Rates & Barrels - New Maxes & Different Projections

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Rundown4:29 Searching for Light at the End of the Tunnel10:47 Turn on the Video Feed!16:38 More Structural Wrinkles to Consider24:06 The Depths of Eno's Closet26:13 Increased Velocity = Increased Injury Risk?33:21 Jeff Zimmerman's Statcast-based Projections39:19 Predicting Future Strikeout Rates for Hitters Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get a free 90-day trial to The Athletic: theathletic.com/free90days Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode of Rates and Barrels is presented by the Salvation Army. Your donations can help those affected by COVID-19 find help and hope. To give, ask your smart speaker to make a donation to the Salvation Army or make your gift at SalvationArmyUSA.org. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 89. It's April 23rd. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. Eno, how's it going for you on this Thursday? It's going good. I'm sore, sore, sore, sore, sore. I ran my new max eight and a half miles yesterday and it took me an hour and 20 minutes.

And, you know, actually at the end, I felt like, you know what? Like, why don't I just go for 13, get this whole thing over with? So good. It's good and bad news. The bad news is I'm sore today. The good news is I feel like I could run 13 next week if I needed to. I would just have to stop running for a week, I think. Yeah, yeah.

After 13, a little breather would probably go a long way. It's cool that you're making that progress. I've been way too lazy for the circumstances i need to really find something to motivate me uh even a future race would would do anything like i need a goal of some kind it's someone to say you have to be able to do this by then and it could be anything could be push. I think I actually have a little bit of friendly competition with my wife. Ah, okay. So usually on the weekend, she'll go for a long run,

and she's been pushing to seven and a half. So that's all I've got is staying out in front of her. Eventually, we were talking about running um you know half marathon together but a with kids it's hard to both be gone running for an hour and a half um and b like she's not that into running with other people even her husband just likes to be alone i can understand that though i get that yeah's therapeutic, right? It's one of those times where I do have a deep appreciation for nature. If I'm out

running around and it's just a particularly nice day, and maybe it's even a certain time of day or the sun's about to set, you just catch certain views of certain parts of familiar places and it just looks amazing. Running is one of those times where I experience that. It's kind of a different sort of joy, but it's also is one of those times where I experienced that. It's

kind of a different sort of joy, but it's also one of the few times where I'm completely alone and I'm not really thinking a lot about work or something on a screen in front of me as well. So I could see not wanting to run in a group, but I've also, if I were constantly by myself at home, I'd probably want to run with a group for the social aspect. So I think it can work both ways. Yeah, I think that social aspect doesn't count if it's your husband who you see all the time when you need shelter in place. But I also think that pacing is an interesting thing. I started out at the beginning. So if I run three miles, I can run at eight and a half minute miles.

If I run my sort of more basic four to five mile runs, I run it between nine and nine and a half. So what I realized on my long runs, the last few miles are 10. So I said on this one, I'm going to start out at 10 and really try to keep that pace. And what was the weirdest thing about the feeling was that for the first half of it, I felt like I had to actively try to run slower to do 10 because my body was like, hey, we're starting out, let's go. But it really served me well because I had more energy in the second half. But in the second half, I felt like I had to run faster to get to 10.

So I definitely really stayed on top of my pace and ended up at 10, almost on the dot, or it was like 9.55 or something, and still had a little bit of energy left at the end. But I've been dragging a little bit of butt since. It's something to do you know i i feel um at this point i feel like i'm ready uh i'm chomping at the bit to kind of like you know i kind of thought that may 1 by may 1 we'd have some clarity about opening up

and i think we are kind of getting to that. I mean, we're starting to get benchmarks in different cities and different, uh, states. Um, you know, the national government is, is, is pushing us to,

to open up. So, um, I, I have a feeling that may not may one, but sometime in early may, we're going to start hearing more concrete proposals, uh,

about how baseball is going to go forward. Yeah. We'll have to see how things progress in the next couple of weeks, but you do get the sense that's where a lot of places are headed. The time in place has been tricky for a lot of people and for a variety of different reasons, of course, but it does feel like we're going to make some progress somewhat soon. There is a cost in lives in the lockdown. I read that for every, this is historical data, so it's not some sort of projection, for every

