Rates & Barrels - Moving tips, contact quality and predictive value, and lineups to stream against

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss moving tips, contact quality -- including the value of high exit velocity batted balls, different sources for hard-hit rates, team performances against particular pitches, lineups to target for streaming pitchers down the stretch, and whether it's worth moving on from Adalberto Mondesi and Byron Buxton in long-term leagues as a result of another injury-riddled campaign. Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels presented by Topps. Check out Topps Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards. Derek Van Ryper back from the long drive down I-80. Yes, I'm in my new place. It is not furnished or decorated, so I'm using a door to add texture to my shot. If you're watching us on YouTube, be sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel,

get notified every time we have an episode go live. Eno and I have had a chance to hang out already, which is awesome. So I've got one set of beers in with Eno already in the three and a half days that I've been here. So I feel like I'm living my best West Coast life so far. That's right. That's right. I panicked last minute and almost brought a box of seized chocolates that we had eaten a couple out of and tried to put the tape back on and be like, here's a housewarming gift.

I don't know why it looks like it's been gone into. My wife, thank God, was like, no, dude, you're bringing beers. It's okay. Well, you did leave a bottle opener here, so I'll consider that a housewarming gift, at least until I return, even if it's only on loan at this point. But for anybody out there who's-

It's those red Solo cups. Yeah, I got four or five Solo cups out of the deal too. For anybody out there who's ever moved even a little far away from where they used to live, you don't have to go cross country. When you move far enough away where you don't bring all of your things with you, or if your things are maybe delayed in getting to you, and you put them in a pod or a box or whatever, you go through this phase. And I'm right in the beginning of it right now. It's about two to three weeks where every time you go to do something, you can't complete the task without being really creative. Yeah, you just can't. And the smartest things that I've purchased so far, two camping chairs and a four-foot folding table from Costco, which is a workstation.

It is a dining room table. It is a drinking beer table. It is patio chairs. I mean, it's extremely versatile for like $100, like three pieces that get you a very long way until you get all those other little pieces back in place. And what I really like about it, too, is that they'll have completely different uses later on in your life. Uh, you don't want to buy something that then you have to get rid of, you know, later, but it's like, you know, for now it's our, it's our dining room set. Later it'll be our camping set. Yeah. The desk shows up on Thursday. So once the desk gets here, we'll take one of the functions of the table away. I want to move it in and out of the office every time I do a recording, which is, you know, it's a small price to pay. But that's my best tip. Actually buy some things that you can use on your patio that also work indoors because you will find them to be incredibly useful if you don't have all your things.

pack a better small kitchen box than we did because we tried to anticipate our own needs, but you tend to forget things like a spatula. We tried to make scrambled eggs the first morning we were here. There was nothing to stir them with. So that was a problem. You can, of course, scramble the eggs with a fork in a plastic cup. So that gets you part of the way there, but you can't really do anything with a fork in the pan. You're living your best bachelor life. so you're living your best bachelor life well yeah it's just it's it's creative problem solving let's make coffee today i had to boil water in a saucepan because i don't have a kettle right now right i didn't bring a coffee maker with me i use a french press so i have a three quart saucepan which also cooked our noodles in it last night i'm starting to think that minimalism

if you wanted to learn how to move more effectively, you should read and listen to podcasts about minimalism before you move because it will set you on the right path to having the right things in the car or in whatever little bit of space you have. Don't be like us. We got married and

had kids and all those are gift-giving opportunities. The family has been giving us gifts and we've been in this house for long enough now that if we ever move out of here it'll take like three trucks we got a basement like you know not everybody in California has a basement

we have a basement and it is full. You do have a lot of things I say that in a very kind way you were nice enough to let us stay with you a few weeks ago when we were here looking for places to live. Thinking about my own move and being in your home, I was like, holy crap.

I don't think Eno's moving for a while. My mom, bless her heart, came here and dropped 12 boxes of books one day. I mean, 12 boxes of books. That's about one-third of the possessions that I put in that pod that's coming across the country. So, yeah. And then she recently admitted, well, you know, they're not all that good. You could get rid of some.

And I'm like, you could have gotten rid of some. She's giving you the option. She didn't want to get rid of the good books that you would have enjoyed. So, I mean, she did you a favor by letting you decide which books that you'd like to keep and which ones you'd like to get rid of. I guess I got to start reading. Yeah. So, thank you to the many of you who've reached out and welcomed me to the Bay Area or sent tips for places to go, breweries, restaurants, places to see. We're new to this area by 2,000 miles.

