Rates & Barrels - Pitcher Week, Part 1!

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Rundown3:51 Eno's Methodology10:42 Cole vs. deGrom Up Top14:37 Concerns About Lucas Giolito25:04 Command vs. Control34:25 Buying a Kluber Rebound?44:45 What Can Prevent a Dinelson Lamet Breakout?55:31 A Limitation of Rankings62:56 A Pod Divided: Matthew Boyd & Lance Lynn Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Raids and Barrels, episode number 66. It is February 4th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we kick off Pitcher Week. The Athletics Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit launched on Monday, and within that release, Eno shared his updated top 175 pitchers. We'll talk about how those rankings diverge from mine. We'll talk about the pitching pool as a whole, and that's going to be the main emphasis of this episode, all things starting pitching.

On our next episode this week, we'll close things out with an emphasis on relievers. Some housekeeping to get to before we get started. We are available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, pretty much anywhere you want to listen to podcasts. If you're enjoying this show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it, please take the time to do that. We greatly appreciate it. Tell your friends if you like the show and you think that they might like the show as well. Some of you might be listening to the show for the very first time.

If you are, welcome. And if you're not already a subscriber to The Athletic, this is a great time to sign up. You can get 40% off a subscription at theathletic.com slash rates and barrels. Everything we do, including that draft kit, is included with a subscription. You know, Pitcher Week is like one of the best weeks of the year,

even though it's a thing that I just made up in the last couple of days. It's like shark week, but for pitching. Yes, yes, pitcherpalooza, whatever you want to call it. It is a fun time because, you know, also one of the things that's great about it is that pitchers aren't pitching right now. So at the very least, there's no large piece of information that's going to come tonight when a pitcher starts. I don't have to change everything because somebody blew out their elbow last night. But at the same time, because we don't have that and because it's static, we do have a chance to argue.

And one of the things, I do think i'm going to update these before the season starts because of conversations like we're about to have where people bring up different aspects of a player or they highlight differences there was some consternation that zach efflin was behind nick pivetta for. And just a discussion of why that would be the case when Eflin's probably the guy who has a job and Pavetta has to at least fight with Vince Velasquez probably for a job. So, you know, sort of real-life stuff. Stuff like Lance Lynn.

Al Melchior wrote a great piece about Lance Lynn's in-zone strikeout rate and how dominating he can be inside the zone. So people are doing research, bringing out different things to think about when it comes to pitching. And then we can play this sort of would-you-rather with a few people, and that kind of solidifies the rankings for me.

And I've got a couple stories here. I think there's already one player one pitcher i want to change um you know because of certain factors so we'll talk about we'll talk about this and it'll probably lead to change yeah i think that's generally how i view the player pool all the time anyway is i'm looking for things that are not what i thought i'm looking for things that are not what I thought. I'm looking for pitchers that have better stuff than I realized. I'm looking for guys that maybe have lost velocity. I'm looking at that research just like you are and constantly tweaking evaluations along the way.

I think that's the right way to go about your business. I mean, we get thoughtful comments on our pieces sometimes that lead us to further exploration of a player. I've adjusted players after that. I think that's a good way to go in the approach. As far as your methodology, I know you wrote about it on top of the piece, but for the listeners maybe who haven't read it yet, walk us through your process when you're ranking pitchers. You touched on a little bit in the last episode, but what factored into this round of pitcher updates?

I'm really blessed, really, I think, to have an allegiance with Driveline Baseball, where they do a lot of great work. They also test a lot of their assertions in a lab format to kind of, they have hitters and pitchers there, and major league quality hitters and pitchers. So they can really test out anything that they're thinking about. Like, for example, right now we're working together on a study about knowing what's coming. And so driveline is

testing with their hitters right now. They're telling them, you know, they're doing kind of AB on off testing where they're telling them sometimes what's coming know, they're doing kind of A-B on-off testing where they're telling them sometimes what's coming and sometimes they're not telling them what's coming. And they're going to try and just look at some results type stuff, but also, you know, time to contact. Did the swing start earlier? Did the swing start later? Did, you know, stuff like that. And so we can get a little bit more granular knowledge about what actually happens uh when you know what's coming but in this case uh they created a stuff number and uh allowed me to to check it out and basically it's based on glenn healy's work with intrinsic pitch values

which tries to remove you know framing count location, quality of the batter, tries to remove a lot of the things that surround a pitch and tries to get, you know, try to take all that out and see what's left. What does movement and velocity do for a pitch? And so they basically did that for every pitch type for every pitcher. and what i did was then went in and then weighted those to create an overall stuff number so you basically take oh degrom through this many sliders with this stuff number and this many fastballs this stuff number you weight them you create an overall stuff number so i had one column was the overall stuff number from driveline the next one is is command plus, which comes from stats.

You know, I've introduced that before people who have been long time listeners know what that is, but basically stats tries to ask, did that pitcher do with the ball what he meant to do with the ball? And so that removes the idea of trying to hit certain zones in the strike zone or in terms of, oh, this corner is good always. That's, you know, yes, but what if he was trying to throw it on the plate and instead caught zone and therefore it was an easier to hit ball? So Command asked, did he mean to hit the plate with that curveball?

Oh, he did. And he did it. And they do scouting reports, scouting reports of the batter, scouting reports of the pitcher, and he did it, and they do scouting reports, scouting reports of the batter, scouting reports of the pitcher, heat maps, and they sort of judge the pitcher's intent with the pitch and how far off from the intent he was. So that's Command+.

I use the ATC projections just to have a numbers-based projection. It's a sanity check. It corrals me. It allows me to know kind of where the market is. It's kind of a market judge. I also threw in strikeouts minus walks because they're the best in-season predictor, but I didn't look at them too hard because season to season, they're less powerful.

Season to season, we do a better job of projecting home run rates. But in-season, strikeout minus walks is great. So I just wanted to have that there in front of me. But I really focused mostly on stuff in command and that's always been my passion from the beginning. The first conversation that I ever had about stuff was with Jeremy greenhouse who's with the Cubs front office right now. And we had a conversation about it at a basketball game that was a bunch of different writers in New York City.

We had a basketball game. We talked about stuff afterwards. And he wrote this piece on baseballanalyst.com about stuff. And ever since then, I've been trying to put a number on stuff. I think we've finally gotten to a decent place with stuff. Command, though, had to be split out because it's a separate skill. And between those two skills is the quality of a pitcher. And what I like about stuff in command is that they were like you talk about batted ball noise and stuff.

You talk about we used to think about Babbitt and this and that. If you focus on stuff in command, all that stuff goes away. I mean, how good is a pitcher? He's as good focus on stuff in command, all that stuff goes away. I mean, how good is a pitcher? He's as good as his stuff in command. Maybe there should be another column for deception. I think that comes out with Joey Lucchese because somebody said, hey, Joey Lucchese had an average strikeout rate last year for a starting pitcher. How did he do that with league bottom stuff and league bottom command?

