Rates & Barrels - Pivoting In the Wake of Injuries, Beating BABIP & Timing Risk

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Eno and DVR discuss how leagues can consider making structural changes to account for the 2021 rise in time lost to injuries, using BABIP as a launching point to dig deeper on a player's batted-ball profile (and the viability of xBA as a BABIP alternative), and taking an appropriate amount of injury risk in lieu of high-risk, high-reward prospects in redraft leagues.  Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at 33% off for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Tuesday, January 18th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. I was just kind of in the intro music. If you're watching us on YouTube, I was kind of air guitaring, and I was thinking about the music, even though I arranged the music, the loops to make the intro song. I'm not actually sure which instrument I should be air playing during the intro.

It's the guitar. I went with the guitar. Yeah, no, I went with the guitar, but I mean, there's other options in there there's some some little bits of funk in there if you listen real carefully so you've got your choices like you can hammer away on some kind of electric keyboard if you want to airplay a keyboard really uh you know let us know which instrument you like to airplay when you hear the intro to our podcast i also feel like it it speeds up. It starts fast and then it catches

itself. That is a video only specialty. So if you watch us on YouTube, you understand that phenomenon completely. It plays in double time for a split second or even a full second or two and then it goes to its regular speed. I don't know why it does that. If you listen only as a podcast,

you're like, what the hell are these guys talking about? Why are they drinking on a Tuesday? It's early. What's going on? Well, apparently it has something in common with my heart because I fainted this weekend. I ended up in the emergency room. I was not excited. I've had some near faints in the past.

I've fainted maybe twice in my life, And I run a really low blood pressure regularly. I'm kind of like a 90 or 60 guy. And I guess I just crashed. I got up and I passed out. And then there was a doctor at the restaurant we were at. And then I was at the freaking hospital. And then they were like, well, it was kind of like when you bring the car in and it's not making the noise anymore.

Like, we got to the hospital and they're like, well, your blood pressure's fine now. I'm like, yeah, I feel totally cool now. After I ruined my friend's evening. My friend was like, oh, my God, I'm sorry i called the ambulance and i'm like you know no you did the right thing but sometimes you just have to make that call and you know it you hope it was just precautionary and in this case it sounds like it was glad you're feeling a lot better and uh yeah something i have to be aware of i guess as you get older like things

you know those near fainting turned into turned into full fainting so i got a yeah probably means more tests and heart stuff and we'll see but i you know i'll take it i guess over the other side the other side is rougher high blood pressure you know you got to change your diet and you know it's a little bit more intense oh i have i'm avoiding going to the doctor for that reason i expect the next time I go to the doctor, it's going to be, hey, you really need to start laying off on cheese, meat, all these things you enjoy

because I've always run with the high blood pressure. I have been a high-stress human probably from the time I was about seven years old. I don't know why. That's why we're such a good match together we have one normal heart yeah like yes combined i think we have a heart that could last a very long time uh apart we need a little help along the way but as long as we do what we're supposed to do we'll we'll be okay but uh yeah lots uh lots to talk about on this episode even though nothing's

happening really in baseball. And we had a rundown, of course, for last Thursday due to some unforeseen circumstances. No show that day. I'm going to guess that we're going to have extra shows randomly sprinkled in as we get closer to the actual start of the season, whenever that is. Especially like emergency ones if some sort of agreement is reached. Yeah, so I always feel bad when we're down a show or we say we're going to be somewhere and we're not um you know look we'll make up for it we'll have some fun again at some point in the future and i wonder i don't i don't listen to a lot of

podcasts it's a failing of mine i just my commute is one minute i go downstairs and I haven't found it super like podcasts like they're talking and they're saying interesting things like I have the TV on, but, you know, most of the time is not interesting. Really not. Blah. It's just like a thing. Like there's somebody here. I'm pretending there's somebody here in my office. But podcasts like I'm like I would be listening to it, and then I wouldn't be doing my work.

So I wonder if other fantasy podcasts are just jumping into off-season content in the normal pattern. Because we, honestly, here, wouldn't we be doing some positional previews about now? Wouldn't we be going team going team by team at least or something like that? Yeah, we have. Which is why we may have to have some extra podcasts

because we'll be like, oh crap, season in three weeks. Let's go. Dealer's choice really, as far as how we break it up. Yeah, I think it's usually around the last week of January when we start our positional previews. So I will spend some time this week kind of mapping that out with you, and then we'll go from there.

I think that's where everybody's at. It's kind of like, hey, let's do the fly-arounds, and if we find out more time later, we'll use it. Everyone's behind, right? I don't know. I didn't release any rankings yet, even though I was planning on doing it months ago. I decided not to do it for a while.

There's more players that could be traded or could be signed than usual right now. There are, but you could still put stuff out and just update it. So I don't know. I mean, I get the sense everybody wants to just pretend it's all fine, which I think is a perfectly normal way

to go about it if baseball is your work. I don't know. I'm starting to have a little bit of optimism about the the real optimism not the like well just because it's gonna be fun they finally got to the table right and uh they seem to be speaking the same language you know there doesn't seem to be any line in the dirt line in the sand that's like you know we need uh everyone to be a free agent after five years or we're going on strike that like i haven't there hasn't seemed there i haven't seen that sort of language in

there in in fact i think it's been like it's been okay like they they they they are talking past each other but as you can tell like the the things that they're saying in each of their uh they're they're not full proposals. They're just discussing. No one's made a full proposal since the union did. But the things that they are proposing to debate on are becoming more similar, I think.

So I think the big battle will be the minimum. So we'll see. I think that the owners went to $600,000 which would actually be one of the smallest increases in a CBA

since free agency began. Going to $600,000. That doesn't seem like that's the end point. Even if they don't get to a full million or whatever the target ends up being. $758 $8. With room to maybe escalate it more quickly throughout the course of the CBA too.