The drive across the country, a little scary in parts, a little fun in parts. So that took four and a half days. So a lot of adventures along the way, but happy to be back. Sorry to hear about you're running into the fires there. Oh yeah. That was my first experience being near the wildfires. And obviously that's a part of life in California, but yes, like ash coming down through the air out of the sky is very bizarre, and low air quality, definitely a concern. On this episode, lots of great questions have been piling up over the last week, so we're going to answer as many of those as we possibly can. We got some questions about max exit velocity. There's some new research related to that, looking at barrels and things that are more predictive, so we'll get into that as well.

related to that, kind of looking at barrels and things that are more predictive. So we'll get into that as well. Some differences between hard hit rates in different places, team performances against particular pitches, a lot of great questions. So I just wanted to take some time today and plow through those as best we can. Let's start with this max exit velocity question, because there's a few related topics right up front. Matt writes, just the theme music for the show each week gets me hyped. Had a question about two minor league max exit velocities I've seen. Jason Dominguez with a 109 mile per hour ground out the other night and Jordan Walker earlier in the season hit a grounder at over 114 miles per hour. His question is, is it less impressive if a player hits the ball that

hard on the ground? Do we need to see a max exit velocity at a higher launch angle to make it more believable? Hope that makes sense. Thanks, guys. Matt from Reno, which actually was one of my stops. I didn't cross paths with Matt, but that was one of the final stops on my tour to California. It's a great question because the original research for Max Exavilo that I go back to so often is Rob Arthur's piece on The Athletic, which says that one batted ball can change projections going forward, and that has no launch angle information attached to it. So he basically says, if the guy can hit 114, that is meaningful and that'll change his projections going forward. But there has been some refining of this recently. There's a researcher

named Glenn Healy at UC Irvine, and he was working with Xuanzhao. And they looked at the predictive quality so uh just the predictive quality of like how if a person hits a certain ball in a certain area um how often is he going to continue to do so right um and the map and like uh you gotta you to look this up. It's going to be a little hard for me to describe, but I'll describe it. But you could look it up. The Healy is spelled H-E-A-L-E-Y. And I tweeted about this over the weekend. So you'll be able to find my tweet.

And there's a link to the article, but also a map. And it looks a lot like uh the barrels map so uh basically the the green parts of the map are the ones that predict themselves well and the greenest part of the map is at 108 degrees like amazingly uh which was the cutoff that Rob Arthur picked. And 108 degrees from, and there's launch angle information in this one, from about minus 10 to 30. So, you know, in that band, yes, Matt is correct. It is more meaningful to hit it between minus 10 and 30. to hit it between minus 10 and 30 so uh and and i think part of it is this i think it's still meaningful and this is this is a little bit anecdotal me sort of trying to make sense of it but i think if the guy uh hits like a minus uh 30 degree launch angle like worm burner at 120 um there might be some sort a little bit of

selection bias in that so it's like if he continues to hit 120 but straight into the ground he's not going to be a good baseball player and so he's not going to get a lot of chances to continually hit it right and straight into the ground except Except, when you hit 120, you do get more chances, and then, hopefully, you iron it out. And so, Giancarlo Stanton has hit 120. His hardest hits have actually been negative launch angle, like, into the ground. I think

his, when he hit, like, 122 or something, it was straight into the ground. But, he doesn't do that a lot. And so, it's not predictive of itself. You know what I'm saying? Like, he doesn't do that a lot, and so it's not predictive of itself. You know what I'm saying? The 122 straight in the ground, he didn't do that a lot, so it's not predictive of itself.

However, it does mean that he can hit the ball 120, and the 120s at 10 degrees that he hits a lot are predictive, if that made any sense. But generally what I would say is it's better to see it in that sort of minus 10 to 30 range. But 108 is kind of still a key number there. And there's still a lot to be learned from just knowing the guy can hit the ball that hard. Yeah, that makes a lot to be learned from just knowing the guy can hit the ball that hard. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think of players that came into the league with low launch angles or I mean,

like Vlad Jr. is probably one of the more obvious examples. It wasn't that he was just pounding the ball into the ground constantly, but he wasn't lifting it enough. I think it's the way I would describe him. I think the more extreme examples from the last decade or so that we've talked about a few times, Eric Hosmer and Ryan Zimmerman, those were guys that were hitting the ball pretty hard, pretty consistently, but on the ground way too much. And Zimmerman, I think he worked with Kevin Long, who was the hitting coach at the time. I think Daniel Murphy was one of his teammates. He made some adjustments to his swing and started to tap into more of that raw power. I guess the other way to ask the question that Matt asked is, is a hard hit, a very hard hit ground ball still indicative

of raw power? And the way we've been thinking about raw power lately is it's not the same as game power for obvious reasons. Like game power, as you've said before, is more of the function of barreling the ball. Raw power is just hitting it hard and maybe hitting it too low or too high. So does this fall into that latter category? Yeah, I think if I saw a guy hit a grounder at 114, I would say he has tremendous raw power. And there would still be that question of unlocking. I think Yandy Diaz is a guy who never really unlocked it. He still hits the ball really hard, but he hits it low on the ground. He had maybe a three-month stretch where he kind of lifted it. And that can have something to do with pitch selection, mechanics,

even probably some hit tool is involved in there. But you can kind of see some of this in action. So, for example, I was being asked on Twitter, I think in this thread, where I kind of pointed out, so, Brian Hayes, I think this is,

personally, I think this is the best time to try and acquire him. I think that people have doubts about his power upside. His barrel number is not amazing. You know, he didn't have great power all the way up and down the minors. And so now it looks like 2020 is the outlier. But I would say that, first of all, the floor is so high.

It's nice to acquire somebody like this that has a good strikeout rate, has a good walk rate, has great defense, and will steal some bases. You know what I mean? Like, worst case scenario, he's like a 280-2010 guy. That's pretty awesome. You know, like that's really useful. And then best case scenario, he taps into the power. And here's my example coming off of this

if you actually look at the the this heat map of what's predictive and you look at cabrian hayes's max exit v lows first of all he has uh this year five balls hit over 108 six seven balls hit over 108 so he already has that sort of max exit below stuff. Now you look up and down, and the hardest hit balls he's hit, 111 was minus 14 degrees. However, if you look at where that sits on this predictability sheet, it actually is not a very predictive ball because he hit it so far into the ground.