Like, how did he do that? And I would say it's because Joey Lucchese has probably the highest deception number in baseball. He throws from a weird angle. He throws a weird pitch. And, you know, those two things combined, like obviously Yuzmira Petit has taken deception. You know, he doesn't have great stuff.

He has a pretty good command, but he's taken his high deception number to a full career in baseball. However, he has a pretty good command but he's taken his high deception number to a full career in baseball however he's a reliever and so that's been part of why joey lucchese is so low in my rankings is that i see the deception wears off over time the more the batters see your unique angle and they see your unique pitch the more they can hit it so i i i suggest that a steep drop-off is coming for Joey Lucchese. So an elite ability to disrupt a hitter's

timing because of deception fades within a few seasons as hitters get multiple looks. My evidence is that it's a little bit Yuzmira Petit-based, but Yuzmira Petit used to have the worst third-time-through-the-order penalties in baseball. And if you let someone see Yuzmira Petit-based, but Yuzmira Petit used to have the worst third-time-through-the-order penalties in baseball.

And if you let someone see Yuzmira Petit third-time-through-the-order, he's like one of the worst pitchers in baseball. And I just think that's, you're in the game, and he throws that invisible ball where his elbow comes forward and the ball pops up. Well, the first time, you can't see it. The second time, you can see it a little bit. And the third time, you're all over it. So I know Joey Lucchese has that herky jerky motion he comes way over the top and he throws a you know a change up with curveball mechanics or a curveball with change up mechanics i can't remember which one it is and between that you know there's a lot of deception but the more people see him man i think it's i think it's going to fall away that's a lot of deception, but the more people see him, man, I think it's going to fall away.

I think that's a very logical hypothesis or a logical approach when it comes to players like that. Now, I want to talk about the very top of the board because I think there is actually more of a debate within at least the top two, if not the entire top four among starters. You have Jacob deGrom just ahead of Garrett Cole. The difference is probably small for anybody that has Cole ahead of deGrom or deGrom ahead of Cole. But if you have the choice, you're taking deGrom. Why is that? What about deGrom is it that you like better? Two things. One, Jacob deGrom is the only pitcher in my sample, the only one, that had a 110 plus stuff number and 110 plus command number. So basically he's the only pitcher in baseball that has elite command and elite stuff. So I think that separates him. Two, because Garrett Cole has like top 10 stuff. He has actually better stuff number than DeGrom,

but he has a worse command number. He's a little bit more traditional. A lot of the aces have league average command and outstanding stuff. That's basically pitchers 2 through 10. They all have outstanding stuff and league average or a little bit slightly better command. Justin Verlander is the closest to DeGrom in terms of pairing the two skills. But DeGrom is younger than Verlander. And then the last thing is Park, Park and League. I'd rather have DeGrom in New York at City facing NL lineups

than Cole at Yankee Stadium facing the AL East. We're shaving hairs here. The German in me still comes out every once in a while. Yeah, shaving hairs. That's what you often do with hair on your face and whatnot. But yeah, DeGrom versus Cole, I think it is kind of a fun debate. Interesting stuff, and command favors DeGrom. The. I think it is kind of a fun debate. Interesting. Yes. Stuff and command favors DeGrom. The park thing is a big one too.

I think there's still a perception among some players and some people who follow baseball that Houston, because of the Crawford boxes is a more hitter friendly environment overall than it actually is. It's a pretty pitcher friendly place to be. So when you consider that Cole has to go from a pitcher friendly environment to a very hitter friendly environment at Yankee stadium, that's actually a big park downgrade, a big park change. Yeah, he has elite skills, but I think you're, you're right to see DeGrom

in that environment, especially as having a much softer landing spot for half the starts. Yeah. The Crawford boxes in, in Houston do provide a little bit of a homer boost there. I think that people like Bregman, it's almost like in Minnesota. If you pull it down the line in Minnesota, you can get some homers, but otherwise it's a tough park. That's what Houston's like. It has one little area that you can aim for. The thing about Yankee Stadium is it has that area, the right field porch,

but then the rest of it's fairly home run friendly too. So it's like it has its Crawford boxes basically, but it also has the rest is also pretty home run friendly. Yeah, the interesting thing, I just ran the split leaderboard over at Fangraphs going back to 1990, so looking at 30 seasons and just looking for starting pitcher war leaders. The Yankees don't have a season in the top 30. There you go.

It's not there. There are guys that pitched for the Yankees later who had top 30 seasons. They had the best bullpen of any... If you just added up all the war for their bullpen of that time, they nailed it. They're number one by far. They've been building super bullpens forever,

but starting pitching? Yeah, that Pedro season, 1999. Holy cow. He had a 139 FIP over 213 in the third innings. That is so gross. And he was one of those first pitchers to have like a 12K9 over 250. You know, like he was nuts. Yeah, he really was.

Let's talk about a few other early pitchers and just get some thoughts on some guys that are somewhat controversial at the top of the board. Chris Sale, to me, is really just all health. I think we both have him inside our top eight, so I don't think there's a whole lot for us to dive into there. But I think there's a couple guys that people just can't seem to agree on, and one of them is Lucas Giolito.

You and I differ as much on Giolito as we do, I think, on any pitcher inside of our top 50s. I had him at 17. You got him at 29. What are your concerns with Lucas Giolito relative to other pitchers that are high up on your list? It's not so much the stuff. You know, I think that that's what he proved last year is that he kind of got his stuff back. He got right back on the fastball. He found his old release point. Everything kind of came together.

That was the stuff that we thought Giolito had coming up, and that was the stuff he kind of recaptured. In terms of his stuff number, he actually has a higher stuff number than some of the guys ahead of him, like Carlos Carrasco, Zach Greinke, Aaron Nola, Patrick Corbin, Jack Flaherty even. So he has the stuff. The problem is he has the lowest command plus number in the top 30 other than Tyler Glasnow. And Glasnow's stuff is just like blistering. It's kind of like a closer who can throw five innings.

You know what I mean? And that's what he looks like. He's got the 145 stuff number, just a ridiculous stuff number way out in front. I think second is maybe Cole with 126. So Glassnow is just way out in front, but he also has the worst Command Plus number. Now, Giolito, his Command Plus is 96, so it's closer to average.

But it's also the lowest of the grouping. So, basically, what I'm saying is, you look at Giolito's history, look at his walk rates coming up. Even when he had the kind of good stuff and he was the young guy coming up, he was walking people. I'm saying the walk rate is going to come back. And I could see it being in the high threes. And last year it was like 2.5. So even the projections, I think, are not catching the downside of his command. Yeah, an 8.1% walk rate last year.

