Rates & Barrels - Miranda Optioned, Another Round of Pitching Injuries & Waiting for a Corbin Burnes Rebound

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Eno and DVR discuss the Twins' decision to send Jose Miranda to Triple-A, Casey Schmitt's place in the Giants' infield mix, the rapidly rising number of injured pitchers, a Phillies bullpen bracing for the absence of Jose Alvarado, budgeting in-season FAB resources, the struggles of Corbin Burnes and the likelihood of a rebound back toward previous levels, and much more. Rundown 0:55 Jose Miranda: Optioned to Triple-A 8:34 Casey Schmitt: Homers in Debut, DVR's Corrected Comp 13:08 Brett Wisely v. David Villar 18:48 Jacob deGrom: Could Return in 2-3 Weeks; Then What Happens? 21:52 Significant Injuries Mounting Among Starting Pitchers 25:07 Changing Pitching Strategy in the Future? 34:44 Jose Alvarado Placed on IL with Elbow Injury 38:28 Becoming More Disciplined with In-Season Resources 44:16 Examining Corbin Burnes' Strange Start to 2023 51:26 Will Pitch Clock Push Older Starters Out of the Game Sooner than Expected? 57:23 IP Leaders Since 2017 Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at $1/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Offers from our partners... Right now, Nuts.com is offering new customers a free gift with purchase and free shipping on orders of $29 or more at Nuts.com/rates Right now, you can try LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get a sixty-day free trial at LinkedIn.com/rates23 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whoa, what are you listening to this for? Wait, who's talking? You know you're driving a 2024 Ford Escape with available Alexa built-in, so you can change the music. Oh yeah. Alexa, change station to 99.2. See? Purchase a 2024 Escape ST-Line all-wheel drive with Tech Pack at 3.49% APR for 72 months with down payment. That's just $267 bi-weekly. Cash value of $40,294. Plus, eligible Ford owners get a $1,000 bonus. For details, visit your local Ford store or Ford.ca.

Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Wednesday, May 10th. Derek Gunriper here with Eno Saris on this episode. We've got a bunch of news items to cover. We have a surprising demotion from the twins. We had an impressive debut from one Casey Schmidt, who I very poorly comped David Fletcher on yesterday's show, so I will write that wrong before the end of this hour. We have an update on Jacob deGrom. We have a Jose Alvarado injury, which is very unfortunate because he's in the midst of what appears to be sort of a late breakout season. He's always had great stuff, but this is the best version of Alvarado that we've ever seen.

And we get some pitching stuff on the rundown as well, vaguely labeled as pitching stuff as I prepare to get to it. But let's start with Jose Miranda getting optioned down to AAA by the Twins. Because this is starting to remind me of what the Rays do with these guys who are big league ready players that we think are going to be pretty steady and safe. And they end up sending them down. And it hasn't just been Jose Miranda. We've seen them do this with Alex Kirilov around his various injuries. We've seen it with Trevor Larnak.

And I like all three of those players. At least I like certain things about all three of those players. And I'm wondering with Miranda, aside from a pretty sluggish start to 35 games to play at a 67 WRC plus is rough. He's not a good defender. And that maybe is something

that I should have taken more into consideration in his profile as far as it being something that could cause him to lose his job completely and get more time at AAA this season. Because previously, I didn't really have this in a bucket of high probability outcomes, but maybe it was more likely to happen than I realized. Yeah, I mean, there's a certain amount of what I would read as poor luck happening, right? I mean, he improved his strikeout rate, improved his walk rate, has about the same raw power, and his barrel rate is only down a little bit. I mean, if I read you those parts of his line, you'd expect him to be hitting 260, 270. The three homers, you know, maybe four or five. Like, he wasn't going to be a guy who hit 30 homers this year.

He's not really that far off, except that the doubles have disappeared, something's disappeared, and yes, he didn't have that baseline of good defense. Kind of hard to fit him in if this is how quickly they pulled the trigger on changing him out, right? It's like, once you decide that his offense is not good enough for that poor defense, where is the corresponding move when he comes back? I mean, other than injury, it looks like you're starting Kirilov at first, Polanco at second, Correa at short.

And who's getting the starts at third now that Miranda's gone? Some combination of probably Willie Castro and Kyle Farmer, I think, was the corresponding move coming off the IL. And, I don't know, maybe occasionally Donovan Solano. I see him on the depth chart over at Roto-Wire as an option at third base, but if those are your options to replace him, it doesn't seem like you're getting a lot better. But the problem is, if you just care about the defense, then is that going to get better in the short time in the minors? Yeah, that's more of a long-term sort of overhaul.

And I wonder if Jose Miranda ends up being a player that the Twins are going to trade over the course of the summer because they're going to need some other upgrades on this roster if they want to win the AL Central and do damage in the postseason. I think as a big league-ready bat, he'd be appealing to a lot of other teams. But is it unlike the profile of Miguel Andujar a few years ago when Andujar had that first breakthrough season with the Yankees and then because of his

defense and an injury he had a major injury that also derailed him was a shoulder injury if I remember correctly it's been just an up and down battle for him to get playing time in the year since even going to other organizations I hope we're not going all the way down there, but this isn't totally unlike that, even though there are things in Andujar's profile that I've always liked. So I'm trying not to repeat my own mistakes and wondering if there's a cautionary tale there.

Yeah, can we get them a third baseman? Does Eduardo Julien's defense play at third i don't think so he's been at second for so long in the minors can we get them one from another team uh josh donaldson's probably available josh donaldson again uh the white socks are about to tear things down. Juan Mankata is he's got a year left and then a 2025 club option that might cost a little bit. But you know Miranda might be an appropriate trade

for that. You actually get three years possibly or two and a half years possibly from a third baseman that will give you a good baseline of defense and really alternates league average or worse years with good years at the plate so a bit of a a dice roll there but uh i think juan mccada could be had um i'm not seeing a lot of other third basemen unless the Cubs want to do something other than Patrick Wisdom,

but they're winning. The Marlins with John Segura might want to re-rack that one. That wouldn't cost them much, but I don't know how much of an improvement that would be over their current situation. Yeah, I don't think that necessarily helps them. What about Jamer Candelario? He has not bounced back the way we wanted. Defensively, I think he's fine at third.