What you do see when you see this is that the 109s that he hit at 14 degrees, he hit three or four balls at 14 degrees, and that's right in the middle of the brightest, most predictive spot in this. So basically what I'm saying is, I know I'm talking about three balls, but it is amazing how powerful three balls can be in the context of predicting future batted balls. It's something that blows away. Everybody does research on this. I was talking to Alex Chamberlain about this. I was talking back and forth with Gun Healy about this. Rob Arthur has a piece that says one batted ball can make a difference. The percentage of batted balls that are meaningful is actually really low.

But when you hit those, it's really meaningful. You know what I mean? It's so strange. So what I'm saying is because Cabrian Hayes hit three balls at 14 degree launch angle and 109 exit velocity, I think he has real power. And I know that sounds kind of ridiculous and it's definitely a stat nerd thing to say, but I think it's true. And so I would acquire Cabrian Hayes right now. And I think it's not that meaningful that his 111 was at minus 14 degrees. Do you think it's fair to say that this is a little bit counterintuitive because

statistically we're talking about a number of events that is generally not statistically relevant? Oh, yeah. That's the problem, right? It goes directly against the way most things tend to work. Yeah. Yeah. And so I understand anybody who, you know, wants to say,

well, you know, all right, I want to wait for more research. I don't know if I believe this. And, you know, we are still kind of the beginning. I mean, we're only sort of, we're not even 10 years into stat cast you know um and if you think about like my that stuff research that i'm doing like uh that started in 2008 so uh and and this year we had three revisions of the stuff metric you know i mean so like um it's uh yes there could we could find out more in the future but um this piece is is pretty rock solid glenn healy is uh is really well respected he has his own

stuff in one number um and uh he did it uh in the computer science division at uc irvine it's a it's a like a publicly vetted uh research piece like, like it's in a journal. So it's just, I think, you know what I think it is? I think that what happens at that moment when you hit a ball 109 at 14 degrees or whatever, is you demonstrate the ability to do that. You know what I mean? On on a micro level it's showing that you own a standout skill yeah remember it's like the ron chandler thing right where once you demonstrate a skill you own it and it might not be true like you think of like

maybe these guys who throw no hitters that aren't very good. Right. Yeah, there are standout results-based. Sometimes people are just hot and they aren't that good. However, there are skills. Okay, for example, if you throw a ball 105, there's a guy in the Giants organization that just threw a ball 105. If you throw a ball 105, that means a ton. Like, you threw a ball 105 if you throw a ball 105 that means a ton like you threw a ball 105 it means you could throw the ball 105 again and it also means you could throw the you

could sit 103 there of course are other questions that go along with it but yes that is a standout you know while you hit the ball 109 what angles are going to be in the future and this and that but like uh there are guys there are guys if you look around there are guys who have like 45 percent ground ball rates that also hit 25 homers because they hit the ball hard so that's why i think it like if you do 109 at 14 degrees you've done something like that is something meaningful i mean it's even more meaningful it's like 115 or whatever but uh you know i i say i think cabrian hayes has real power and that's what i see when i look at this map is like oh crap 108 was a really big deal rob arthur

was completely right this this totally backs up rob arthur's claim because up and down 108 from minus 10 to 30 degrees is just the big bright blinding green light on this on this map and there's a bit of a box around it so like you could say 107 to 115 from minus 10 to 30 but that that's the most important information. So Max Bay, who I work with on the stuff thing, he created an extra base hit stat. We can maybe share the Google Doc in our show notes or something. But it's basically based on this idea

that the number of balls that are truly predictive is actually smaller than barrels. Barrels are the most predictive overall stat that we have in terms of power, but the really predictive balls are even smaller than barrels. So basically, you can actually become more predictive than barrels by cutting off a smaller piece. That really goes against my initial thought about barrels and stuff like that.

But he made a smaller, more predictive barrels, basically. Buxton, number one, baby. Shohei, number two. Tatis, number three. Tyler O'Neal, number four. Right there by Vlad

Acuna Jr., Judge Harper, Salvador Perez. A couple other top guys that are pretty impressive. Joey Votto, 17th. Evan LaGoria, 18th. The old man brigade. Reese Hoskins ahead of Pete Alonzo, but right there at 23-24. Alex Kirilov. This is what we're talking about with the Cabrian Hayes thing.

