Rates & Barrels - Power Outages & Mailbag Mysteries

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Eno and DVR discuss Quinn Mathews' 156-pitch complete game at Stanford, several players experiencing a downturn in power as the middle of June approaches including Tim Anderson, José Abreu, Eugenio Suárez, Kyle Tucker and Manny Machado. Plus, they answer several mailbag questions, including inquiries about Ryan Mountcastle and Bobby Miller.   Rundown 0:30 Quinn Mathews Throws 156 Pitches in College Playoff Game 6:43 A Look Back at Pitcher Abuse Points 16:01 Where Did Tim Anderson's Power Go? Will It Return? 21:21 José Abreu: Any Signs of Turnaround? 24:14 Eugenio Suárez: Summer Homer Binge Coming? 30:19 Kyle Tucker: Time to Tinker Again? 37:01 Manny Machado: Is Lost Power Entirely the Result of Injury? 42:32 Mike Trout: Zero Cause of Concern About Power? 45:37 Other Power Fallers; Fewer Reasons for Optimism 48:10 What's Up with Jeremy Peña? 55:02 Mailbag Monday: José Ramírez, Ryan Mountcastle, Bobby Miller Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at $2/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/rates and get on your way to being your best self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So let's be clear. When it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents electronically? Mm-hmm. The answer is FedEx. Okay. But what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments? How do I find all the... Also FedEx. Impressive. Is there a regulatory specialist I can ask about? FedEx. Oh. But let's say that... FedEx.

What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Monday, June 12th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we dig into some power outages.

Some players who, as the first half winds down, are still not hitting for as much power as we expected. A lot of reasons for that, but we'll try and untangle a few of the more common questions we've been getting in the mailbag. A lot of mailbag questions on this Mailbag Monday, and we begin today with something from the college baseball playoffs. Many people last night were watching the Stanford Texas game because I think it was really the last baseball of the night. That game was still running well after the time Sunday Night Baseball between the Red Sox and Yankees wrapped up. And they were concerned about the arm health of Stanford pitcher Quinn Matthews, who finished a complete game with 156 pitches, which is a boatload. And I understand why people are upset. It's a lot of pitches for any pitcher,

especially someone who's not getting paid a big league salary to throw baseball. So, you know, what should we make of this? Stanford got the win. It was to keep their season alive. I think the thing that was really troubling to me about it was just that they had a five-run lead in the ninth inning.

And there should have been one capable reliever who could have got those last three outs to take a little bit of that wear and tear off of Quinn Matthews but this is kind of the problem in college baseball right now is usage can wildly exceed what major league organizations will willingly subject pitchers to. Yeah, I mean, it's so tough looking at these young people and just knowing that just by numbers, they're not likely to be stars in Major League Baseball. Even as good as the Stanford program is, maybe one of those guys makes it to the major

leagues, you know? And they've got prospects that people like, you know, but this could be the biggest moment of Quinn Matthews' baseball career. Could be. I mean, it might even be likely. It's hard to say. He was picked in the 19th round of the draft last year, decided to go back to Stanford for another year. I was looking at Pipeline's rankings of the prospects in the 2023 class. Quinn Matthews just outside the top 100 overall. It's across all positions.

So this is a guy who's going to be drafted probably somewhere in that third to fifth round range this year. And, you know, we can get into the hit rates on picks in that range. But to me, that's kind of in that sweet spot of, I don't know, close to a coin flip to actually reach the big leagues, which I don't know. Like the bigger question here is just like, how much should we let a high school pitcher versus a college pitcher, as you age, how much of a say should you have over your own workload? If Quinn Matthews tells Stanford's head coach, David Esker, coach, I want the ball.

Let me keep the ball. I got this. I'm taking this. At what point is that okay? If it's ever okay, is it on David Esker? Is it his job to say, Quinn, look, I know you want the ball, but I want your elbow to be intact someday, like beyond the end of your baseball career if possible. We got this. You got your teammates.