Right now, he's 36% worse than the average. There's some poor luck there. The BAMP is down. But the barrel rate is the second worst of his career. It wouldn't cost him much. I think he signed a one-year deal. They could send over a relief prospect or something probably the weird thing with candelaria when you look at his defense at least by outs above average year over year this year he's in the 94th percentile

last year he was in the eighth percentile he's been in the 38th percentile back in 2021 he was in the 82nd percentile back in 2019. Defense statistics are hard. Yeah, so I don't know if that's solving your problem either, if you're the twins, but it is surprising to see that Willie Castro and Kyle Farmer appear to be at least the short-term options. Maybe the twins are willing to sacrifice

the defense once the bat gets going again, right? If Miranda spends a couple weeks at St. Paul, starts hitting again, and comes back and hits like he did last year, then maybe we're having a completely different conversation two or three weeks from now. Simple question here, is he a hold? Is he good enough? Did he show enough last year where you're waiting this out for however long it takes for him to get the opportunity again? Or is he an unfortunate cut as someone you probably drafted around that pick 150 range back in March? on that pick 150 range back in March. I have no shares.

I might answer the question for you, but I think in 15, no, I think I'd move on. I think you have to. The upside is just not great enough. I mean, look at the rest of the season projections, 260, 12 to 14 homers. I think you can find that on the wire. The only caveat I have

is we just tried to find a third baseman in the league, and so third basemen are a little bit more scarce. I, in my main, have Ryan McMahon and Brandon Drury and thought I'd handle the position, but find myself, at least in some half weeks, not wanting to start either. So if you are stuck in that situation, I still think you've got to leave him alone and try to sniff the air and maybe catch him again on waivers

before he comes back. Yeah, you always get a shot at getting a player back if you cut him loose and they get called up a few weeks later. if he does have there's not gonna be a fab of palooza if juan miranda's back you know you could probably get him again wouldn't think so 12 to 15 bucks which is i'm talking like one to two percent maybe yeah hopefully a nice small bid i think the the numbers that you see in the projection for miranda are probably more reflective of the upside of casey schmidt than i uh implied yesterday i think i comped him to dav for Miranda are probably more reflective of the upside of Casey Schmidt than I implied yesterday. I think I comped him to David Fletcher more because of the concern that he

would be kind of empty power wise from what he did in the upper levels of the minor leagues. He hits the ball harder than Fletcher because everybody does. Right. And he's had, he's had some, some, some years.

I mean, in 2022, he had 21 homers, you know, spread out across three levels. I don't know what's going on there. It looks like this year maybe he tried to sacrifice the power for contact. I don't know exactly what's going on. The ground ball is through the roof. It is interesting to see a guy with a poor...

I mean, it's a maxi v it's you know i hesitate to mention it because it's a four plate appearances but he hit the homer on a 103.8 i just talked to alex call um about this idea that you know you can still hit homers if you don't um have the greatest maxi v and you know he said i think he he said 109 is the hardest he's ever hit a ball, but 109 is capable of going out of the park. I do think that having that plus-plus capability is interesting in terms of upside, but you can also have players that hit for decent power

with 109 max EVs. So I don't know that we know that much more about Casey Schmidt today. Even the 103.8, what do you think David Fletcher's max EV is for his career? Oh, I looked. His debut season, his max EV was 103.7, which is really funny how similar that is.

So don't take it all back just because Casey Schmidt had a homer, although it was a nice one to a deep part of the park. So the reason I was taking it back is I looked at David Fletcher. David Fletcher never had power in the minors at all. Even if Casey Schmidt did it a little old for the level at high A last year, it still

means more. There's still more raw power there. I think the problem for me, looking more closely at the profile, there have been instances of swing and miss. It's reflected in some of the scouting reports on the hit tool, so it just breaks down for a bunch of different reasons. But the versatility that he can play all over

and play a lot, that's sort of your floor. If the power comes later, the power comes later. I've seen some pretty high ceiling comps on him. I don't know if it's because he's a giant and it's the Bay Area, but I've seen a Matt Chapman comp thrown out there. I don't know if that's because of the defense first and then the possibility of raw power later or what that is, but that almost seems like really pie in the sky to me. I think

you were still talking about a deeper league sort of player. Probably in 15s now, you're going to think about him as someone to pick up, if only because someone like Miranda just got sent down. Someone gets sent down, you've got a big hole to fill, you want someone who's going to play a lot, you take a chance on someone like Casey Schmidt, maybe it works out. Yeah, and I hadn't noticed this.

I sent the anecdote in about Casey Schmidt replacing Marco Luciano at Shorten being okay. I hadn't realized that he's been playing there all year this year. He's got 20 starts in AAA at short versus just eight at third. So it sounds like, it looks like Casey Schmidt is the shortstop of the intermediate future for the Giants. It's not a bad thing to be.

But that means his fate is tied to Brandon Crawford's. And I did see Brandon Crawford had a little gaggle in front of his locker. So he told people in that gaggle that he's hoping to return this weekend. He was being questioned by reporters and not followed by geese. I'm glad you clarified that. Why are the geese following Brandon Crawford?

Does he got bread in his pockets? The scrum, sorry. So I don't know. I mean, he may be back down again pretty soon if Crawford's coming back do we see somebody else that you know the Giants would rather sent down than him I mean if Casey Schmidt's not playing the outfield you know that infield gets fairly crowded with Crawford, Estrada, Flores, Davis, Wade, Jr. Wisely or VR, I think, could be corresponding moves. Who do you like better between Wisely and VR?

I saw Wisely make a few nice defensive plays in that series against the Brewers, but I don't know if I see enough there offensively. I thought VR was going to hit because kind of the opposite of Schmidt, where he got a lot of time in the upper levels of the minor leagues. He showed power. David VR hit for pretty big power at AA and AAA. And relatively speaking, especially Sacramento, even though it's in the PCL, is not one of those offensively charged environments. So I was able to look at those numbers and tell myself the story that it might actually be more meaningful because of where he was doing it.

