Rates & Barrels - Pondering Projection Adjustments

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Rundown6:30 Looking Forward: Adjust Houston Hitters?15:21 Using Projections to Find Bounce-Back Candidates22:09 Vlad Jr. vs. Similarly Priced Third Basemen29:24 Adjusting Appropriately for Injuries37:12 Does Pedigree Matter When Throwing Late Darts?46:53 Hitter/Pitcher Split in Draft & Hold vs. Other Formats58:26 On Big ContractsFollow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiperE-mail: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 61. It is Tuesday, January 14th, 2020. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we will discuss the potential adjustments that you might want to make to your projections for Astros hitters in 2020. Eno wrote a piece about bounce back hitters last week that had a few bigger picture ideas that I wanted to discuss with him. So we'll talk about that. And we'll get to some mailbag questions, including one interesting one about hitter versus pitcher resource allocations and how that might vary in different league formats, including draft and hold. Some big show news. We're going back to two episodes per week starting next week,

so Tuesday and Thursday afternoons you should have us available for commutes and dog walks and all the things you have in the later part of your day. We are available now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, pretty much anywhere else you want to listen to podcasts. If you're enjoying this show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it, we'd really appreciate it if you took the time to give us a rating and review. Some of you might be listening to this show for the first time. If you are, welcome. If you're not already a subscriber to The Athletic, you can get 40% off a subscription at theathletic.com slash rates and barrels.

Everything we do is included with a subscription. Eno, I appreciate you taking the time to do this pod today, in part because you're in Las Vegas. You're there for the FSGA, the industry conference. And I know it's hard to get away from anything when you're in Las Vegas to record a podcast. I hate Las Vegas. With the fire of a thousand burning suns. It's got this, it just reeks of desperation and cigarette smoke and just like gaudy death.

You know, it's just gross. You i'm a big hunter s thompson fan and a lot of my views on vegas were shaped by his views on vegas as well as the fact that my dad was a bookie and lived here uh for two or three years and i visited him um you know and he would drop me off at circus circus and go drop do a bunch of bets and come pick me up again and i think i've hated it ever since i did the imax that we had like this imax is one of those big circle ones you know with the early imax um and we watched some movie about the earth and i ate a hot dog and and and barfed and uh so ever since I was 12 years old, I've hated Vegas. Oh, man.

In a roundabout way, your terrible experience with Las Vegas as a child may have saved you from even worse experiences in Las Vegas as a young adult. A lot of people hate it because they've lost thousands of dollars there. They've destroyed relationships while they were there. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can go wrong and go right at the other end of the spectrum as well. I think I just got to a point with Las Vegas where there were a few years. I mean, I was at Rotowire for 11 years. I think I went three or four times in some years for different work trips. There'd be the industry conference.

There'd be NFBC live drafts. There'd be NFFC live drafts for football. And then maybe the summer all-star break trip that we'd take as a company. And again, as work trips go, any work trip where you're going to Las Vegas and drafting is good. But as an actual location, there are so many other places I would rather go. Part of that's the fatigue of the city. Part of it was that for a long time, it just felt like you couldn't get good beer anywhere. That's changed a bit in the last five years, especially. That's

got better. If you go off strip, there are some places that are kind of interesting. There's so much gravity. If you're talking about gravity, it's easy for me to go up to my room and get away because my room's in the same building but if you're talking about getting off the strip i feel like there's some serious gravity there uh just because you're at a conference or you're this and everyone's you know around and the way they make it they make it so you can't even figure out how to get out of the hotel you know they do have that going for them just like you're like in like where am i you know i can't figure it out uh but i guess i'll just go into this bar uh the one thing i will say is like there's great food here uh i hope to have some of it because all i had last night was some freaking guy frieri donkey sauce oh no no no no no donkey sauce. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Donkey sauce? Yeah.

What, like chicken tenders or something? No, I had one of his burgers. Oh, okay. Well, it sounds like it was just kind of okay. It was okay. You know, I wouldn't... It was not worth the price. It was like a $20 burger or something, but that's Vegas, too.

Anyway, I'm here, and hopefully I can accept an award for us. I mean, I think they are going to decide that here. Yeah, the host of the year award that I'm up for is decided at FSGA, and then the art of the year for our podcast art. And then we are also nominated for an FSWA award. That will be decided on in February or announced in February. Oh, that's not here.

Right. Okay, I see. I got confused myself. Yeah, because we are finalists for best podcast from the FSWA. So you could win smoothest voice of the year while I'm here. I could.

I could. And if you're there when that award is announced, please accept the award on my behalf. They should change it to that. That would be a good thing to put in your bio. Smoothest voice. Service-wide smoothest voice in the nation. That would be a nice award.

It would be great for the Twitter bio. My only takeaway on the Vegas thing on the food front, go to Lotus of Siam. It is off-strip. It's not far off-strip. Take a few people with you that sounds like a keith law recommendation really good thai food enjoy a nice thai meal and you'll by the time you like adjust for the cost you're going to spend the same that you would

have spent eating it guy fieri's donkey sauce shack so you might as well go have a good meal you know it's donkey shack all right all right let's get to down to business i guess down to business indeed so for the last 24 hours now recording this around three o'clock eastern on tuesday the astros and the sign stealing scandal has just dominated the sports news cycle and you know we're not going to sit here and put the asterisk by World Series titles and go down that rabbit hole. I want to take a really kind of practical forward-looking approach, as practical as we can be anyway, thinking about the Astros in 2020. Because on the Under the Radar

podcast last week, our colleague Ian Kahn said, every Astro is off my board. He was referring to the hitters, and the added context there was he doesn't think that the hitters will be as effective without the sign-stealing system in place. And I think it's really difficult to assess a situation like this from a performance standpoint. You want to take something away, potentially, from the Houston hitters, but it's hard to decide how much that would be. And I think one of the examples that came up last week was George Springer. Springer's coming off of a career best season anyway. And even if there was nothing like this as an undertone, we'd still look at Springer and say, okay, he's probably not doing what he did in 2019 again. There'd be some regression there anyway.

So how do you start to approach Houston hitters knowing what we know and just trying to account for help that they presumably have had at various points throughout the last few years? You know, I see a corollary here with steroids. And I'm not talking sort of morally but i'm talking about in terms of the difficulty the difficulty in studying the the issue so you know i remember five six seven years ago i remember you know sort of vaguely trying to look at steroid hitters coming back off of suspensions you know and you know do they do just as as well when they come back and you know i think my my answer was yeah yeah they do just as well when they come back and the the underlying problem is when did they start cheating and when did

they stop cheating and did they ever stop cheating and and that's separate from how much does the cheating help, which are almost unknowable, I think. I think in both cases, I think that the general consensus is right, which is they help a little. If you think about, there's a couple ways in on this. If you think about 3-0 counts, what's special about 3-0 counts? You kind of know what's coming. You know? You know it's going to be in the zone, and you know it's probably going to be a fastball.