1% rise in unemployment, there's a 1% rise in suicide. And we just went from three and a half to 15% like overnight. I've read some data on child abuse and domestic abuse being through the roof. You know, this has a real cost. The lockdown has a real cost. And I'm not saying that, you know, they're equal. I'm just saying like if we've done some work flattening the curve, then at some point we need to discuss how we're going to open up rather than just focus on that bit. So, you know, I think there's some hope for it. I know that some people think, you know, there was a poll on Fangraphs that said, you know, was asking people, you know, how much baseball is going to be played and when will it be played? know how much baseball is going to be played and when will it be played and when i responded the number one response was something like 76 to 100 games starting in june or july but the number two

response was zero games i don't know man there's just there's so much money at stake and there are there's such an uneven there's such a regional equality to this situation that i think that they could find a region in which to work so i think that it'll be arizona only uh the florida numbers aren't great and um splitting it into two or three places i think makes it harder to do um and, and Arizona of the three states that they've discussed is probably the best off. Um, so I, I like, I know personally that, you know, Northern California, when you look at, and this is another thing that annoys me about this situation, the data is bad. The, the, like the way that people are chopping up the data, the way that people are presenting the data, uh, the data itself, there's a lot of bad data out there.

I mean, you know, if I watch like a lefty mainstream media, they have a thing up there. 800,000 people have been infected. 40,000 are dead. That gives you this sense that like, oh, my God, 5% of the people who are infected die. Jesus Christ, you know. But that's wrong. That's totally wrong. There's no way that only 800,000 people were infected.

Right. What we've really struggled to do from day one is test enough people. Right. That's a huge part of the problem. We don't know how many people are asymptomatic. We don't know. And when we do this, and when we do this and when we do something when we do something that's a little bit more like like targeted in scope a little bit something

that like okay so they have the santa clara antibody test they went out here in my in my uh neighborhood and they and they like they they they they tested a bunch of people they said oh 50 more 50 times more people are infected than we think because of the antibody test. And then they also just found out here in Santa Clara that someone died of coronavirus in January here. So it's been around longer than we think. More people have it than we think. And even if that study was flawed, one in eight pregnant ladies in New York had coronavirus. So I think there's a likelihood

that almost 10 of america has had it right which totally changes the mortality rate from it and you know everything you're right there there is a lot of bad information out there because we're just missing so much data and i'm surprised yeah i'm surprised by how bad this data is dude we're talking about life and death we're not recording that that well? I don't, like, I don't understand that. Like, I can't believe that, like, you know, the governor of New York is going on and being like, we have this record of this many people dying, but that's not a good number because we're not even recording how many people died in their houses. What? Like, why isn't there proper accounting of these things so um i've there's a there's a lot of different ways to chop up the data um there's a twitter account that i follow uh who usually does baseball things uh but in this time we all uh all do different things okay at frag f-a-r-g underscore i-d-M-A. And he's just using his data skills to kind of do an inferred infection rate and inferred death rate by accounting for certain things and

comparing countries and stuff. I just find what he's doing pretty interesting. And, you know, surprisingly, there hasn't been more people who have these data skills in our space uh that have tried to clean up this data and and work with it but um anyway uh long story short i believe in uh 81 to 100 games um i still i'm still holding on to that july 4th date uh july 4th means spring training starts in mid-June, which means in mid-May they have a proposal that they have to get the MLBPA's approval on, they get the doctor's approval on. Anthony Fauci's out there saying it's possible to play baseball.

So I think it's going to happen. Yeah, it's a long road to say that there is still reason to be optimistic. And fortunately, the Triple Crown League that I put together continues. I had another draft last night. It was the AL-only auction. That looked like fun. It was a lot of fun. And one thing that I have taken away from our current situation of not being able to have drafts and auctions in person and using Zoom more for aspects of my life, which I never previously thought I would use Zoom, is that it's actually really fun.