And even their AA affiliate, Richmond, for a long time is one of the more pitcher friendly environments so just to see 20 plus home run power in less than full minor league seasons from vr made me think this could actually work out so far it really hasn't it's a 202 301 409 line with 13 homers and 279 plate appearances. The power is translated, but the rest of the offensive profile is lacking. Yeah, I have a feeling that he's got a hole. He's got these worrisome fly ball rates that are very high. And now that I'm looking at his contact rate, you can see he does so by targeting the high pitch, but he has awful, awful contact rates on low pitches. He's got some 40% contact rates inside the zone low.

If you look at his heat map, it's really small in terms of contact rate. It's just high and tight. it's just high and tight and you know even high and away is is poor for him so there's a lot of blue on that and I think that's one evaluator told me that he thought David VR was headed for Japan and I think I could see that it's I think the combination of uh hit tool and uh the type of swing that he has the type of approach that he has is uh too exploitable i mean that's what we're seeing um and if they do send him down i think the the directive will be find a way to do something on those low pitches it makes a lot of sense because the the numbers sort of jumped off the page those last two minor league stops and even last year when he debuted, he was pretty good despite the 32% K rate.

It looked encouraging enough to, in deeper leagues, NL only leagues, take that flyer and see if he could turn himself into a semi-regular. He is the type of player that maybe the other teams didn't have as much of a book on. He wasn't ever somebody that like you know fangraphs had him as the 33rd best prospect for the giants you know so if you're an opposing team and they call up the 33rd best prospect do you have a book on him already um and then if your chapter's

probably been the more uh prominent prospect yeah so uh you you know, this year might be the year where, you know, let me see if I can see real quick pitch percentage, you know, this year, pretty low in the zone. And last year, they were already throwing a lot in the zone. I don't know. Maybe he just you just something something's not right for him. Yeah, I don't have that much hope for him. I've tried to stream him a little bit when the schedule was good and tried to use him for some power, especially in that league where I'm kind of trying to figure out third base a little bit. But I'm not in. And Wisely has something that that the giants do need which is the

ability to play center field and so i bet you he stays up even though he doesn't even have a team prospect uh and he's another one of these like could be better than than Scout said he was does have good patience and contact ability the power is a big question mark and the patience hasn't ported over yet to the big leagues

so if you were betting today on the player that gets more big league playing time in the long run or generates more war in the long run, would you bet on Wisely or would you bet on VR? I think Wisely just because the Giants' usage let's say

Crawford comes back and Schmidt survives and VR goes down. Oh, but see, you said war. Schmidt could have outstanding defense backing up Crawford at short and replacing Davis late in games or pushing Davis to first or even playing second, right? Whereas Wisely plays center when Jastrzemski is hurt

and they're facing a righty because Slater plays against all lefties, mostly in center. I think it's Wisely. There's about a 5% difference in strikeout rate at AA when you compare them. Wisely's a little bit younger than Viari is right now. Playing up the middle is enough

to help gain that same sort of defensive value. You might be good at it. Yeah, all right. That's enough to switch it for me. So maybe a guy that I should have been more interested in when the Giants acquired him, but interesting to see him getting a chance along with Casey Schmidt right now.

This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at one Peloton dot C-A slash bike slash rentals. All access membership separate terms apply. Best Western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze and it felt a little like. life's a trip make the most of it at best western

we got some pitching injury news to follow up on jacob degrom many injuries so degrom maybe maybe two to three weeks away from a return which seems like a very positive outcome and then it just leads you to the inevitable question of okay so let's say he's back in two to three weeks now is he yeah is he good for the rest of the season is he good for a month is he good for the rest of the season? Is he good for a month? Is he good for two starts? Like, we don't know. But this is the maddening thing about this season. The Jacob deGrom pattern has been so frustrating for the last three seasons now. Count this as the third season, 2021, 2022, 2023, all dealing with injuries like this. You knew what you were signing up for.

you knew what you were signing up for is there any reason to keep hope that he'll hit a point where he just gets past this without having some kind of surgery you know like elbow shoulder form whatever it's so it's so frustrating because he's so good on a per inning basis yeah he said he's really trying to avoid that i mean he already you knew he already had TJ, right? Yeah, back in college, yeah. Yeah, so having TJ that early does have ramifications for the length of your career in terms of just what the statistics say. So I don't know. I would just love to see what he could do sitting 95. I mean, I just would love to have him try that 95

with an 88 mile an hour slider i have a feeling he'd still be really good might give up a couple runs and might you know drop some f-bombs but uh i have a feeling that he he would get more innings out of himself but you know i think there's a larger question here, which is, you know, we are in the midst of, I don't know, what looks to be one of the worst injury seasons ever for pitching. You know, when Britt and I did that story with Will Salmon, we had it up to May 1st. And, you know, since May 1st, we've added uh starting pitchers on the IL Chad Kuhl, Jose Urquidy, Luis Garcia, Tyler Malley, Kyle Wright, Jake Woodford, Vince Velasquez, Ryan Yarbrough, Jose Suarez, Max Fried we're like a week and a little bit into the into May we've

already added that many pitchers and a couple of them are out for the season. It's a tough road out there. I remember the chart you had in that story, and how there were some other years that were within reach. You could look at it and say, that's probably within one standard deviation of a normal season still.

We're not just going to ring every alarm bell and stop the pitch clock now. Just shut it down. It wasn't at that level. But I think what's surprising me is when you go through this list that I put together, it is a lot of longer-term injuries. It's not just I strained the hamstring. I'm going to miss a couple turns.

We're going to play it safe. It's six-week injuries and up. It's a lot of forearms, elbows, shoulders, lats, all sorts of things. It started back in spring training. It doesn't seem like it's accelerating yet. It just seems like it's not slowing down at all. It wasn't a blip. It wasn't an early season.