So, hitters hit better on 3-0 counts. Boom. We also know that pitchers, if they add another pitch, even if it's not a good pitch, it helps with their third time through the order penalty. And why would that be? If it's not a good pitch, it helps with their third time through the order penalty. And why would that be? If it's not a good pitch, the reason is there's another wrinkle of they don't know what's coming.

So those two ways in, I think are sort of unassailable when it comes to how knowing it helps and whether or not it's distracting, you know, and, and I think that, you know, so I did do this where I distracting um you know and and i think that you know so i did do this where i like you know okay the astros in 2017 playoffs uh actually were out hit by the dodgers you know the dodgers had a better batting average better on base percentage better sucking percentage

which is weird unless you realize that logan Logan Morrison just said that the Dodgers were cheating too. Yeah, for about 20 minutes, right? And then that post was deleted. But it was out there for a little while, and people screen grabbed it, and it made the rounds. Yeah. So looking at the actual numbers, and I've seen people try to do home away stuff. Yeah, okay, Alex Bregman at home last year was 50% better than league average. Well, guess what?

Away from home, Alex Bregman is a career 50% better than league average with a bat. Last year was 86% better than league average away from home. He hit 315, 446, 663 away from home. So I don't think looking at actual numbers is going to really like actual results on the field is really going to give you that aha moment where you're like, Oh, look, I spotted the cheating. Um, and, uh, and so because that is so difficult to hit, to nail down, I'm going to believe the projections. I mean, the one nice thing about the Astros is they're mostly veterans. So in terms of, you know, breakouts, I think most of their breakouts are behind them. So yeah, fade them because they're getting old. Fade them because they don't really have that much upside on the hitting side anymore, other than maybe Kyle Tucker and Alvarez. He kind of hit the ground running.

I don't know how much more upside he's got. But in terms of the established guys that we're talking about, yeah, fade them because they're old. Don't fade them because uh this cheating scandal yeah i think that's more in line with just how i approached the game anyway and i think the the comparison to the steroid situation is is a fair one again from a performance and not being able to really separate the influence or the impact of those drugs on the final lines. You just can't quite figure it out for all the reasons that you mentioned. So you look at these guys and say, okay, I'm not paying top dollar for George Springer because he's priced up more than he probably should be. I mean, Springer is ADPs like 46, for example. You look at Michael Brantley,

I mean, Springer's ADP is like 46, for example. You look at Michael Brantley, 128. Kyle Tucker, 139. Tucker, as you said, is the one guy that still has this high upside to reach. I look at this group and I'm like, this is still going to be a good offense. These were very good or possibly great players that may have had some help. They're still very good or great players going forward. I just don't think things are that different for them looking ahead to 2020. I struggle with that. I don't think I'm fading them. Bregman in particular is, you know, I think he's fascinating because his stack cast

numbers that, you know, we talked about this a little off air, his stack cast numbers are not amazing, but he also strikes me as very Jed Lowry-esque in that he knows what he can do, and he does it really well. I might be a little bit more worried about Bregman on another team than I am coming into this year because he's a little bit like where Dozier used to hit those home runs. Brian Dozier used to hit all of his home runs to one part of the park in Minnesota when he hit 50 home runs or whatever. There's a little bit of that going on with Bregman he pulls a lot of his homers into the uh into the crawfish boxes or whatever the craw crawford boxes that's right although I kind of like might call them the crawfish box but uh but but at the same time he hit uh 25 homers on the road last year so it's not it's not all a function of that.

But in terms of what he does is he knows the zone. He knows what he can do, what pitches he can do damage on, and he pretty much only swings at those pitches. So that's why his walk rate has been better than his strikeout rate for his career. Not first career, but for the last two years. And I think that's his particular brilliance, his contact, extreme plate discipline, and enough power to make that work. I do not regret trading Javier Baez for Alex Bregman.

No, I don't think you should. It's similar to the Springer situation where he jumped from 31 homers in 2018 to 41 in 2019. I wasn't expecting him to hit 40 again in 2020 anyway. I was expecting high 20s, low 30s. Now we have the complication of the ball, right? Right, yeah. The baseball is also the other thing that we still don't know. We can guess, but every season's like that, though, right? That was something that i

think you had from a bill james tweet i mean we every season's gonna be unique could be a hitter year could be a pitcher year the ball can change at any time maybe not as extreme as it was from 18 to 19 but it could change back could be balls that we saw prior to 2019 it's just one of these things like we just don't know. Like, and I think it's frustrating to say that, but it's the simple truth. Yeah. And all that we can do, I think, is sort of trust the projections and then work off of them.

And the way that we work off of them, and that sort of may help us transition to the bounce back piece because, you know, I used Steamer to find the five biggest bounce back players in terms of Winslow replacement. And, you know, each of them sort of brought up an issue that is not necessarily in the projections. So projections have to work. They're almost like being the paper of record or something. They almost have to be centrist. They have to give us the most likely outcome, and they can't just take whatever new is finding that Alex Chamberlain or Jeff Zimmerman or any of us come up with. They can't just zip that in unless they've sort of vetted it

and given it time, and maybe some other people, the industry has vetted it. So they're going to be a little bit slower than any of us can be when we read these new findings from everybody, you know? And so, you know, for example, barrels, we know now that barrels are probably the best stat cast stat in terms of their best and small samples and their stickiest year to year. And they, they're correlate best with power numbers so you know barrel rate really good not in any projection systems not in a single one

of them you know uh they have some of the projection since most of the projection systems now have like sort of raw exit velocity in there uh but in terms of slicing up the launch angle and doing something like barrels not in there so when you look at Vlad Guerrero, for example, he's got a really bad barrel rate, but really good exit velocity, and he's young. So when you look at that projection, it's a nice projection in and of itself. But because it's not the most stable projection, because he's young, he doesn't have a long track record, you can play with that a little bit more in your mind, I think. You can say, oh, well, I believe this, or I don't believe that, or I think he'll lift it, or whatever. You can work on that, and you might be able to do

better than the projection system, the raw projection system, because you will be considering his barrel rate, and the projection system won't be. So there are things that we can learn, and we can learn faster than production systems but the one reason that like what the astros are saying is like most these guys have a really long track record you know most of these guys have thousands of plate appearances where you know their projection is i wouldn't go that far off of it you know what i mean it's just why you know what what do you what are you you're saying're saying that George Springer cheated his way to 160 homers since 2015? I don't think so.