I'm just looking at the pitchers I have ranked ahead of him. Onlyake snell was higher among the pitchers that i have ahead of giolito and it was only by a little bit 8.4 percent uh snell's a guy that we agree on i would say in terms of our rankings but the same kind of underlying problem is there and i think with the injury a year ago i mean the the shower pedestal injury or whatever that really was like i can't really ding them for that that just sounds like some sort of wonder if there were two athletic sex um injuries last year it sure seems like it the corea one was like you were you were what you? You got a rib broken while getting a massage? Who's your masseuse?

I mean, that's outrageous. Sorry, so what were you saying? I just think with Blake Snell, I think he's one of those guys that some people are a little bit hesitant to buy into as an ace, I guess you'd say. I know he had the big season in 2018 with the missed time last year, some durability concerns, and then with high walk rates, even when he was really good. I mean, that amazing 2018 season, he had a 9.1% walk rate. That's below average for that range in your rankings.

He ended up having average command i think the big thing for him was a slider not because the slider added a ton of stuff for him but because he can command it so now he has fastball and slider command and he can use the curve kind of in the plate on the plate and stuff you know he can miss he can miss kind of bigger with the curve um so i think uh and this actually is relevant to someone that's a little bit lower on the list, Max Fried. So I think that I may want to change my rankings for Max Fried. Because when I did the command and stuff sort of grouping together where I took their different pitches and weighted it and put it together. I found Max Fried had below average stuff and below average command. And that's why he ended up

44th on my list despite good strikeout minus walk totals, good what looked like decent stuff. Someone brought up the fact that in September he threw the slider. He was throwing the slider twice as much, three times as much as he was throwing the slider twice as much three times as much as he was at the beginning of the season that's relevant because the slider had the best stuff number and the slider had the best command number and a little bit of a maybe a mini Snell breakout here and what I might need to do is look at people who really changed their pitch mix in September and then re-weight their command and stuff numbers by their final pitch mix. I should ask then, I think this is

probably a question that just popped into a lot of people's heads, how quickly can you trust command? Or to borrow one of your words, how sticky is command? Well, in terms of year-to-year stickiness, Command beats walk rate. So it would be one of the better year-to-year R's out there. So I did 2018 to 2019, and the R was 0.79. It's fairly good.

Walk rates are about 0.66. So it captures more than just walk rate does. So that's good in terms of how quickly does it stabilize in a given season? Um, I think it, I think the pitch mix example shows you that it can, it is valuable and it becomes, uh, it stabilizes faster than walk rate, but it can be susceptible to changes in pitch mix. And I think that's command stuff are like the sort of this, what happens, uh,

what the reasons why people change their pitch mix. Oh, you know, Max freed found, I have this better slider by stuff and I can command it better than my curve. So I'm going to change my mix and it like thinking about max freed and blake snell i don't think max freed has the same upside as snow because he doesn't have the same overall velocity but there's a very similar thing that

happened there is he found the slider and got a lot better and that's that That shows up on the granular pitch type metrics as well. There's another column in your rankings for those who are looking at them while listening to the episode. It's the NFBC ADP. Mike Clevenger is firmly inside the top 10 among pitchers. He's the only one inside the top 10 with that command plus score under 100 obviously he missed some time with injuries last season do you believe that there is obviously you believe there's good enough stuff for him to justify a top 10 ranking but do you think there is hope for him on the command plus front where he can kind of inch his way at least

above the 100 mark and more closely resemble the other pitchers at the top of the board? I don't know. When I look at his delivery, I don't think so. It's a crazy delivery. I mean, I love watching it, and it seems really scary. And I think it actually, I think how scary his delivery is makes this change up play up but

I just think that it's going to have long-term effects I don't like people are kind of treating this last injury as a freak injury but given just looking at his delivery I don't think it's that freak of an injury so you know Bieber it's funny in terms of profile Bieber has a lower stuff number yeah but Bieber is a little bit like a mini de grom he's got 106 stuff number and he's got 107 command number right he's there's it's very rare to have to be even at that level. The guys over 105 in both of them include Verlander, Strasburg, Castillo, Woodruff, Syndergaard, Endlist. So when you can have both, I will pick you.

I think that Bieber is going to have a longer career in terms of innings pitched. I think he's going to have a longer usefulness in terms of results. And I just think it's easier to depend on him. And there's a slight little bit about those pitchers with command aging better and staying healthy more. Because there was this whole thing about Billy Beane saying that I trust strike throwers I think they stay they stay healthy and Jeff Zimmerman found a little bit of a whiff of truth to that I guess if you think about guys who throw a lot of strikes they would have

good command and if you have good command you probably have repeatable mechanics if you're repeating your mechanics you're less likely to hurt yourself whereas if there's an imbalance in your mechanics yeah you're gonna hurt an obl yourself, whereas if there's an imbalance in your mechanics, yeah, you're going to hurt an oblique, hurt an elbow, shoulder, whatever it is, depending on what exactly your mechanical flaw is, the injury that you're most susceptible to might vary. and we talked about him on a SiriusXM show. We used to do this thing called Farm Friday. They still do it. It's James Anderson and Clay Link now. And James and I were talking about Bieber,

and one fear we had when he was called up was that he would just live too much in the zone with stuff that wasn't good enough, based on scouting reports at least, for him to ever get by without having a high home run rate. He just looked like he was always going to have a high home run rate and that played out it's played out so far but it's but i think interesting the stuff like it's actually really good stuff like shane bieber has exceeded expectations by a lot compared to what most people expect them to become as a prospect yeah and i and i think that there is a command control thing that one thing that that

always gets in my head about command versus so command is supposedly you know can you do with the pitch what you want to do with it and control is supposedly uh can you hit the zone to me it's always like well then command is superior to control right so like there's some guys who like generally know where the strike zone is and can kind of throw towards the strike zone but don't have great command um that's what i think of with like clevenger and carlos carrasco and stuff um but if you say to someone like bieber like you're living too much in the zone and he has good command then he can widen the zone he can aim a little bit further out you know and i think that's honestly what he did i think he he cut back on the fast

balls a little bit and he tried to you know throw a little bit higher and a little bit further out than he had been and uh and his home run rate rate was much better in the second half. And you do get to a point, I think, if you locate well enough, you throw pitches that look like they might be getting the zone and they're actually out of the zone. So you have hitters chasing harder pitches to hit. That's what you want. That's what you want.

And I think if you've got good command, you can do that. So, you know, one of the most interesting things to me on this, and it doesn't smell right, but I talked to the researcher over at Driveline, Dan O'Coin, about it. And, you know, maybe there's something we're missing. We're still trying to research all this. But Max Scherzer shows up at having, like, basically average, slightly above average stuff and showed up better in Command Plus than he did in stuff, which is just weird. Yeah, I would not have expected that.