All the guys that were going to break broke, and now we're going to settle in. It's, no, guys are going to keep breaking. It goes back to what we've said before, though. This isn't new, and I'm not blaming this on the pitch clock because I don't think we can blame it on the pitch clock. There's just not enough information yet. It's too early to do that. But the bigger problem facing every major league team right now is how do we slow this down? It's a billion-dollar question question to solve and it just doesn't seem like anyone is necessarily getting there. The other thing that stands out to me is almost every team, not quite, but almost every team has been affected by this. And this is just starting

pitchers that I was looking at where it was top to bottom, at least one from every depth chart. You start getting into relievers, plenty of relievers have been blowing out too with various injuries so it's it's really it's really troubling and it doesn't seem like our hypothesis about the pitch clock was maybe guys will take a little off right that's not happening i mean i think the thing is that that could still be that's still on the table for a second order result. Right, a way of correcting, saying, hey, look, we're down way too many guys. Or just as a pitcher yourself, just being like, I can't handle this. And I tried to just do what I did did before and i just spent the year on the

injured list you know and so next year i want to be healthy so i'm going to try and train a little bit differently so it's not something that'll happen right away i still have some hope that it will happen um but not much evidence that it will happen, and that's because Gasman gets paid. But, you know, also, like, what do we do now in this new reality, if it is a new reality, in our leagues? And I think there's two ways to go right one is just

be merciless and cut anybody who's hurt and don't even wait for the bad news just eliminate your injury optimism with pitching right now just as soon as they're on the aisle gone I'm not going to wait around for this guy even and the extreme

of that would be job drop jake to grom right to grom woodruff glass now earlier in the year we've had all sorts of chances to run through this problem and i hear that and and it i wonder if it is by the numbers the right move but i want to try this out that say it out loud and see if it works. Could it be, in the light of this, would it actually be better maybe to hold guys longer? And my reasoning is this. The minor league cover is going to get bare.

It's going to get worse. And you kind of think, oh, I'm going to find... Like, what's the idea? You drop the injured pitcher and you're like, I'm going to find, like, what's the idea? You drop the injured pitcher and you're like, I'm going to find something on the wire, right? But what happens to the wire over time is just that it's going to get worse because you're losing supply, right? So as the wire gets worse,

it might actually make sense to pick up a reliever and try to ride it out and put a guy in who gets a save every two weeks or something but gives you innings and keeps you afloat and gets you some k's you know um so i'm not sure what to do uh i'm nursing uh taj bradley tyler glass now in a couple places um you know just looking at this injured list uh i think i i don't have that many i have no shares of max freed because um my projections didn't love him but if I did I think I'd hold him I wouldn't trade for him somebody asked me if they would trade for Max Fried right now I said no

Kyle Wright seems to be around the place where I would drop Tyler Malley is somebody in redraft leagues I would drop because the news was pretty bad, and he went on the 60 day. But in Dynasty, I have a league, a 12-team Dynasty league that's just overflown. All my IL spots are taken up, and now bench spots are being taken up

by hurt people, and I'm staring at Tyler Malley just being like, you know, in this 12-team, should I just drop and move on? There's other ones. Jose Urquidy is an easy drop. Luis Garcia, obviously out for the year. But it does get hard. I mean, Kenta Maeda is probably hard in deeper leagues to figure out what you want to do with him.

Brandon Woodruff, I think, is the hardest decision out there right now yeah and the further you get down the road of being close to his recovery the harder it is to say I waited this long yeah I waited a month so why wouldn't I wait another 4-6 weeks I caught him right at the beginning

a week after the injury no you won't it was really more of a choice of I just want to make sure that I'm maxing out playing time and having options up and down my roster every week. I mean, we're seeing and this is where my ongoing frustration with how the how the fantasy baseball tends to work in weekly leagues is growing. You know, you had the Max Scherzer neck injury, which maybe is minor. That pops up on a Tuesday, but all of your pitchers have locked for the week by the time you get that information,

so you're stuck waiting. The timing of injury news impacts everyone. I'm not saying, woe is me, I'm the only one dealing with this, but I'm saying it's not a really good gameplay experience to have guys get hurt and be in situations

where you could have replaced them and you obviously would have played someone but just to not be able to do it. That doesn't seem good. Our friend, Yancy Eaton, was suggesting having some different kinds of mulligans where you could spend fab to get them and bid fab to get them, which

it got me thinking, it's like, what if there was something else to spend fab on because one problem with fab is that we're all throwing buckets of money at the same players if there were some strategic things you could unlock with your fab dollars perhaps that would be more interesting i like the line of thinking i thought maybe we maybe we have something there for the future i think it would still just get used for streaming. Probably. Where people would just have an early Monday start and then spend FAB to put a starter in

that spot after they banked a start. Do you like FAB better with the $1,000 budget that the NFBC has? Or do you like it better with the $100 budget in leagues like Labor? Just think about how it flows over the course of the entire season and how you handle it and how the

league handles it. What I like about the $1,000 is that there's a 10 cent bid basically. Right. That becomes super valuable at the end of the season. Definitely the last couple of fab runs you're like, ooh, I'm so glad

I have five bucks right now and those five bucks wouldn't exist in the hundred dollar thing right what if the answer is a number between a hundred and a thousand like what if a thousand is too much but a hundred is too little and you want to have 300 but i hate the numbers in between because it's very easy to say like you know hey use 10 percent yeah but you could still say that yeah you could still say that but then you have to do some math before you do the bit 10 of 340 is 34 i think people can just move the yeah that's true i don't know i i'm thinking more about it because i i see it happening in so many leagues where it's just firing away. Here's a big chunk of my budget. I don't even care because I know I'm not going to spend it all. And I think there's some truth to that. Is there a benefit to just backing off and being less aggressive than everybody else in the first month and a half or two months, saving the money, creating the hammer for yourself for June, July, August, September,

and then just winning a higher percentage of bids for the final four months. There's a sliding relationship, though, because you're getting less out of them because you're going to get, you know, the holy grail is six months

out of somebody, you know? Right. And I wonder if that just happens so infrequently that we're chasing something that's a total lunch. And there was a good Razzball tweet about this

where they tweeted about the rookie starters that everybody had spent a ton of money on and what their value has been so far and how none of them have really produced the value that people wanted with their big bids. And that's an unfortunate sort of conclusion I'm coming to having spent a lot on Taj Bradley and just hoping he comes back soon. Yeah, I think that's the tough

one for me. I generally don't think the rookies are worth it, but in Fab, I spend more of a drunken sailor because we do have guys that come up and it feels like this guy has so much more upside than spending ten dollars on casey schmidt but where i was going yesterday when when your case of the ass became my case of the ass and i said just forget everything give me the crappy players what i was really trying to get at was give me the guys who are going to play that nobody else is excited about because they end up being bargains.