I hate the kid Zoom stuff. What were you saying? Sorry. It probably sucks for that kind of stuff. Yeah. So previously, for years, for several, you've had this technology for at least, I don't know, three or four years at least where it's been good enough to work during a draft, right? It's amazing how much more fun an online draft is when you just turn on the video feed and talk to your friends while you're building your team. Most of the people in the auction last night jumped in the Zoom room at one point or another.

night jumped in the Zoom room at one point or another. And that added a level of enjoyment to the online draft that, frankly, I think was there all along, but we never thought to do that until we had to, until we missed social interaction. So I mean, I'm just glad we did it. It was just purely fun and therapeutic. And I think that there's probably actually something about a draft that leads to a better Zoom experience because I've noticed this with, you know, I've got a Zoom happy hour, G's up. My wife saw that because my friend actually sent out a calendar invite to it. And my wife was like, is that like G's like geezers?

And I was like, gangsters, come on, wife. We're gangsters, not geezers. And we're gangsters that send out calendar invites for our Zoom happy hours now. But what I've noticed is that when we're at like four or five, we're starting to get to the point where it's hard to know who talks. And I've been trying to work with Casey McLean, who's a Seattle-based comedian. We've been trying to think of how can we have that bar feeling? He knows comedians. I know people in beer. He knows people in beer.

Could we bring these people together and have like a bar experience. And the problem is somewhere between like four and five and ten plus. Nobody knows when to talk. And you either have to do something structured like I'm the host and I'm going to and now I'm going to point to you and now you talk. And now I'm going to point to you and now you talk. I have a question, you know, that your lester holt voice yeah that's what it sounded like well uh i guess um but yeah that's my that was at least my host voice um and so oh god we should like flip roles for one of these podcasts and i pretend to be the host. Oh, we're definitely doing that now.

We're absolutely making a note right now. Switch roles. And voices. And voice. The voice thing would be tough, but we could try it. So the whole problem is when to talk, and I could see how in a draft, there's like a natural when to talk, right? Like, oh, I have to pick soon, so I'm going to stop talking. So you have this sort of like the person who's furthest away from picking talks a little bit, and then the people talk with him.

And as soon as they get closer to picking, they stop talking, right? Yeah, and then for an auction, I think everybody was kind of busy enough watching the bidding on one part of their screen. Oh, it was an auction, so it wasn't a snake. I'm thinking of the snake, you could stop talking. I did a snake draft where we did the Zoom, and it was kind of like whoever was furthest away from drafting usually was talking. Totally makes sense to do it that way with Snake, but with an auction, what naturally happens is you'll have certain players who come up that a few people in the room are just not interested in, and they'll start talking about something else that happened a few players before that.

Or if you're eating dinner, Jeff Erickson was eating some tacos, and Dallas Keuchel was nominated. He goes, there's a taco player. He just took a bite of his taco and just stopped bidding completely because he didn't want them. So it's table talk. In a way, it allows for some of that skill that I've been trying to develop

myself, which is to read the room better. But I was watching your auction with um was it was it gray in the al labor uh yeah and labor yep and i'll labor and he would sometimes say things like oh i don't know and like like just like throw out a name like he doesn't care about it. And you're like, I don't know, dude. Those were all guys he liked every single time. Those were horrible bluffs. And with Gray, I'm not sure if he was doing that

just because it's funny to have that kind of bluffs and give it away. He's definitely a funny guy like that, yeah. I think it was probably more that. I don't think it was just a leak that he was unaware of. I think it was just kind of an intentional having fun with it sort of thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, hey, someone declares someone a taco player,

that's one less person who's bidding on the guy. I mean, it's information. But it also makes it more fun. It's just more fun. And the way people throw a guy, intentionally mispronounce or do a nickname or be like, the guy I like the least personally, but his game is good.

Whatever, they'll say something about the player. It just makes it more fun, you're right. So the wrinkle for last night's auction, it was 15-team AL only. The rosters were smaller. So instead of corner and middle being separate, it was 15-team AL only. The rosters were smaller. So instead of corner and middle being separate, it was just infielder. It was four outfielders instead of five. It was one catcher instead of two, only one utility, and then seven pitchers.