Right. It doesn't add up. It's like he probably hit 135 or 140 of those on his own, if not more. Yeah, exactly. Without that extra help. Like, yeah, the extra help mattered, but it probably didn't matter as much as you might think when you're mad about it and trying to account for it. Exactly. But the Vlad Jr. thing is really interesting.

Again, he's one of the guys you wrote up in the piece, but I'm looking back at his ground ball rates as a prospect, and they were higher than I remembered. I'm sure I looked at it at some point on his way through the Blue Jays system. The best we really saw from him outside of rookie ball was double A in 2018. He had a 39.4% ground ball rate, but the 30 games he was at AAA in 2018, he was up at 47%. He's at 49.6% last season as a rookie with the Jays, 48.1% for the hot minute he was at AAA. You look back to even high A, 48.6% ground ball rate there over a 48-game stretch, and then 46.8% in the Midwest League back in 2017. So this has been part of his profile for a while. It made me think about Christian Jelic as a hitter,

where if you look back at Christian Jelic's launch angles from 2015 to 2018, he was at 0, 2.5, 4.7, and 4.7 again. He had a freaking 4.7 degree launch angle in 2018 when he did what he did. That's bananas, right? He jumped up to 11.2 in 2019. I think we knew for a long time that Christian Jelic was a very good hitter. I think that was always part of his profile, going back to his time as a prospect, early in his career with the Marlins,

and then that added power that finally came in the last couple of years was probably more than anybody would have expected. But I think you can see those big jumps in launch angle. And that's ultimately what a breakout is, kind of reverse engineering it. So when you think about Vlad Jr., I mean, you just have to be fixated more on the tool or the skill of hitting the ball very hard and having such a great hit tool, being able to hit pretty much everything. It's the combination of low strikeout rate and high

average exit velocity and believing that he's a good enough hitter to make the necessary adjustments to get the ball in the air more often. Yeah, yeah. And I think I'm really excited about him, actually. If you look at what he did just in his first year, an 18% strikeout rate and above average ISO.

And we're not even talking exit velocity barrels. We're just talking about combining power with a good strikeout rate. And the list of people with that sort of combination is just really exciting to me. Jose Ramirez, Alex Bregman, Anthony Rizzo, Nolan Arenado, Mookie Betts, and even Eddie Rosario, Ozzie Albies, Starling Marte, Cody Bellinger, Charlie Blackman. These are all the guys that had less than an 18% strikeout rate and above average power.

It's a great list, and he's already on that, and he's only 20 years old. So I know that the barrel part is not good. He really sticks out like a sore thumb. If you look at max exit velocity, the guys around him all lift the ball better. But, you know, if you combine that with his age at 20, and, you know, I do agree that there's some comps there

for some legendary hitters. I think, like, especially compared to some of the people around him in drafts, I'm excited about him. I think he has a real chance to up his launch angle a little bit. In other words, what he's done has been really impressive. The fact that he can even hit the ball as hard as he has without really lifting the ball is impressive, actually, in its own way so um you know i don't know i think it might be time to hit the button on that i don't know if you kept that sound drop of me from the winter meetings

would you rather i will i'll dig it up and make it a button on my keyboard this afternoon that that will definitely happen. But yeah, this is an appropriate time to play a quick round of Would You Rather. And again, we're looking at the NFBC ADPs. Vlad Jr., right around pick 56. Other third base eligible players in that range. Would you rather have, for this season only, Vlad Jr. or Eugenio Suarez? Vlad Jr. Vlad Jr. or Eugenio Suarez? Vlad Jr.

Vlad Jr. pretty easily. If you just take the projection, he's better than Suarez by two bucks. And in terms of age and general trajectory, I'd rather take the guy on the way up. So that one's easy for me, actually. Yeah, not for nothing. Suarez struck out 28.5% of the time last year. It's a pretty big jump from where he was in the previous four seasons with the Reds. Got to the power a ton and hit 49 homers, but it's kind of like the Springer concept where it's like, well, we're bringing him down anyway, just because that's an outlier, amazing home run total in a year where the ball was extremely lively.

So you bring him back down to a normal range and you expect Vlad Jr. to be probably the better source of a batting average based on the projections. Similar or equal in terms of power, despite the massive gap in 2019 and then run production should be pretty close as well. So I'm with you on that one. I understand why people would consider Suarez, but I'd prefer Vlad Jr. there as well. How about Vlad Jr. versus Manny Machado for 2020? Yeah, that one's difficult because the projection for Manny is five bucks better. Manny is five bucks better. And it takes a lot to kind of push them together.

Manny has been just so steady. And what was weird was he just didn't get the same boost, home run boost that everybody else got last year. But there was a little bit of work done by Alex Chamberlain on something called deserved barrel rate. And I'm pretty sure that Manny under, what is it, like he underperformed on his barrels basically. Right, he deserved more barrels than he had. Yes, that's it.

And you can see that it was weird. His worst ISO in five years at a time when the ball was just going nuts. So I have a feeling that there will be a little bit of bounce back this next year in terms of his swing and his reach rates and swing rates. He didn't look like he was really pressing, but pressing can show itself in other ways. And I think he'll have a bounce back he'll steal more bases than vladdy vladdy will have better batting average but it

won't be uh like sort of i don't think that manny will hit 250 again um so i think i'm taking manny uh but i don't think if I was in a draft that I would slap the table and decry somebody for deciding that they wanted Vlad over Manny. Personally, I think I would take Manny.

I might be a little, again, in this tier, a little low on Manny. The more I think about it, it's like if we're going to regress Eugenio Suarez back to his reality, we should be regressing Manny Machado back up to his. I think there's a better profile there. So I think there's some recency bias

in the initial ranks for me where Suarez has that edge over Vlad. I think the more I look at it, I'm probably Machado over Suarez, but Vlad over Machado with that difference being next to nothing. And I think, yeah, you can certainly argue Machado over Vlad pretty easily. Last one from this bunch, Vlad Jr. or Chris Bryant for 2020? Here, the projections are pretty close.