Playing time ends up driving final stats because you get the counting stats. Yes, you take on performance risk with the less talented players, but if you can find the Casey Schmidt types, you said think of an example of someone that no one liked who ended up being good. One of the examples I have is Tommy Edmund a few years ago. Did anyone care about Tommy Edmund as a prospect outside of Cardinals fans? I don't remember anyone being excited about that guy. He was a really cheap pickup for me

back in the RDI days and he would have been a five-year keeper easily because of his power-speed combo, right? And I think those types of players end up being sneaky good and they just cruise under the radar. The only thing they're doing is playing. Bryce Elder going for 30 and 40

when everyone else is going for 200. Yeah, so you get a few more bites at the apple. I guess the counter argument to that would be, what if Tommy Edmund, or the equivalent of Tommy, what if Casey Schmidt plays for a week or two weeks? It just goes back down. It doesn't do a lot and then you have to make a decision like, he's

playing, but are they going to keep playing him? Because within our range of outcomes, we have to be able to think the way the organization thinks, see those next best options and say, OK, do the twins really think Kyle Farmer's better than Juan Miranda? Oh, I guess they do. They have more information than us and have different goals. They're trying to win real life games. So we think Miranda's obviously better, but Farmer's going to be a better defender. I mean, they were just using him at short. You know I'm tired when I say Juan Miranda instead of Jose Miranda.

That is rough. That is a big EDVR. We were both too tired dads today. It's rough. Yeah, you were telling me, I don't know what I'm going to do when there are just more people in the bed. Like it's already 50 pound golden doodle. It's enough.

There's no more room. Yeah. We had two doggies and a boy coming off a bad dream and a stupid cat, stupid 5 a.m. cat scratching at the door. I know I'll never have a cat, so that's a good thing. So it's not just starting pitchers like we said. Jose Alvarado is hurt. MRI is being reviewed right now, so we'll get more information probably in the next 24 hours or so.

Obviously, it's a 15-day IL state at a bare minimum, but it's an elbow injury, which puts us back to a familiar question. Who closes for the Phillies while Alvarado is out? He picked up five saves so far this season. Sub two ERA, great whip, zero walks. For a guy that's always

had trouble with walks, a 13% career walk rate to go even five or six weeks with zero walks is incredible. Maybe it should give us just a little glimmer of hope for edward cabrera as a reliever someday yeah nevertheless i think my pick is sir anthony dominguez uh he's not coming off his best uh appearance but uh you know he gave up six uh he had four earned runs in his first appearance with no outs.

And then four appearances later, gave up three earned runs in one inning. And all of his other appearances put together one earned run. And the model likes him, and he's gotten holds. And they're not using Craig Kimbrell at all. 762 ERA, 162 whip this season for Kimbrell. I know the model still says he's good and maybe with time he can figure it out. That's the worst thing about being a reliever.

Sir Anthony Dominguez, you take away his first start, you know, I can do that math real quick, but you take away his first start and, you know, everything looks different. Like, say, let's say the season started on April 3rd, he has a.251 ERA with 15 strikeouts and 14 in the third innings and five holds. You know, he's the guy. Yeah, Kimbrell had i think one rough outing back on april 1st and the dodgers got to him twice and that's what really sort of sent everything sideways six earned runs in just one inning over two appearances against this

former club that'll that'll mess up the ratios pretty bad when you're talking about 13 innings total yeah exactly i mean smoltz talked about it where he's like, as a starter, it was easier to overcome a bad start just in terms of numbers and bulk and sample. He said, the one thing I hated about being a reliever was you could spend a month trying to undo a bad outing as a reliever. Long road to recovery.

I think I'm with you on Dominguez given the recent form for Kimbrough. It's been such a up and down battle. If we knew that Jose Alvarado was even capable of improving his control half as much as he did, he would have been the hands down favorite from the very beginning. But that was a

skills change that I didn't see coming. Maybe other people somehow saw it, but why would that happen now after so much time? I think that's a really interesting development and i wanted to see what would happen over a larger volume of innings was that going to hold was it going to be the reliever equivalent of robbie ray cutting his walk rate a few years ago this does happen sometimes it's just it's hard to buy into it until you see it for really

like a full season for guys that have four and five years of walk troubles. Yeah. And, and location plus is not that much of a help because, uh, you know, you're not talking about a lot of pitches yet for these relievers, but a really nice location plus this year. So,

you know, something, something did change. I think probably, I don't know. I would say that with relievers, if we're talking about rookie or big fabulpalooza starters not being worth $200, I don't think I would spend, you know, $200 being

20%. I don't think I would spend 10%, much more than 10%. I think I would actually try to keep it under 10% when picking up relievers I like sort of 30 to 60 and 70 out of 1000 for relievers that you think are going to close it's going to take some money but there's usually like 2 per week that's how I've seen it. Adam was a big one last week, but I got Alzelay behind him for $30.

Maybe that was too much. We'll get to see. But I didn't want to spend. I think Adam went for $120. I just didn't want to spend that. What if Fairbanks comes back next week? What if Alvarado just needs two weeks off? I would buy Sir Anthony Dominguez,

but I would put him on a bid stream with other relievers on it and would top out at 50-something and have a couple at the bottom for three. I know we had a question about how do we do fab. It was kind of a broad question that came in. We were talking about it a little bit on the Friday show last week with Al, and I was thinking about it from a $1,000 budget perspective. It's basically, it's a 26-week season. So make the math easy. Say it's 25. Take 1,000, divide by 25. It's 40 bucks a week.

