Rates & Barrels - Looking Back at the NL West

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Rundown4:06 Appreciating Max Muncy7:59 Corey Seager and the Kris Bryant Problem13:00 Built for Expanded Rosters21:43 Eric Hosmer Actually Hits the Ball Hard27:46 Some Love for Josh Naylor32:02 Cal Quantrill, Glue Guy?37:12 Eduardo Escobar & Non-Barrel Homers42:22 Zola Finding: Luke Weaver on 2019 Championship Rosters48:33 Josh Rojas & Tim Locastro: Interesting Bench Players55:43 Are the Rockies the Biggest Winners w/Universal DH?60:27 Garrett Hampson's Playing Time Outlook66:10 Right Long-Term Direction, But...68:33 Mauricio Dubon's Path(s) to Regular Time75:47 Beer of the Week: Toughest Beers to Track Down Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get 40% off a subscription: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Register at lls.org slash big climb. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's episode number 99. May 28th is the day. The Wayne Gretzky episode. Unfortunately, we are not talking to Wayne Gretzky on this episode. That'd be pretty cool, even though it's a baseball show. Maybe he drinks craft beer. I've never really had a chance to look into that with the great one.

I saw some numbers. He is ridiculously dominant in his sport. I hadn't seen this, but in terms of points, he's like 400 or 500 points ahead of Yarmir Yager. Yeah, it's pretty absurd. I guess it's a little bit like nolan ryan isn't like nolan ryan like a thousand strikeouts better than anybody else or like 500 or something helps to play for 30 years but um yeah i mean so gretzky broke fantasy hockey back in the day they

used to split up his goals and assists into separate players. I think his assists were named like Eddie Beers or something. I forget what they named his goals, but you would draft him separately. And he was still, both of his half players were actually like top 15, top 20 players because he was just that dominant. Yeah, we haven't had to do that yet in fantasy baseball. We haven't had to split a player.

Well, Shohei Otani, but for different reasons. Yeah, he actually just does two functions. Dude, he literally almost leads by 1,000. Nolan Ryan has 5,714 strikeouts, and Randy Johnson had 4,875. That is wild. No one's even going to get that close because the injury and the career and we just don't have the innings anymore. Greg Maddux did not have a great strikeout rate,

but he got 3,300 strikeouts with longevity and tons of innings. We're not going to get people there anymore. We might get a Roger Clements, but it seems kind of unlikely too. 27 seasons in the big leagues for Nolan Ryan. That record is safe. The best active one is Justin Verlander with 3,006. How many more seasons has he got left? Well, to catch Nolan, he's going to have to pitch until he's about 62.

Yeah. Well, to catch Nolan, he's going to have to pitch until he's about 62. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. And we'll still be drafting him probably as a third or a fourth rounder for most of those seasons, too, just based on how good the end of his career has been so far. But we are not going to talk about Gretzky anymore in this episode.

We're going to talk about the NL West, and we're going to turn over some more stones, looking for some overvalued and undervalued players, and also shine a spotlight on some players who are positioned to be included on expanded rosters. Even though things look a bit bleak right now with the negotiation between the Players Association and the owners, forget that. Let's just assume they're going to get there let's not bring ourselves down so let's start with the dodgers you know i took a lot of flyers on max muncie back in 2018 when he was first getting that opportunity with the dodgers and i didn't have him a ton of places last year for the encore and it was a really good season and it made me wonder if maybe overall i at least maybe some other people are still underrating him a little bit uh the barrel rate again per batted ball event very good 12.3

percent just by the sake of comparison on his own team cody bellinger lives at 13 i think one of the knocks on on muncie or concerned with muncie initially would be that he would sit against lefties or they wouldn't handle them well if he played against them. But he followed up a 141 WRC plus in that 2018 debut with the Dodgers with a 135 WRC plus last season against lefties. It is only 300 total plate appearances over the last two seasons in that split. So the usual concerns about the size of that sample apply, but this is a guy who's got first base, second base, and third base eligibility, so he's versatile enough to

handle spots all over the infield, and there's really no reason to think that he was going to play less than 90% of the time even before the DH was something that we could talk about for NL teams. So where do you stand on Max Muncy?

Is 2019 a reasonable baseline, or is there possibly another level here? I don't necessarily think there's another level offensively. He went from a 162 to a 134 WRC+. I think 162 is a little bit unsustainable maybe for his type of skill set with that type of strikeout rate. He just burst onto the scene. But coming back with a 134, I mean, look at all his projections. They're basically saying he's going to be 25% to 30% better than league average. And I believe in him.

I think he is projectable at this point with two seasons in a row like that. At age 29, you wouldn't put too much of an aging thing on it i think the one thing that possibly offers upside for muncie owners is the dh situation and i know that when we talked about it the first time we said that this would help everybody including jock peterson aj pollock maybe the most and that they would probably rotate people through the DH situation. But I think actually, in a way, it helps Muncy the most just because it guarantees him as much playing time as he wants. You know, there will be a waterfall cascading thing that happens that helps even all the

way down to Matt Beatty. You know, people get playing time on this team because it's such a loaded team that's ready for this kind of play with extra doubleheaders now being in play possibly and trying to shove 100 games into the half a season. And then the DH slot. So I think that they are set for this. They have a ton of depth but muncie is the one who's now uh i can i would give him 98 of the plane like you know somewhere

first base second base dh yeah he's very safe i mean i think with bellinger playing the outfield really well muncie at first base makes a lot of sense. Gavin Lux, probably the regular at second base, makes a lot of sense. And even if you bump Muncy into the DH role and play somebody else at first some days, that's still an everyday role, even if it's rotating through that extra available spot. His ADP for May, sitting right around 65, I think that's been pretty consistent. But it is interesting that for the first few months of draft season, I'd see Chris Bryant next to Max Muncy and snap answer Chris Bryant being the more valuable player. The more I've looked at both of them, the more I've realized that the market probably has it right putting those guys next to

each other. Yeah. And Bryant, I think, represents a one-man statistical mind screw because he's got these bad exit velocity numbers and you just don't know how much of it is the aging and how much of it is the injury. although it's a slightly younger player over there at shortstop because Corey Seager you know there was you know a little bit of a chance that you know he would be a guy that put together 91 exit velocity like he did with a 19 strikeout rate so like in 2016 he was putting together the exit velocity and and the contact rate that you would want from a guy who could hit 300 with 25, 30 homer power. That's what it looked like. All he needed to do is improve his barrel rate a little bit. He improved his barrel rate minutely, lost exit velocity, got hurt, and hasn't gotten

it back yet. So is the exit velocity all due to the shoulder? And can he get back to So is the exit velocity all due to the shoulder? And can he get back to 90-ish exit velocity? Can he get a 10% barrel rate and pair that with a 16% to 18% strikeout rate? Then he does still have upside. But he's also, at this point, 26, and we don't know how much sort of nagging left injury is in there. You know what

I mean? Yeah. And I think what I've realized is while I have looked at Corey Seager as a player who I've wanted to have everywhere at the price in 2020, there's not a lot in the underlying numbers, even if you start looking at second half of last season, that makes me say, hey, there's a supporting argument for my belief that he's actually one of the best values on the board. healthy and now with off-season time to get healthy and this shutdown period which i don't think is really helping him but just the fact that he was entering 2020 going through kind of a normal sort of off-season rather than all the rehab work that's really all i have to hang my hat on in the claim that i believe he can get back to being the player he was before the injuries the pre-2018 numbers to me i i just don't have a compelling reason to believe he can't get back there with health,

even though Bryant's a good example of a player who didn't get all the way back after his injury. Still a very good player, and maybe even in some rooms a little bit underrated relative to what he could still do, but I do see those similarities between Bryant and Seager with some of the uncertainties about Seager's baseline at this point. Maybe there's even a better comp.