So we only bought 18 players because there's 15 teams, but still, compared to a 12-team league where you buy 23, it's only six players off the total you normally buy so the challenge the depth was basically the same but the shape of the player pool over a 15 team only league is very different and i i kind of feel like um you may have had some influence in what I did in this case because I bought John Means. When you buy fewer players, you don't lower the budget. Numbers go up. So top-end players, Mike Trout, I think, was a $55 player last night. John Means went for $10.

Wow. Because that's what pitchers like John Means went for $10. Wow. Because that's what pitchers like John Means were going for. And also, early on, for the first hour, there were probably too many values, pretty consistently. It wasn't just a lot of spending for a pocket at the very beginning. It was

minus three, minus five, and people didn't catch on quickly enough. and then we ended up having a ton of money late so so all the five dollar players became ten dollar players all of a sudden yeah that happened and and there were some 10 or 12 other players who became 20 players i mean it was it was wild and it was mostly the same group that we had in a mixed league setting the week before where we bought 23 players instead of 18 it was strange because the mixed auction had the disciplined feel of an only league auction and the only league last night actually felt more like tat wars mixed where

people just had that wild spending video had something to do with it it may have i i i think it was just the unusual league size though i i think that yeah i think that had something to do with it it may have i i i think it was just the unusual league size though i i think yeah i think that had something to do with it but i i actually liked it as an improvement on the 12 team original roto and i don't bring up the old rules to the crap on them i bring them up because if we were making the same game that glenn and the founding fathers of Roto, Dan O'Kran, if we were making that today, it wouldn't look the same as the 12-team monoleagues that have been played for 40 years. We would build the game differently. And this is one possible way it would happen i think way more people playing so just just in terms of like not in people you can bring to the table

like of course we're gonna have 20 team leagues and you know yeah i think your default would obviously still be mixed it wouldn't be only but even with the only league the the active roster spots would be different. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, yeah. And hasn't the game itself expanded, like the player pool? The player pool is a little deeper because there are more teams in the league now than there were then. The rosters, I think, are a tick bigger now.

Yeah, we went up to 26 26 and i think we've added like four teams since then so yeah i think that uh the natural progression is to deeper leagues also there's just like uh i think there's something with the the internet has done i've talked a little bit about this before between broadcasting and narrowcasting you know i think in the 70s and 80s we there were there was broadcast tv and you watched you know four I think in the seventies and eighties, we, there were, there was broadcast TV and you watched, you know, four or five channels and you had a, a, a better shared experience with the rest of the world. Like we all watched Care Bears or whatever it was. You know what I mean? I say that because that is a missing part of my childhood. I didn't have a TV

till fourth grade. So, um, I don't know if it was Care Bears, but whatever it was, like we all, we all said whatever we were watching. Yes, I am. But, uh, we had some sort of shared experiences broadcast, but now with the internet,

uh, we end with cable, the cable TV started this, but then the internet, uh, broadened this thing, which is we now narrow cast where we like know exactly what we want. And we can go as deep as we want into that thing.

And so we went from wanting to have a 10-team league where it was only the stars and we all got to fight over the very best of the players to, I think, just the way we consume media pushing us towards, let's have a 30-team league with 25-man rosters. the way we consume media pushing us towards let's have a 30 team league, you know, with, with 25 man rosters where you're like,

let's do it exactly like they do it in baseball and let's do salary cap leagues and let's do this and that. So, um, I think it's a natural progression and, and it, and it fits, uh,

what, what we've done as a, as a people. Yeah, I would agree with that. And again, try new formats, but regardless of the formats you try, turn on Zoom during your online drafts

and auctions going forward. It makes them a lot more fun. You don't just feel like you're staring at a computer screen for five hours by yourself. And don't be sad if your wife makes fun of you for the Zoom calendar invite. You probably deserve that. Right?