I don't know if anybody who watches Scherzer pitch even once in a while would have thought that. There's a relationship between, and that's why in my thing I mentioned demonstrator results. At some point,

demonstrator results takes some point demonstrator results takes over because there's dude they're doing something you're not capturing right and so you know i i struggled a little bit with uh like noah cinder guard his command and stuff numbers together suggests that he could be as high as fifth or sixth in the league. I mean, he has better stuff numbers than Luis Castillo and better command numbers than Luis Castillo. And I have Castillo ninth. So shouldn't I have Syndergaard higher? Well, Syndergaard's demonstrated results

over the last three years have kind of been just okay. Right, and I think something you touched on before is you're isolating skills and removing things like framing but when you start putting those things back in because they do exist and you have to you have to like herman riquez looks okay and this should be higher but she pitches and cores like i'm not gonna ignore that right like yeah and oh man i feel i don't feel very bad for the rockies often but i do feel bad bad in this Greek tragedy sort of way that their best tradable asset can't really help them as much as he would help anybody else. That really sucks if you're the Rockies, right?

Yeah. It's a terrible way to have to go about your business. He's so much more valuable being traded somewhere else, not just to us as fantasy players and to himself as how much value he can create, but they're better off trading him than keeping him, even though he should be the kind of guy that, hey, you won. You made a good trade for him, and he's helping you, but he's not helping you because of your environment, and that's just unfortunate.

But I'm glad you brought up cinder guard i mean i forgot two other guys in my 105 plus 105 plus grouping and i just want to say real quick wheeler and barrios yeah i i've i've heard some pretty interesting takes on on brios recently and we'll get to him i think in just a minute cinder guard was one of those guys i was going to bring up on today's pod so i'm kind of glad you just brought him up on your own because i i still even with the flaws even with his inability to control the running game even with that propensity to occasionally give up home runs more than you think a guy with that stuff should in home run right it wasn't bad last year in the year of the rabbit ball when you compare it to other pitchers

around the league. I keep looking at him and saying, no, this is going to happen. Noah Syndergaard is still going to be an ace. I just can't get past that. The price has really never been lower since he's become

Thor, at least. If you look at his ADP right now, he's fallen just outside least if you look at his adp right now he's fallen just outside the top 70 overall so there are 22 23 starters going ahead of him in most rooms like that that seems like a bargain to me i am so in dude this he's probably my number one value in the in the in the top 20. And he has the stuff, he has the command. And one thing I think is missing from our conversation is he has a new pitching coach.

And I really think that could help him because he's been going to the two-seamer too often. The whole league is going to the four-seamer. Get the strikeouts. Your velocity and movement on your pitches is going to reduce the number of home runs don't worry about home runs don't throw the two seamer to avoid home runs throw the four seamer to get whiffs and i have a i have a lot of hope for jeremy hefner who is one of the

pitchers i listed one of the players i listed uh former players i listed as a as a good pitching future pitching coach they they hired him there and i I think it could go really well for him. Poached from the Twins, right? Mm-hmm. And the Twins, I think, are doing great things with their pitchers. Yeah, along with the Reds, those are the two teams that I think last year

took the biggest step forward in terms of how they were handling pitching, and they've put themselves in the circle of trust. So imagine the Mets with that talent being in the group of teams whose pitching philosophy we of trust. So imagine the Mets with that talent being in the group of teams whose pitching philosophy we could trust. That would make things very interesting. I think the projections already like the Mets.

The Mets are right there with the Nationals, I think, in terms of projections. If they run with it, they could go pretty far because if they run with it, it means they could go pretty far because if if they run with it it means cinder guard is an ace and then all of a sudden you got two aces at the top of your your top of your rotation and who knows like maths even has some upside so like you know and then you've got all these veterans behind them uh i i think there's a there's a chance for that rotation to be really really good good. Since we're on the Mets, let's talk about Marcus Stroman.

I had him kind of buried in my rankings at 84. You get him up at 49. I think he was one of the pitchers in the middle of the pack that we were furthest apart on. What do you like about Stroman at this point, in addition to some of the things we just talked about? It seems like I'm missing the mark a little bit on him. Relative to just the ADP market, maybe I'm a little closer to where he goes, but if you have him as a top 50 guy and the market has him as a fringy top 75 guy, he's going to be a player that ends up on the roster of a lot of people reading your work and listening to this podcast.

listen to this podcast yeah you know there's a little bit of uh you know just the fact that his stuff is good you know and you know there's a little bit of just like oh look he's got you know 110 stuff in league average command like that belongs you know in that grouping where he's at um you know it's certainly uh better than you know the miles michaelis you, Madison Bumgarner, Lance Lynn grouping was where you have good command and below average stuff. So I'm a stuffist. Stuffist. I'm a stuffist, so I had Stroman

up a little higher. But then on top of that, there's the fact that he, as the season went on, changed his pitching mix. With the Mets, he was a little bit different in terms of his pitching mix and With the Mets, he was a little bit different in terms of his pitching mix. He kind of went to the cutter more. He went to the cutter more than the slider and reduced the slider and kind of became fastball cutter using the slider. His slider is almost like a curveball. He almost became more of a fastball slider pitcher where

he used the curveball as a third pitch. It's kind of a different mix than he's really had for a while. If you just look at what happened after he started doing that, let's just use August 1st. It's an easy beginning date. He had a 3-6-11 era with eight strikeouts per nine uh babbitt was fine home run rate uh below one like it's always been for him and uh i think he can do that i think he can have like a three five three six era and anybody who can have under a four era to me uh should be top 60 at least. Well, and I think home run suppression is a skill that he's really owned

for all of his career. Yeah. So that helps in the uncertain age that we're in as far as the ball and how homer-friendly the 2019 season was, at least. Let's kind of flash back closer to the top end of the list, talk about a couple other interesting names that are up there. Corey Kluber came up on the show I did with Matt Modica yesterday

as a guy that had great results just over a year ago. I mean, Corey Kluber was elite year over year for multiple seasons. And in an injury-shortened year, it just kind of seems like people have given up on the idea that he could be a sub-3 era guy with a whip near or below one and is it the thing we brought

up last week with the uh durable for a long time but then he broke down and now people don't trust him like what do you think is going on with kluber and where do you fall in him for 2020 i'm working on a piece about pitcher bounce backs that started with basically just taking Steamer and comparing this projected season to last season, finding the 10 most bounce backiest pitchers, and then kind of diving in on five of those. I'm diving in on Kluber. And one thing that I found already is that kluber lost more command plus year over year from 2018 to 2019 than all but two or three pitchers

and it's funny how we normally think of injury as maybe robbing you of stuff like you have an injury oh he's not going to throw it as hard. He's not going to crispy, you know, bite that slider off or whatever. Kluber actually ended up where he was because he still had a good stuff number. That's because his two breaking pitches are elite. It's not necessarily off his fastball, which had a below average stuff number.