I could see that maybe being part of the solution. That's my sort of offhand prediction right now is like $750 or $8. I'm going to go with $8 because I think that's a bigger deal and that's where they should put all their energy. $800,000 minimum, no more qualifying offer um uh you know and the cbt goes up to like 225 the and baseball's already said

cbt to like 218 well that's bs the cbt should go up four million dollars after revenue after overall revenue in the sport has like nearly doubled like yeah no yeah still some work to be done but uh maybe maybe you're right maybe some reasons to be uh optimistic uh as we have been doing for the last few episodes keeping a close eye on that mailbag getting a sense for what people are interested in before we get to our usual you know draft prep sorts of questions and And I thought this email from Eric was really interesting. He's been running a longstanding league. And after the 2021 season, a few teams elected not to return for 2022. Their claim was that the injuries became too random and too frequent, and they made the overall competition too reliant on luck. They basically were saying fantasy baseball is no longer fun because of the injuries,

which 2021 was a bad injury year, especially early on. Lots of key players. You mentioned in the email, right? You have Trout, Tati, Sakunya, DeGrom, Bieber, Rendon, Adalberto Mondesi, Eloy, Jack Flaherty. Those are a lot of very early picks that missed considerable amounts of time. So the question is, aside from IL manipulation, is there any data that suggests the injuries have become less predictable and more frequent? And if so, how can the fantasy community manage this? Well, I mean, obviously COVID is a factor here here and as a person who plays fantasy basketball

right now I'll tell you that it has become frustrating in that sport and in fact way more frustrating than I think it ever was in baseball in baseball it seemed to be sort of one or two teams at a time and over fairly quickly. Basketball, it seems like every team has somebody that's out right now. In our basketball league, we created a thing called IL+, or at least Yahoo did to deal with this. IL+, is an IL spot that has fewer rules associated with it. As long as someone's out for the game,

you can stash someone there. So I've seen that, right? In our fantasy leagues, if you had a limited IL fantasy league, they probably added IL spots in the last couple of years. They should have. Yeah, and that's been something

that historically I didn't like to have in leagues. I always felt like you should have. Yeah, and that's been something that historically I didn't like to have in the league because I always felt like you should have to make some difficult decisions with your bench spots. But because of COVID especially and the way the COVID IL has worked, the added number of absences, the shorter-term IL, the 10-day IL, that switch a couple years ago too, I've softened on that quite a bit. It's funny. The things that you think you're just locked in on at one point in time, you get a couple years ago too, I've softened on that quite a bit. It's funny. The things that you think you're just locked in on at one point in time, you get a few years down the road,

and you're like, actually, I shouldn't have dug in quite so much on that. That probably wasn't worth it. I said I would never live in Palo Alto. Never. I graduated school in here. I said I'm never coming back. Oh, man.

Now I can see school. I'm looking at school right now you can you can see throw a rock out your window at school on a good day so there's something else going on though because we've done some reporting i've done some writing about um you know arm injuries going up after the shortened 2020 um so uh i think that was a thing where, you know, the whole process of, you know, being a starting pitcher is to, you know, create the ability to pitch that long over the course of season. Pitch that long into a game and then pitch that long over the course of the season. You treat the whole year as a process of getting ready to for, you know, six to seven months, you know, do this. process of getting ready to for you know six to seven months you know do this um and uh so with 2020 in there obviously starting pitching took a step back i would say uh hopefully that next

season would be uh better in that way for starting pitching uh because now that it's a much more normal off season you know they've had a normal season and now a normal offseason. Hopefully, we start on time or near on time so that they're prepared for the type of season they're going to get. So already we're saying maybe because we don't know when the season will start. And that does also highlight the fact that players are locked out of team facilities right now.

So I would say that someone who is rehabbing right now is a little bit like someone rehabbing during COVID where they're not rehabbing under optimal conditions. However, the MLB Players Association made a deal with, I forget the name, some sort of facility. And apparently there's a ton of them. BAT? IBAT?

Something like that. Anyway, there's some sort of facility. Britt was tweeting about it that now any player can go into free of charge as a member of the union. And they've got basically a year on that. However, that's not the exact same as being able to be in touch with your doctors, your trainers, everybody at the organization. So you have to really lean on your agents, your local facilities. And so we may see some injury from there. But not to be long-winded, but the last thing that is actually the source, and I was listening to your names. I'm not sure that there's a couple of them

that were this. The biggest increase year over year in injuries last year was hamstring pulls. There were more strained hamstrings, almost twice as many last year as in the past. And so Rob Maines and Derek Rhodes did a great piece on that in Baseball Prospectus, and again, I think it's very tempting to be like, well, you know, they had like that weird 2020 season, so 2021, they just weren't ready for the full season, hamstring strains, you know, it's not going to happen in the future, however, nestled within that piece was some analysis that this is a long-term issue, and so the question i put to you is do you think that there's a possibility that players are training um you know and not incorrectly but they're training with different

goals in mind for example bat speed and exit velocity um and less with uh sort of general athleticism and uh base running speed in mind. And if that, this could be a consequence of that. Was the increase in hamstring injuries, was it year over year for a few years? Or did it just spike up to this new level? More of a spike, but there was some research that was saying that it was trending up across the sport in terms of like in college and, you know, among kids. Okay.

So I guess I think about it a few different ways. Like I think of hamstring injury is the kind of injury that you suffer either because you weren't like stretched out, loosened up enough and sprinted, which it's a stop start game. We talk about that all the time. Even defensively, you're coming from a dead stop to a rapid start. When you're running the bases, you're gaining speed really quickly and you get hurt decelerating a lot. So part of it is just the nature of the game. And then the question is, if you're not training properly, how is the way you're training making it worse? You know, is it strength imbalances? Are you too strong in some areas and not strong enough in others, which I think kind of drives at the,

the, the suggestion you had that people are, are optimizing for barrels. They're optimizing for, for power rather than paid for rather than speed, because speed is less important now than it was in the past. Clearly just based on the way teams try to steal bases. Although you still want fast players.

You still get a guy first to third, first to home. Those things happen if you're fast. The teams didn't kind of be like, we need one fast player. Right. Terrence Gore has like six rings. Yeah.

So you have changed what teams are trying to do and what players are trying to do as a result. I could look at that and say, yeah, okay, I kind of believe that. The increase that we saw, even if it doesn't stay at the 2021 level, because that was unique to players having that weird run-up to 2021, we're going to have more hamstring injuries, more soft tissue injuries in general. Hamstrings, quads, calves, all that stuff could stay up, relatively speaking. And that wouldn't surprise me all that much.