Does Alex Kirilov have plus power? Does he have real power, or does he have 18 homer power? I don't know. When I see him on this thing right next to Manny Machado and Pete Alonso, I say this dude has real power. Yeah, I think even the more public-facing barrel numbers and exit VLOs on Kirilov point to a guy with well above average power. I think he's probably a 30-35 home run guy at his peak

and more of like an easy 20-25 guy in a typical season. So I'm definitely in on Kirilov in the long run. Yeah, other names that pop for me are Haas, Eric Haas, right there with Austin Riley and Juan Soto. Avisel Garcia is just

when he's not catching balls, or when he's not catching or whatever. When he's not in the field, he's great. Who else is up here that's interesting? Darren Roof, 44th, right next to

Jan Gomes, 45. In fact, Jan Gomes is... I picked him up in AL Labor. If you're looking for a second catcher or a fill-in catcher and he's been dropped because he doesn't seem like he's the starter in Oakland, from the usage, from what I see, from what I've talked to people around Oakland,

he's not necessarily the starting catcher, but it's going to be a little bit more like 50-50, and he's going to get DH at bats. He might be the starting DH against left-handers, which means he's going to get really at bats. Like he might be the starting DH against left-handers, which means he's going to get really close to 50, 50. Uh, so he's, he's an interesting pickup for people if they need a catcher.

Yeah. So I think there's a lot of interesting stuff here. Be sure to check out the full thread because it it's very detailed. I still need to dig into it more myself. Uh, as you can imagine, uh, the excess reading time has not been where i'd like it to be over

the last few days but some really exciting stuff there and i'm all in on cabrian hayes as a by low even without this just on principle there are other reasons to like him he's a great defender at third base on a rebuilding team he's gonna hit in the middle third of the order and he's always had a good hit tool those reasons are also all good reasons to go after Hayes. Yeah, he showed on our winker list for those reasons. The winker list for me is great hit tool, great strikeout rate, going to play, and reasons to believe they could increase their barrel rate or increase their power somehow.

Yeah, so really interesting stuff there. Thanks for writing about that, Matt. I'm glad it kind of was in line with some things that Eno had seen recently from the research community. By the way, is it research or is it research? This is a problem I have encountered recently in my life. I'd never heard research until I think it was Steph's last lab group. And I can't get a clear answer on this.

That almost seems like the BBC way to pronounce it. Yeah, it's got to be regional. That sounds sort of Englishy. Yeah. I remember when I was in England, the one that just really got me was Innovative. Oh, geez. Yeah, I wouldn't have seen that one coming at all.

That one blew me out of left field. Like, what did they just? Oh, innovative. I love it. Yeah. I mean, it's research for me, but. Yeah. I've always said research. So if you are in academia and we are wrong, please drop us a line on Twitter. He's at, you know, Saris. I'm at Derek Van Ryper, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic. of course, is a great way to reach us. All right, you know, let's get to a few other questions here. Lots of great ones, as I mentioned up top.

I want to start with a question from Casey about hard hit rates, seeing some differences on fan graphs versus stat cast. In this case, Casey was looking at Tukey Toussaint's hard hit rate on the two sites and noticed a difference of about 18 percentage points. Is there one of those sites that you prefer over the other? And could you explain the differences between those two sources? Yeah, this is like an industry thing. It's like two businesses this is kind of i guess why sometimes people say oh you know there's three wars just you know so it's bull bs you know um i kind of wish there was one hard hit i i'll have to admit i kind of wish there was one more

you know like it would make it a lot easier easier to know what we're talking about because but whatever. I respect the right of each war holder to to have a different a slightly different methodology. So that's that's fine. It's no big deal. The difference is hard hit that you're looking at. Now that StatCast is on Fangraphs, there will be two hard hits on Tukey's page on Fangraphs. If you look at the StatCast area, he's got the 52.5% hard hit. Then if you look at a thing called batted ball, there's a hard percentage that's 37.7% right now. That's BIS so I think most of the the whole section here it's called batted ball and fan graphs is from baseball info

solutions so those are street those are stringers those are human beings that are watching the game and deciding that's a that's pulled that Center that's oppo that's a that's a pop-up that's a line drive that's pulled, that's center, that's oppo, that's a pop-up, that's a line drive, that's softly hit, medium hit, and hard hit. And so generally, I think that's inferior to StatCast. The one thing that's nice about it is that it goes back a long way and so it does tell us a little bit about pre-StatCast players. But a human, when BIS, when they look, here's what

the thing says. The calculation is made based on hang time, location, and general trajectory. So you're asking a human being to do that. To kind of be like, okay, well, that was in the air for 2.2 seconds, and it landed in the outfield, so that was a hard hit. I'm a little torn here, though, because I think the hard hit on baseball savant and stat cast is just 95, 95 plus,

no matter what you do with it. And we were just talking about, you know, ground balls, right? If you're a, if you're a pitcher and you're giving up 95 plus mile per hour, average exit velocities on the ground,

less of a concern that you're doing it in the air. So if the human doing the work at Baseball Info Solutions takes the 95 plus on the ground and pushes that into the medium bucket instead of leaving it in the hard hit bucket, I think that might be a little bit helpful, but I think you are introducing some human error or just some subjectivity to something that could be much more objective if you added a few more ways to measure it, right? If you look at more specific information about a batted ball type, it's almost like what they're trying to do at Baseball Info Solutions should be done by a

computer, and then we'd be in a better spot. The best of both worlds would be merging the two together. For me, I don't know how much value there is here. Let's see here. I'm doing the hard hit leaders. Qualified pitchers last year, 2020. I don't

see a reason to fade these pitchers. Let me just give them to you. Number one, Frambois Valdez. Number two, Garrett Cole. Number three, Patrick Corbin. Okay, well, that's a reason to fade him, but there's a lot of other reasons to fade him, right? Declining fastball velo, declining strikeout rate,

two pitches. I mean, there was a lot of reasons to fade him that didn't have anything to do with hard hit. Shane Bieber, four. Herman Marquez, five. Is this a list of good pitchers or bad pitchers? Yeah, I mean, I see and I think the way I'm looking at it right now

from last season, I've got it sorted where Marco Gonzalez was the worst in the league, the highest hard hit rate allowed. Derek Cole was in the top six. Yeah, yeah. I've got it with the qualified thing on. Yeah, so if you turn that off, you find someone like Hugh Darvish is 12th.