17 for Vlad, 15 and a half for, I mean, 15 and a half for Vlad, Chris Bryant's 17. But I have to say, I don't think that Bryant has ever really been the same since his shoulder injury. It's kind of funny to say that after he hit 280 or 30 homers last year. Yeah, he's been getting dinged by the draft market, I guess we'll call it, just the way he's been handled. I think people are right to be skeptical, but one thing that stands out to me

when you look at other players near the top of the third base list, if you look at average exit velocity, 87.4 last year for Chris Bryant. That's what I'm talking about. That's low. I mean, like Bregman, who we just said earlier, is pretty low for an elite hitter.

89.3, Noel Arenado, 89.5, Rendon, 90.4, Rafael Devers, 92. The guys in this group, Suarez, 89.6, Vlad Jr., 89.3. I mean, he stands out. Like there's light red and deeper shades of red on my screen. And then I see this blue box and chris bryant with average exit velocity so i think there is definitely some concern that he's just not quite the same player that he was uh power wise a few years back yeah there's some evidence that just exit velocity just just goes away like it just over time goes away you know and there is no aging curve it's a

it's a straight line down um and so you pair that with uh you know there was a piece that jeff zimmerman just recently wrote that showed that um like sort of projections become less useful after a player turns like 31 32 um because uh uh that like bounce back projections uh miss their mark more often when they're 31 or 32 meaning you know the aging curve may not be uh 100 airtight on some of these projection systems and And so I know Chris Bryant is not 31 or 32 yet. He's 28. But you look at his personal exit velocity aging curve and you think about how the league is going young and you don't want to get out in front of yourself

and pick somebody who's never played in the big leagues over Chris Bryant. That would be pretty aggressive. But given that Vlad was pretty good last year and is going to play all year and is eight years younger, I'm convinced. And that's how I think we can improve on the projections. We know that it's possible the projection systems don't have an aggressive enough aging curve. And we're talking about a $2 difference or less than $2 difference. There, I think, we can make better decisions sometimes

than just trusting the projections. Yeah, I think injuries are fascinating for so many reasons. A lot of times you get more of a discount, especially with hitters, than you probably should. And then in other cases, I don't know if it's the elite track record, but you don't get enough of a discount. People keep pushing a player higher than he should go. But generally, the injury discount on hitters, to me, seems like it is worth taking. Like the risk maybe gets overestimated and the price overcorrects.

Bryant just looks like a relative outlier in that class of player. You know, it is interesting because he hasn't, he's played, right? So, you know, you're like, well, he's playing. He's out of, you know, four out of five years, he's had 630 plus plate appearances so he's played it's just that the quality of play has gone down um and yet you know

he's still you know 30 better than the average every year but still i see enough of to worry me and uh enough in the lab to really excite me. Yeah, I think you're right, though, that people, the injury thing is a source of opportunity and risk at the same time because you look at someone like Brantley. I thought his ankle, I thought he was done. He had some really bad ankle injury in Cleveland, maybe a year or two before he left Cleveland. I didn't think he'd come back for that last year in Cleveland.

Then he came back and had a great year. Then he signed with the Astros. He had a great year. Every year, he's gone for less than he's been worth at the end of the year. It's like, we're still talking about the ankle? It seems like it's okay.

Okay. Yeah, he's, at this point, is there, you know, slightly more injury risk with Brantley than other players in that range and other corner outfielders close to his age? Yeah, he's had a couple devastating injuries that would seemingly make him more susceptible

to another devastating injury, but I don't think that risk is being appropriately priced. It certainly wasn't last year, but it still seems like he's really affordable. I look at where Brantley goes. He's outside the top 100 overall in terms of NFBC ADP. I want Michael Brantley on as many teams as possible at that price. Yeah, really good batting average, 20, 25 homers, totally all in there. But when people talk about risk, Jeff Zimmerman has been tweeting about this recently,

and when people talk about risk, I don't think that we've really refined the way that we talk about risk. I don't think that we've really refined the way that we talk about risk. Like, I don't think that we necessarily always talk about it in the right way. Yes, you know, risk, yes, every pick is risky in some way. And risk, the flip side of risk is opportunity. And there's just always a relationship between the two. That's why I like the saying, every player has the right price,

because if everyone's going to be out on Stanton and he's a fourth-round pick, please give him to me. He still has amazing upside. That is absolutely still part of the skills that Giancarlo Stanton brings to the table. Hitter-friendly environment, loaded lineup. It's a question of health again. To me, it's not a question of skills really at all. It's all on health.

And he's a little bit more like a Bryant where the discounts aren't quite as steep but some of the guys you wrote about like Chris Davis wasn't crush a top 50 ADP guy last year for the first time like fine I think we finally pushed him up there last year at this time we're kind of being like no we we're not going to pay that price for him yeah it's it's it's exactly where Eugenio Suarez is right now it's like i liked eugenio suarez last year i liked him a lot two years ago because i think two years ago was the year he was just outside the top 150 we knew he had a job to call his own it's a park that boosts up homers the lineup was pretty good it was easy to see the room for profit there and then it starts

to go away when the market pushes the player up too high. I mean, it doesn't mean I don't like the player. It just means I don't like the player at the price. Yeah. And to our point that sometimes research moves very fast, I did cite some research in that piece that maybe has been proven wrong in the week that's gone since. Because, you know, we've been trying to study the effect of injury on projections, like the relationship between injury and projections. And we've been just talking about it on this podcast. And Chris Davis was obviously injured last year,

and I think that was the biggest part of his loss of production is the hip injury. You can see a real sharp decline in his exit velocity. And even when when he came back he didn't get the big peaks that he used to and i think he just got all messed up and if you look mechanically like he was uh doing different things with his hands in the second half of the year he was basically i think trying to uh compensate for some weakness in the hip and so he got all messed, you know, if he gets all that right again, he's fine. He's, you know, locked for 40 homers and a.247 batting average. But one thing that came out this week, and Jeff Zimmerman again, I love his research, he showed that injury is bad.

Injury is mostly bad for the future. The projections may miss. If you're talking about a 25-year-old that played through injury last year and is going to be totally fine this coming year, then a projection might miss on them a little bit. But a 32-year-old coming off a hip injury, it's best to trust the projections or even the player might be worse than that. So my back of the napkin for Chris Davis is probably more like a 240 batting average and 35 homers and

some missed time but still a really good player and the price is cratered so i think it's still very much like an individual case sort of thing where if the price falls enough with the right skills having some optimism or taking the chance taking that that risk on makes sense. I think Chris Davis falls into the, it makes sense to take the chance bucket when it comes to injury risk at his price for 2020. Yeah. Yeah. And back when the ball was not juiced and he was young, so there's a lot of moving parts here, but even back when the ball was not juiced in 2014 for the Brewers,

he hit what in a full season would amount to 247 and 25, 28 homers. So if the ball is de-juiced crazy far, he's still going to have power um and he might actually become more useful as as you know the ball the ball uh it changes again but i i i doubt that the ball gets completely deduced even the ball that was being used in the playoffs may have been like a 2018 ball you know 2018 chris davis had 48 homers you know there were a lot of homers in 2018. So I think we may, if we regress, we regress to sort of 2018 levels and not like 2014.