But I also wonder how much you look back at what happened this year if you're a player and say, hey, you know, I don't want to miss 40 games. I don't want to miss six weeks with a bad hamstring injury. I'm going to do something different. So I wonder if there's a counteraction that we see. Maybe it doesn't come in 2022 for the lockout reasons. I mean, again, the training at a different facility is not the same as rehabbing at an injury. There's so many ways to take this, but I think where I'm at right now is I have less injury optimism than I normally do with players coming off of major injuries for the reasons that you described. I feel like the

soft tissue stuff can fluctuate a lot and I want to see more. So I'm not ready to draw a strong conclusion there, but I'm worried about Acuna. I'm worried about Mike Soroka. I'm worried about anybody coming off of a major injury that requires a lot of extra attention from team doctors and athletic trainers.

And I realize that there are probably some other workarounds in play that we don't know about. Every situation's different. I just, I think that's one area where I'm going to be a little more careful in 2022. The question though, yes, there are more, there are more IL stints now than ever, right? Like that's, that is born out in the numbers. So this is a bigger problem. If you haven't changed your structure for your league to have either more bench spots, more IL spots, or some combination of both, you need to do that. It used to be 19 hitters, 9 pitchers, 7 bench spots, and maybe 2 or 3 IL spots in leagues that had them. And that was enough.

I think you want to expand benches by at least one spot and expand IL spots by at least two. And I think that would be closer to ideal. You're the commission most cases, like are you or someone you know is the commission. I realized for bigger contests, you don't have that say. So you have to just accept it for what it is. And those leagues have already started up. So we're not getting changes in overall contests for this year because it's too late to change it now. But I do think we need to be aware of this i think the other tactical change you have to think about if there's a way to work around it i realize only certain sites can handle this i think increasing the number of lineup changes you're allowed to make is huge i know some people

out there still play in daily moves leagues i don't love that format but it's another place where i've i've moved a little bit because for all this frustration for all these absences that pop up midweek for any number of reasons it is a lot less frustrating to be able to go ahead and make a correction on tuesday wednesday thursday than it is to have to wait until at least friday in the twice weekly changes if you're in a once-a-week lineup change, you've got to fix that. Well, we've seen. Isn't the NFBC Friday thing almost like a new thing for them? They used to be fully weekly, right?

They've been Fridays for a while for hitters. Only for hitters, though. And I just think... But there's nothing more frustrating than the hitter goes down with an injury or like you have a Tuesday game. Your team starts on Tuesday that week, and you don't find out until Tuesday that the guy's hurt because they don't give you any injury update on Monday

because they have a day off. Yeah, I mean, you always have to err more on the side of what you know on Monday. If you have a healthy option on Monday who plays the same number of games, even if it's a lesser player than the guy, you've got a Monday-to-Wednesday guy and a Tuesday-to-Thursday guy,

and the Monday guy's healthy and the Tuesday guy's not, you probably have to err on the side of just playing the Monday guy, not even knowing the identities of the players just because of uncertainty. So generally, I think to answer this guy's question, this email's question, I would say that yes, there are more injuries and that by itself means more chaos and that means more you know unpredictability um however i would say that's always been a part of the game um it's always been a source of chaos and unpredictability i think it's a major uh point of you know why we can't project players better, either nagging injuries that affect their performance on the field or just keep them from playing at all

or affect them long-term and how good they can be because they've been injured somehow. So I would say it's part of the game. If you can convince them to come back with some of those mitigation strategies in terms of we'll change this, we'll have more IL spots, we'll have more bench spots, then that's worth doing. If they think that it's completely up to luck now just because there are slightly more injuries,

I would say that they're probably overreacting to a few injuries they had in their squad last year. They got mad that they're probably overreacting to a few injuries they had in their squad last year and they they got mad that they should have won quote unquote and uh you're not gonna do much to convince somebody of that i think you know the two people that uh will leave your league uh that you were not going to convince to come back are the ones that felt they should have won and something about the rules or the you know the game uh kept them from winning or the one that felt they should have won and something about the rules or the game kept them from winning, or the one that thinks they can't ever win because in that Dynasty League, somebody has amassed too much talent at the top.

Those two are very hard to convince to come back. Yeah, Dynasty Leagues hit a point. I think it's always like four or five years in where you have the teams that can win and the teams that can't and if those groups are if it's like four teams can win and most of their teams can't that league's toast like that that league's not coming back from that at a certain point so it it takes a lot of balance to pull that off but i think and rules i think that it's tricky i think dynasty the rules are. The rules of the game are super important to keep everybody invested and interested and to make sure there's

movement and player movement and stuff like that. So midweek replacements, whether that's even just a twice weekly switch or even going to daily moves, that helps you avoid some of that lost time. You have to find what's right for the league, put it to vote, but at least offer those as alternatives to the weekly lineups that are out there.

I would say redemption for players that do get hurt. We have that in tout wars and labor. If you lose a player, I know not every league uses fab, but you could also have redemption in the form of moving up in waiver priority or something along those lines. You lose a key player. You lose a top three round pick, you immediately go to the top of the waiver. If you use them for the year, you go to the top of the waiver. Right. You go to the top of the waiver. If you use them for the year, you go to the top of the waiver. Right.

You go to the top of the waiver order. Even if you don't have that. Yeah. So you can work on some wrinkles like that. The other thing is more extreme, also requires a little more legwork by the commissioner. But hey, we're about solutions here. So if injuries,

if devastating injuries are a big part of why people are leaving your league, I think you could actually have some kind of built-in protection where you say, we're going to split the season into two or maybe even three parts. That's something Jake Seeley's done for a long time. And after every either 50-game stretch or after each half, we're going to redraft. Maybe you could protect a handful of players. You could set it up however you want.

Or even have rewards for each. Separate first half, second half. Like a first half cup where you get 10%. You get double your fee back or something. Then if you got your injury at a different time, you didn't win, but you got your money back because you had a good team in the first half. So think about some things like that that your league might be into because I think the way the founding fathers of fantasy baseball put the game together, it's great, but we don't have to stick to that. We're 40 years past that now. So let's adapt a little bit and make a game that everybody still wants to play.