I mean, I would not look at this, especially in the shortened season, but in general, I would not look at this and say, you can't draft a guy who's bad in this particular category. And I think especially in a short sample, and we've talked about this before, I think it just has to do with, we just haven't, we've shown that pitchers have some control over launch angle.

We haven't really shown that they have much control over exit velocity. And I think that has to do with the fact that the pitcher's command is not as good as people think. So a pitcher can generally throw high in the zone or generally throw low in the zone, and that can change the launch angle of what's being hit, right? But they also miss their spots by an average of... The research said 10 to 13 inches is the average. I'm being kinder than the research

because the research had some flaws in it, but I'd say six to eight inches probably is an average, right? So let's say you are primo command guy and you only miss four to six inches. There are times when you're going to aim for the black, miss by four or six inches, and it's right in the happy zone. Right? So even guys with good command will give up hard hits. I think Shane – it's not even a list of people with bad command because Jose Barrios has good command.

He's on this list of hard hit. Shane Bieber has good command. He's on this list of hard hit. Aaron Nola has great command, and he's on this list of hard hit. Shane Bieber has good command. He's on this list of hard hit. You know, Aaron Nola has great command and he's on this list of hard hit. Yeah, I just think there's some guys who are more susceptible to yielding hard contact when they miss because of either their mix of pitches

or maybe a lack of premium velocity. Maybe they live in the zone. Yes, it could be a stuff thing. It could be that they live in the zone. Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of different things i think there is i'm not saying that this is like a fait accompli and we have we know everything there is to know there's they're definitely like andrew haney for example uh you know rates well by stuff rates well by command uh his k minus bb is good uh his sierra and fip are

always good and he underperforms those numbers every year. And he gives up really hard hit homers. And is it because he shows the ball? Or is it because his fastball's actually got interesting characteristics? It's not a terrible fastball, but is there something

about his fastball that gives up homers? There's definitely almost enough sample now with haney to be like seems like he gives up hard count right he owns that skill or fails to own that skill right but i can't i can't it's not i can't really tell exactly what it is it's not like he gives up a terrible barrel rate either it's just a lot of smoked balls so yeah well thank you for the question casey hopefully that breakdown was helpful i think limited value in using that overall but at least understanding how those are different might be helpful if i had to pick a lane i'd probably just use the stat cast one

because of the consistency but i wouldn't want to rely too heavily on that for a bunch of different reasons let's get to a question here about team performances against a particular pitch. And this question came from Robert. I think it was inspired by Blake Snell's recent good outing against the D-backs, 13 Ks there through his slider. 48% of the time had a lot of success in that outing. Robert tried to do some research and was looking at the weighted slider runs per 100 pitches. Arizona happened to have the worst performance in that category. So is it possible to match or to measure the effectiveness of a team against a particular pitch type?

I mean, every bone in my body is saying no. But just because. So just to tell you what that stat is, I mean, for anybody who doesn't know, basically that stat takes the run environment before, or basically takes a look at what's happening in the game before that ball is put in play or swung on and missed or whatever, and then looks what's going on in the game after and gives that pitch the credit, right?

So you could be whiffing on sliders. You could be hitting over the top of them into ground balls and creating outs. Whatever it is, the game is worse after. So it's not that great if you're looking at a single pitcher because it always said that, for example, R. r.a dickie's fastball was amazing pitch well that was only because he threw like 10 a game and nobody was ready for it because they were sitting on the 80 mile an hour curveball i mean knuckleball it was it was a change up basically his fastball was a change up so so

you know that it lies on that level now okay now okay, now we're leaving the pitcher behind. We're looking at a team. Here's where there's enough where I'm like, well, here's some ways that a team could be bad at sliders, for example. One, they do not have really great coaching and preparation. And that's actually sort of separate there. Coaching, I could see, for example, the Giants out here use three L screens

during batting practice. They'll have a pitching machine behind one, and they'll have humans behind the other, and they'll mimic different arm slots, different pitch types, and do fastball off-seed, and just basically try to screw with the batter as much as possible to prepare them for the game that day. Not very many other teams do that. Also, downstairs, I was told that I would lose my poop if I was allowed to go downstairs and look at what their pitching machine could do.

They have installed some sort of new pitching machine. No one will tell me exactly what it does in San Francisco, but I'm sure, just guessing, I bet you it has some sort of video component where there's a fake pitcher winding up to release the ball. That's been done before. a fake pitcher winding up to release the ball. That's been done before. I bet you it's one of the best spin machines.

It can spin sliders like nobody's business. And then it's got to have a high VLO. So it's all three of these things. Maybe there's some other aspect of it that I'm not anticipating that makes it great. So they work on that, and they work on the 3L screens in batting practice. And then there's preparation, which is really great information given to their hitters, catered to each hitter's style that really gets them ready for the game. In fact, I heard that the—so now we're talking about Arizona versus the Giants. I heard that the Giants were doing the 3L screen thing in Arizona.