Carlos Correa? Yeah, and I mean, same position, similar draft day prices. Big shortstop. Correa has a little bit better plate discipline, and so maybe somewhat more upside in OVP. But Seager might retaliate with a slightly better strikeout rate. So if you like Correa, I think you should like Seager. I think you could...

These two are the shortstops that allow you to wait on shortstop. Yeah, the depth is amazing at the position because you have two of them you know and as long as you don't need steals from your shortstop position which it can get tricky because then you make sure you have to get them at second or the outfield you know there's not a lot of guys at third or first who are stealing bases so you have to think about where you're getting your stolen bases from but like if you don't need stolen bases from shortstop then you can put seager and correa in a bucket and once one is picked pick the other i do think though the key difference for me is that if you look at barrel rate for carlos correa last season even though

it was about a half seasons where the plate appearances that was a career high 13.5 you have a isolated skill you can look at and say, wow, he was actually reaching a new level last season. You look at launch angle and sweet spot. That may have been kind of hitting a peak for him. The K rate was still within the range of previous norms. It was at the higher end, but he was still normal there. The XBA, the X slug, of course, with the hard-hit numbers being where they were,

those things all look very encouraging for Correa. So I think, to me, it's easier to make that case for Correa than it is for Seager, where you're really just buying entirely on a lack of health. Yeah, there's a little bit more. We've seen what Carlos Correa could do at his very best, and it's recent and a little bit less of a guessing game, I guess. So, yeah, I agree with you. I would probably put Correa ahead,

but I think that the projections are missing a little bit on Seager, this chance that he puts together the exit velocity and the contact rate that he had in his freshman year and puts that together in a way that looks a lot like uh correa you know correa's projections are 270 30 home runs i think you know seager's uh projections would be like 280 25 30 if like we're talking sort of 75th percentile or so so um and I think that generally across the board, Seager's batting average is projected to be better. There's some similar value there. In general, I think the Dodgers' depth is going to play well this season, especially if

they have a very old trio in the starting rotation with Kershaw, Price, and Wood. There's a lot of injury history there. And so, as always, they're going to reach down into their next starters. And boy, those next starters are really good. Dustin Mays, really good. Ross Stripling is really good. I mean, Ross Stripling is like a Ryu clone.

That's what he said to me. He's like, I tried to build myself to be Ryu. And Tony Gonsolin, I think most likely Mays in the minors. If we need to, maybe we should try to build a staff in this one. Like build the actual, we keep assuming 15 man pitching staff? If it's 15 out of 30, then you're going to Jansen, Baez, Kelly, Trinan, Gratterall, Floro, Kolarik probably. Yeah, he's on.

So that's your seven relievers at least. And then you're going to go down to, you're going to have to have Stripling because he's on the Major League contract. So you've got Stripling, that's eight. Gonsolin is on there for me, nine. And then you've got your five starters. So there's one spot left for Dustin May,

Jimmy Nelson, Scott Alexander. I think it's maybe likely Dustin May starts in the minor leagues. Right. With the taxi squad options, if it works where anybody with minor league options can be placed on the taxi squad, then that might be the way that roster has to work and as soon as someone gets hurt he's the first guy who gets kind of to leapfrog some of the relievers who are more situational guys yeah yeah yeah and uh and and i think that stripling and gonsolin are probably on a lot of people's lists as people being hurt the most by the acquisition of Alex

Wood or David Price or whatever situation they see in the depth chart right now. But I still think that Stripling and Gonsolin have mixed league value. I think they would be great SPRPs. Maybe not in weeklies. In weeklies, they're bench players that you're hoping for an injury. You don't want to be a deep league to put them in a weekly league, but in a daily league, spot starts. Maybe you can start to get a sense of when they will pitch or they basically become a reliever that you can put in your starting pitcher slot and leave them in there and get wins.

I think you'll get wins in good ratios as they vulture them. I mean, I think Kershaw is going to come out of the gate throwing four-inning starts. Yeah, I think a lot of pitchers are going to have those restrictions that first, maybe even the first couple of times through the rotation. So teams that have enviable depth, let's call it, like the Dodgers, are very well positioned to work around that and be able to withstand any sort of surge in injuries that might come about from the unusual shape of the season. As far as the position player depth goes, they're really solid there, too. I mean, if you're trying to figure out which 15 players stick it's not really that much of a battle i mean a guy like edwin rios maybe gets the last position player spot you mentioned matt baity before but chris taylor kike hernandez

all those those guys who don't have everyday roles like to have all of them at the ready is a really nice luxury doesn't seem like they had 15 players position players on their roster before yes they they already built a 30 man roster what's going on here how did they how do they expect to fit all these people on a team uh but okay you have your uh your nine starters, and then you've got to go. I think most people are going to carry three catchers. Maybe not. Maybe not the Dodgers. Maybe Kiebert Ruiz gets in there, though.

I mean, they've got Rocky Gale here. Rocky? Yeah, it is Rocky. I got it right. I think. Why do I know who Rocky Gale is? That's so weird. Anyway.

I don't know. They've got Rocky Gale is? That's so weird. Anyway. I don't know. They got Rocky Gale on there as third, and I think it's probably more likely if they have a third catcher, they have Rocky Gale on there and don't start, raise his clock to just have him sitting around. So with three catchers, you've got your nine starters and two catchers, so you've got 11, so that means you have four bench slots. And the people who are not on the fan graph starting slot

are Enrique Hernandez, AJ Pollock, Taylor doesn't have a spot. Actually, Enrique is considered the starter at DH here. We'll just call him that, even though that seems weird. Starters that we have Pollock, Taylor,

Beatty, non-starter. Yeah, Beatty is going to be in. So the fourth is Barnes. So I said nine position players plus three catchers. That's 11. So you have four spots left. Four spots are Chuck Taylor, AJ Pollock, and...

Who the heck is... So they put Kike as the DH, though. That's weird. So who... I'm trying to think... So maybe Rios can sneak on this team, dude. Yeah. I think he's the last guy on

for the position players. I like McKinstry a little bit, just to give a shout-out to kind of a non-prospect that people don't talk about much, but this is a guy who can play all over the infield. He's 25 years old, bats lefty, and tortured AAA last year, but did pretty well in AA2 with a 126 WRC+,

by keeping his strikeout rate about the same and just adding a ton of power uh basically pushing his fly ball rate inching it upward but he's got some speed and some power and can play all over and would be uh kind of like a lefty uh a lefty Kike, if they put him on the list. He would definitely be more able to add them that sort of flexibility they like. I mean, he's played second, third, short, and left field as recently as 2018, all of those positions. So if they wanted to have kind of a backup shortstop to Taylor or a guy who could play second as well, it could be McKinstry. Rios is a little bit more of just like a bat.