I might like old Roto, but not everyone's going to play that way. I like this idea of redrafting. It's funny though because there are definitely two skills in fantasy baseball that are separate. There's drafting a good team and then there's roster management. Looking at me, I think

the thing that I have to learn every time I learn a new game or learn a new platform is roster management. I think I've always been a good drafter and it's been, you know, that's what's separated me from, you know, taking that next step. So, you know, by doing that, the one thing you are losing is that roster management skill and you're rewarding drafters, better drafters. If you drafted three, like if you thought aboutfters if you drafted three like if you thought about if you drafted 10 times a year you'd be rewarding only drafting yeah but what's funny is

i've played in some of the in-season nfbc leagues over the years like i've done one at memorial day they always do like the half yeah they have one one and the fourth of july i think was the other one i've done and it is definitely different flying without the groupthink, without months of prep, without the full season projections in front of you. It just leads you down. People overvaluing hot starts. Yes.

The players that have over and underperformed up to that point are fascinating because the recency bias is even thicker than it is when you draft at the end of a full season. Even if you do a full season draft in October. Who was great in September, you know? Right. Even when you do that exercise just at the end of a full season, there's a lot of recency bias.

There's even more when you do in-season redrafts. So it's just another way. If you're trying to find something different that'll get people interested, have another draft. Reset it. Keep one, keep three, keep three keep zero keep five i don't care how you set it up but there's a solution in there somewhere so thanks a lot for the email eric definitely a frustrating thing that we've all been dealing with here in the last couple of

years with injuries piling up we got an email from adam adam was wondering the best way to use babbitt to determine if a player actually had a bad season or was unlucky. Are there other stats to look at to help determine this? I would have thought K percentage, but I looked at Kevin Newman, who had a sub 20% K rate and a bad BABIP, and I wasn't sure how much improvement I could expect to see out of a player of his caliber. Thanks for any help. Love the show, Adam. All right, so BABIP, I think a few years ago, like 10 years ago, or even 15 years ago now, the first time BABIP started showing up places, it was really exciting because it was like,

hey, we get to have this secret sauce that's going to help us find players who were lucky and unlucky. And then I think we realized once we had more information about the quality of contact that hitters make and the quality of contact that pitchers allow and all the other factors that can lead to a high or low BABIP, that number in isolation wasn't quite as useful as we would have hoped. But I do think we can start to use it as, or you can continue to use it as more of a flag of something that's just off compared to a player's career norms. I think when I look at BABIP, if I have it on the dashboard for any reason, I'm just looking to see if it's way up or way down compared to previous years and career levels. And then the question that immediately pops into my mind is why? What's going on here? Why did this bad go up or down? What causes could there be? Fortunately, we have things like StatCast. And I think with StatCast, you can look at

expected batting average. And I think with Kevin Newman, that's probably something that's a little bit more instructive. Like, okay, what was he supposed to do? The way he hits the ball, the angles and the velocities at which he hits the ball, what was his batting average supposed to look like? You still have to look at it, I think, more from a year-to-year sort of workflow

and keep digging. But I think it gives you a better indication of how lucky or unlucky a player might have been, at least compared to Babib as the alternative. So that was the first place my mind went when I saw this question. With Newman, it actually wasn't quite as bad as it appeared. If you look at the XBA, he should have been in the 250 range. 255 was his XBA. He hit 226 last year. We're still talking about a guy that's probably not useful outside of NL only leagues.

Even there, there's some job loss potential. He's not a barreler. He has to run to make a typical roto profile work. I would say in some weird ways, Kevin Newman

is a reason why I'm afraid of Nicky Lopez. That is like the downside profile to me of what could go wrong for Nicky Lopez, who ran a ton, especially in the second half, and probably actually helped some people along to titles in certain instances. I just see a guy that doesn't hit the ball hard, even though he makes a lot of contact. And when you do that, it just doesn't give you a lot of paths to be useful. Oh, that's a great poll. If you look at Kevin Newman's expected batting average, even given his 300 year, they're basically all around 250, 250 and 260, and very steady.

And Nuki Lopez, the same thing. He's hit 240, 201, and 300 in his three seasons. His expected BA, though, has been 215, 238, and 239. So basically, he's been a 230, 240 hitter his whole life. So, basically, he's been a 230-240 hitter his whole life. If he's a 230-240 hitter again, then he's probably more like a 320 OBP guy with no power. There's going to be a lot because they've said they don't trust Adalberto Mondesi as an everyday player. You kind of want your shortstop to be an everyday player. are in the middle of a renaissance perhaps or at least they are at a different point in their

rebuilding process where they just need to try everybody out and that doesn't include necessarily someone like kevin newman you know what i mean like they need to try out the to see if they got somebody better than kevin. And I see on their team Diego Castillo and Rodolfo. Man, they're not even on the Fangraphs ones. That's crazy. Rodolfo Castro, Diego Castillo, and Hojian Park. I got his name wrong. Hoj Park. Those three guys name wrong. Hoi Park.

Those three guys are going to get timed this year just because they need to see if they're any better than Kevin Newman. Yeah, so there's definite playing time downside here. Yeah, playing time downside, as you said. And then the last thing I would say is, yeah, generally the things, the components of babbitt are uh if you want to look at some old school stats like line drive rate uh is a big deal uh speed uh is a big deal and um line drive rate speed and k percentage is it does mean something it just means you get

more more chances more ducks on the pond. But the last thing, and then like up-down spray angle matters because fly ball hitters, I was just looking at somebody. Ah, Reese Hoskins. Reese Hoskins has a 50% fly ball rate. I think he led the entire league in fly ball rate last year. That's really good for his power, but he's never going to have better than like a 275 Babbitt because he hits so many fly balls and they don't have good Babbitts. The last, but all of that is in XBA. So I agree with you that like XBA is a powerful tool. It has all those things. It has a speed. It accounts for how many balls were put in play and it accounts for how hard it was hit and what angles it was hit in. The one thing that's not in XBA that could be meaningful is horizontal spray angle.