There was another question or idea that kind of popped up as I was reading the piece that you wrote last week. And it pertains to Michael Franco, but it, it's broadly applied to plenty of other players. I was working on something for the draft kit, and it's a piece that looks at some interesting late darts. And one of the questions I've started to think about more in the last couple of weeks, I've thought about it before, is how much does pedigree matter when you're throwing late darts. The idea that a player was supposed to be good or very good in the eyes of many talent evaluators. Eventually, a player like Michael Franco disappoints people enough times,

falls way outside the top 200 overall like he has this season. He's sitting with an ADP of 460. He probably has an everyday job to call his own in Kansas City. He doesn't strike out that much. This is a Kansas City organization that turned Jorge Soler and Hunter Dozier into very useful power hitters

as key pieces in their lineup a year ago. How much does pedigree play into it when you're looking to throw either late darts or even just looking at bounce-back players that maybe haven't met expectations yet yeah there's a there's a there's like a relationship between pedigree and number of years of sucking you get more chances when you have a pedigree right but also

the then if the number of years of sucking is large, it overshadows the pedigree. I want to look at Alex Gordon's page for a second. Fitting that it's another Royal. Right, but also remember he was a great prospect, right? Yeah. He's supposed to be kind of a can't miss yeah good quickly sort of player oh just check this out 2006 320 in double a 325 with a 430 obp 29 homers and 22 stolen bases whoo that is lovely and 2007 247 batting average 3 314 OBP, 15 homers, 14 stolen bases.

Not a bad player. No, that's actually pretty good for a guy who skipped AAA as a rookie to come in and put up those numbers. That's not a bad season. And he played good defense, so the Franco thing is not really the same. And he played good defense, so the Franco thing is not really the same. But then the next year, 260, 16 homers, the defense went away. So why did they send him down this year? 2009, ah, 2009, 232 batting average.

Still had a good OBP. The power was gone. The power was gone, and I think they were souring on him as a third baseman. And then 2010, 2015, 315, the power's gone again, and he's no longer a third baseman. But he comes roaring back, you know. But my point is here, two years of bad, two years of okay, two years of bad, and then in the fifth year we got a really good scoring season.

So two years of good. Franco had, I would say, two or three years of okay. From 2016 to 2018, he hit like 260 with 25 homers a year. Right. Because he's below average defensively most years, that pulls down the overall value a little bit. It doesn't perfectly line up. OAA really hated him.

Yeah, but he's one of these guys that doesn't strike out a lot, and he hits the ball pretty hard. Even if he didn't have any pedigree or any prospect hype at all, he'd come up as an interesting player, especially when the price is next to nothing. It's true. I have these fairly close with some people in Philly's Twitter, and they're not into him.

I would say that one piece of opportunity here in terms of projections is that the projections for some reason only have him playing 450 plate appearances and that's a little bit weird because he's a right hander and as a right hander i think he either plays 600 or 300 you know what i mean yeah it's not like 460 is just a weird place to put him. I guess that's sort of if you average the two. But I think there is a possibility he plays for 600 play appearances because, as you say, the Royals, I think, are going to maybe play Dozier at first.

That's what I think they should do. I don't think you can play Ryan O'Hearn every day or anything close to that. Yeah, I think you'd rather see what you have in Franco. And Dozier's a righty, so you're not platooning Dozier and Franco. Nope. They're moving Whit Merrifield to the outfield,

so you're going to go Mondesi and Lopez up the middle so Merrifield's in center Dozier I guess could play right because you're going to probably DH Solaire so that's an option too if you really want to play O'Hearn if you want to sign some lefty and also because your left field situation is death it's so bad

Brett Phillips and Boba Starling Brett Phillips is hitting the ball like 84 miles an hour or something i love that dude feel bad to say i i brett phillips is is like he seems like a really good dude i just i feel he he like remembered me from uh some afl interview we did that was just the afl interview itself i think it's on my Facebook page. It was just laughing, all of us laughing the whole time. And he saw me, and even though he's in the middle of a terrible season,

he's laughing, and he's asking me about my job and what life is like. And he knows that I've changed jobs. And we start talking about the K-Vest, and he's like, I need to look into this. And I talk about the K-Vest with a bunch of other people, and maybe apparently Joey Votto went out and bought some K-Vest after we talked. But most of the other people are like, what are you talking about, dude? No, I'm not going to wear that.

But Brett was like, to to their credit younger players more and more of them are doing it but um you know so it'd be funny if brett phillips has just spent the off season figuring it out and comes back and is it makes good on some of his promise but him and bubba starling is uh that is just straight death so um yeah think Dozier's going to play in the outfield. I guess if you think about it from their perspective, you want to be super cheap and not spend money, and you've got Phillips as this guy that has nothing left to prove in the minors. Starling, why would you even send him back at this point?

Oh, yeah. You invested a lot in him. Platoon him. Let those two guys be your starting left fielder. Platoon them and hit them ninth and just see if one or either of both of them figure it out. What's the downside to that? Yeah. It's just this team, man.

What are they doing? What are they doing? What are they doing? They're not developing pitching. What are they doing? They're not developing pitching. Even the pitchers that they do develop, like Junis and Keller, they're just like, meh.