If you gave yourself a $40 a week budget, and then you could just say, okay, I'm going to take some from the end of the season and move it to the front every time I overspend. I think that sort of budgeting would make you a lot more disciplined as a player. We did do that. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. You can hammer more anytime you need to. There's situations where you spend more, but if you just kind of think about staying on that track and doing that, I think it might keep you, if you you're like me from just going all in on too many of the shiny new toys and also what's nice about that approach is you can recalculate

so now whatever you have now see how many weeks are left divided by that many weeks and so now you're like oh i have 15 a week right so then if you then if you keep it in your pants for a week and you're like ah i gotta back up to 18 keep the wallet in your pants pocket in the purse wherever you like to keep your money just keep it in there that's fine and the other thing i mean you could just not bid on players for a week that's always an option too if you don't have injuries if you don't have if you don't have a need you could not bid bid, or you could just bid mins and just maybe shuffle some things around. I think there's a temptation when we have this one opportunity every week to change our roster to do something. And sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Oh, you know, that reminds me of a little bit of what the Cardinals are doing.

Yeah. Let's do something. We can't sit still. We can't just wait for regression. Let's do something we can't sit still we can't just wait for regression let's do something trying to stir up it doesn't work that way it just does not work that way

well having the Cardinals won a couple games I was like I was so annoyed when I saw that three in a row three in a row three in a row you did something

congratulations it was all Wilson Contreras apologies he was the problem no it's like you look at the line from last night oh jack flaherty pitched last night and he went five oh he gave up three earned on seven hits and walked five only struck out three and gave up a home run he's not any better pitching wise they just scored runs same exact dude didn't want to answer questions about his velocity being down

after the game, which look, I can respect that as a pitcher, you know what your velocity being down means. It either means you're hurt, your mechanics are out of whack. Something's wrong if your velocity is down. So to have the reporters, to have the gaggle show up at your locker and ask you questions about it, that could make you upset.

I understand that. That being said, that's kind of your job. Part of your job is to answer those questions. Also, don't berate them for not understanding pitching. The only way people are going to understand is that they ask you, the person doing it, questions. That's the only way to get more information. How are you feeling? What's going

on? Tell us why this is happening because we don't understand, Jack. He could have said, yeah, that's right. We're asking questions. We're trying to understand. He could have said yeah that's like we're asking questions we're trying to understand and he could have said all the same things he said with a totally different twinge on it if he just said you know it's just all part of trying to get through a game you know sometimes it's up sometimes it's down sometimes it's about getting through the inning sometimes it's about you know saving bullets sometimes it's about you know throwing harder to get a guy out

even bullets sometimes it's about you know throwing harder to get a guy out right tone was that so hard yeah yeah you read the transcript you're like okay and then you hear it and you're like oh okay that's a little different you'd expect this from a guy struggling for the first time this isn't new maybe it's a similar line of questioning to what he's been hearing for parts of two plus seasons now so maybe that's upset because he thought getting rid of wilson contreras would make him better and then he was like nope i'm still not good yeah i don't think that was it but it's just like come on man just figure it out you're a pro answer the questions don't don't be mad at reporters for trying to understand more about the craft that's not the problem here i was wondering at what point do you think we can look at the pitch clock and performers and say, hey, maybe there's something here between someone who was previously very slow, who had to adjust.

The person I'm thinking of is, of course, a brewer because he's one of the slower starters in the league. It's Corbin Burns. And I think it's more me grasping at straws trying to understand why is Corbin Burns' strikeout rate so low? Like a 19.8% K rate for Corbin Burns? That's kind of weird. Walk rate's up a little bit too. Just doesn't look like himself out there right now. And you take a look at some other things going on with him. Velo is down slightly, but not an enormous amount. Enough to be a little worried. But how much of that could be fatigue? How much of that could be something else entirely?

That can't be separated very easily. So at what point during the season would you look at someone and say, adjustments to the pitch clock might really be the problem here, without asking them directly? I feel like you're not going to get many pitchers on the record to say, I'm struggling because of this. Because, yeah, it seems like they're whining about it.

Scapegoating and whining, yeah. Yeah, it's hard to tell. And, you know, Burns had that, just such an interesting offseason with the bad arbitration case and the bad blood with the brewers. Yeah, with the front office. But on the one hand, you'd think,

if I'm furious, I'm coming back and I'm as good as I've ever been. Within the range of outcomes on that, and I have no idea what happens. If you're mad about something, you ever do something when you're really mad? You hurry through something or you go lift weights when you're really mad?

It's not usually better. Usually you hurt yourself. And I'm not saying that's what Corbin Burns did. But that extra motivation sometimes can actually be bad. If you were already very good or great at what you were doing and you go in there and you go harder, sometimes harder actually hurts. Yeah. You know, the swinging strike rate is showing some signs of rebounding. It really started poor, but it's back up to 13% on the rolling number.

And that would be closer to in line with what he's done before. And my tendency is, you know, somewhat like with Dustin May, you know, what you have in these two guys is two players that have high stuff numbers and low strikeout rates and low swing strike rates. And people are kind of glued to those because we've used those so long.

But I think he's going to strike more people out going forward and I think he'll be fine the stuff plus is not exactly where it was last year but it's well within the framework of aging I believe and you know among all

qualified starters I believe he's still let me see where he is he is seventh yeah I had a little very good Gossman McClanahan you know cease I don't know I think there's a lot of I think there's great stuff there Dustin may you know he has a longer history of not striking people out and I you know of course you know balls and play is part of the model. And there's, it's possible that there is some sort of wobble in the model, because,

you know, we used to have a shift, the model was born in the shift. And so, you know, we're taking a model that looked at balls in play during the time of the shift and trying to apply it during a time when the shift has been limited. So at the same time, I would say Dustin May has a 245 lifetime BABIP over 184 innings. It's not quite enough to sort of award him that skill. But if you're looking for why my model is more upbeat about him than most projections i would say it has to do with that babbitt number as much as it has to do with thinking that he's going to strike more people out and every projection system says he's going to strike more people out his his career says he's going to whiff more and strike more people out so sorry that was uh that was a random, uh, digression there, but, uh, generally I, I'm not worried about

Corbin Burns, but I do, uh, tend to wonder, uh, about older, older players, older starters. And if they, you know, they used to be such a good bet, you know, older starters have been being such a good bet for such a long time. Um, and I wonder if this will be the year where we're reminded of all the body parts that can go on an older pitcher. Max Scherzer's neck. I mean, that's the thing, though.