I mean, like, for being completely fair. Maybe. I wouldn't have done a calendar invite, but I also get yelled at by my wife by not using the calendar enough. I got in trouble for that literally an hour ago. Almost daily, that comes up now. You didn't put rates and barrels on the calendar? No, that one repeats at the same time every week. Usually, it's one-offs.

Occasionally, it's drafts that I get in trouble. I get scolded for not having those on there. I should put those on there because I'm basically useless in the house for five hours. And that's out of respect for other people in the home. I should probably put that on the calendar. The Black Tux believes every groom deserves a better experience when it comes to finding formal wear, a suit or tuxedo for their big day. Did you know the Black Tux was actually started by two guys who had one of the worst tuxedo fittings you could imagine? It turns out they aren't alone in this frustration. Just listen to these one-star reviews from competitor tux shops that shall not be named.

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two different 70s freely colored shirts to go with it not surprised that one one salmon and one light blue a little bit like the dumb and dumber combo and goal set both shirts have been shadow banned by my wife i in fact think she hid them she may have burned them yes you know what she might be doing on those runs she might be taking your things and burning them somewhere dropping them off in donation piles yeah that's probably more likely i mean that's that's like honestly if you have clothes you don't want, even if they are ugly, put them in a bin. Give them to someone in need. Don't burn them.

Or if your favorite player gets traded or signs a contract with a new team, maybe don't burn that. Just give it away. You're not going to wear it anymore. I have a hard time giving away clothes, though. And it's always this mind game game where i'm like well you know you haven't worn that shirt since you lived in new york that was 10 years ago and then i'm like well you know i like to wear that shirt under a sweater it doesn't i don't like it by itself but i like it under a sweater so if it gets cold enough i will wear it under a sweater you know

you live in california now it's never cold enough, I will wear it under a sweater. Eno, you live in California now. It's never cold enough for a long-sleeved shirt and a sweater. I'm like, but what if I visit New York? The very rational side of you, the angel on your right shoulder, I guess, in this case, is using the voice you're going to use when you lead host the show. That was lead host voice, very clearly. Okay, so we got some baseball stuff. We do. We do have some baseball stuff. We got a question from Scott. It's an email, and it reads,

Hey guys, your show is by far the best baseball podcast going. Thank you, Scott. We appreciate that. When you refer to pitchers gaining more velocity in spring training, is it basically better mechanics attributed to driveline-type philosophy, players in better shape,

or getting a new coach or joining a new organization with the increase in speed? Does it carry greater risk of injury now that they are suddenly throwing harder? Thanks for your time. Scott.

There is. There is, because either they are throwing closer to their max which is stressful on them um or i mean that's that's what i would guess that they're strong if they're not throwing if their max has moved as well as their sitting velocity then maybe it's less clear uh but also just throwing harder has been shown to put more stress on the elbow. So I would say nothing in baseball is unqualified, but I would say a slightly qualified, yes, there's more risk. I think there's plenty of examples of guys, Jesse Hahn had a big velocity increase and then just went in the tank. Um, a Ryan bull rookie, uh, had like a two or three mile an hour increase last year and,

and went in the tank. Um, you know, even guys that were on my list of, um, spring increasers this year. Let me see if i can find that one i think there was people that i didn't discuss because i was like oh that guy got injured already um i didn't didn't have that one round up because i thought well we're doing this without a rundown i don't know if you guys have noticed this yeah usually i say on this episode we're going to talk about these things and then we talk about most of those things, but I did not do that.

So that was the cue for things being a bit less structured with this episode. Well, anyway, I would say yes. I would say yes, that's a risk. Naturally, the intersection where all of the things happen has a street sweeper in it right now, a guy walking across the intersection where all of the things happen has a street sweeper in it right now a guy walking across the intersection with a leaf blower on his back and a bicyclist all at the same time and amazingly my dog hazel sees all of these things and has been surprisingly quiet barking

she's been a very good girl so far now i've just just jinxed it, and she's going to bark her head off any second. Here's another name. Tyler Beattie was up 2.7 miles per hour this spring. I remember hearing the Keith Law Show last week. Keith Law's got a podcast now. It's on The Athletic. It's everywhere you listen to podcasts. You should check it out.