So if you are a lefty that hits for decent power and lifts the ball well, you still might not have your expected batting average may not be right for you because you're going to be hitting into shifts a lot. And if you are a pull hitter, even a pull hitter hits the ball hard, you're going to be hitting into the shift. And so that'll cost you some points of BABIP. So I think I would just basically use XBA compared to last year's BABIP to get a sense of how much possible regression there is there. And the only other thing I would then look at is I think pull percentage. Yeah, I think there's a certain type of player that shows up as a chronic underperformer and

a chronic overperformer. If you look at like XBA minus actual batting average, you can look at the difference between those two numbers and see, oh, okay, this guy actually was very lucky. If the, if you take the, if you take the average and subtract the XBA,

if the number is positive, that means that player overperformed and got lucky air quotes could be more going on, but that's where Nikki Lopez falls. Like if you take, if you go to savant, you can make this leaderboard. It's just the expected statistics leaderboard sort by that difference column.

And if you drop the minimum balls in play to 50, Nicky Lopez is fourth among all qualified hitters in terms of we'll call it good luck. The, the number of his actual batting average and the difference in that and the XPA, it's a pretty big difference, but a bunch of guys on that part of the board are hitters like that. it's a pretty big difference but a bunch of guys

on that part of the board are hitters like that there's a couple other weird things i saw though too there are a ton of giants on that list i think before i split it down to the lower balls in play number if it was just qualified hitters there were five giants inside the top 50 and it was a bunch of different dudes i'm just Crawford, Belt, Posey, Wilmer Flores, and Steven Duggar. Those five guys don't all hit the same way. But I just thought it was interesting the Giants were loaded with a bunch of players there. Randy Arrozarena pops on this leaderboard

as a guy whose XBA at 220 was a lot lower than his actual batting average at 274. He was probably the best player in terms of being an early round draft pick who I saw on here and was really surprised to see here. Luis Robert was on here, but he was actually 338 and his XBA was 297. That's not like, okay, fine.

That's no big deal. But a Rosarena, 274 down to 220, that made me think, what's going on with Randy? Is there actually some more risk there? Yeah, but he's right into what I was talking about. He puts the ball all over the field. He's very hard to defend.

He has, if you look at his spray chart, he pulls, he pushes, he pushes for power, he pushes on the ground, he pulls on the ground, he pulls for power. There's no real, and he's a righty. So, you cannot perform the same extreme shifts on a righty as you can on a lefty because frankly you have to have a guy near first base that's you know it's a geometry problem um so so thank you for pointing that out. The other thing I would add to the XPA is handedness and pull percentage. But where, for example, does Randy Orezarena rank

in terms of pull percentage in the league? I've got here. So Jose Ramirez was actually pulled more than anybody and is a lefty oh i don't see him on the first page it's interesting he still could have that balance profile but look at this kevin newman among the 15 uh among the 15 players that pulled the ball the least last year that to me it's just an absence of power in his case. Yeah, it's not quite the same thing, is it? That's not spraying the ball all over the place.

That's just not being able to hit it hard. But Juan Soto there has an interesting profile where it could be ideal for batting average in Babbitt because he has power to all fields. He's one of the lowest pull guys, and he does make enough contact so he's in some ways um the ideal hitter for babbitt other than the fact that he's not super super fast the other player that popped into my head too when we were looking at randy a rosarena just now is javier baez because i think baez has an actual batting average last year at 265 the xba was at

241 he swings and misses a lot, but when he connects, he hits the ball really hard and he doesn't pull everything. If you look at his spray chart, he hits the ball out to center, hits the ball out the opposite way. And I think that might be kind of part of the,

how does Javi Baez get away with this? Well, that's part of it. Like he hits the ball to all fields. And if you can hit the ball hard and hit the ball to all fields and if you can hit the ball hard and hit the ball to all fields you can afford to do something like strike out 30 plus percent of the time yeah i'm i'm struggling with that giants thing though i would say that yes probably uh they uh are going to regress um just in terms of pull rate they were 11th in the big leagues and pull percentage so it's not like they're like going oppo all the time um i can't really explain that one unless

they were a very you know very much aggressive mix and match team so maybe they always had a platoon advantage and maybe that somehow factored into their bad. I don't think that's a complete fluke. I don't think it's completely random. I think there's something there. I want to pull on that thread a little bit. Tyro Strada, favorite player of this podcast, I think by the end of last season, also on there if you lower that threshold.

So it's something that the Giants seem to be doing consciously or through some adjustments, machinations, through something they were doing, they were finding a way to get a lot more out of those balls at play than they were supposed to. They were sixth in barrel rate, so they hit the ball hard. That'll help.

Yeah, I would guess that there'd be some regression there so uh i think i think we answered that question from adam but i just immediately thought of xba when i read that question so thanks for sending that in hopefully that page is helpful and yeah in the absence of xba you're looking at uh line drive rates uh strikeout rates uh stolen base uh totals looking at ground ball fly ball because you don't want to have the Reese Hoskins profile. You're looking at pull percentages. The other side of that leaderboard, too, before we move on, I just thought that's interesting because it's loaded up with the mashers

who you can play further back defensively. You've talked about, I think, Garrick Sanchez is a good example of this on the pod. I think late career Albert Pujols has been a player like this where, yeah, you hit a missile, but guess what? The defenders can play you back because you're so slow that they're still going to throw you out anyway. And then those missiles that should be hits are not hits. And I think that that's a sort of a common sort of profile that you'll see if you look at the opposite end of that list for players who who underperform their xba sometimes it's actually deserved because of something like speed and how the defense can actually play that player oh this thing keeps undoing picture and making it pictures

like is chris owings was he an over-performer? I'll be on that momentarily. Owings is a player I never think about. He doesn't even show up on the list when I search for him. Yeah, something's weird that's going on here. Did he even get 50 balls in play? Sorry, what was your question? Don't worry about it.