But that DH possibility gives him a slightly better chance. Exactly. And then Rios, like, you know, the strikeout rate looks terrible, but the batted ball rates are pretty good um he seems to to be able to hit the crap out of the ball basically um so i don't know i don't know it may actually that might be a spring battle it's weird when spring battles are going to be fought uh in mid to late june but uh still looking forward to them. And with the longer roster, they'll be like,

Rios versus Zach McKinstry. I'm here for it. I'm much happier for doing that instead of... Much better than whatever I did this week. This week was, let me just tell you, I started, I told you, I have the ass, and I'm trying not to bring the ass to everybody else, but I have it right now,

and so I'm trying to hide it. So hopefully you haven't noticed it yet. Maybe there's a little edge there. Maybe you can tell. Maybe we should just segue to the next team. How about that? Yeah, let's just do that. We're about 21 minutes in,

and the ass really hasn't revealed itself yet, so that's good. Four more teams. So let me see if I can get you riled up and uh point out the fact that i was very surprised to see that eric hosmer hit 46 of his batted balls last season at or above 95 miles per hour that was surprising and he just continues to live his life mostly on the ground, 56% ground ball rate last year. But as we've said many times, Eric Hosmer plays a lot. Thanks to that contract, he will continue to play a lot. There is a little concern on my end that he's actually struck out

more in each of the last two seasons than he had at any point previously in the big leagues. But this reminds me a little bit of Ryan Zimmerman a few years ago before he started hitting the ball in the air again. And the only thing that would have led you to Ryan Zimmerman a few seasons ago was a really high percentage of hard hit balls despite the worm burner tendencies. So is there any reason to think that Eric Hosmer is actually fixable? Because hitting the ball that Eric Hosmer is actually fixable? Because hitting the ball that hard that often is actually kind of an interesting skill. Yeah, you know, like having some personal experience talking to this dude about ground balls,

I think I would not talk to him about ground balls. It doesn't go well. And I've read like other people talk to him about ground balls. It doesn't go well. I've read other people talk to him about it, and even Andy McCullough, who likes him and has a good relationship with him. I read the piece on Hosmer thinking that he was not going to hit ground balls this season. And when I read that piece, I was like, if you read this closely, he did not say anything about not hitting ground balls this season. I was like, if you read this closely,

he did not say anything about not hitting ground balls this season. So what I might talk to him about, and I don't know how you talk to these guys, and I don't know how you talk to somebody about a flaw like this late in their career, but to me there's a second flaw that's not just the the ground ball rate it's so that he he used to be really good at making contact outside of the zone and contact rate outside of the zone is the thing that ages the poorest and just look at what happened contact rate outside of the zone the average is around 63 it used to be a little bit higher but now it's around 63 percent

with the royals his contact rate outside the zone was at like 70 percent with the padres it's been 58 percent and i don't know why it happened so quickly that's not usually how aging works however it fits the general aging curve and so that's kind of a reason why i don't even really like him as a bulk guy i know that uh errol cohen who i love to death and is really smart about this and and points out that he's a really good bulk rbi guy that you can get for cheap and that you have to think about runs in rbi just like every other um you know statistical category i'm just you know look at 2018 he had 72 runs in 69 rbi and what if he strikes out more it could happen i mean yeah if he jumps another three four percentage points gets up to a 28 k rate doesn't

get the walk rate back he will still be able to still play, but he'll fall in the order. He'll fall in the order, and then he'll start sitting against lefties. They have an option now to do something about that, and if they're winning, then it becomes like, listen, this is Hosmer's

WRC Plus for his career, 79. That's against lefties. This is it for the last two years, 45 and 59. Yowza! And if the Padres are doing well and it's a short season and the manager's like, hey, man, we've got to go for it, now he's not even playing against lefties. None of this is outside the bounds of normal aging either. I mean, he's 30 years old.

I'm not saying maybe 28 is a little bit pushing it, but even like 25, 26 without a corresponding help and walk rate and the same ground ball rate he's had forever, then you're looking at 250, 300 OBP, 400 slugging. What? That's like James Loney, dude. James Loney and under contract through 2025. Unless, of course, he does figure out how to hit the ball in the air

and opts out after 2022, which will not happen. Below replacement with the Padres, man. I think one of the reasons why Dave Cameron has a good position within the Padres and is being listened to now is because he wrote, this is a really bad contract, really bad idea. And to his credit, at least Preller has realized that one. Yeah, that piece came out like, what, a week before Dave got the job at the Padres? It seemed like those things happened really together yeah yeah oh man that's uh i bet he doesn't open this page this fangraves

page of all of you i bet he doesn't he just tries not to he just diverts his eyes i mean if they just accepted the money as a sunk cost on hosmer Myers, platooned them at first base and said, whatever, we don't care. That wouldn't be the worst platoon ever. That'd actually be a pretty good way to handle an ugly situation instead of jamming them both into the lineup more than they probably should be in the lineup. Well, with Greg Garcia currently the fan graph's choice for DH,

I think Hosmer and Myers, and perhaps Josh Naylor are going to be a three-man combo for those two lineup spots. So there are your DH winners for this squad. Yeah, I think Naylor and Franchi Cordero are kind of battling for extra playing time. I mean, Franchi's a stat cast darling. We've talked about him for a long time now.

And I think with Maylor, he's been young for the level everywhere he's played. He's shown in the upper levels of the minors an ability to put a ton of balls in play, to draw walks. He's shown a little extra power the last couple of seasons, too. If the only game power we'd seen from him

was last year at AAA in the big leagues with the rabbit ball power we'd seen from him was last year at triple a in the big leagues with the rabbit ball i'd be more skeptical but we saw some of that power show up at double a back in 2018 17 homers as a 21 year old that season so he's a guy that i like quite a bit i i think of all the options they could squeeze in i would probably go ahead and put a few chips on Josh Naylor to be the guy that benefits the most from the Padres having the DH spot available. Yeah,

I mean, depending on which projection system you pick, Naylor is the one of the three that is projected to be league average with a bat. So, it is a little bit annoying that Naylor, Cordero, and Hosmer are all lefties, but that can still be useful.

I think that means that Myers is at least guaranteed one-third of the playing time, but I think it'll actually end up being around 60%. And the one thing about Cordero, we did talk about how he made some improvements, but then we looked at his winter ball stats and he still struck out a lot. So, you know, if he murders the ball and runs real fast and puts all that together, he still needs to make some improvement in the contact rate

because 35% strikeout rate is just, even in today's game, is still pretty difficult. So as much as I kind of like him, I think he's a long shot. I think it's more Cordero on the taxi squad. Yeah, or at least just as the you might be out of options the backup corner guy i think you might yeah backup guy backup corner uh and tommy fam of course has had some some injury issues and has the eye condition too that people never seem to forget about so um you know jeff zimmerman had a cool piece where recently where

he looked at predicting injuries and he kind of had a rubric that like once a player has spent 300 days on the dl there there there is a little bit of predictive energy for the next year in terms of uh of being on the dl again because it's really hard to project injuries and project injury and playing time. And, uh, Tommy fam was surprisingly close to John Carlos Stanton in, in, uh,

lost days. That makes me sad as someone who believes in fams talent. Yeah. It's just a different shape, uh, because of, uh, of how it's happened.

But, um, uh, he was on, he was at least highlighted in the same way but uh yeah we love fam let's build a let's build a lineup real quick we've got uh the starters everywhere plus hedges and uh maybe torrens so that would be uh 11 we got four left uh cordero is listed as a starter and greg garcia is listed as a starter um so that

means dozier is one lagaris is one myers is one nailer and nailer so there's your there's your bench it's fairly heavy on outfielders but since we had greg garcia dh the infielders are greg garcia and brian dozier backup infielders and myers will become a backup first baseman yeah i really think they're gonna have to platoon hosmer and myers as someone that had to live it in the sim are you platooning him i've been platooning them and i got an email email from Will Myers about it. He didn't like that. He's mad. He's very mad. And he's not hitting.