They're just, okay, congratulations. You created two fifth starters. They won the World Series four years ago. It's crazy to me. When I look at this roster, I see no – the only thing that i see is like a team it's almost like baltimore orioles right now which is bad because the royals have had a few years to rebuild they shouldn't be where the baltimore orioles are they shouldn't be you know playing rule five guys and playing you know terrible prospects just to see if maybe one of them has something left you know yeah i see like a little more of like a like a pirate big league roster but i think

do the pirates have a better farm system though like that's the yes i think that's the that's the key difference they got o'neill cruz man they got like a seven foot tall fire breathing shortstop he'd be so good and pick up basketball, too. It's always helpful to have that guy in short. I want him on my team. Yeah, so anyway, I don't know. We got off track there. We were talking about Franco. I think, yes, but I would say that Franco

is kind of a monoleague play for me because at this point, everyone's hitting 20 homers. Freddie Galvis is hitting 20 homers. You don't want to draft a guy that's projected to hit 20 homers freddie galvis is hitting 20 homers you don't want to draft a guy that's projected to hit 20 homers in a 12 to 15 team league i don't think but in a monolig yeah sure there's i i could he might end up on my labor squad or something you know yeah he fits there he fits in draft and hold he's he's more of a watch sort of player in more traditional mixed leagues in case he ends up sticking in the middle third of the order and then kind of pushing that plate appearance total in the direction of 600 depending

on how all the pieces come together maybe they add a veteran late and and that kind of creates a little more of a competition for playing time but as they line up right now i think he's going to play a lot he puts a lot of balls in play There's a few other righties there that have had late breakouts after people kind of gave up on him. And at this price, I'm okay with taking that shot on Michael Franco. Some interesting mailbag questions that came in this week. The first one is about draft and hold, but it's a broader question that Daniel sent us. He's wondering if in draft and hold, if you should actually have more of like a flipped sort of approach instead of the typical 60-40 split that you see

people use 60% of your budget or your draft capital going to hitters, 40% going to pitchers. Should it be flipped because of the format and not being able to go in and get pop-up pitchers on the waiver wire. Because in Drafted Hold, of course, there are no in-season moves. This was inspired by a 50-round league he was in, in which one of the owners did not take their first pitcher until round 14. So it's just kind of an extreme in the other direction. Got Daniel thinking about this. What do you think about that split in general? You know, the 60-40 or 65-35 or 67-33?

How do you usually approach it when most leagues have 14 hitters and nine pitchers in their starting lineup? I mean, I always skew hitter, and hitter projections are better year to year, and so they're easier to build on. There are more hitter lineup spots in most leagues. So I definitely skew hitter. I think this is an interesting question with Dravenhold in particular. My sense is that I would personally really want to hit the quantity button more than necessarily the quality button in a draft and hold because there's no waiver wire

acquisition so you have to basically do all your waiver work in the draft so yeah i would want an ace i think i may not do the thing where i waited to the 14th round or whatever but if i was the in the draft. So, yeah, I would want an ace, I think. I may not do the thing where I waited to the 14th round or whatever, but if I was the 14th round guy, then I would go nuts on pitching for a long time in the middle of the draft. And I would want my roster to be,

you know, 60% pitching. So roster construction flips even if the use of the picks doesn't fluctuate as much for you. Well generally I like to have my bench be mostly pitching for the same reason. It's not necessarily flipping the roster construction it's like pushing it to the extreme. I think in a draft and hold I would have more pitchers per roster spot

than I would have in almost any other setup yeah i think that's in line with what i've done the last few years in that format it's not it's still not quite 50 50 like i still i still think i actually i think i do go a little more heavy with pitching so it's not totally balanced but it's for that exact reason it's just knowing that hey you know what having some relievers who are high leverage relievers and having some guys that are bulk relievers to start the season that could become starters, you might plug those guys in because you know they at least have a big league role. It's more like a monoleague strategy where you're looking for playing time. You're looking for innings. You're looking for plate appearances just to make sure you're not taking

zeros as injury attrition and demotions gradually whittle away at your available players over the course of the year. For sure. For sure. Then, like I said, like I think my waiver work, yes,

there, there are hitters, you know, that are important and that's usually short bench leagues i think the longer your bench is the fewer hitters you require during the season that matter you know i think it's like mostly pitching that you find on the waiver uh you know close saves and and and starting pitchers that you find on the waiver wire so you know as the bench gets shorter yes then you have to do more hitting stuff but um you know with those 50s there's a lot of roster spots so i would definitely have a ton of pitching i think the other thing i try to do in that format i try

to make sure i've got ample cover with either multi-position eligible players or just depth to cover three, basically three deep at every position at a minimum. So again, the multi-eligible guys are extremely valuable or guys that will pick up eligibility in season. You kind of know who's going to move around like 20 from the previous season is a pretty high bar to clear. So a lot of players only have two or three spots where you can use them, but they might pick up one or two additional spots as the season goes on. You might have some guys who are only available at one spot now that finish with four spots where you can play them by season's end. So I think trying to find players like that among your hitters

will open up those extra roster spots for more pitchers if you want to get closer to like a 60-40 pitcher-hitter split, I think I end up a little more like 55-45 or even just a tick past 50-50 when I look at how those rosters have been built. Thanks a lot for the question, Daniel. I've got another question here from Ryan. He writes, hey guys, following the advice of Under the Radar last year, I went ahead and traded for Shohei Otani, who's a hitter only in a 16-team

6x6 5-keeper league. You guys just talked about Otani's appeal as a multi-position player in some leagues, but I'm curious in your thoughts on him as a hitter only. I'm planning on keeping Trey Turner, Alex Bregman, Ozzie Albies, and then two out of these three, Otani, Joe Adele, and Matt Olsen. What are your thoughts? So, yeah, Turner, Bregman, Albies, no pushback on that. You definitely want to keep those guys. I think it comes down to Otani versus Adele for the last spot. And this is, again, this is a keep five, 16-team league,

so 80 players are kept. So you're keeping Olson? I'm keeping Olson. I think Matt Olson's a top 50 player i just extremely high floor the batting average is the one category where he can lag but i don't think he's a juice ball power guy i think he's legit 40 home run power guy in that lineup so 25 he's in for me i i totally understand the desire to keep a player like adele though because relative to the pool and we talked about him i think last week too like we know we know it might not be an immediate payoff from joe adele like he had some issues at triple a

probably get to wait a couple of weeks before he's up of course this year gonna take some time to potentially adjust to big league pitching. It's that long-term value and the things he does as a potential five-category player that make him stand out here. So it is a question of future value versus present value, I guess, that could swing Adele back in there instead of Olsen. First part of the question, is Otani a lock to be kept for you in that league where he's a hitter only?

You know, I didn't see in his details if it was daily or not. Yeah, that was not included as part of the message. If it's a daily league, I think he's definitely a keeper because you can get somebody else in there. If it's a weekly league, that does

get tougher because you have to think about him as about a four games per week hitter most weeks, factoring in a rest day or possibly two rest days and then a start day for him as a pitcher if everything holds up as it is currently structured. So in daily, absolutely. Let's assume weekly for a moment. In a weekly league, do you want to hold hitter-only Otani? Might go Adele there.