But with those three pitches, I think he still has good stuff. The injuries totally robbed him of his command. And he's a command guy. Last year he had below average command. And I would say if you plug in his 2018 command, if he gets back to that, I think that's a big part of what happens with injuries. The oblique is pulling at the wrong level

it's not pulling hard enough or it's this or that or you know all of a sudden his arms two inches this way or you know what i mean it's like the command is is where these things really come out is where the body really can fail you and if he can get back to his old command level then he should belong in the top 15 honestly he has stuff numbers that that would that hang out up there if he had even league average command so i struggle with where to put him because what if that command doesn't come back just because there were so many injuries and the market rate on kluber the the baseball market rate, the real life market rate shows that baseball doesn't think Corey Kluber's got it anymore. I don't know though. I'm going to push back on that a little

bit. We don't really know if the Cleveland front office did a great job shopping Corey Kluber around. We don't know for sure how exactly they see Emmanuel Classe and the return they got compared to how we all see it. I mean, could this just be like when someone in your league makes a dumb trade and one already good owner just gets a better player than they should because somebody made a mistake? I know on the other hand, you could say, well, Cleveland knows Corey Kluber and his injury as well as anybody, And they're willing to give him up for that package. So there is something that's a little bit off there. But I just don't know.

I think the missing part is the money. If you're Cleveland, you've been cutting money for so long, everybody knows you want to cut money. Right? So the conversation almost becomes tinged with, oh, well, I know one of your goals is to cut money. So even if this isn't a straight salary dump, Corey Kluber's 18 million is a bigger deal to you than to me. It's such a stupid thing that's happening with so many teams in the league right now. And I understand the rationale behind the thinking and understanding that, you know, there is risk. I still want to take that risk at that price. I think there's a good

enough chance that Corey Kluber can be that top 15 pitcher at the price of a guy that you get at the end of maybe the sixth round of a 15 team draft. Like if he's my, my second starting pitcher, I'm very happy with that. I think we talked about Texas and the ballpark changes there. It's going to become at least a little more pitcher-friendly, maybe a lot more. We don't know what the magnitude of that shift is going to be, but a climate-controlled ballpark in Arlington should be more pitcher-friendly than a non-climate-controlled ballpark in Arlington. pitcher-friendly than a non-climate-controlled ballpark in Arlington. Yes, the park should be not as big a factor as some people will think, I think, going from Cleveland to Texas.

But I think this brings up a little bit of something I didn't cover in my piece, which is general pitching strategy this year. And I saw a really interesting thread between Mike Gianella and Rudy of Ras Ball that they were talking about the efficacy of going after more top starting pitching. And Gianella correctly, I think, pointed out that the top 15 pitchers return more value than any other grouping of pitchers. earned more value than any other grouping of pitchers. But Rudy pushed back and said that a lot of that value came from the top two starting pitchers, and those top two starting pitchers weren't necessarily taken 1-2. Right? That's true.

So it's good to shop in the top 15, but we don't necessarily know which of the top 15 is going to be number one this year. So I've been adjusting my pitching strategy to invest a little bit more in pitching over time because I thought I could just find great pitchers. I don't know the ball as part of it. It's harder to find back-end pitchers that pop the same way just because the home run rates are crazy. harder to find back-end pitchers that pop the same way just because the home run rates are crazy but also uh you know everyone's everyone is doing that and so if everyone's shopping in the late game starting pitcher you start you start having those end of drafts where everyone's like especially if you publish lists of your pitchers you like where everyone's just like nabbing all the guys you like um because they're all shopping

in the same late starting pitching bucket so i'm willing to to increase my investment in starting pitching but i think i'm gonna step back from last year when i tried to get two aces a bunch of times i think it's just too much risk there's risk up and down steven strasburg you know injury risk chris sale injury and performance risk, really. There's a lot of people at the top that have only really done it for one year, like Shane Bieber, Walker Bueller, Luis Castillo. You can maybe even say Blake Snell. There's a fair amount of one-year guys.

Jack Flaherty is already up there. So there's the risk that they just aren't as good as that one year, even though we think the metrics all lined up for it. And so I may have a lot of leagues where I wait, and my top two pitchers are Syndergaard and Kluber. That sounds risky, but then what I've done is I have a lot of good hitters, and then I can hit the middle rounds when all these people that took two and three starting pitchers at the top have to go for hitters. In the middle rounds, I can take more interesting guys.

So maybe my third pitcher is Brandon Woodruff. You know? And my fourth pitcher is Zach Gallin or Trevor Bauer. You know? I'm trying to push together at the top. I'm trying to get more top 50 pitchers, but maybe I'm not going to focus on getting two or three top 15 pitchers because that just takes so much money.

That takes so much auction money. It takes so many high draft picks. It takes so much investment to get that. You know, I think I had one league last year where i went uh bauer bauer snell won two in the second and third rounds and you know i felt pretty good about it at the time well and injuries significantly altered your fortune in that case i mean bauer pitched hurt and snell had his weird accident yeah but i but that i mean that's the thing the pitchers get injured more often they get they they stay injured longer it's still it's still true to this day so it's still worth uh

there's also there's also more hitters on your team. Yep. Right? Almost every starting lineup in fantasy baseball has more hitters. Do you think that's a flaw in our game, by the way? Well, it ends up making the bench mostly pitchers. Yeah, I just wonder. In a deeper league, I've seen deeper leagues that shave hitters away from the active lineup to make that a little bit more balanced but i just wonder if that's on the list of things that our rotisserie founding fathers may have got wrong uh the two catcher thing is the thing that is clearly wrong we've covered that before no one should ever do that that should that should not be defended anymore. Die a fiery death. Yeah, that was a mistake.

We owe the founding fathers of rotisserie a great debt for making this awesome game that we still enjoy and play. But they got that wrong, and we can fix that. That's fixable. I could see the 14-9 split being something that gets a lot more contentious if that becomes part of the conversation. Well, you know, in the major leagues right now, there's basically a mandated 13-13. Yeah.

Because there's 26 roster spots, and they said basically 13 have to be, no more than 13 can be pitchers. Well, anyway, we'll get away from the, uh, rules related stuff and talk about a few more pictures on this episode. Uh, I think there's kind of a funny difference between a couple of guys on the list that you put together and that I put together. Jesus Lizardo, Denelson Lamette, they're next to each other on both of our lists, but there's a, almost a 20 pick gap in terms of where they are on those lists.

Um, and, and I think we were talking about Denelson Lamette a little bit before we started recording. There's almost a 20-pick gap in terms of where they are on those lists. And I think we were talking about Denelson LeMet a little bit before we started recording. He's looking like one of those guys who's going to keep creeping up in terms of ADP because just about everybody out there in our industry seems to like him. And if that's sort of a consensus opinion, that usually kind of moves ADP up. I mean, the more that idea of Denelson LeMet possibly being an undervalued potential ace or maybe an SP2 that you get after pick 100 or whatever his ceiling is, it's higher than the price right now. What concerns do you have about Denelson LeMet, even as someone who ranked him quite a bit higher than I did? Yeah, I have definite concerns and in fact uh may want to to look at his ranking in particular here are the uh top i'll go i'll go i have them like 41 i'm gonna go all the way down to 75 okay top 75 pitchers with a below 90 command plus.