The interview he had, he had an interview with Eddie Bain last week, and he's had a long career in baseball. Most recently, I think he's with the Red Sox. And he was talking about Chris Sale's velocity going up before his injury in 2018. Remember, time's all messed up. And he was just recalling that story, and he remembers being at that game and saying, this is bad. This is too much. Like, this is not – he should not be throwing this hard because he doesn't usually throw this hard. And there's still this difficulty in scouting and in the organizations and I think overall is that do you really want to tell a guy to not throw that hard or to throw less hard than he's throwing?

Yeah. Because throwing hard is better, right? Like it's, it's, it's just drilled into us that that's what you should do if you could do it. So just let it go. But what,

uh, what year were you talking about again? I think it was late 2018 that he was referring to. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The VLO spiked, right? Like it was maybe in August.

Yeah, dude, it went uh he was he'd been sitting 95 for a while 94 95 and then he went up to 97 7 in june and july was 98 and august was 98 too he's not supposed to throw that hard at this point. And then he dropped all the way to 92.8 in September. It's almost like, and I'm spitballing here just because I don't have a perfect analogy, but it's almost like the arm loosens up more at a certain point, and then you get this extra velocity, but that loosening is the beginning of an injury process like there's a cliff or something like you can build up and you can build up and you can build up and then something happens where there's some tearing or something right like there's definitely something uh the rubber band effects in your body and so you know you could see like right before the rubber band snaps it

having like more being able to go back further and spread further right uh but it already having like a little tear in it um and it's also interesting that uh you know versus his max in 2017 his maximum velo was 99 to 100 in 2018 his maximum velo was 99 to 100. In 2018, his maximum velo was 99 to 100. He had one month where it was over 100. So his max velo didn't change much. He just threw really close to his max velo. He just decided in 2018 to throw harder. And that Glenn Fleiss definitely has a study a study about like the closer you throw to your

maximum the the the the worse it is for your elbow so um yeah i mean i could come up with a list it's not something that i could do right now really quickly but you know it is something that uh we could look at you know early in the the season, who's throwing close to their max, especially in tandem with who's got a velo bump and who's throwing close to their max. You know what I mean? Right. I do wonder, I hadn't thought of this before, what our data is going to look like if it's an Arizona-only strategy. Because right now, there's only two of the 13 or 14 parks in arizona that are equipped for trackman which is yesterday's data uh tracker so i don't even trackman doesn't even have an agreement with mlb

as a group so what is our data going to look like when we're trying to analyze this game we're supposed to have to switch to hawkeye, right? And Hawkeye's not in minor league parks. Yeah, not in spring parks then either. Yeah, so we're going to be flying blind. Although, you know, to some extent, we'll be able to reverse engineer some stuff because if we do get distances and stuff like that, we might be able to say, well, in the past,

this hang time plus this distance would have meant that he was hitting at 98 or something. So we might be able to reverse engineer some of the ex-avilo stuff. But it actually allows for a little bit of a transition to the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is that Jeff Zimmerman released his baseball's Avant stat cast based projections, where he only used stat cast things that have been proven to matter, like barrel percentage, launch angle, max exit velocity, sprint speed,

Proven to matter like barrel percentage, launch angle, max exit velocity, sprint speed, combined with a little bit of plate discipline stats to look at what a model that just based on that and didn't look at previous results. What kind of like previous back of the baseball card type results, you know, what kind of projection system would spit out. you know, what kind of projection system would spit out. And, you know, it's going to be, it's going to be fine for us going into 2020 to use these numbers. Uh, but what is it going to look like going into 2021 when you don't have these numbers? Uh, but at the beginning of his article, he said something very interesting, which is he talks about the model thinker by Scott page. It's a, it's a page, uh, a book he read and he And he says, do not put too much faith in one model. The lesson should be clear. If we can construct multiple diverse, accurate models, then we should make very accurate predictions, evaluations, and choose good actions. So Jeff Zubrin's thinking behind this is going to save us in 2021 too, which is that we may not be able to use the