They're going to take care of it. So there's that question too, and that gets pushed aside sometimes where it's like, what does the player want? want and as an adult i know college when i was in college me making decisions for myself i thought i had my best interest in mind and you know didn't always actually make the best decisions so it's a tricky thing to sort of kind of work through because i think on some level there is merit to the idea that quinn matthews should have a say in how much he gets to throw. Yeah, but somebody tweeted at me that the decision-making part of his brain has not fully grown yet. I am proof of that. I lived that part of my life, and I'm looking back on it now.

I'm like, yep, I definitely was not capable of making the best possible decisions. But I would have wanted the ball if I had any sort of talent like that. I would have said, sure, I got this. I'll keep pitching. And that would have been bad for my long-term health. I can see that now. So that's where I think this gets really, really difficult. And just seeing how different this is than what professional organizations will do.

I think that's the part that makes everybody so uncomfortable. Right, right. And I think we'll run through that in a second. There is some research here and some reason why we've seen pitch counts go the way they've gone in Major League Baseball. But I want to push back just real quickly on the idea that he might be a coin flip to make the big leagues because at 107th on the baseball per second, that's in one draft, right? So I think you're right about where he might go,

sort of fourth, fifth round guy. I don't think it's coin flip. You have to be a top 100 pitching prospect to start getting to coin flip status. So he's just going to be top 100 of one draft class joining the very many prospects in the minor leagues. He would be lucky to be a top 300 pitching prospect once he gets in, I feel like.

I'm just waiting for the moment in the elimination game on Monday when Quinn Matthews comes out of the bullpen and gets the three outs. He said in the post-game interview, that's what he was probably good for three outs on Monday. He did say that, but we did find something that says that there are rules in the NCAA that if you pass 110, you are not

allowed back in the game for three days. That reminds me a little of the Little League rules. We had rules where if you pitched past 50, if you were a certain age, 55 pitches, you had to be out for three days so you know that's that's what we're doing on the on the on the youth level in terms of trying to project protect arms so at the very least they can't send it back out there for for more uh but uh some of this started with uh ranny j i'm sorry i'm gonna miss this up ranny sorry but ranny jazza yearly uh who wrote

for baseball prospectus and designed something called pitcher abuse points and if you threw you know pitches one through 100 zero abuse points you know and then it kind of a sliding scale where the biggest bucket is 151 plus you get six abuse points for that and there used to actually be people that went that far and when he first debuted this piece in 1998 uh the very top of the list was randy johnson roger clements bartolo cologne kurt schilling levon hernandez and so you say well those are all veterans in the middle of a time when people did throw a lot of pitches the bottom half of the list you start to see oh wait a second ped second, Pedro Martinez did not have a great end of his career. And then there's this guy, Jesus Sanchez, who was young and being treated the same way as Roger Clemens

in terms of how many pitcher abuse points he was allowed to have. So he redid it. And this is the list that was pretty damning i think and and pretty much uh shocked maybe shocked the industry and and and was well shared around the industry and obviously had a big effect on the industry because these were the 12 most abused young pitchers you got bartolo cologne and livon hernandez at the top and so you say oh that's fine but those guys were freaks they pitched way like into their 40s, I think. You know, they just they they were healthy guys that didn't throw that hard and weren't honestly that amazing, at least near the end.

But the rest of the list is where you're like, oh, my goodness. Jesus Sanchez, Brad Radke, Jarrett Wright, Sean Estes, Kerry Wood, Jimmy Haynes, Jason Schmidt, Tony Saunders, Jeremy Gonzalez, and Kevin Millwood. I mean, this is a list of the biggest injury flameouts in baseball. You can almost not get them on a list together easier, you know? So, you know, this kind of went around baseball and it was a it was a big deal and there are still models that are uh that are you know that are treated with as much there are still models for fatigue that have elements of pitcher abuse points in them

like dr mike sun who just got hired by the theubs, like pitcher abuse points was a bit of an inspiration for him and his model, you know, kind of leaps off of that. You know, one thing that is interesting though is here are the T12 least abused pitchers of the time. Trey Moore, Doug Drabeck, Brian Anderson, Bob Tewksbury, Jimmy Key, Jeff Supan, Greg Maddox, Brett Saberhagen, Jose Silva, Billy Swift, Kent Merker, Mike Grace. I mean, there's some injuries in there too. And it's not the list of the best