It's not like he's crushing on his side of the platoon and I'm being a jerk by not giving him more time. He's playing like garbage and writing me emails, which is exactly what I like. Fairly consistent with my real life interactions. One, I got to find the glue guy. I always got to find the glue guy. The glue guy is Cal Quantrill

because Gore and Patino will probably still be on the taxi squad. Although Gore has a chance, I guess, of making it if somebody is injured in spring. I think Quantrill with, in terms of options and playing time is a really,

a really good long man glue guy that can come in in the fourth inning. There are plenty of pitchers that he'll have to come in in the fourth inning because Joey Lucchese and Denison Lamette are really bad when it comes to the third or fourth time through the order. Third time through the order, don't even talk about fourth time through the order. So bringing in Quantrill in the fourth inning for those guys could net them some wins, actually. I think Adrian Morahan will make the roster and has been stretched out in the past, so he could be kind of a longish guy

that could be the second glue guy. And if I order them in terms of talent, for me, it is Paddock, Lamette Richards, Davies Lucchese, and Lucchese is the first person to lose his job. I think the Lamette Richards thing is really interesting. I mean, no one really talks about them one versus the other. There's probably a 125-pick gap in ADP,

but I wouldn't be surprised if Richards just had a better year than lamette like that it's not out of the realm of possibility i think it says more about lamette's volatility i think the strikeouts are going to be there of course because that's what he does but we've seen a level from richards a few years ago maybe he can't be that guy anymore we've seen a level from him where he pitches kind of like an ace. That's pretty exciting to me now that he's healthy again. Smelling good is important, and thanks to Hawthorne, smelling good is easier than ever. It's time to move on from that old bottle of cologne that you've been holding onto since high school. It's time to start taking care of your hair and your skin.

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What about like a bonfire? Usually you have bonfires at night and then you sleep afterwards, probably from alcohol and staying up late. You're right. That's the other thing. But I do associate the bonfire smell with a nice night's sleep. And some people don't like that smell. I like it.

I like grabbing a shirt from the previous day and smelling that bonfire smell on it. Yeah, it's a nice smell, actually. Or like a barbecue, a Little Miss barbecue in Arizona. You stand in line there next to all the food, and it just permeates your clothes. And you notice when you're packing up your bag to go home, you're like, oh, that's the shirt I wore at Little Miss barbecue. You stand in line there next to all the food, and it just permeates your clothes. You notice when you're packing up your bag to go home, you're like, oh, that's the shirt I wore at Little Miss Barbecue. I don't want to wash this shirt. I want it to smell like this forever.

I don't want to wash it. My new pillowcase. I should probably have a side hustle where I work at a barbecue pit just to absorb the smells. Speaking of Phoenix. Well, if the players and the owners don't get it together, we're going to have to need some side hustle, some main hustle. Yeah. Hey, look, if you've got ideas for what a good main hustle for me would be,

feel free to tweet at me, at Derek Van Ryper, if this boat tips over. I bet you could do some of the broadcasters are doing like, there's a guy that did announcing a bunch of penguins, like rushing to the ocean or something. Yeah. And Andrew Cotter is, I think he's from Scotland. He does some sports play by play overseas.

Yeah. He does the ones with his dogs. Uh, he's got Olive and Mabel. They've had a few good ones. They had a zoom call. There's that like British humor and his dog, his dogs are like just most dogs. They're just good dogs.

They're fun to watch. So if you, if you have the ass and you need a lift at Andrew Cotter on Twitter, he's put up a few pretty good videos in the last, I don't know, six weeks or so. I'll be checking them out after this. But yeah, you definitely should. Speaking of Phoenix, kind of in passing there, let's talk about the Diamondbacks.

I ran this leaderboard yesterday. I forget if we've ever run this one before. Maybe you've already looked at it before. But I'm working on my presentation for PitchCon. P con started today by the way my presentation is tomorrow so i'm kind of finalizing the the slides and things for that and uh non-barrel home runs kind of struck me as a thing like hey like what what about that like what's the deal like who who hits non-barrel home runs like balls either aren't smoked or they're not hit at the optimal launch angle. Eduardo Escobar was fifth on the list when I ran the query of non-barrel home runs. He had 11 of them last season. He's very average in terms of exit velocity. Look at the league average last year. I think it was 87.5. He was at 87.8. There are some problems with average exit velocity that I'll probably talk about in the presentation. 7.8. There are some problems with average exit velocity that I'll probably talk about in the presentation. So it's like, okay, how did this guy do this? How did he go well over 30 home runs? He

doesn't hit the ball hard, doesn't barrel it that often. He's 37th out of 250 qualified hitters in sweet spot though. So he puts the ball in that optimal launch angle range a lot. So that's kind of a, a kind of a sticking point for me. It's like, okay, this is the thing that he does really well. It kind of puts him in this position. And playing time is huge, right? Because I think he showed us in 17 and 18 that a 20 home run floor was actually legit. He made some adjustments during the end of his time in Minnesota, carried those over. So the crash might not be as bad as we think when we recall that just a few months ago,

the thing we were most worried about in Major League Baseball was the unusual baseball that they used that juiced up home runs last season, right? So he's just a weird player. He's just outside the top 100. We don't talk about him that much. Am I wrong to think that Eduardo Escobar is actually a little safer than we might think? No, I don't think so. And I think there's also something that happens with the short season where the compilers can't compile further, right? So, you know, let's say he would fall back to 25

home runs. That seems fairly safe. You're right. His fly ball rate is totally different. You know, his barrel rate jumped that last season in Minnesota and has remained steady around 8%, which is not amazing, but it's also comfortably above average. And so that's the kind of thing that can turn in a 200 ISO in 25 home runs these days. So yeah, I think that's it. But the difference between the 25 and the 35, But the difference between the 25 and the 35, once you cut that in half, it's five homers. I know that's just silly math, but it's like the people that normally would separate themselves with these large, everyone's going to come to the middle of the pack more, right?

And he's comfortably in the middle of the pack and doesn't cost anything. So, you know, you still want to go after the guy that would hit 35, 45 homers in a major season because it's still that separation is still meaningful. But when you come to like, can I buy a middle of the pack guy for zero dollars or do I take a long shot on somebody who might not play at all? That's not always an easy answer you know like a joe adele versus eduardo escobar totally different things and for certain teams it maybe you need the joe adele because you got malik smith earlier and you you need to take a shot at something in the outfield uh but really what's going on is that there are a lot of teams probably that should take Eduardo Escobar because he's going to be eligible at a few positions, be able to stick and plug and play in different places.

He played 33 games at second base, 144 at third, and even, nope, shortstop was 2018. So just being able to do CIMI is pretty fun. And to just be like, I'm going to get 25 homers and four or five steals and a decent batting average from a guy I can plug in CI or MI, I think that's underrated as a bench piece in mixed leagues. Yeah, I think in shallow mixed leagues, you know, maybe he's not quite exciting enough to bother with but i think in like 15 teams and deeper and again he's not

it's not super cheap but he doesn't get talked about as much as the other guys and his price tier and his skills actually look more stable uh upon and the specifics of this season also pull out um some of the competition if they're you competition. If Jake Lamb had kind of figured stuff out and pushed Escobar into more of a utility role with a smaller roster, that could have been possible. But now Jake Lamb is listed as a starter at DH and is more battling with sort of like Kevin Crone for first base DH at bats, I think, because you would rather have the defensive Escobar at third, I think. Yeah, I'm right there with you.