And by the end of the series, when they noticed that Arizona didn't take, because the Giants go first, Arizona didn't take it down. They left the 3L screens out there. For the last day of the series, they were like, hey, let's try this. Because they probably had some people watching what was happening in the field and said, wow, that's a good idea. We could do that. Guess what happened like two weeks later? They hit?

All the Arizona coaches got fired. Oh, no. All the Arizona coaches got fired. So I get just a little bit of a sort of whiff of we're just going to copy this because we're a little bit desperate here right now. And we don't know exactly what they're doing, but we're just going to copy it. I've heard this before from other things. You might have heard a story on here about batting stances in the Astros. Oh, geez. But, yeah, sometimes people just copy each other.

They don't even know why they're copying. But in any case, then the last part that I just want to say is scouting and acquisition. So maybe you scout and acquire a certain type of player that has a weakness against a certain pitch type, because maybe you say, oh, we just love guys who hit fastballs really well. Maybe those guys, some of them just don't hit sliders that well. And you've acquired a bunch of guys who can knock the snot out of fastball, but have some trouble against sliders. So you could have a scouting bias. You could have a preparation and a coaching bias. So I guess it's possible that a team could be bad against a certain pitch type. I don't think it's probable

because you're talking about like 15 different batters, right? It'd be pretty weird. And I think that was – I kind of truncated the email just to get to the main point. I mean, Robert was wondering about each individual player in a lineup will have specific strengths and weaknesses against certain pitches. Right, exactly. Is it possible to look at the sum or the average of the parts? It might not be helpful to look at the sum or the average of the parts because you're scouting every you can scout everyone individually and attack them individually but you could happen to have five or six hitters in the lineup on a given day who are bad against sliders or a couple that are just bad against

premium velocity or something that that's possible but yeah i'd be i'd be careful about trying to find a ton of value in this as well i love what what the Giants are doing. Every time it comes up, when you explain some things you've seen them doing that are really putting at the forefront of coaching and development, it makes sense. It helps to explain something that coming to the season, we thought what happened last year was a fluke and that they were going to be at best the third best team in the NL West. I probably would have said Arizona was going to win more games than San Francisco back in March. Put that on the long list of things I've been wrong about in 2021.

But when you have unexpected success or unexpected failure, you want to dig in more and understand why. And I think the why with the Giants is well thought out and compelling more often than not. It's just an organization that seems to get it and wants to continue to learn more and kind of push things in the right direction even further. Yeah, I mean, just talking to their coaches, every time I talk to them, they say something that kind of blows my mind. They definitely went out and tried to acquire people

who think hard on the game and are good at connecting with people um so and then on top of that farhan is a waiver wire genius i mean this dude found max muncy you know and and donovan solano and mike justremsky and these are all waiver claims yeah you know how many waiver claims do you they know how many successful waiver claims GMs normally have in their lives? They probably have like one or two that they remember. And usually it's like,

remember when we claimed that one reliever and he ended up being good? It's like Rule 5. Everyone's like, Johan Santana. Yeah, Rule 5 matters. Johan Santana. You're like, yeah, Johan Santana.

That's about it. There's like two guys from the Rule five over the last like 20 years and everyone's always excited about it i'm like i don't care i mean good luck to these guys but i don't i don't know man it's it's a it's a really low percentage play but this guy he's i think he's done a really good job and i think like the even the you can almost count signing Tommy LaStella and guys like that as almost waiver-ish because you're talking about two $3 million signings too. Yeah, I'm with you there.

So a huge list of reasons why they're having success. And probably the Dodgers and Brewers are doing very similar things. Yeah, they're not alone. First of all, Farhan was at the Dodgers, so I think they're doing very similar things i've heard the dodgers a little bit more out there on vr on virtual reality but um you know obviously the brewers have some pretty good player development going too so it's not i'm not trying to say it's only the giants but it could be a thing that i think the lefty righty

splits is meaningful and the the difficulty and there was some stuff of it and it's in the in the email too uh the difficulty he was pointing this out is that like the lineups change too so doing anything on the team level ignores the goings the goings and comings off the il uh you know guys who've been demoted you know call ups like all that stuff and then if you try to cut it into smaller tidbits, it gets worse because now you're just looking at a lot of noise. So let's say you say lefty-righty splits. That is pretty useful. That could tell you something about just the handedness of the team, basically.

But what if they, like the Cubs, this is the email I brought up to Cubs too, right? It's another email, but it's very, very related. This email came from another Matt. Matt was wondering, with so many batters moved to the trade deadline, I was wondering how the starting pitcher streaming landscape has changed. I use the Fangraphs team splits tool

plus Eno's commanded stuff numbers when streaming starting pitching. Which teams do you think are now viable to stream left-handed pitchers or right-handed pitchers against first team in general? It's obviously the Cubs are losing their best hitters. I mean, yeah, they gutted that lineup. So

his question was, how bad do you think their offense will be now? Probably bottom five. I mean, name three good hitters still in that lineup. Like Wilson Contreras and... I got a share of Rafael Ortega, baby. I came up on the waiver pod yesterday, and it was after we talked about Joe Adele.

