Zimmerman saw it and was like, you're not gonna make it to opening day. And he was right.

I had like five healthy starters on opening day. So that was not a good team. So I think I want to prioritize health early on. Later on, in the picks where you're taking starters, where you might just drop them, or if they're not healthy, then yeah, that's the switch I make. Flipping one more time back to the hitting side and thinking about superstar rookies or guys that

have superstar ceilings. We saw Jackson Churio figure it out in late May, June, and took off after that. Could be pushing into that first second round pretty consistently. What's your approach to the highly coveted prospects getting called up earlier, right? It seems like there's actually a window for those guys that have more of a full season now that they've changed rules, they've incentivized teams to be more aggressive with those promotions? Where's the sweet spot for you? And are there even players on prospect lists

right now that have enough ceiling for you to justify maybe a fourth or fifth round pick? Because that's where those guys start to go once we get closer to opening day. I mean, the sweet spot for me is playing time. And you have some guys where it's like Jackson Holliday, where yes, he's like a number one prospect. And I'm not even talking about Jackson Holliday as a bust

or whatever. I'm just saying he was a number one prospect, but it wasn't obvious where he was going to play. And he hadn't signed one of those extensions where the money's locked in and so the team doesn't care about starting his playing time, you know? Churio, extension, you know? I thought as soon as he signed that extension, I bought him. I had a fifth round TGFBI pick on Churio

that treated me pretty well. What I saw in the spring with Julio Rodriguez one year was this guy is playing every day deep into the spring they haven't sent him down to the minor leaguers and he's he's killing it this spring like they're just gonna make him the center fielder on opening day so if I think that they is there's a spot for them and maybe they've signed an extension if there's like you know things are falling into place then I will try to take part I can't do it in the first three rounds, I think,

without any track record. I know Bobby Witt probably treat his people who did that well, but that's so spicy for me. And the first three rounds, you're talking about mid-career peak age veterans that have track records and are good, too. I don't have to take that risk on. But I really like around the fifth, sixth round,

you're talking about pick 75 to 100. People are taking risks there in other ways. They're taking closers. Those are inherently risky. By the time we're all taking closers, would I take a Jackson Shurio type? But I don't know that the names, this year's name, do you have a name for me?

As I don't actually, I'm like kind of going through and I don't see the same hot prospect that's, you know. Can't you do it a year later with Jackson Holliday? Do you think the playing time situation's better? I mean, he's in the absolute sweet spot as far as and they're not being a lot of risk. If you're wrong, you can cut him at pick 180, pick 200,

and it's not gonna burn you that bad. Why Langford at 68? going to burn you that bad. Wyn Langford at 68, no, I like that, actually. That's this year's version of the Jackson Cheerio. He's going to have the job. He's going to play every day. He's made some adjustments, and we saw some second half power from him.

So I think this year might be more of a post-hype prospect situation than the actual hype prospect. Or guys we saw debut already, like James Wood, guys that got a few months last year Those are so some of the players were we thinking about nice and early We have to go everyone has a game to get to I want to thank everybody here for hanging around for our show today Thank you to baseball HQ Hershey Ray Murphy for putting this event on thanks again to James Gale for producing this episode.

That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back on Friday. Thanks for listening. Bye! you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you Thank you.