I think that's how they incorporate Lamb back into the mix. That's a nice kind of secondary win for Escobar in the process. I was really surprised to hear on one of the Roto-Wire pods recently, Todd Zola was looking back at the NFBC data from last season, and Luke Weaver was on a lot of championship rosters, even though he missed a ton of time, which I think probably tells us something about the types of players that successful fantasy managers are drafting in that range right a guy that changed teams and had some pedigree and was pitching well of course before he got hurt and then once he was out you had a chance to replace him and stream so it wasn't

the end of the world especially at the cost but i think with weaver i kind of look at him and say hey there's obvious risk because he had an arm injury last year. He's around 200 overall for his ADP right now. Why not draft him there? I mean, is there anything in terms of stuff or command that suggests that he was completely over his skis last season and the quality of those innings was entirely a fluke? Because I was actually buying into it. because I was actually buying into it. Yeah, in fact, the stuff,

the metrics tell a fun story about him, which is that he bought a Rapsodo before he went to Arizona and tried to just basically, using the advice of the Rapsodo rep that he talked to and some targets on the Rapsodo, built himself a better curveball. And that's funny because he'd been in St. Louis and he'd been taking advice from Adam Wainwright on his curveball, but it just didn't work because

A, what was the exact tenor of that advice? And B, he's not Adam Wainwright. He doesn't throw from the same slot. He's a drop and drive guy. It's just a total different guy. So he maybe shouldn't just necessarily think that Adam Wainwright can teach him a great curveball. When he went to the Rapsodo, he built a curveball that last year had a 108 stuff number by driveline. So that now is actually his best pitch because the changeup is 103, the cutter is 102, and the fastball is 92. And I think the fastball, even though it comes in at below average i think that there's a fair amount of deception because he's a drop and drive guy with a little bit of ride and just the the where the ball comes out it just it seems to stay on a string high you know what i

mean um there's something about sort of kind of coming in low and throwing high pitches that don't drop you know and so i think the combination of his release point his mechanics make that fastball play at about average now the cutter he threw 14 of the time last year i think it was just as important as the curveball that he didn't actually feature as much as he did with the Cardinals, but was better overall. So now he's got, I would say, he's got three average pitches and one above average pitch. You could be more positive than that. You could be like three above average pitches and average pitch,

which means that I think he's comfortably above average as a pitcher, you know, I, I, and you know, that's his projections. I think maybe miss on that a little bit. They're calling back to a season with the Cardinals for 95 ERA.

When he did not have those pitches, he did not have the cutter and he did not have the curve ball. So he was a guy who had a, you know, an average fastball, slightly above average change and to kind of show me type pitches. Yeah. He's had two partial seasons where he's come back with like a low threes

FIP last year in 2017, the two times he's done that. Injuries of course. I mean, you say it in the partial season thing, you know, of course, injury is a big deal and he's coming off an injury and the last the last note from rotowire says he you know the team is going to be cognizant of the workload so like he's definitely the not the guy who's going to give you a lot of wins early in the season definitely going to be uh taken over by the glue guy which i think

actually might be merrill Kelly or Mike Leak. Yeah. John Duplantier, maybe. That's a good name. I think, I mean, I think he's more interesting than,

than the other two. Alex Young, kind of interesting in a multi-inning role too. Is that E. Jackson? Is that, Oh, Edwin Jackson!

Yes! He's never done it before either, has he? He had a stint with the Diamondbacks before. Yeah, he'd been with them. Man, I wish it was a new team. Edwin Jackson actually could make this team. I didn't think we'd get there. Let's build a 15.

We've got Bradley, Guerra, Chafin, Rondon, Ginkle, Lopez. That's the six relievers I'm happy putting in. Maybe even Young.

Because he pitched for them a little bit last year. So that's seven. Then you've got your five starters. That's 12. So we got three left. Whichever of Kelly and Leak, you got two left. Two left. Duplantier.

Yeah, he's got to be in there, right? And so the last one is Jackson versus Taylor Clark and Stephen Crichton, who's 28 years old and was okay last year. I guess he might make it. I don't know. Maybe Corbin Martin, depending on how he's progressing from Tommy John. He had that in early July.

He'll be in the taxi squad. I think they can just stash him away. He's kind of an interesting guy for keeper in Dynasty Leagues, though, to think about picking up if he got let go when he was down. Well, if Jackson lets him put them on the taxi squad, he's on this roster. Yeah, didn't think we'd get there. We put Jackson on a team, yes!

On the position player side, Josh Rojas is pretty interesting. He can play all over. He doesn't have a spot to call his own, but we talked about Jake Lamb as we were talking about Escobar. I think Josh Rojas is another one of those guys that finds a little extra time even if he directly isn't frequently a DH. Yeah, I mean, as a lefty, they can play all over. That's a fun little thing.

And infield-outfield is just one of those things that as you can hear from some of the rosters we're trying to build, infield-outfield is really important. It just gives you that kind of versatility that you don't have to necessarily be grouped with one end or the other. His stat cast numbers aren't amazing,

but they could be average. He could be kind of like an Eduardo Escobar type player, actually, that could play all over and bring you some decent value. I think the strikeout rate will come down and the batting average will go up. But I also just don't really see necessarily an in for him because I don't think he's going to out bat Lamb

or Kevin Crone at DH. And if everybody's healthy in terms of Peralta, Marte, Peralta, Marte and Calhoun, I don't think he's going to step in because if anybody needs a platoon mate, it's Calhoun.

He needs a righty. I think Rojas, though, has about as many paths into the starting lineup with an injury as any backup position player in the league might have. He's got to have as many outs as anybody. I agree with you that Lamb and Krohn, DH-ing power-wise especially, just bring a lot more to the table potentially than Rojas, but take away a starter

at second base, third base, even shortstop because you'd slide someone else over, left field, right field, center field, maybe Tim Lacastro takes over in center. There's probably five positions where if you lose the starter, Josh Rojas at least picks up big side platoon playing time at that spot. Yeah, good fun guy to have on your deep league roster.

Young, too, so if the exit velocity kind of improves a little, there's definitely a little bit of a jump up possibility. Zips has him for 15 homers and 23 stolen bases if he got full playing time. So definitely a guy to put on your radar, if not your roster. I do wonder about how good this team is and what that matters. Is there somebody also that could just lose their job because the team is bad

and they want to play Rojas? Calhoun, maybe? He did a one-year deal, right? I think he's a one-year deal. Two-year 16. What? I think he's a one-year deal. Two-year 16. What? Yeah. They're pretty well run.

They've done well with the Mike Hayes in front of us. I doubt they'll be bad, bad, yeah. I'm surprised they gave Calhoun a second guaranteed year. That stands out a little bit. LoCastro is a deep roster winner for me. You could fake it with a backup center fielder with Marte on the roster. You could just have a double Marte-Parte in center field and not have LoCastro on this roster.

But with the added space, LoCastro on this roster. But with the added space, LoCastro, I think, becomes the backup center fielder and possibly the platoon mate for Calhoun and Wright. Yeah, Tim LoCastro had a better overall season than I realized, and you just mentioned it. He could fly. Look at the steals last season. 122 combined games between Arizona and Reno.

26 for 27 as a base stealer with 17 of those steals coming in Arizona. Didn't get caught as a base stealer last year. When I did the describe the tools piece with Keith Law, we kind of went through, like he went through like, sort of like, this is how I, as a, like as a scout would see, uh, speed and, you know, um, and I sort of went through like, this is what the stats say. And, um, the thing that's,

that's kind of funny is we've come back around to, um, you know, sprint speed being less predictive actually than, you know, time to first. Um, and the Castro is actually, I think, uh, like second best at times first. So, uh, here, Oh no, Tim, the Castro is the fastest man in baseball by sprint speed. But if you use time to first, it's Magna Sierra. That guy can fly too. I've seen him play a few different times. I saw him way back in the Midwest League,

and I saw him play a AAA game, I think it was, last year. He can move. And the biggest difference is between how their sprint speed and their times of first actually belong to like people like kevin kiermeier and cody bellinger who were very good at getting to first base in a fast fashion but weren't necessarily top five ish uh in terms of sprint speed there's some technique in that he's fat and like like taking a swing getting rid of the bat and and like just it's kind of like being a good uh track and field sprinter faster too yeah yeah yeah yeah being a sprinter versus uh

uh like being good at the 100 versus the 400 or whatever yeah some some sort of uh overlooked little things that can make you run to first faster than other players who are just faster in a straight line over a longer distance. Top performers in business and sports often attribute their success to their morning routine, whether it's waking up early, setting their goals for the day, exercise, or meditation. But not everyone has the time to do it all. With Hydrant, you can jumpstart your mornings. Hydrant creates flavored electrolyte packets you mix directly into your water to make hydrating your body easy and delicious. Each rapid hydration mix has the four essential electrolytes your body needs. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, and zinc help you hydrate quickly and

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It gets ugly as we move to the bottom section of the NL West, we'll say. It gets uglier. Yeah, it's going to get worse. We've got Beer of the Week kind of lingering out there in the background, too. A couple things on the Rockies. This was suggested to me on Twitter as part of a thread. First question was about the Brewers and the DH. Who wins the most was effectively the question in the NL.