StatCast data in 2021, depending on what the 2020 season looked like. But because we created that model, we may have learned something that can improve our regular models. So, you know, I think that was an interesting quote I wanted to share. And then he has a piece up on Fangraphs with his top 10 best and worst projected hitters by the StatCast. his top 10 best and worst projected hitters by, but with StatCast and, you know, Trout,

Alvarez, Betts, the top three by OPS, not too surprising. Maybe Betts hitting 35 homers, according to StatCast is a little surprising, but I don't think so. He's moving to a stadium that should be very conducive to his home run power.

Austin Meadows is fourth. That might be a little bit surprising. 36 homers and 14 stolen bases by StatCast. That suggests that maybe he is worth all the heavy investment he's getting. Gary Sanchez is a StatCast darling. You might be surprised to learn that StatCast says he'll hit 289. Judge, 270, 37 homers. Stanton, 279, 39 homers.

It's more of a question of health than talent with those two. Ronald Acuna Jr. coming in at 8th with 36 homers, 284 average, 25 stolen bases. But here's the big surprise. The last two, 9th and 10th. Kind of similar looking dudes. Should I make you try and guess? No, that's okay. You can share them.

Alright. Peter Alonso and Kyle Schwarber. Yeah, I mean I had the table open so it wouldn't have been fair. That would have looked unfairly alike. Yeah, I mean, I had the table open, so it wouldn't have been fair. That would have looked unfairly alike. Yes, I'll guess. You should have just said yes.

Is it Peter Alonso and Kachor? But 41 homers for Peter Alonso, the 289 average, which is surprising people. people. But if you head on over to Savant, you will see that Pete Alonso had the second highest max exit velocity in baseball last year. We know that's significant. 118.3, sitting in between Sanchez and Vlad Guerrero. But Alonso had almost twice the barrel rate as Vlad Guerrero, almost twice the barrel rate as Vlad Guerrero. So he doesn't have the same sort of flawed swing path. I think Vlad Guerrero can fix it, but in his first goal at the league, Vlad did hit too many balls on the ground.

So as far as I'm concerned, Alonso is up there with the Titans, the Judges, the Sanchez's, the Stanton's when it comes to quality contact. And I could actually see him out hitting his sort of traditional metric-based projections because they focus so much on the 26% strikeout rate. And that's why they keep giving him 250 batting averages. But He had a 260 batting average last year with a 280 Babbitt. A guy who hits the ball that hard could have a 330 Babbitt easily.

He's a player I just don't have yet this season. Partially because of the high price in snake drafts. I think in auctions, it's a little more likely to happen. I talked to an analyst with a team who thought that uh you know there was an idea that he peaked he hit the ground running with his peak and he's only going to regress from here going forward because of the the contact issues on that and i talked to a player a person with a team who said absolutely not like the the the batter ball profile can fill in, in ways like we don't even have all

of the data in terms of batter ball profile, and it can fill in, in ways that would be beneficial to him. Also, he had a single digit swinging strike rates in the minors at all stops, except for triple a. Um, so there is a chance that he, he cuts that strikeout rate. At 25, it's probably only two or three years of cutting the strikeout rate, but he's starting at 26. Stanton started at 30-something, 33 or something. So if he starts at 26 and cuts it down to 24, 23, he could have a season where he hits 280, 290 with 55 homers. I mean, that's on the table.

Well, it leaves us with a question that actually had crossed my mind earlier this week, and I wasn't in a place to write it down on outline for us. Maybe we'll save this for Tuesday. But Alonzo, I think, was exactly the player who I was looking at when this thought occurred to me. Which is more sticky, the high A and double A strikeout rates

over the span of about two seasons or the initial strikeout rate at the big league level? You know, like which which of those numbers means more? They both mean something. And how do we how do we rectify one against the other when it comes to players like Pete Alonso? when it comes to players like Pete Alonso. Because my brain tells me that I should believe he can improve his K rate simply because he struck out less against inferior competition. Which when you start to break it down, you're like, well, wait a minute.