I'm like, wow, those are two guys coming from very different places at very different points in their career. Yeah, Ortega's like 29 or 30. He's like a six-year-old. Like, which one's going to help me more? So I think this is kind of part of a broader question and it does tie into the last one like you have lineups changing all the time i think one thing we've done generally poorly in the season-long community they

do it really well in dfs is accounting for the changes in opponent quality when you take the best hitter out of a lineup, think of the Padres. Without Fernando Tatis Jr., when he's on the IL, that's not a lineup you fear because even with him in it, they're above average, but they're not way above average. They're not a top five offense. They're more like in that 10 to 15 range. Without him, they're just a tick below average probably overall. Then you start taking your shots. You have all these situations like that. The trade deadline is just one of the big ones where teams can absolutely get gutted, but the Cubs weren't a team that you feared before, but now they're a team you'd seek out. Like you would actively seek out streaming pitchers, guys you previously would not

use against the Cubs. You absolutely will use against the Cubs during the final two months of the season. Yeah, yeah. I guess I have a little bit of a weakness as an analyst is that I'm not super into DFS, and so I haven't looked at the sort of predictive quality of all these different splits you can look into. But I would have to say that my general thought is that you could almost do better, like you're kind of doing the blink assessment

where you're like, know just look at just look at the lineup right and be like oh that's not a good line that isn't that gonna do you better than being like well uh in the last week uh they've murdered you know sliders from righties and the guy that's coming in today throws a you know what i mean yeah i mean i think the the hard thing too is as you start to break things down even by month for teams that haven't changed as much you could trick yourself into avoiding a matchup that's basically a string of good games put together or a string of bad games put together right team slump just like player slump so you could say oh well the tigers in august are uh they're a league

average offense i should be more careful with them it's like no you probably shouldn't be more careful with them there hasn't been that much that's changed for them did to them yeah by the way i sold cal control uh for clint frazier and devil's rejects right after that start so i mean maybe maybe i'll look dumb later but uh i felt pretty good about that the august thing is kind of funny though because if you look at the wrc plus by team from the bottom up pirates dead last rangers second to last brewers third to last rockies fourth to last and then marlins rounding out the bottom five all teams that we've been picking on for most of the season.

I think the Brewers are the one surprise there. Those are mostly teams I would stream against. I mean, Brewers away from home, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Like Alec Mills gets them today. It's not like Adamas changes everything. I mean, Adamas and Tellez have been good,

but it's mostly about bringing them up from the bottom than making them a top offense. Right. So if everything's clicking for them and they get Yelich back to yellich i mean that's that's what they need to do if they want to go far and in just to do a real baseball little snippet there if the brewers want to go far they need uh they need christian to be like 90 christian at least you know uh i think that uh that and that's that's just gonna be the reality for them because if he's just if this is who he is and he's just an okay player, then that whole lineup is just okay.

But I would say Pirates, Rangers, Brewers, Rockies, Marlins, Mariners against the working up from the bottom, Cleveland, the D-backs. The Reds are surprising. I don't think they're necessarily a soft streaming target. The Twins, I think they make sense because buxton's been hurt donaldson's been hurt a lot nelson cruz is gone twins is a little bit dangerous though and they're barrelers man they lead the league in barrels and yeah and you could get bad uh lineup news like right before where it's like you do you think donaldson's gonna be out but then he's in or

whatever and you know what i mean yeah you could get burned by that but that's just not the same twins lineup that we thought it was going to be coming to the season because of a variety of different factors buxton crews yeah yeah so i think you can mess with them the royals the cubs i would just say the twins and the cubs are the two teams that probably fell the most at the deadline yeah and and because of injuries and other factors whereas earlier in the year you were more careful with who you'd use against them. Now, you don't have to be. So another spot.

It's been the refrain in this episode. Be careful. Because reading too much into these limited samples and splitting things out too much can lead you astray in some of these cases. And you don't want to make bad decisions that you think are good decisions rooted in data. All right. You know, let's get to one more question for today. This is an injury concern question from Perry. Perry writes, I've spent a good portion of the last three years waiting for Byron Buxton and Adalberto Mondesi to come back from the IL, and I'm wondering if I should just move on.

I'm in a 30-team Dynasty League and have the likes of Alex Kirilov, Julio Rodriguez, George Valera, and Royce Lewis waiting in the wings. Should I try to get 50 cents on the dollar and let someone else worry about Mondesi and Buxton? Thanks for all the info and laughs, Perry. This is tough because it's a 30-team dynasty league. So replacement level when you lose a guy is really high.

And then the penalty of taking 50 cents on the dollar when you trade players who could be as good as Buxton and Mondesi is really steep. Because, look, you're getting less than you should. And trying to replace them, trying to find quality on the wire is almost impossible. of fine quality on the wire is almost impossible. Unless you're going to win a championship this year by trading them for some rentals, I don't think you could really justify getting rid of either one of these guys right now because Mondesi especially, his value might be at a three-year low right now. Yeah, and I just think that the psychology, there's a little bit of a psychology at play here,

the recency bias. I think you need to take advantage of recency bias. Just like, remember this moment, um, and, and, and nurture it within you and hide it from people. Um,

and then once Buxton and modesty have a really three-week stretch to end the season, take part in the happiness. Remember that little kernel of doubt that you stored away. And then trade him. And it'll be harder. Because then you'll be like, oh, dude, Buxton came back and he smashed like six homers and stole three bases. And that's what everybody wants from him. And he's, you's 27 but then remember this this moment too like sort of store away this feeling so that you you can trade him away later at closer to full value i would say that both of them have done enough that i think long-term you may want to trade them.