And somebody on the thread suggested it's the Rockies because Sam Hilliard doesn't quite have a place to call his own. We talk about Garrett Hampson, Ryan McMahon having to battle for playing time. They can obviously platoon being a lefty and a righty. Brendan Rodgers, a top prospect who got hurt last year and should play a lot. Now he has a path. It did make me think, the Rockies could be among the biggest winners with the DH edition because they have some good bats that don't necessarily have a spot without it. Kind of in that process, I started to wonder, are we overlooking Rymel Tapia

as a threat to Sam Hilliard's playing time, or is Hilliard capable of just taking away the large side of the platoon in left field and kind of pushing Tapia to the bench? I think with the DH, it's okay. I'm avoiding the question. It's fair. I think with the DH, they'll both play because Tapia is better defensively.

And with Dahl's injury history and the fact that he's an at-risk player because he had his spleen removed, there's a non-zero chance he doesn't play at all. Yeah, it's a little bit like the Carrasco situation we discussed earlier. Leukemia last year, he is at an elevated risk. Dahl, the spleen removal, that is even further from my mind

than obviously carasco's leukemia situation it's a good good thing to bring up well apparently the thing was he had a choice between trying to just like heal the lacerated spleen which would have taken him out for most of the year or take the spleen out and he could get back in sooner and i guess just because he you know you can't fault him for it, he hadn't played very often. He needed to get on the field. He probably ached to get on the field. He had the spleen removed. I don't know how that'll play in, but generally you can say he's an injury risk. That means Tapia will play some. It may be in bursts here or there. I wouldn't bet on him because I don't think he's a very good player. i would rather have hilliard in there uh and then with the dh there's a soft landing for

whoever because if if it's not necessarily that you know it's all about left field or whatever hillary could play some dh desmond is like pretty close to done for me even though there was a little bit of a dead cat bounce for him last year and the I just wanted to say why I like Hilliard so much. Hilliard's max exit velocity, which is important in small samples, was 58th out of 478 last season at 114. It was 114.1. Miguel Sano was 114.2. Josh Donaldson was 114.2. George Springer was 114.3. Behind them, Trey Mancini was 113.9.

Michael Chaves, 113.8. So suffice to say he's good there. Also, your exit velocity on fly balls and line drives is a powerful metric. And Hilliard was 45th there, right there with Jock Peterson, CJ Krohn, Jose Abreu, really good barrel rate, even better if you consider barrels per batted ball event, and barrels per batted ball event are a little bit better than barrels per plate appearance, obviously because once you're doing barrels per plate appearance, you're bringing in how often they strike out, which is another variable that you have to consider. Obviously, Hilliard has that problem, a little bit of swing and miss, but I particularly liked his plate discipline and his swing and reach rates last year, really good in the small sample, and I think that means that he's going to have a good walk rate

along with a good strikeout rate and hit the snot out of the ball when he hits it, that he's going to have a good walk rate along with a good strikeout rate and hit the snot out of the ball when he hits it. And he's going to steal bases. He's one of my favorite guys. He's one of my favorite bench guys. I think he's worth having as a bench guy in a mixed league. I think he's worth a shot in any league. Yeah, I would agree.

I think you made a really strong case for anybody who was kind of on the fence about Hilliard. With Brendan Rodgers, I think we didn't get to see that much of him last year, but the track record in the minors, pretty impressive. Some of the underlying numbers there are not quite as good as Hilliard, but still not bad. 94.1 average exit velocity on flies and liners, kind of comparable to Trevor Story in terms of max exit velocity as well. Just looking for some options there. I'm not convinced that Garrett Hampson has to play more than part-time.

That's sort of where I'm falling on how to get McMahon and Rodgers into the lineup in all of this too. Hampson is an interesting speed play where he goes, but I don't know. I don't know if he's ever going to hit enough to be more than a part-time player. Yeah. There's little parts where you look here and here

and you put together if he can walk like he did this one year and have power like he did this one year and make contact like he did this other year, if you put all those things together, I think he could be a league average bat with good defense at a tough position. But that's not a huge ceiling. It's not something that you need to beat down the Rockies door and say, oh, they never play their best players. Well,

I'm not sure, Garrett. I don't think that Hampson's necessarily that kind of player that you need to sort of claw at your chest about. Looking at some of the depth options here, I think because this is a team that we don't usually get excited about pitching with, it's less fun and helpful to build out their pitching staff. But I have really warmed up to Scott Oberg over the course of the later part of this draft season. I think I've

come to appreciate that he's had two really nice seasons now in 18 and 19. Decent strikeout rate, not elite, but really good ratios and certainly as someone that gets a ton of outs on the ground, kind of fits the park about as well as a reliever can fit in

Colorado. Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't really look like Wade Davis has much left in the tank. No, no, it does not. I expect nothing. I'm just looking at his stuff numbers. You expect nothing? From Wade Davis?

I can't. Yeah, you i think you know he had a good curveball stuff percentage you know stuff number 122 but his fastballs at 101 and that sounds okay like oh okay an average fastball except the problem is he's a reliever and once your fastball is below average as a reliever there are very few people that continue to be good relievers i I mean, I think of somebody like Sergio Romo, right? Where his breaking ball was just so good he just kept throwing the breaking ball and kind of started pitching backwards at some point in his career. I don't think Wade Davis is a possibility

for that. No, he had some amazing seasons at his peak, but I think Oberg or Jairo diaz or somebody else ends up taking over that job relatively soon after things get up and running uh anything else is going after oberg isn't he uh yeah because there was a lot of uncertainty health-wise i think with davis coming into the season and then he got named the closer. I think it was in February. Nick Groke from The Athletic had that nugget. Jairo Diaz has the traditional closers group of metrics that I would normally look for,

but I do agree that Colorado makes things a little bit different. Oberg has a little bit more of that starters arsenal that I think can help him kind of suppress balls in play, suppress home runs. He's at least had a decent home run rate for his career. He's sort of demonstrated two-year at least track rate. And, you know, 94 miles an hour is not bad, but Jairo Diaz has the swing strike rates and the 98-mile-an-hour fastball of a future closer. So I wouldn't not mention him. But when it comes to exciting glue guys, I'm always trying to find my glue guy. Ubaldo Jimenez is literally on this team.

And there's a C. Gonzalez, which has got to be chichi not carlos that is that is chichi back to pitch chichi is terrible uh i'm sorry that's rude uh i hope you're not listening chichi um he's not anymore all right i think it says here that hoffman is in the rotation. I mean, he's got a good curveball, but he had a 770 ERA in AAA last year.

Wow. Yeah. Like, I'm not like an ERA guy. Like, you know I'm not an ERA guy, but you have to go back to 2016 to get an ERA under 4.7 at any level. Yeah, I think that's enough reason to just take a wait and see and not really have any reason to be optimistic for now. I don't. Like we've said this before,

they're such a candidate for, like, do something different. God dang. One of our first episodes, probably like, I don't know, episode six or something like that. I made you GM of the Rockies and asked you what you would do differently. So if you want to go. Nobody pitches more than three innings on the squad. Nobody.

Yeah, they should try some weird stuff this year especially. It's a lab. I'm telling you. Turn it into a lab. Let's move on from the Rockies. Let's go to the Giants. Let's make this even harder. Oh yeah, let's turn it up a notch. Yeah, let's bring it up a level.