Denilson Lemaitre. Oh, who's that? Garrett Richards. Josh James. Full stop. And I mention that because, you know, Glassnow's close. Josh James. Full stop. And I mention that because, you know, Glassnow's close. He's got the, where's Glassnow now?

He's got a 90, right? So he's right there, 90.3. So I mention that because I think there's like a threshold you have to pass to be a starter. And if you look at the bottom of Command Plus and you don't do anything sorting for how many pitches they've thrown, it's all relievers. It's like all relievers. And Joey Lucchese. And the problem is, like, you can see it with Denelson LeMet.

He only pitches five innings. He only has two pitches. His third time through the order penalty is bad. And these are all command and arsenal related things. Yeah, his fastball and slider are great. But a lot of times I get a kind of a Chris Archer vibe. I was going to say, I think you just described Chris Archer. And I just think about how much the fantasy community, including me, liked him and expected more from him year over year.

Is there any reason to think it could be different? I'm wondering if that evidence is out there at all. Well, I mean, one thing is that Lumet plays in the National League. well i mean one thing is that lamette plays in the national league so what what was the source of archers problems is always home runs and you know if you can just get a free couple of outs from the pitcher that can push you into the fifth fifth inning and then they can take you out before the lefty that would hit the home run would hit the home run. You know what I mean? But it also means he's not going to be up for a lot of wins,

and it also means that his innings and strikeout totals are going to be a little bit lower than you'd expect given his number of games started. Yeah, that was always a thing that Archer managed to get around. He was so durable. to strike out so many yeah but he but he and they let him in they said let him in the game like he like he was like more of an ace but i think probably looking at his strikeout minus walk totals like we all were but you know i have archer fairly high because i like i said i'm a stuffist and he's got the stuff.

And there's a back story, too, where he kind of reverted back to his old pitching mix and had a slightly better second half. So I have him in the top 60. But maybe LeMet shouldn't be 30 or, like, 22 away from Chris Archer. Yeah, I had him with Jesus Lizardo lower than you and lower than the field. And Lizardo is totally different because I think there's a lot of polish there for a pitcher, especially at that age. Stuff's not really a concern. It's really innings. It's innings for me that have me hesitant to buy into Jesus Lizardo at the price he's going for in early NFBC drafts.

Jesus Lizardo at the price he's going for in early NFBC drafts. That reveals a bias on my part, which I think league to league is either a good bias or bad bias, which is that given how few people are now, uh, you know, qualified starting pitchers last year, we had 61 qualified starting pitchers given how few people are actually throwing more than 170 innings. And Joe Musgrove was a qualified starting pitcher with 170 innings. So we're talking about people that pitch 175 plus innings. We've got 61 of them. Let me just make it 170 and see what that is. 51. We had 51 starting pitchers that threw 170 innings last year. And they weren't all good no they weren't um but uh yeah let me see who's the worst that pitched 170 innings

mike leak i i don't i don't mean to like make fun of mike leak all the time because showing up and throwing a lot of big league innings is still impressive it just doesn't help us in our game oh and look jeff samarja third worst third worst pitcher that threw 170 innings hmm you wouldn't think that based on some of the reactions to was or was not placed on your list but i will say that uh that because of that i've become more interested in quality innings and i've i guess you know some of my a lot of my leagues are adding dl slots because there's been so much use of them a lot of my leagues have gone to unlimited dl and if you're telling me I could have 125 really awesome innings from Jesus Lizardo, unlimited DL slot, and the opportunity to then try and fill in the

next 50 innings with streamers or just flavor of the month or pop-up starters, or, you know, there's always a lot of starting pitching over the course of a season that pops up that we didn't expect. So Jesus Lizardo at 125 plus replacement level is very interesting to me. So as long as I thought you could get to 100 innings, I would only then consider injury risk on a granular level. You know what I'm saying? I think Jesus Lizardo is a top 40, top 30 type talent with his arm. So I moved him down to 41 because of injury risk,

but not much further than that. I think there probably is some overestimation of how much a typical starter can throw and is allowed to throw at this point like that 200 benchmark is is still something that our brains revert to but that's just it's becoming less common how many 200s i'm gonna guess 12 oh good guess 15 yeah i probably looked it up at some point i mean it's it's just a shorter list than we all think or would want it to be. Yeah, I'm not penciling. I think my average starter is going to get 175.

And, yeah, if I have Luzardo and Urias on my roster, then maybe my next pitcher, instead of being Lance McCullers, will be My Michaelis, where I kind of try to balance a little bit more towards innings. I think it's funny that there are guys like Musgrove and Miles Michaelis, maybe even Josh Lindblom is like this too. More of a guessing game with him, of course, having been in the KBO for the better part of the last three years.

But they all seem very interchangeable to me, and that's how they end up kind of buried in my rankings. I just feel like if I miss out on any one of those three, or if I miss out on two of those three, I'll just take the third guy. And I wonder if I pull those guys too far down in my rankings because of how replaceable I perceive them to be. You know, there is a weird thing where things, because of the way,

like I would throw people in tears at first and then kind of try to sort out the tears generally after that. But because of how I kind of just tried to fast appraise someone, they ended up near each other. So definitely the fact that Jesus Lozardo and Julio Urias are right next to each other is not an accident. It is an accident, but it's not.

They're both high stuff, decent to better command with some, not necessarily injury, but some innings risk and some playing time risk. But that's where those ended up. I have a couple of those. Lance McCullers and Jose Urquidy are right near each other. Oh, Bauer. To me, Bauer and Darvish are very similar players.

Yeah, you definitely start to see it. I have a grouping here. Mazahir Tanaka, totally boring, not much potential to be much better than his auction price, projected for a $0 value. I've got him 67. Get the boring stuff out of the way, and the next run is super exciting.

Mitch Keller, Spencer Turnbull, Josh James, Dylan Cease, Sandy Alcantara, Adrian Hauser. get the boring stuff out of the way and the next run is super exciting mitch keller spencer turnbull josh james dylan c sandy alcantara adrian hauser you know like that's a that's a real fun grouping you know and it's like do i take the boring you know oatmeal guy or do i take a shot and and it's also because i'm i'm aware that like a lot of players players play in leagues where only the top 75, 80 pitchers matter. So if you're getting down to the end of your league, what names do I want you to go after? Turnbull, James, Cease. I want those to be your last pitcher because they have the opportunity to be much better than that. Yeah, I might need to rethink Spencer Turnbull.