Maybe that doesn't matter as much as I think it does. Being able to crush pitchers who aren't nearly as good as the guys you're going to see going forward in the big leagues doesn't mean you're a lock to get down to that K rate over time. There's something else that has to happen for a player to repeat minor league strikeout rates against big league competition, especially when you're doing as much damage as a guy like Pete Alonso does. Yeah, and there's some variability

in terms of how the different projection systems treat that. I mean, Steamer has them at a 25.3 next year, and the Bat has them at 26.1. So there's some spread there. I know that MLEs are a big deal here. They're Major League equivalency of those strikeout rates. So an 18.5% strikeout rate in A ball is different than the 18.3% strikeout rate he had in AA in terms of what those would translate to in the major leagues. And I don't

think that necessarily he can go back to having an 18% strikeout rate. I'm not saying that, but I do think that those strikeout rates describe some upside. I think that gives you hope that the initial strikeout rate in the big leagues is not a baseline, even if previous low strikeout rates in the

minors aren't actually an attainable ceiling, if that makes sense so maybe more to explore here but but triple a matters too i mean his strikeout rate jumped at triple a in 2018 but it that's so weird to me because triple a is where you keep your 26 you know your your your 14th 15th and 16th pitchers you know what i mean well yeah but keston here i had the same thing like keston here i had a lower k rate just like pete alonso jumped up at triple a and then was up another level even in his debut but yeah it's a it's a weird idea because the the the 14th 15th 16th pitchers on a staff on a major league staff are gonna have a better sense of how to use their stuff in terms

of sequencing and um location strategies and stuff like that, right? Whereas in AA, you're going to have better arms in terms of VLO and stuff, but they won't necessarily know where to place it. They won't maybe be that great at game planning or sequencing. So maybe that's the real big difference there is more of a attack strategy against you. I mean, I talked to Mookie Betts about how when he got to AA, the big jump for him was that now they had four game series. And in the fourth game, he could tell what they were trying to do to him. Oh, he could catch up on the game plan a bit. Yeah.

Yeah. So I would say that maybe the big difference between AAA and AA is that professionalism. Yeah. And it, it presents different challenges for hitters. So solving that depends on different skills perhaps than what got you that low K rate earlier. Mash high velocity.

Like, right. He obviously has no trouble hitting high velocity. So if he hit a, a, a guy in AA that had great stuff and great velocity, he had no trouble with that. So maybe the jump in strikeout rates suggest that he can be pitched to. And then if you look at that in terms of his splits, and these aren't very predictive,

but it is interesting that his higher strikeout rates, his highest strikeout rate came in September-October, and maybe there was an adjustment back in terms of the league. But his worst month last year, he was 4% better than the league average, and he pretty much raked in the first half and the second half. So I don't think there's much risk with Alonso. And this StatCast projection suggests to me that I've missed out because I don't have that many shares either. Right. And this StatCast projection is looking at things differently than traditional projection systems, which is why it's such an interesting piece that Jeff put up.

But it leaves us with a question that, again, I think we'll probably answer on a future episode. What might enable a player to improve against breaking balls and off speed pitches because i wonder if there's a pattern where guys who have no problem with big league velocity have those lower k rates up through to double a hit triple a they see the sequencing they see better breaking balls at least breaking balls a better command and better sequencing k-rate jumps there they see that even more in the big leagues k-rate stays up at that triple a level when then can we look for improvement what would tell us that it's there not a question we can answer you know in the minute we have left but a question one last thing malik smith got the worst projected OPS, man. I am so glad I have one share.

You only have one. That one share. You're not flush with him. Yeah. I am so sad about that one share. I wanted to just now be able to say I have no shares, but that damn one share. At least I got Joe Adele with him. If I could just mash them together, they'd be an amazing player.

Just convince the Angels to give Adele that opportunity. Let's do this drastic surgery. Adele's power with Malik Smith's legs. Bionic man? Yeah. Yes. Well, that is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels, but if you're enjoying the show on a platform

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