I didn't have a lot of pre-written notes. I had no pre-written notes about the Giants because every time I look at their depth chart, I just kind of shake my head. I think they're absolutely headed in the correct long-term direction. I trust the front office to get it right. I think there's going to be some very ugly spells,

especially offensively with this club. Unless they're going to do something unexpected and push a few young guys in to get them reps against big league pitching this year, like Joey Bart. Why would they do that? I don't know. I don't see anybody, really anyone,

at any corner of this depth chart who I'm truly excited about, especially because when the Arizona plan was kind of the frontrunner for this season, you could take players out of that park, you know, Brandon Belt, a lefty whose power gets squashed, Mike Ustremski, hey, like, okay, put them in a more hitter-friendly environment relative to their normal home park.

That's a reason to be excited. That's not happening. Yeah excited uh that's not there was a happening for that yeah so that's that's not there the closer situation's been a mess for a while i've seen some weird stuff with kevin gossman um in i think it was our was it our sim where he got a big contract extension yeah and then in the other sim i mean he got traded for a fairly decent prospect because he was doing well. Yeah. Pretty odd, right? But it is worth kind of hammering this point home.

He could be good. He could be good. Like, especially, I think he's a great weekly. I think he could be good in any league. I have a couple of shares of him because I think, you know, in a weekly league, he's a little bit harder, but there will be some times where you want to play him. Two starts and starts at home.

Yeah, I think we've seen the demonstrated track record of missing bats. He's got the good changeup. And the biggest problem for him has been home runs, and he's now going into the place that suppresses home runs. Yeah, I do see reasons to like him now. And I always wanted him to get out of Baltimore. It happened. He didn't get the great results right away. But San Francisco is as good as it gets for a pitcher with the problems that he's had throughout his career. So that's my guy as Giants go, I guess, on the pitching side, who I actually want to have

a few places. I still don't think I want to really take shots in the bullpen. It's more of a pick-em-up in season than a draft and stash. I guess the position player who should play a lot because he can play all over is Mauricio Dubon. And I think he'll hit higher in the order with the Giants than he ever would have hit with the Brewers. That bodes well for his counting stats. So you could get multi-position. You could get a really nice average floor with a bit of pop. We've seen lots of steals from him at lower levels. He had a 30 steal season back in AA in 2017. This is a team that has nothing to lose, and that's kind of the perfect conditions for a guy like Dubon to exceed expectations

yeah even though I think long term it's going to be maybe a Joe Panik like career where even before the end of his team control he's no longer a starter especially if the Giants get better over that course or he spends you know five years on bad Giants teams starting. But I love watching the gears grind on the Fangraphs depth chart when looking at center field. Mike Estremski, 31%. Billy Hamilton, 26%. Steven Duggar, 21%.

Marcio Dubon, 18%. I doubt it ends up that way, but it becomes more of an odds chart, which is like, you know, these are the odds that one of these guys is playing here. But the last, the most recent update on Dubon's page is really interesting. It comes from Alex Pavlovich of Sports Bay Area, where he says, I can really legitimately see him playing center field a bit, said Gabe Kapler. I think earlier in camp I was saying we're going to take more of a wait and see. I think at this point it's demonstrating he can play center field in the shortstop.

That is one of those manager things. I don't know. It just means he could play there. I don't know. I think the T, I don't think he'll start anywhere, but I think he'll play everywhere. Right. And we see Nico Goodrum

is probably a good example of this too. That type of player who doesn't have a spot to call his own but plays enough spots well enough to keep starting every day can exceed expectations for a little while before people catch on too. It took a while for fantasy owners to realize

how useful Nico Goodrum was when the Tigers started giving him time in 2018. If you haven't drafted your NL-only league, he's a great NL-only play because he will just give you so much roster flexibility in terms of like, you know, oh, I don't have to pick up the only shortstop that's playing at all on the wire because i'll just slide dubon over to shortstop

and pick up an outfielder that might actually be playing a little bit more that i like better just gives you a lot more options when you're looking at the thin waiver wire on a 12 team league you could do better at any position he'll play, probably. I'm with you there. This is a rebuilding team without a lot of loaded, big-league-ready players that are knocking on the door. They don't really benefit from expanded rosters. Is there anybody who becomes more interesting to you?

Because those guys would have just received a call-up anyway and would have been received a call up anyway and would have been gifted more playing time anyway because of the nature of the team right like i just don't see any clear-cut winners as a result of expanded rosters here well i think jylan davis gets a real chance as opposed to having to be dfa'd or whatever or having having to put him up against Pence for a roster spot. Now Davis and Pence can both be on this roster with Wilmer Flores. They'll play some corner outfield, they'll play some DH, and they'll get some playing time. I think that Pence is a retirement tour signing, I think. So I don't think he's a lock to actually play a ton

at 37 on a bad team without the need to draw fans right yeah if yeah you can't have fans in the park the retirement tour uh that whole thing isn't quite the same. Projected to be a below average bat, right-hander, without defensive value. I love his style, but I don't think that that requires playing. I think he could be on a short side platoon in right field with Mike Estremski, be on a short side platoon in right field with Mike Ustremsky, where Hamilton and Duggar are playing most of center field with some Dubon, and Dickerson plays left field as long as he's healthy, and Davis plays when he's not. I think that'll mostly be what happens dh is flores and sandoval and uh with some flores in the infield and sandoval i guess too um and second base is dubon and yelmer sanchez with dubon playing shortstop against lefties um i think that's what's gonna happen maybe solano makes

this team too can Can we build it? We have to build a 15. Here we go. Build a 15. Dickerson, Yastrzemski, Dickerson, Yastrzemski, Pence, Davis, Flores. That's five.

Longoria, Crawford, Dubon, Sanchez, Belt. That's 10. Three catchers, 13. We got two left. Solano. Darren Ruff getting in there. Three catchers, 13. We got two left. Solano. Darren Ruff getting in there.

Hamilton. Duggar. I didn't put Hamilton or Duggar. Yeah. And we didn't even put Ruff on. Duggar's more likely to stick of the two, but I think both will probably hang around. Man, that is weird. Did i see a scrum sheet twice

maybe i mean this is just one of these things though where it's like you have to realize that every at bat every plate appearance every inning when you're rebuilding has value to long-term evaluation and development and yeah that makes it hard for me to believe that Billy Hamilton, in a season where there are fewer plate appearances to go around, it makes it hard to believe they're going to do that. Why keep him? He was an NRI. I think they might just release him.

Because wouldn't you rather just overplay Stephen Duggar trying to figure out what he is then give half that time it's to hamilton especially if they play there may not even be that much trading and if there is trading there's not going to be like no one's going to give you anything of value for billy hamilton right like so it's not like let's keep him on the roster and see if we get something for him later yeah you don't have that same volume of playing time that you have to fill. So a player like Hamilton, maybe he's someone else's 30th man in this year's odd sort of build. But we did it.

We got through the NL West. The Giants were the team I was really concerned about when I was putting this outline together. Let's go to beer of the week. Let's do it. I'm going to ask you an all-time beer question. What is the beer that you either

worked the hardest or waited the longest to track down before you finally got it? Beers that come to mind are Treehouse, King Julius. King Sue from Topland Goliath. That's a good one. Yeah, those come to mind. King Sue, su i mean i guess the distribution of king su aside from they don't make tons of it but it's fairly difficult to get that far outside the

midwest right like most toppling goliath distribution is in the midwest jester king Midwest. Jester King has a, like, RU 55, uh, sour. I, I really wanted to get my hands on a Jester King sour before I could. Um, yeah, those are the ones that come to mind for sure. All right.