With Max Scherzer, the overall durability for most of his career, there are way more Ws there than Ls. If you took that bet on Max Scherzer for the last seven years, you've taken, by volume, only two workload L's.

If you want to count this year and last year in there, everything else is good. 170 plus innings in this era has to be a win, especially for guys in their later 30s. If he finally is broken now, if Verlander finally breaks down now. Like that's remarkable durability.

That's your car that lasted 300,000 miles. And then finally sputtered out on you. Like oh okay. Well that worked out really well. It was durable until it wasn't. That's what those guys effectively were. And they could still be fine. I also wonder too.

This came up maybe last week on the 3-0 show the minor leaguers who've been working with the pitch clock already might be a little ahead of the curve relatively speaking and that they're they're already adapted to this their their method of training their bodies responses their everything and their routine has already been starting to adapt to that faster pace. I wonder if there's going to be a lag for the guys that have this longer period

of time where they didn't have to deal with that. Will it be something that after a half season they adapt to, or a full season, or two seasons, or will it never happen in some cases? All possible. All unknown, but that's something to think about as well. I mean, another funny thing about Burns is that it was Burns and Shohei Otani among starters who were the slowest starters by tempo last year.

Otani has been another amazing version of himself. It hasn't really been a case where we're sitting here going, what's wrong with Otani on the mound? Is he tired? Is something up with Otani? Like, no. You talk to their trainers. I mean, I don't know what Burns is in the offseason, but definitely, you know, driveline,

they were pretty aggressive with putting the clock out on them and, like, simulating clock experiences in the offseason. So that seems like it's fairly easy to do, though. You'd think that Burns would have done the same, but, you know, some people did and some people people didn't i think we saw that in spring training pretty quickly that there were some teams that were just like we're gonna figure it out in spring training and other teams are like no we've got a couple weeks before let's let's try this out first and even with that the violations we were seeing initially those have all tapered off too so it's

much less of a concern from a taking the automatic ball perspective than it was back when the spring started but i was on a show with a former pitcher uh in chris townsend uh here on the a's network and um his opinion was just that uh their baseball is gonna have to cycle through the older pitchers that aren't good with it, and that's what's going to happen. It's just going to push old pitchers out. Yeah, and the younger pitchers are all totally cool with it. And that has actually been my experience talking to pitchers. Like, I don't even bother asking young pitchers about the clock anymore

because they don't know any better. It's like they don't – they're like, yeah, it's fine, whatever. They don't even have an opinion on it. They're just like, it's, it's baseball and it's what it's like, you know? So, so I think we're going to, we're going to get to people that are like that. The weird thing is that they're not throwing any softer, the younger kids. No, they're not holding anything back. So let's take something off to stay healthy. Um, that they're not testing that hypothesis for us yet. No, no.

So will we just have more careers that burn bright and shorter? We're already having that with Mason Miller coming up and people blowing tons of fab on him and he's back on the IL. So that's something to consider. But it may want to push you, if we're talking strategies, it may want to push you in the future towards drafting younger pitchers.

You know, you mentioned burning out fast and bright. Just in the last few days, Matt Harvey announced his retirement, right? You think back to 2012 through 2015, that three-year stretch, Matt Harvey was as good as anybody. Harvey Day was a day that everybody was excited about. I bet he would have had good stuff plus. I'm thinking peak Matt Harvey would have had some really good stuff plus numbers,

and it just fell apart on him. It was one of the faster declines from elite top-end dominant pitcher. He didn't just go from top of the line, top of the rotation, excellent stuff, to like, oh, 380 ERA, 125 whip and strike. He missed a couple stops. Dude, he went from sub-3 to 5-plus pretty quickly.

He went from a true number one to a guy that had to battle to keep his rotation spot by numbers. That's how fast it turned. Before his team control was up even, yeah. Yeah, and that's not a great outcome at all. It's bad for everyone. Bad for Harvey, bad for fans, bad for everyone. There has been some, I think, advancement

in the understanding of healthy mechanics. There might be some listening who don't believe that or believe that there are certain people on the outside who know better about healthy mechanics than people inside baseball. I think the truth of the matter is velocity is rewarded, and so therefore everybody wants to throw harder, and throwing harder causes stress. throw harder and throwing harder causes stress. Yes, there are some people out there who espouse certain types of mechanics that may keep you healthier, but they also produce people who throw 91. And that's just not an option in today's baseball. Now you'll get hit if that's what you're throwing up there. I was thinking back to looking at Mark Pryor's baseball reference page. Mark Pryor's ceiling was not quite as high as matt harvey's ceiling and he burned out

even faster really yeah i mean he's the poster child no he had two seasons the difference was it was two very good seasons and then he was fine for 04 and 05 and then it fell apart like just not even able to pitch again health just gone yeah that's awful too awful cool that he's still around the game as a pitching coach but then you know like take the mark prior thing and like put it in the context of what we're doing today and we're all trying to get mark prior at least if if we can't have you know max scherzer and justin berlander anymore you know if we can't have the olderzer and Justin Verlander anymore, if we can't have the old starting pitcher anymore because of this new environment,

then we're all going to want the young pitcher. But how many $200 fab bids do we have to burn to get the one mark prior? So you're kind of screwed on both ends. We tried to, in our main, take an approach where we were going to take some horses. And it didn't always look amazing by Stuff Plus, but we went with Corbin Burns first.

We took Logan Gilbert, Jordan Montgomery, Grayson Rodriguez, Jameson Tyon in the middle there, and Savali. And we were like, these are guys who are going to give us innings we need innings these guys are going to give us innings they may not be guys who can jump up to be aces but they're going to give us innings and we've been more or less right as you can tell from the names that I put out there you know it's been it's been hard hoeing for everybody I think but there's definitely an adjustment to be made to the current pitching environment.

And I don't know if we can make it in season. It's kind of hard to turn the tanker around that quick. But when it comes to next year, I think there's going to be a sweet spot that I'm looking for where guys have had at least one year experience in the big leagues and they're not 38. And I'm trying to,

I'm trying to buy in between those two things. The more, the longer I play, the more I stare at baseball and study it. I know this is a, this is true of many things. The less I know, it's a constant reminder.