I think I might have him a little bit too buried in my ranks. One name in particular that you mentioned there that is pretty affordable in most leagues, and everyone wants to stay away from the Tigers because they're bad at least until they bring up the young starters, but Turnbull I think might be good enough to stick in that rotation even

after the likes of Matt Manning and Casey Mize and Tariq Scooball, all those guys get added into the fold in the next year or so. But yeah, it's funny how that works. I mean, this is kind of a flaw in rankings that doesn't... I think it touches on something that our friend Todd Zola brought up. He did this thing called Toddcast. It was like a short 10-minute that he posted, he posted up on his Twitter account yesterday. And he was talking about how there's this sort of this quality that a good fantasy player has that you really can't describe very well. Like it's just, it's an intuition almost

in the roster construction process at the auction table or at the draft table. And putting that process into a list, especially, is really tough to do. Maybe you could write about your process if you have this ability and try to explain it in different ways, but it's not going to be reflected in rankings. And I realized that when I was putting my list together, I had a bunch of prospects that I would take a chance on at the very bottom of my list. I'm talking about guys like Julio Rodriguez and Jared Kelnick and Drew Waters, the guys that could come up this season but probably won't. And where the intuition comes in is in a certain type of

league, I will have a player like that and I'll jump them over a player that I have ranked higher because you can't put that on the ranking but you can't put that on the rankings you can't put that on the rankings because there's a really low probability that those guys even see half a season in the big leagues but I know that the payoff is worth rostering them in certain

instances and I have to selectively pick my spots whereas there's no good way to explain that in a list um yeah and i think that i think that the the what you're getting at is that like league settings are almost everything you know where your particular league is going to have a quirk somewhere in it that that there is no vanilla league there we have to make rankings to to the largest portion of these leagues,

but there are no vanilla leagues. And so if you're in a super deep league, maybe it seems ridiculous to put Dylan Cease over Caleb Smith, you know, because Caleb Smith has a job and has demonstrated results and pitches in a nice park. But to me, he had below average stuff below average command his velocity fell off last year he's much more masahiro tanaka to me than he's dylan sees but the deeper your league is the more you want caleb smith and then and masahiro tanaka than

too many shots in the dark right yeah and i I think the size of the league obviously shapes how much talent is available on the waiver wire. And the more talent there is available or the higher the quality of that talent that you can use to replace players in your roster in season, the more aggressive you can be with injury risk players

or with prospects who might not have a job right away because you can go and find what you need, you know, after the fact. You can see how the end of spring training plays out and final cuts and injuries and all the things that could lead to an unexpected prospect hitting a roster. You can gamble on that and then not really pay any sort of significant price for it in the long run because you were able to go ahead and just pick up Joe Musgrove because it was a 10-team mixed league. I think that leads me to take players like Musgrove and probably rank them a little bit lower than they're actually going to be taken in in a lot of leagues that might be more like

15-team leagues. I try to think about 15-team leagues and how I'd play them as the basis of my rankings, but there's still certain tendencies I have as a player that are going to influence the way I put players up against each other on these lists. Yeah. Yeah. And Musgrove to me is in a really interesting grouping. Luke Weaver, Joe Musgrove, Jake Odorizzi, Andrew Haney, those four pitchers in a row have slightly below average stuff and very good command. And, you know, I kind of, you can almost see it. It's almost like this DNA helix that kind of goes back and forth with the stuff and command numbers. Like I'm a stuff is so, you know, there's a whole group of guys that there's that have the stuff with good command.

And then when I have to choose the first time time I chose command over stuff, really, was the Granky-Nola-Corbin grouping. That's the back end because they have elite command and fading stuff or average stuff. Then I go back to stuff for a while. I go back to stuff for a while. I go back to stuff for a while. And then the next group that I could, that are command forward are Soroka, Hendrix, and Eduardo Rodriguez and Hunjin Ryu. Okay. That makes sense. Then I go back to stuff for a while. And then I come back with Luke Weaver, Musgrove, Odorizzi, and Haney. So I am still trying to, to feel out the relationship between stuff and, and, and command. Uh, but I think that there might be

sort of there's got to be some interactive effects and there's got to be like if you're elite you know if you're glass now you can handle a 90 command plus but if you're Zach Gallen you had a 90 command plus you like might be a fifth starter you know

so there is like a stretching effect where like if you're elite at something, but elite at command. Joe Musgrove is elite at command. How far can that take him? Keichel, elite at command. And doesn't it seem like we underrate Keichel most years? I think we do because of the U-word. I think we don't see the rapid value increase potential. Or upside, as some people might call it.

Rapid value. I've been using the word potential for a lot more recently, and I think that's your fault. I know. I mean, it was more of just a, hey, let's try and describe what we mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More words than one. Any one word could be the crutch word or the problem in this case.

I had a pitching coach, a major league pitching coach, telling me that Dallas Keuchel's ability to put the split the the sinker and the change up in the exact same place is unparalleled and that would kind of fall into a similar bucket for me as something like the deception we talked about with Joey Lucchese I realize it's a different mechanism but it's this it's this very unique skill that he might possess far above other players in the pool that enables him to get better results than you'd expect compared to his raw stuff scores and his command scores and it's gonna enable him to beat uh you know era indicators and it's gonna leave us all just frustrated year over year but then you keep looking at it people that that have crazy ass deliveries and we have a word for them it's called

believers this is true i just thought of carter caps when you said that yeah my god can you imagine Carter Capps trying to start a game? It would be a five-hour game. Yeah, right. He would strike out 20 and walk 20. Yeah, that'd be kind of fun to watch one time. But there is one disagreement we have that's kind of germane to this discussion. I had Matt Boyd 40, and you had had him what did you have him low um 58 yeah i mean it's still i actually have a note here next to matt boyd's name says down so i think you've convinced me one of the things really interesting is he has the lowest stuff in my top 75.

And it doesn't come with elite command. It comes with above average command. But I was looking at his strikeout minus walk total, and his strikeout minus walk total is better than the sort of eight pitchers ahead of him on my rankings. He's kind of interesting in the sense that he could get traded to a much better team, and that would prop up his value, but it doesn't necessarily change who he is as a pitcher, right? Like, there's room for the value to go up for factors that are out of his control.

But I just, I kind of wondered if the league just figured him out. Like, he had a plan, it was working. It was getting him more strikeouts. It led him to the sub-4 ERA in the first half. But if he's been solved and he might not have anything to fall back on for a counter-adjustment to get back to that first half level. Well, I have something for you.

We had about a 45-minute conversation in September. Part of that led to a piece that I did on the work he's doing on his body in terms of muscle activation technique and DNA testing for diet and all that stuff. And half of it's bunk science and we'll know about the other half. But the beginning of that conversation with Matt Boyd was about pitch selection and home runs. was about pitch selection and home runs. And he was talking about how he's beating everybody in with the fastball and away with the slider.