So I, I've got one. I've got one that I finally was able to pick up. Central Waters has a partnership with, uh, a farm that makes maple syrup in the state. So what Central Waters does, they have a great barrel aging program.

I've talked about it before. They make a lot of bourbon stouts and rye stouts, all sorts of great barrel age stuff. They took some of their barrels, their bourbon barrels after brewing in them and gave them to the maple syrup farm. They, of course, took the syrup that they got, put that in the barrels,

let that sit for a while, sold that syrup, which is also very good. It's from a place called B and E's trees. And then they said, Hey, central waters, why don't you take these barrels back and put some beer in them again?

So they've got a few barrels that have gone back and forth and they make a maple barrel stout they're not the only place that makes it i know founders has cbs they've done that for a few years this is central waters version of that and it was very limited release it's always kind of like a i don't know fall late fall christmas time sort of thing where you might get lucky and pop up at the right bar on a day where they tap a barrel of it. And that's pretty much it. And then it's just sort of gone. And they were able to release some. Well, they decided to release some recently because I think they wanted to get people to go up to the brewery and do carryout.

I mean, they're two hours north of Madison. They're in the relative middle of nowhere. So they popped it up on their online store. I picked up a couple of bottles. I haven't drank it yet, but it's the beer that I, for years, I just thought it's a unicorn. I'm never going to have that beer. It's going to be the Central Waters beer that I always wanted that I never had. And now I finally have a few bottles so probably gonna put some in the fridge and have it ready to go for either baseball's opening day or maybe even just when there's an agreement that would put us on the path for opening day because it is a it's it's a celebration sort of beer it's a big hitter yeah i want one i just love the concept right like the maple flavor anyway is just great and the the amount

of time it takes to make the products trade the barrels back and forth to age it yeah there's a lot of effort that goes into producing that yeah there's a there's a, I think Eclipse in Truckee here has a, they have this line of 50-50 stouts that they put in different barrels. And the king of that one is the Pappy, the Pappy Van Winkle barrel aged one. So I do like the kind of thinking about the provenance of the barrels. of thinking about the provenance of the barrels. I also had the distinct pleasure of walking through the Goose Island barrel house for Bourbon County. Yeah, that was probably pretty nice. Yeah, it was pretty cool. It was pretty cool.

And it was just randomly. I was there because i was there was some pitchfork people for pitchfork fest and they had to pick something up for pitchfork fest because they were doing it so it wasn't like one of those like oh you know we're gonna show you behind the scenes it was just like where are we what are we doing what oh where what is this and i was just like running up to every barrel and like reading what it was in like rare and this and that and smelling the barrels was just so it was so great um you know i was also thinking like you know sours um have been on that list i just can't i can't oh west letter in the uh the the um the 12 the 12 yearold triple or something.

That was one that I wanted for a long time that actually David Appelman from Fangraphs brought back from his trip to Belgium. I had with him for the first time. But I think Sours from Cantillon were something that I really wanted for a long time and finally had. And I just bring that up because my beer of the week is a sour beer

which couldn't be any further from uh canteon which is like canteon is like the uh the og the original gangster of of sours they're very i wouldn't say restrained necessarily but just like um beautiful and light and and and interesting interesting and multi-flavored. They definitely don't have sour gummy worms jammed in there. But I had a Dan's Jam sour gummy worms sour from Full Tilt Brewing near Baltimore in Maryland. And it tasted like liquid sour gummy worms. Which you would say is pleasant? I really liked it, yes.

You didn't like sour gummy worms growing up? No, I do like sour candy. I still like sour candy. I eat a lot of it, but it reminds me of the red, white, and blue popsicle sour that I had last year. That beer was like deep blue like it was a it but it held up it it actually it was a accurate depiction of

a popsicle in a beer i i actually couldn't believe they pulled it off yeah yeah and i've said this before we're like i'm i'm all things through science i'm i'm okay with it my wife was like well it's a little sweet it kind of tastes like a cider or something and i was like i don't know it's still got that sour finish i'm into it um i i it was it might be a little bit hard to find but i bet you they'll do it again because uh it did so well um it was uh very popular popular on untapped and people were looking for it. I've got a couple more Dan's Jams in the fridge. Thanks to

Dan, my friend Dan who was part of that brewery and once gave me a tour of their bar while it was being built when I went over there for the All-Star game and then took me on a tour of the best drinking establishments in Baltimore and then put me on a cab at like 2 in the morning to D.C.

Were you supposed to go back to D.C. or was that a prank? No, I was in D.C. for the All-Star game, but I will say that cab ride, hmm. Not your best cab ride, huh? I think I said when I got there, where am I? That's got to be among the worst things a cab driver hears, is getting to the place they're supposed to go. Or I didn't want to go here. Like a $ like getting to the place they're supposed to go or, or, or the, I didn't

want to go here. $50 cab ride too. Yeah. That's, uh, uh, there, there was a colleague of mine previously who in Las Vegas told a cab driver, he wanted to go to Paris. So he wanted to go to the airport and got to the airport, got there there and he was obviously very intoxicated and said oh no i mean uh the paris hotel so the guy had to drive back from the airport back to the strip luckily in vegas everything's pretty close together by the by the airport i mean i'm i'm sure at that point he was long hauled a couple of times though too like it's like all right to to add some add some uh money on the meter. Yeah,

they dig out on the interstate when they don't have to and you get the $25 ride, the $30 ride instead of the $12 ride. I get so ticked off. I'm like, I can see my hotel.

It's right. What? What are you doing? I mean, I got to a point where I've gotten into cars there and I've said, hey, yeah,

I'm back here again. I've tried to make it really obvious. I come here a lot. Don't long haul me and i was told that if that happens you're supposed to uh get one of the hotel uh employees to come over as you're getting your bags and tell them what happened and they'll basically make them leave without you having to pay for being long hauled or maybe you could just pay like 15 bucks what you're supposed to pay instead of 30 plus. I thought that was a pretty good tip. So if it ever happens again,

I probably won't ever go back to Vegas. If we ever go back to Vegas. I've kind of accepted that and it's fine. There are plenty of other places I'd rather go at this point. So as long as I get to go to those places, I'm fine. My beer of the week selections, I got two, they're from Delta Beer beer of the week selections, I got two.

They're from Delta Beer Lab, the closest brewery to where I live. I've been really trying to get down to the low ABVs to offset some of the maple barrel goodness that I'm slowly working on. Also summer. Also summer. It's like 85 with 70% humidity here. So they make a mango ghost at the Delta Beer Lab that is really good. I think it's a little bit less acidic than some of the other

sours I drank. Sweetness absolutely comes through. I think the malt character of a ghost also plays up a little bit too. I think they do really well with that. Then they have a honey red ale, which is great. It's got some local honey mixed in. It's the kind of thing that I realized like i have enough friends enough people in my life who do drink beer who don't drink the same types of beer i drink i should try to drink some things

they would like and then i can make better recommendations to them but i really enjoyed both of those and if you if you're not in milwaukee uh a reasonable approximation i wouldn't necessarily say it's the same thing, but if you want to try something that you can find, most likely you can find mango cart from Golden Road Brewing, which is, I believe, a mango gose. It's at least a mango sour. And I know at least one of our listeners really likes it. So it's a good one to pick up.

Yep, I'm right there with you. It's a great recommendation. If you're enjoying this show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it, please take a few moments to do that. We greatly appreciate the many of you who've already done that. If you don't already have a subscription to The Athletic,

you can support the site with a subscription. Get 40% off at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. We really appreciate everybody who's doing that now and always. And you can always reach us via email, ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com. Just be sure to spell out the word. And if you do that on Twitter, he's at Unoceros. I am at Derek Van Ryper.

That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Tuesday. Thanks for listening.