The stack has is not working for me right now. My question was the other end of the leaderboard, and it's a lot of guys that don't run particularly well, so teams can defend them differently. Oh, yeah, for sure. The hard contact they're making is not being rewarded the way that it should be because there are defenders playing in spots where they can't normally play

thanks to that player's lack of speed. Gary Sanchez is not that, but I would assume a fair amount of them are big lefties, first baseman types that pull the ball and hit it for power. Yeah, you'll see some guys like that sprinkled in too. It's a thing. If a player can play you in the infield three or four feet back,

then they can steal hits from you. What are you doing with Tommy Pham in drafts? He's cheaper than he's been in years. The general vibe around his numbers seems to be that he was unlucky. He's one of the surprising XBA way over actual average. He's a righty. I don't think of him as a dead pole guy. I'm going to verify that by looking a little closer at that now, but he has some speed. He has power, kind of a five-ish category guy or four, I guess, if you kick out batting average, who's available outside the top 200. I mean, is this the point where he's just declining

and it's actually not going to be as good as it appears to be? Because on the surface, this looks like a pretty obvious bounce-back target in the middle rounds. I'm buying. The one thing that makes me nervous is he doesn't have a landing place yet. And that might tell us a lot about what his playing time situation will look like because there is the possibility he gets on the small side of a platoon. But I don't see it.

He's projected to be one of the top 10 bounce backs in baseball this year by Steamer. He made it into my bounce back article because he was one of the top 10 underperformers on barrels his barrels did more poorly than 90% than the population in baseball last year his eye is still like a top 10 eye in terms of reach rate

so I still think that people will see him as someone who can help on the base pass and take a walk and still be around. There's some disagreement about his defense on the corners, but I think that he can still be, he has the athletic skills to be a good defender. So I see him as a starter and I liked him at the contract that Fangraphs has him crowdsourced. So I think he will be in demand as a starter type player when things restart, especially since he's not going to garner a long-term contract. So we're talking about someone who will sign for one and 10 or two and 20, I believe. And that's something that a lot of teams need and will desire. So I'm buying him.

I'm buying him. I have had two DCs I've done on NFPC, and I have them in both. I think as maybe an OF4 or 5, and the projection CM is better than that in the auction calculator. And so to buy your OF3 as an OF4 or 5, I think, is a fantasy value. I think in real life baseball, he has the skills that people want. He barrels the ball and he has a really good eye at the plate and he's an athlete. So I know there's peripheral stuff that I think might've been overrated. He's not always the easiest teammate, but

I think that somebody will find the prices right and give him, you know, at least an 80% job out there. And I think it was on this pod where I suggested Oakland, Tommy Pham, Oakland, it all makes sense. He's the kind of guy that goes there, plays a lot, has a good year. And if they hang around in the playoff race, he stays. If they don't, then he's on a contender come August via trade, Chad Pinder, and Ramon Laureano. You know, Piscotty has one leg out of the league, maybe. I mean, he's pretty close. He's been hurt. So his projections are okay. But if the injuries are going to keep him from hitting his projections, then he's not very athletic. He doesn't have a great eye at the plate, and he doesn't hit for enough power to offset those other things. And then Chad Pinder, I think, profiles better as a utility player.

So they really, you could almost see them having two opportunities in that outfield. At least one and a half. So I like that pick for you. The one thing that Pham wasn't doing that he needs to do, actually, is pull more. The one reason he was underperforming on his barrels

was his barrels were opposite field barrels which are inferior to pulled barrels. So once again, pull percentage. Pull percentage is a very powerful tool. It's just hard because it's not, it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. Like for example, we just talked about

how Reese Hoskins' pull percentage versus, you know percentage might hurt him, and Tommy Pham needs to pull more. It's not the easiest tool to use, but it's pretty powerful. The other name on this list that I will not give up on, but I can't draft him right now outside of the endgame of draft and hold because we don't know about his health, is Nick Senzel.

The knee could be a problem. Maybe he misses a portion of 2022. It's a great unknown at this point. I think he had an arthroscopic surgery in May. Back in September, sent him for another opinion. So the little bits that we saw of him were actually pretty encouraging in the underlying numbers.

And I'm not talking about the stolen base success rate. He was two for seven as a base dealer, but the plate skills, some of the quality of contact was actually really encouraging. So if it's a huge, if, if Nick Senzel can just get healthy, I still think there might be a very good offensive player there. Yeah, it's really hard to know when to take that shot. I would say that, and I thought of this a little bit when you were talking about the injuries earlier and Mike Soroka. There were a couple moments in your drafts where people are taking prospects and not like the number one prospect in all baseball, Julio Rodriguez?

Yeah, I think he's the one for most people. But we're talking about taking prospects like Ronzi Contreras with the Pirates. This is where I was in the draft when I was considering Soroka. Ronzi Contreras was going. Grayson Rodriguez, the excellent starting pitching prospect for the Baltimore Orioles. So prospects were going. I said, well, I'd rather have Mike Soroka because we're talking about players that are not likely to get... These are on-off players. They're either going to be worth a lot because they play a lot and they're good, or they're

going to be worth nothing. Very sort of 50-50 coin flip, good luck, but you're buying ceiling. That's when I would take Senzel. I would take Senzel over who's a good batting prospect that people would actually buy for this year. At that stage, we're, it's later than young. It's later than Torkelson. Maybe is it more like a Riley green for this year only? Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's a great one because Riley green can come up and strike out 40% of the time, uh, struggle a little bit and have to go back down, you know? And yes, uh, he could put together a really great season,

but so could Senzel. So in some ways I would, uh, I, and it depends a little bit on your roster build and this and that and the rules of your, if it's a keeper league, like I'm not saying take Senzel over Riley Green in a keeper league, but like in a redraft, you know, where

you're taking a shot, if you have Riley Green and Senzel both on the board, then maybe you take something, you wait for who comes back to you, and if it's Senzel that comes back to you, then that's fine. You're taking a guy who could be good. Yeah, I can't emphasize this enough. You don't have to draft Nick Senzel.