Just a bit of a headache. But in a daily league, what are we talking about with upside for Joe Adele? what are we talking about with upside for Joe Adele? Otani, if, if he got 650 plate appearances would be a guy who you'd expect to hit two 80 with 32 homers and 15 stolen bases. Like,

and we're not talking, I'm not, I'm not talking like pie in the sky, like just prorate what he did in the past. And, and do we think that I'm excited talking like pie in the sky. Just prorate what he did in the past. I'm excited about Adele, but are we sure that Adele is going to do better than that? What part is he going to do better than? What's his strikeout rate going to be?

I think the volume of playing time is the problem that we've always come back to with Otani. Adele could beat him in playing time by 200 plate appearances in typical years. And again, the plan with Otani could change. They could eventually just say, it's not worth it to have you be a two-way player. Be one of the best hitters in the league and get your 650 plate appearances. And if that happens, then it's really hard. Or what I i would do and this is not necessarily what the angels are going to do because they need starting pitching but this his the career arc for otani may uh go in the direction

which college two-way players do normally which is they're a hitter and a closer. It seems so much more manageable. So much more manageable. To fully maximize him and to have him available as much as possible. And his skill set actually, in some ways, predicts that because he has

bottom shelf command plus. And I know that you Darvish has and he's made it work and and so yes maybe otani can too but you know if you've watched otani pitch like you know that he doesn't have great command so what if he came out blowing 99 you know with either one of his secondary pitches and maybe fewer of them. You know what I mean? I think he'd be a great closer.

Of course, they're going to use him as a starter in the short term, but this is relevant if you own him. I would say that he's maybe in some ways more bankable as a hitter long term. Yeah, so here's what I would do. I would keep Otani and Adele, even though I think Olsen might be a more valuable hitter than both of them for this year. Because one of the things Ryan pointed out,

he wrote, I'm in a rebuilding mode, having traded my first three picks for this year's draft, so I'm leaning Adele and Otani. I think that's the right way to go. Yeah, I can see that. Because if you're missing early picks, you're not going to be able to supplement that core.

Olsen's probably a top 50 type player, but also, is he more than that? Is he ever going to be a top 10 type player? I don't think so with that strikeout rate. Just in the way that he works. He's bordering on extreme fly ball.

So, I think he's more like Chris Davis- davis-esque maybe not 247 batting i was maybe a little bit better but that sort of deal where it's and better obp probably but you know that sort of deal where it's not a great batting average a lot of power year in year out but you know that's for rebuilding squad i squad, I could see leaving that off. Yeah, play the long game. Go Otani and Adele and go for the upside in this case. Because, again, I think Olsen might be an easier player to find in the pool.

Yeah, he'll never, like, Olsen will never steal five bases in a season and probably never hit 280 even. Yeah, I'm with you there. Thanks for the email, Ryan. We've got another email here. This one's from John. He writes, hey, Yinz guys. Hope you had a great New Year in DVR. Hope your home has been free of adjacent garbage fires.

Yeah, fun fact. There were three deer running through that exact same intersection where the on-fire garbage truck was. Much nicer than a garbage fire. Much better start to 2020 than we had for an ending for 2019. First off, a blatant thank you for all your work last season. I was a regular listener from day one. This podcast helped me make my first push into the playoffs

with the division championship in my head-to-head keeper league. Unfortunately, Wade Miley ruined everything, but that's the nature of head-to-head. Anyway, quick question for you in regard to the Rendon signing in Anaheim. Do you worry at all about him falling victim to the first year after a monster contract syndrome? I think that's part of the smart system we've talked about before that Rick Wolfe and Glenn Colton have put together over the years.

They don't really use players or draft players coming off of a big contract like that. Or do his skills and likely batting behind Mike Trout make you forget about all that? Thanks, and here's to an exciting 2020. Cheers, John from Pittsburgh. If you didn't know where John was from based on the Hey Yins guy, I had to clear that up for you. I think we touched on this philosophy that Rick and Glenn have put out there before, and they've had a ton of success winning a lot of industry leagues over the past two decades.

I think you wrote about this at the beginning of last year. That's when it came up, right? Players reaching a bit more on the heels of signing monster contracts. You had a piece about Harper and Machado and some other players, right? Yeah. Pressing. Um,

you know, this is a little bit outside the numbers, but starts with the numbers a little bit. I, this guy is a, is a, is a, is a metronome,

you know, and I have never seen him stressed out, you know, he is just relaxed. Like, um, and the, what's in the numbers is he's just never had a reach rate that was anything

close to the average, you know, uh, he's, he's's he's very disciplined at the plate and uh his swing rate has just mostly gone down with time so i think that their system is right for the wrong reasons in a way um which is i think that mostly what they're capturing with that idea is that players sign big contracts off of peak years and are also old. Right. It's like when you break down the reasoning behind it,

the reasoning is something you can completely get behind. Yeah. I don't think it's the contract. It's not the money or the pressure leading the charge for them to say, oh, these guys can't handle the pressure. I don't think that's the point of their system. I think it's a, hey, these players are, yes, old and coming off of big years. And relatively speaking, yeah, Anthony Rendon is going to be, what, 30 in June?

Yeah, he'll be 30 in June. He just had his career best season in terms of home runs with 34, average at 319, RBIs at 126, runs at 117. I think this was a normal Anthony Rendon year. He walked a little bit more, which was nice. And it was the live baseball that just pushed those numbers up for everybody. He just caught that like everybody else did. So I don't think a whole lot has changed for Anthony Rendon and his profile. I think he's being drafted on the strength of his career best numbers, which are repeatable but unlikely to repeat.

If you could pay for 325 homers, then pay for that. Right. I don't think I want to draft him in the middle of round two, if that's what it's going to take to get him. He really doesn't steal bases. I guess if you look at Freddie Freeman, year over year, 300 average, low to mid-20s power, flashes up into the 30s, in a live ball year gets up to 38.

They're probably more similar than their historical adps would lead you to believe so maybe the market has been wrong about rendon two or three years running but you know uh for what it's worth freeman hit more homers in the non-juiced years right that's i mean but in terms of like the type of player they are that's yes that's sort of like the best case scenario i agree on that but i agree that there are similar players and i guess if people think that they're second rounders it's fine they're i think they're very projectable i think they're keep the batting average high i think one of the things in 12 team and 15 team leagues you have to do is keep your batting average high because once you lose that, you kind of are behind the game.

In mono leagues and the very deepest leagues, I think it's a different story because it's almost like head-to-head where you kind of almost want to punt a category. But when it comes to shallower leagues, they're great. I would actually go back to my meat and potatoes. They are meat and potatoes because they're rock solid. Year in and year out, they're good.