It's like, if I thought I knew 10% of what I could know about baseball going into this season, I'm down to like 5% now. And last year I started at 20 and dropped to 10. So it's every year. It's only getting worse. I should be learning more and getting better at this. And it feels like it's like running in an underwater treadmill situation or something. Yeah, it's not easy.

Yeah, it puts you, I think it should put in context the people who say they know everything it's like how how do you keep looking at this and thinking you know everything i think you solved it yeah it's crazy when you look at the the volume of innings thrown we think about de grom as someone who's missed a lot of time who's not durable if you go back through 2017 de grom is 16th in baseball in any pitch 877 so only 15 guys have baseball in innings pitched. 877. Only 15 guys have thrown more innings than DeGrom since 2017. That's wild. Garrett Cole,

number one. Aaron Nola, yeah, he's a horse. Zach Greinke, okay, yep, old, not throwing very hard anymore, but staying healthy. Patrick Corbin, some of that time he was still good. Yeah, not a metric of how good you are, just how much you pitched. Well, yeah, availability.

Ability is contained within. You have to be good enough to keep pitching or have been good enough to get a big contract to keep getting the innings. He was good enough in the beginning to get the contract. He's absorbing innings for his team right now. Sure, yeah. Someone's got to go out there and do it.

Max Scherzer, number five on this list. Jose Barrios is the other pitcher over a thousand in that time. And Barrios, hopefully he's not going down the Corbin path just yet. Herman Marquez doing it mostly, almost entirely, I think in Colorado. So, you know, kind of unfortunate that no one noticed that durability has been wasted. Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn, Charlie Morton, Kevin Gossman, Zach Wheeler, Luis Castillo, Robbie Ray, Hugh Darvish, and then DeGrom. And the overwhelming majority of those guys got big contracts or will get a big contract.

I don't think Aaron Nola's going to have his. So innings are actually sort of rewarded, you know? Yeah, they are, but it's more just like staying healthy enough to get to the big contract. If young pitchers are just blowing out and falling apart before they can even get to the free agency phase. There's a lesson to be learned there maybe for a young pitcher. It's like, yeah, I got to put up some innings too.

It can't just be the gas. Well, that's the problem that you said Matthew Libertor once said he had to take development into his own hands. I mean, this is true of all pitchers, but you've got to figure something out with health. You have to find a way to get from point A to point B because nobody inside the game has solved it yet. There was a mailbag question about what teams are good at avoiding injuries and is this something the Rays are bad at. We've talked about it from the context of the Rays are just willing to embrace the already injured players. about it from the context of the Rays are just willing to embrace the already injured players.

They see players that come cheaper via trade than they should, or players who are more available as scrap heap type free agents. And they just say, it's fine. Let's just see what happens. And that's ultimately going to lead to a lot of time on the IL. We could look at a multi-year study and say, oh, who actually avoided the il but i think you'd also want to know you had to compare apples to apples you have to have you'd have to account for velocity you have to account for you know sitting versus max velocity that differential you'd have to account for how he was used how many innings he like how many pitches he's throwing and then you really want to account for how many high stress pitches he was throwing and you want to account for maybe how many high velocity breaking balls was he throwing and how

many zero two counts was he in and you know that sort of stuff so it's it becomes really hard that's how that's the one thing that sort of came to me when we did this piece about the pitch clock is yes you know the pitch clock might be having some effect, but it's so complicated. There's so many other things that go into it. Like, velocity is up again, always. You know, it's always, always up. It's up for 33-year-olds. It's up third time through the order. It's up for everybody, you know?

And that's a main source of stress. If injuries are going like this in velocity, it's also going like this in velocity it's also going like this it's not just it's not correlation means causation but that's that's a that's a place to start at least it's one thing to look at let's let's try this let's just try 80 of our max see how that goes see if we still get most of the same guys out quickly you get fired from your player development job if you tell all the pitchers to throw at 80% of max. Oh, that's...

There's your answer. How come no one's trying this? Like, well, would you like to lose your job in baseball being the first one to try? It does seem like a thing that a team could... I don't know. It'll be a smaller market team with less pressure. Some team that can get away

with these types of things. Well, you know, what you really would want to do is to kind of do a, a, like an internal study, right? Where in order to do a study,

right. What do you have to do? You have to have like the, the test bit, the control bit. And like the other, you have willing participants, you have to be able to sign up.

Well, but see in, in baseball, you could be like, well, they're willing participants. have to sign up well but see in in baseball you could be like well they're willing participants because they're you know in my organization you know so that's not the best science so then yes but then there's also the ethics of like okay well we're gonna take these lower value prospects and tell all of them you know to sit lower and see how their health outcomes are how would you like to be one of those prospects and be like, you want me to do what? That's awful.

Is this going to help me to get to the big leagues? So bad. Yeah, you can't run it like that. You just have to have an organizational philosophy. But even still, people take a step to their development on their own where they're going to do their own thing. You still have to wait like six to ten years. You have to wait six years to know you're right.

And in the meantime, your guys are throwing less hard. Yeah, in a league where guys can hit premium velocity. So now you're not even bringing that. Hey, how come the Marlins, their guys are throwing 93 and maxed out at 98? Like, that's weird. Would you be more willing to do it in a in a home park that was a cavernous home park like is that part of this like i actually got a pretty big park so i think it might be interesting to do it as an expansion team because expansion teams are born

into rebuilding almost oh yeah 100 and so and born with young players a lot of you know so you know you could just try it as an organizational philosophy at the beginning and i don't know you'd have to decide if you were right within five years right because otherwise you're one of the worst teams ever for five years just trying to see if it worked well our guys our guys had innings, though. Yes. We led the league in innings, but we were last in everything else. Last in Ks, last in ERA, last in home run rate. I mean, that's the prediction

that the baseball is in. Yeah, it's not fun. The list of pitchers, I didn't put it on the screen, but it's sad to see the number of starting pitchers down right now with pretty significant injuries. Almost every team in the league, again, has been affected.

We are going to go on our way out the door. A reminder that you can get a subscription to The Athletic for $1 a month at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. You can find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. You can find me at Derek Van Ryper. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening.

... ... ... ... ......