Right. You can certainly go to option C, and I understand. I'm throwing it out there as the, hey, if we get good health news, there's still something good there in the skills that I think you want to pay attention to. 310 XBA, really good strikeout rate, hits the ball to all fields, high speed. Your Soroka call, I mean, I was on him last year thinking we'd get a half season or more of him pitching really well. I think people just forget, first off, how young he is. He debuted as a 20 year old. He's just

24. He turned 24 back in August. There's almost no way he's ready for opening day. Two Achilles injuries like that. It's a short list of players that haven't done that. If I get 50, 60 innings out of him, how much do you think Grayson Rodriguez is going to put together

150 innings season this year in the major leagues? There's definitely a question of what I think they're going to do and what I would do being pretty different and I would say thinking about like the success of maybe Alec Manoa last year especially how would you look at Grayson Rodriguez and his dominance at double a and say, yeah, I think he needs a half season at triple a I'd be surprised. Like if you want to give him four or five starts there, just make sure that he keeps dominating. Fine. Like,

I'm not going to argue against that. I mean, he's young. I think it's just a safe play because what you, you don't like, you don't make a full season off of Grayson Rodriguez. You like, you don't make the playoffs off of a full season of Grayson Rodriguez,

I don't think. So what you do is maybe you start the season with Rutschman up there. Maybe you start the season with somebody else up there. You try to build an okay team. You move the walls so that Means has a good ERA,

blah, blah, blah, blah. And you change it up. And if everything's going well, then hey, okay. It's April 1st, and we won, up, and if everything's going well, then hey, okay, it's April 1st, and we won, what, 15 games, or we won 12 games. Let's see what happens. Let's bring it up now.

But then the season could go south just as quickly. He comes up, he struggles, he goes back down. I think this is just where I've always probably been a little more aggressive than actual player development people and the way teams want to handle things because of service time and whatever other reasons. But I think you want to finish developing pitchers in the big leagues when you're in a situation as dire as Baltimore's. I think you'd rather solve big league problems. If you feel like the pitches are big league quality and the command is ready, put them in the big leagues.

That's exactly what a farm director told me. He's like, why am I wasting these guys in the minor leagues? I have major league pitch grades on all their pitches. It's time to go. I think with Grayson Rodriguez, that's what we're talking about here. Maybe we just landed on a name where it's like, I actually think giving him big league volume this year could happen.

That's a short list of pitching prospects. It always is. Because you need opportunity plus talent. And guys on good teams, even if you are an Aaron Ashby believer. I just took Mitch White. Pitching Plus loves Mitch White. I took Mitch White on the comeback from Mike Soroka. So I just basically took Mitch White and Mike Soroka neck and neck. There's nothing on the big league roster that prevents Grayson Rodriguez from being a big league starter the moment he gets the call to Baltimore. Whereas other teams, depending on their situation and depth, whether they're contending for the playoffs, managing innings, whatever it is, they all tend to have more complications than what we have with Rodriguez.

Fine, I made a bad pick. Look, it's a name. I was also just trying to put this in context where i think that the heavily injured players you have to kind of consider them prospects they have that same sort of bust rate yeah and i think it's it's kind of a zero or one in terms of what you're getting for the most part like not in the big leagues in the case of soroka on the il and then back and i think with soroka from age, people just forget how good he was. 214 big league innings with a 286 ERA, a 116 whip.

Yeah, the strikeout rate's not amazing. The ratios are great. That's a World Series winning team that he's on. There's run support. There's help in the pen protecting his leads. Obviously, he knows how to pitch. That's how you get to the big leagues as a 20-year-old in the first place.

You have all of those traits. Good command, three-pitch arsenal, yeah. And those pitches could still get better. That was the thing that made Soroka so appealing before the injuries. I think that's all still in play. So all that's a very long-winded way to say, yeah, I'm in on the Soroka. Part of drafting players like that in draft and hold or leagues with IL spots, it's not drafting too

many because you can't afford too many zeros. You can take a shot with a player or two like that, but that's about it. It means not drafting them early. It means keeping your nose clean long enough that you can take some of those shots. Yep.

I'm with you there. So we've got one more question here. Maybe we'll squeeze in two because this other one's a really easy toss-up sort of question that we can answer pretty quickly. One more long sort of form question. This one comes from Andrew. He's wondering if we have any opinions on how to spur owners to trade more frequently in long-standing dynasty leagues.

His situation, entering year 13, they have 10 teams. They keep 25 to 30 with 40-man in-season rosters. Most teams are balanced and have already gotten their hands on their type of players and prospects, and they're treating their teams as a guide for who to root for in real-life baseball, and it leaves them without many trade fits. The only incentive is during roster cutdowns when everyone wants to consolidate their keepers.

Everyone just seems scared to trade away a pre-breakout player. It ignores the possibility they can just as easily come out of a deal on top. We've briefly discussed expanding with two more teams, but that's obviously a drastic step. Do you have any outside-the-box ideas for this, or is this cyclical and something we just have to live with for now? Thanks, Andrew. My first thought here, Eno, is that this league doesn't sound like it's fallen

into the trap of a deeper dynasty league where only a handful of teams can win. Based on description, it sounds like a group of reasonably equally competitive owners and managers that make this a lot more fun to play. Tip of the cap for doing that 13 years

in. Maybe part of the secret is only having the 10 teams because I think those deeper leagues, I think of RDI, that was a 20-team league with a lot of really sharp players in it. You start to fall behind talent-wise in a 20-team league, harder to make up ground there. In a 10-team league, it's at least

possible to start building something that's competitive because half as many teams are vying for the same guys. Easier to keep 10 managers happy than 20 right yep um yeah i you know i think that uh it is difficult i think one of the most difficult things is to keep a league vibrant and to keep a league uh trading and to and the one thing that that uh sticks out for me here is that you have no penalties for keeping. And, you know, like in Devil's Rejects, we have no penalties for keeping. And that has led to, yeah, some roster consolidation.

I think we're lucky, in effect, to have some people who have won before wanting to win in different ways themselves. Like, you know, I give Tom Trudeau a lot of crap. He's actually named his league Trade Spam, which is, you know, has something to do with the fact that he, like, our inboxes are just filled with offers from him and i've gotten annoyed at him in the past but um he he won the league and had uh you know like trout and goldschmidt and like you know had and you know you know peak performance kluber and all these players and then he traded kluber goldschmidt and something else for uh acuna as a prospect and it blew my mind because I was just like, what? Those are all, you know, you know, and it was because he wanted to win another way.