And that was working for him. And then when the home runs started happening, he would look at them and they would just be poorly located fastballs. So he didn't know whether or not he had to change his approach, the fastball in, the slider away kind of deal. The slider, he can go away and in, but it all came off of the fastball in. He didn't know if he had to change his whole approach or if he just messed up the command and he had to work on his body or work on his command. And some of it was mental. He said a couple of home runs he gave up

because he tried to reach back and throw harder. Now, why did he try to reach back and throw harder? Because he doesn't trust his stuff? Because he already tried to beat that guy three times inside fastball, and he thought he had to throw it harder that next time? Because he's worried he's becoming predictable? So there's a whole mental aspect of the adjustment he has to make. There's the stuff aspect.

He said, you know, I think my changeup's there. Maybe next year I'm going to do more of, well, this guy supposedly does well against changeups, but I've just beaten him three times in a row on the fastball in. Maybe the changeup away is set up in this in this case and from a stuff number the change up looks at least average so i don't know why he couldn't just activate that you know and that could be part of why he's better next year um but how much of this is just uh him talking in my ear and convincing me

Matthew Boyd, salesman, salesman, and, you know, talk to players and they're, you know, they're all salesmen. So I think, uh, I think I may move him down a little bit. He, he seems like he would more comfortably fit in at least the Joe Musgrove tier of guys with, He seems like he would more comfortably fit in at least the Joe Musgrove tier of guys with iffy stuff and better command. There's another tier later with Miles Mikolas and Lance Lynn where they've got better command and stuff. Maybe I'll move him down to the 50s or something. Yeah, we should talk about Lynn and then we'll wrap up this episode. I think Pitcher Week is off to a rousing start, but we're pretty far apart on Lance Lynn.

I had him up at 33. You had him at 53. I think where I have him is very close to kind of where the market, again, the NFBC ADP has placed him thus far. Maybe it's something with the Texas pitchers where I just want to have Texas pitchers or something, but we're 20 spots apart for a guy that is a fringe top 50 pitcher for you and a fringe top 30 guy for me. What about Lance Lynn makes you skeptical for 2020? Well, there's a bit of the sort of late career bump in Velo. You know, at 32, you're supposed to be losing velocity.

at 32 you're supposed to be losing velocity and he just threw harder than he'd ever thrown before he'd never averaged 94 in a season ever, even his rookie season he was 93 and I know he can do that by throwing close to his max and there's a couple mechanical tricks that he can do and it doesn't even look like he lost velocity he was 95 in in august and september so i can't say that he was falling off in that terms but i've always had trouble evaluating him because he throws the he throws a fastball if you want to throw the cutter and it's not necessarily like a slider

type cutter if you want to throw the cutter in he throws a fastball like 80 of the time and he doesn't have what i would consider like basically like an out pitch you know he doesn't have uh he definitely doesn't have something that'll show up on on your twitter stream you know where it's like oh my god look at Lance Slim's sexy curveball. Oh, he doesn't get the pitching ninja puke emoji? No, he does not. No, he does not. He does not get the puke emojis.

And his fastball consistently, year in and year out, has the best whiff rate of any of his pitches. His four-seam fastball. year out has the best whiff rate of any of his pitches. His four-seam fastball. And again, there's a lot of that happening in baseball where people are throwing... He threw a lot of high fastballs last year. People were throwing high fastballs for whiffs. The fastball's turning into a pitch that people use for whiffs as much

as they use it for establishing and getting strikes and getting ahead in the count. So he's at the crux of that. But I just have difficulty with people that are so one note in terms of basically he lives 87 to 94. of basically he lives 87 to 94. There's no real need to worry about back and forth. He's not going to really throw something so slow that you can't hit it. Zach Greinke throws a 69 mile an hour curveball and a 91 mile an hour fastball. You have to cover all the range in between because he's got

five or six pitches in between. Zach Greinke and Lance Leonard are like the opposite. Yeah, I'm looking at some of the different things on his savant page and trying to come up with a reason to believe that most of last year was sustainable. And I can't come up with one that says he's going to repeat. That's why he's not a top 15 pitcher for me of course that's that's normal but i think he's just owned that skill that fastball for so long like i'm comfortable with i think

he's an extreme floor sort of player where it's like the ratios are not going to be horrible like i have a hard time seeing things going as sour as they did for him in, in 2018, there was a trade in there. Um, you know, Yankee stadium, obviously tough place to pitch,

but you go back, like look through, he's always kind of a mediocre whip guy with a good ERA. And I think it's something that spores talked a lot about. We tend to overrate those players in our minds. Like we think they're better than they really are. And we underrate guys, I think, going the other way, like high ERA but really low whip.

So maybe a little bit of that's going on with how I'm looking at Lance Lynn as well. I mean, certainly if he has a double-digit K-9 next year, I'll be wrong. Certainly if he has a double-digit K-9 next year, I'll be wrong. I've studied this a couple of different ways. At Fangraphs, I wrote about how he's a little bit like Jaime Garcia, where he has what seeming like four or five fastballs. If you do a tableau of Jaime Garcia and Lance Lynn's fastballs,

the amount of different movements they have, the different clusters they have within is very impressive. So I would say that we might be underrating Lance Lynn by saying he only has two or three fastballs. I think he might have more than that. And so that speaks to a little bit of pitchability around the fastball where he can kind of hit, uh, he can kind of do more. And that may, that may fall beside the way lines when,

even when you're kind of trying to do stuff or command metrics, because if he does have kind of like a secret fourth or fifth fastball, maybe that doesn't show up enough in the scouting reports or show up enough, uh, on the pitch classifications for you to assign the right value to it. And you'd be like, well, that looked like a backup slider. You know, that can't be what he meant to do unless he meant to do it, you know? And he seems to have a real touch when it comes to his fastball. So maybe I'm underrating him. I just, I prefer pitchers with out pitches. And for the longest time i've classified him as not really having that and maybe a 94 mile an hour four seam is his out pitch well as you as

you said on this episode you are a stuffist which i hope ends up on a t-shirt in the very future not sure what the design would look like maybe it just says Stuffist in big letters on the front, and everyone's like, what does that mean? The puke emoji. Thousands of those are going to be sold. Well, Pitcher Week rages on as the week continues. And as always, you can reach us via email, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com if you want to get a hold of us that way.

Just be sure to spell out the word and if you go the email route on Twitter, he's at Enoceros. I'm at Derek Van Ryper. I should mention we have two other fantasy baseball podcasts running this season here at The Athletic. The first is Fantasy Baseball in 15 every morning,

6 a.m. Eastern. You get all the news, everything you need to know for the day from Al Melkier, Michael Beller, and myself. We also have The Athletic Fantasy Baseball Podcast, which drops new episodes opposite this show on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. So be sure to check those shows out as well. That's going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Thursday.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.