Because it's not a good sign when your GM says, we're not sure he can be an everyday player, which is what Dayton Moore recently said about Adalberto Massi in public. It's weird, isn't it? I mean, it's not nice. Maybe it's like a gauntlet he's throwing down, or he's like, come on, dude. Is he trying to motivate him?

Because that is not a way to maximize value. Yeah, he's not going to trade him away, I guess, after that. He's not helping his trade value. But normally, I thought Moore was a guy that tried to support. They paid their minor leaguers, and they've been pretty supportive. But could that have been posturing? Because the league knows that they probably want to trade Merrifield this winter. Is having some kernel of doubt about Mondese's playing time volume a way of trying to protect Merrifield's trade value?

Because you've got Bobby Witt Jr. coming up too. Oh, we could play all three of them because Montessi's not really an everyday player right and then everyone's like oh then we get to pay top dollar for Witt Merrifield that's how he thinks it's going to play out and it's like well I'm pretty sure everybody else can evaluate those three players and see that you have motivations to get rid of the oldest one of the three i think there's less of these sort of uh uh galaxy brain 3d chess things than than we want there to be i was talking about uh a gm uh to somebody and being like i don't think i'd ever work for that guy and they and they and the executive said there were fewer heroes and villains in baseball than people want to think. Really?

There's just more regular people around the game than we assume? Yeah, I think so. More Clark Kent? Yeah, maybe these guys. And we like narrative. We don't get full access. As writers, we try to we like we like narrative we don't get full access you know as writers we try to give uh people access but we don't we ourselves don't have full access and then whatever access we have is filtered down through the narratives that we put on the stuff that we get through our access

so you you're never getting the full story of what you know an aj preller is like you know no not just to pull a name out of a hat. Well, if you sat down with someone who's been in his inner circle before or who is in his inner circle currently, and if you, you know, had some beers with that person, then you may get some actual unfiltered information. And that's actually the sort of...

You're describing the situation in which I got that sort of feedback, so... Not that it was about AJ, brother. No, of course not. Why would it be? I'm still stuck on this pitching machine that you described in San Francisco because I want rates and barrels field trips to become a thing now that it's possible. We can get in the same vehicle and go to a place and check stuff out.

But that's like getting access to the everlasting gobstopper machine. Like that's, that's really not going to happen. Is it like, if I hold out hope that that's going to be our first field trip, I'm going to be waiting a very long time for that. Do you know what the coach who was telling me about it said I should do? He said,

I should take a bucket of balls and throw them all over the field and go, what the hell? Who did that? And then go run down and look at it. Well, if you need me to bail you out when you do that, if that's the route you want to go, I'll bail you out instead of throwing the balls. Yeah, I have a way to get an organization to hate you. Yeah, I think being on the more friendly side with the Giants is probably the better long-term play. But I love that that was suggested to you. Was that 3D chess?

Was that some attempt to get you out of the Giants' orbit? Just talk Eno to doing something ridiculous so we can ban him for life. Just imagine the tweet from one of the other beat writers. Looks like Eno Saris is being kicked out of the park. There's a bucket of balls on the field. I can't tell what's going on here. It would be very confusing and very exciting for anybody who was covering the game that day

to see something like that unfold during batting practice. But if you've got ideas for some rates and barrels field trips, drop us a line. He's at, you know, Sarah's I am at Derek Van Riper. You can subscribe to the athletic for just three 99 a month at the athletic.com slash rates and barrels.

Thank you to the many of you who have taken the time and supported the site over the years. And if you're thinking about doing it now, it's a great time to get in. Of course, we got the push to the playoffs. We got fantasy football stuff starting up as well. If you play that. And thank you're thinking about doing it now, it's a great time to get in. Of course, we got the push to the playoffs. We got fantasy football stuff starting up as well. If you play that and thank you to you for coming back.

Oh yeah. Was I, was it, was it not fun having me gone? It may have been for our listeners, but it was, uh, it was difficult for me.

I'd much rather be hosting this show than driving down I-80 with two hands firmly on the wheel, just like unsure of what's actually coming up next. There's parts of that drive that are just very long stretches of straight, flat, boring drive, like 455 and a half miles of Nebraska, for example. Very easy driving. easy driving. But for somebody who's never been through like Wyoming and Nevada and stuff before that is like Mario cart brought to life, but without the turtle shells and stars and mushrooms and stuff, which would make it terrifying with the power slide for sure. Yeah.

So highly recommend it if you need a thrill and have a week to burn. But at the same time, I don't actually recommend it. You haven't even gone up into the foothills yet. Ooh, baby. actually recommend it. You haven't even gone up into the foothills yet. Ooh, baby. Now do it with a bicycler on your side and on the other side. Oh, jeez. There are some people doing some crazy things on pretty busy roads out here,

so it's going to be an adjustment to say the least. Yeah, it's alive and well. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.