He wanted to win, you know, with some prospects he held on to. He identified a new core. And that has helped keep the team, the league pretty vibrant. But I generally am pro having some sort of penalty for keeping. I like in auto new, for example, that the prices go up. I think that tracks with major league team building, and it doesn't make sense just intuitively when you're playing a game that somebody could, and this has been really tough in our basketball league,

could get together five of the top stars in the game on one roster and have no reason to trade any of them and just win for five years in a row. Yeah, I kind of see it more as wanting to have a shelf life on the years, even if you don't put prices on players, right? You're doing snake drafts, so there's no salaries or anything. Yeah, keep a guy for three years.

Keep a guy for five years. Three, five. Having some kind of expiration date on how long a player can be kept, even if it's a flat keep X number of players, that might actually increase the activity because then you have some urgency. Like, hey, I'm going to lose this core. I want to make moves and trade some young players. I think that's probably your best path without adding teams to the league to incentivize people. But then

the same thing that we always say with Keeper and Dynasty rules, you can't necessarily just do that right now. You kind of have to do it with some warning. You kind of have to say, hey, we're going to add this rule after this season. You could put the numbers on everybody now.

Make this year one and you know then in year three year after year five then this way of a play that to me would probably be your your best bet if you don't want to go to the trouble of salaries in the pitchfork league is that we tie um uh players to the the round they were drafted in. And then we have some sort of inflation of rounds. So, you know, I had Mike Trout for a while, and when I acquired him, he was like a 16th round pick, and then he kept inflating, inflating, inflating. I think I still have him, but now I have to pay like a second round pick to keep him.

And just some sort of, yeah what it whatever it is if it's a price that goes up or a round uh penalty that goes up or a number of years you can keep them that just it just uh it just uh offers some urgency like you're saying some some constrictions uh to to make to make things happen. Hopefully that helps, Andrew, anybody else out there in similar situations to trying to get activity because trades are fun. I find in leagues with salaries and expirations on contracts, there's a lot more movement because it sort of forces some action along the way. Last question here came from Perry.

He writes, knowing nothing else about my team, who has a bigger short and long-term fantasy impact between Matthew Boyd and Yandy Diaz? It's a 30-team head-to-head points league. If you're wondering why this is even a debate, I've been staring at this for a few months now. Maybe we can help Perry no longer stare at the Boyd-Yandy Diaz debate. Is there a clear side for you on that one that you'd rather be on? There's something I actually love about Yandy's game where he doesn't lift the ball well, but he hits the ball really hard. And he has a really good eye at the plate. Let me see what his reach rate is here but he's yeah 18 last year like he's a

he's like a top 20 type guy with in terms of eye at the plate so he does everything i want except for two things he's right-handed on a team the platoons of the wazoo he's not that great a glove uh and i see you know i think i see taylor walls like running away with third base and at very least stealing most of yandy diaz's playing time there so right now he's projected for a decent number in terms of steamer because the depth charts say he'll get 30 of the playing time uh at third base and 30 of the playing time at first base and some playing time at dh and that'll give him 560 plate appearances if i knew he was going to get 560 plate appearances he would be the guy i would keep i just i'm worried that Taylor Walls takes that job outright. I'm worried that at 30, there's not much projection left for Diaz. I'm worried that if he becomes a full-time first

baseman, he may just bounce around and be kind of a backup first baseman or NLDH type. Chris Baseman or MLDH type. So it becomes a little bit harder to see the future beyond this year, in which case Boyd might come back around. For next year, I would take Yandy in a second. Yeah, I think because of the Boyd injury for 2022, I'd be on Diaz. If you're trying to play the long game, I'd rather just have Boyd. Give me the pitcher, the guy that should still be a starter,

can be a bulk guy, has flashed at least being kind of a mid-rotation fantasy guy. What he was doing before he got hurt was actually some of the best stuff we've seen in his career, just in terms of ratios. Had the ERA under four, had the whip at 127. I think I'd

rather bet on him getting healthy and then getting a spot to give us 150 innings going to like next season and beyond yeah there's there's a path for getting better like yandy's not going to get better with the glove he's probably not going to lift the ball anymore yeah i would agree i think yandy's hit the point in his career where he's very likely to be a 300 plate appearance guy and he'll quietly just fade away even though the plate skills are really good and he hits the ball hard he just mashes it into the ground and doesn't seem like that if the rays couldn't fix that by now they're gonna get pretty antsy about it because he's arbitration eligible now so yeah right right there that. So someone else has to try and fix him. And I know the UZR numbers

aren't great, but just from watching, I doubt there's a lot of other teams that want to play him at third base. Yeah, I get that sense as well. That is going to do it

for this episode of Rates and Barrels. Before we go... Could we help? That's got to be one of the deepest leagues of any listener. If it's a really specific question

that we get to answer on the pod, it will generally be at the very end. Hopefully, just the process of how we think about the problem is helpful to people who don't have that exact problem because I think Perry might literally be the only person on the planet with that exact problem.

Hopefully, we helped Perry, but I hope we helped a few other people with the way we thought about solving the issue in that situation on Twitter. He's at, you know, Sarah's I am at Derek, but right for the pod at rates and barrels doesn't tweet yet.

Could tweet soon. You want to be there when it does, because it could be really exciting. The first tweet be, Oh, it's going to be the, our combined wordle score. Of course.

What else could it be? It's awful. Oh God. It'll else could it be? That's awful. Oh, God. It'll be an accompanying video of the three of us. We'll have Britt on and we'll all solve a wordle together and then we'll tweet the results.

Shut up. If you still want to subscribe to The Athletic, 33% off at theathletic.com slash rates and barrels. If you want us to go away, I understand that as well, given that there are enough Wordle tweets out there. I'm guilty of it. I did it the first time because I thought it was a cool game.

I wanted to share the game with people. I don't think anyone cares how I'm doing in Wordle. But if you do, just tweet at me, and I'll direct tweet it back to you. I'll just have it ready to go because I like to play. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Thursday.

Thanks for listening.