I don't really have a complaint. I think he can make sense for a second rounder. Myself, just to have a nice, highly projectable guy who's going to hit homers and have a high batting average, fine, I'll take it. Yeah, you're not going to lose if you do take him at 20. That's a normal year, that is. If he gets hurt or something, that could screw you.

There's no big marker. If Miguel Sano had a big year at 29 but still struck out 26%, 27% of of the time um and his adp you know went through the roof i would be saying hey you know this guy doesn't make a lot of contact he's 29 look at his body blah blah i don't have that for rendo you know he's actually the other comp just looking at third baseman he's kind of like if you said, what would Nolan Arenado be like if he didn't play half his games in Colorado? He'd be Anthony Rendon. That's the difference between the two players, I think, is the ballpark. It's like they have all the same letters in their name, too.

They pretty much do. They pretty much do. Yeah, I think they seem like very similar players, even though completely different when you watch them in the box. Yeah, you're right, though. Rendon just has that calm demeanor about him all the time. So I'm not all that worried about him as a result of the contract. I do think he's coming off what will go down as his best year of his career,

but I don't think he's going to crash back to earth and make you look stupid if you take him in the middle of round two, even though I'm probably looking for speed or an ace pitcher in that spot instead. I think he's a perfectly fine player to build a roster around. That is the one problem with both Freeman and

Arenado and Rendon is that if you're not getting speed there, you're going to have to take some chances on speed later. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Just taking chances on speed in this environment means you could really go, you could get a zero later. If you're like, oh, I'm going to take Malik Smith later. Well, congratulations.

Malik Smith lost his job in the second week of the season. Yeah. It just tests your faith in players that you maybe don't want to have quite as much riding on as you will if you didn't get speed early on. We've got one last question here. This comes from

Elliot. He writes, I just renewed for the year at the Athletic, mainly because I love listening to you guys. Thank you, Elliot. Anyways, I'm having a tough decision on my outfield keepers. The league's a 270 cap, and it can only play three outfielders, so you can keep a max of these four. You can get a max of four out of this group. Nick Castellanos at 19, George Springer at 27, Aristides Aquino at four, Austin Riley at four, Kyle Tucker at one, and Jesus Sanchez at one. All right, so six players there. He can keep four, can only play three, so keeping a younger player is fine for the value.

It's not really any problem there. It's not like, I can't play him, or how am I going to make the pieces fit sort of thing. What do you think of that group at those prices? I mean, Springer at 27 is probably a little less than his auction day price. Castellanos at 19 kind of seems like he's right on it. And then the other guys were all really cheap. So do you like those cheap guys enough to hold some of them over the more expensive players?

No. I'm usually I can usually convince myself to keep players and sometimes I keep too many players because I kind of auctions in these leagues are kind of weird and like I think of auto new a lot I think the auction is overrated and auto new because everyone does their work during the year and at the end of the year and

the auction is full of like bounce back old guys which is not a great way to build your team. You might want to get one of those, but it's not going to save your team. It's just a capper type situation. In this case, I feel ready to cut Castellanos, cut Aquino, cut Austin Riley, cut Jesus Sanchez, and keep only Springer and Tucker. And my reasoning is, you're only playing three outfielders. You need the very best.

Riley and Aquino could be fatal flaws. It might be worth seeing if they can figure those out, but that's $8. I don't know. I'd rather spend that. Castellanos, I think, just came off his peak season. And he's a Sanchez. I just don't think he has the upside. So the upside play for me is Tucker at a buck. And the veteran keeper for me is Springer at 27. And if I were going to keep a third, I think I would, I mean, I'd rather keep Austin Riley than Aquino. I think there's a better chance of him playing every day. I think his pedigree as a prospect, more importantly,

his track record as a prospect is less troublesome. With Riley, it's strike out a lot, get more time at that level, cut the K rate down. With Aquino, he was kind of this late pop-up guy at AA. I think the league kind of figured him out down the stretch they got a very crowded outfield i just see more ways for it to go wrong all things being equal in this case the price is equal between riley and aquino so i'm with the enthroned castellanos back i think springer is good enough at that price one more year at 27 i'd probably hold on to him

definitely want tucker at one but riley's the third guy for me uh i don't really think that there's a compelling fourth there for the same reasons you mentioned i think jesus sanchez might be a decent regular but i don't think he's going to be the kind of guy that in a mixed league you want to have in a league where you start three outfielders yeah true true that beer of the week is on hold for one more week it might become beer of the week is on hold for one more week. It might become beer of the month in, uh, in the 2020 version of our livers have voted. Yes.

Our livers have voted. And, uh, I think the recommendations will be a little more robust on a monthly basis than, you know, we, yeah,

because I, there's only so many times I can like recommend like a moon raker IPA or Alvarado street IPA. Like I have to sample some stuff so that I can come up with something. It's more likely I can do that on a monthly basis. Maybe you can describe players as chewy

instead of beers as chewy because people like when you say chewy. Keep that in mind as you think about the show. Austin Riley just really gets you in the molars. As always, you can reach us via email, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com. No need to do anything special in the subject line.

You can just tell us what the email is about, and that email will reach us. You can find Eno on Twitter, at Eno Saris. You can find me, at Derek Van Ryper. Eno, enjoy the rest of your time in Vegas. Don't let the plastic nature of the city drag you down too much.

Enjoy the time there. And again, Lotus of Siam, man, I'm telling you, it'll make your trip. All right, maybe that's where I'll go. I'm going to probably have dinner with Niv Shah, the creator of Otter New tonight. So maybe in the next podcast, I'll share a nugget of either strategy advice

or something coming in the auto new space. But, yeah, I think this is going to be a really fun year at the Athletic Fantasy. I think we're going to do some fun things this year. And I know we've got a couple of hires in there, and I'm looking at the draft kit right now. And this is, this is a really fun time. This is when,

you know, we've got all of our plans starting to get going or the draft kit starting to come together. And, and we're all got our, our drafts in front of us. And there's only, only hope.

It's all, it's all optimism at this point. Research goes up a lot this time of year so a lot of cool things coming up on the site you mentioned the draft kit we're just a few weeks away from that we'll talk a lot about the process behind that on our upcoming episodes as well my and my my piece for this week which i'm about to finish the research for is uh based on our conversation about danny santana and whether or not a player's war projection matters. Nice.

And I think that should be really fun. So if you're on the fence in terms of signing up for The Athletic, maybe I'll get you with that one. Yeah, definitely. If you're not already a subscriber, hit up the link. 40% off if you go to theath the athletic.com slash rates and barrels, everything we do is included with a subscription that is going to wrap things up for this episode of rates and barrels. We are back with you next week.

Thanks for listening.