pitchers. There are some real nice long careers in there with Greg Maddox, Supan, I guess. Jimmy Key had a pretty good career. So maybe these people had longer careers relative to their talent. But I mention that because there's a cool piece that's from Dustin Palmatier in 2013 on BP. And he just looks at college pitchers who were overworked, middle-worked, or lightly lightly worked and how their injuries went and in terms of you know injuries five years down the line from when they were used in college and how many days they missed and how many career injuries they had the overworked and the lightly worked had the worst outcomes it was the middle that did the best and i suppose there's a couple theories on this and even dustin brings this up which is if you're

lightly worked in college that probably means that you're already dealing with injuries and so you know to be lightly worked in college is maybe a red flag where it's like well why wasn't he available more often you know um to be overworked means you were healthy and dealing and so some of those great pitchers are in that bucket right where they're just you know they were great pitchers but um you know then to try and kind of parse it by there's obviously you know i think this is going to be a little bit of a red mark uh against the stanford uh program in terms of you know uh how people are drafted you know out of that out of there um uh and uh uh oh the family's in town and they're asking if I want In-N-Out. Sure, I guess.

Do you? Yeah, I guess so. I'm running today. I can eat In-N-Out. Real quick, what's your order from In-N-Out? Because apparently if you walk in and just order off the little menu, you're out of your mind. You're supposed to tell them something that you want that's not even on the menu.

Yeah, I get a double-double no-cheese animal style. That's mostly on the menu. Yeah. But anyway, to get back to which program is the worst, I would say that you would consider this like, oh, we had this piece of information. Voros McCracken, who advises different teams statistically and was the creator of DIPS,

Defense Independent Pitching, said that pitches thrown per start and numbers like that are a huge factor. I think he said one of the biggest factors in his college pitcher model. So this is something that people really think about it has to be considered a bit of a red mark against Stanford pitchers and if you look at other programs this is old so it might not be true anymore 2016 you know they probably have new head coaches and everything's different but and back in 2016 it it was florida georgia unc asheville uh that were overusing their pitchers and ucla that was the nicest to its pitchers arms i think that's about the time that garrett cole

was coming through there yeah well i mean it's it's it's such a tough thing to to break down for so many reasons i mean the other part this, even thinking about how you get guys who are in that lightly used group, is the workloads they had when they were high school age pitchers across travel ball and all those different environments. And how difficult it is to get that information. Even the Little League rules that I'm talking about. These have been implemented recently. Before then, your Little League coach could have used you over and over again

if you were good. It's rough. The main reason we're talking about it is because it was an eye-popping total. It was an amazing start. It was one of the best pitching performances in college baseball this year by far, but it's just alarming how much of a workload it was.

It's been a big source of debate. How do you keep pitchers healthy? I don't think that's the answer. But the other part of all this is even with all these changes in the time since this originally came out 10 plus years ago now, we're still breaking pitchers. We're just doing it

with sitting close to max and throwing harder. We've found new ways to do it whereas it used to be too many extreme workloads now we're just like we'll keep throwing harder keep throwing harder keep throwing harder and now we're breaking pitchers but that's okay we'll just keep throwing harder yeah it's kind of a dirty underside to this uh industry that seems like uh supply is never really a question and so if i'm always gonna to have another arm that I can reach for, then it seems short-sighted.

Maybe the Cubs are doing something interesting. If you do look at things like how many innings did your top five starters pitch, that's really well correlated with overall wins. Without even questioning the amount of the quality because you just assume that their top five pitches are better and if they pitch more, then that's good. And so there's got to be some team out there that can be the anti-Rays that can say,

well, we're going to try and keep our guys healthy so that our best pitchers are always in. I don't know. That seems really difficult to do, and I don't think anybody's done it, because if they had, we might have noticed by now. And there was this idea that the White Sox kept pitchers healthy for a while. Remember that? It was Cooper. Yeah, that was a thing. And then I talked to a picture that pitched for him he said yeah he just told us not to report our injuries okay that's one way to one

way to try and make it seem like you're keeping people healthy yeah wow nice highly evolved techniques yeah we keep our pictures healthy because they keep their mouths shut. Didn't work, shockingly. Try again. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning.

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Come on kids, back to the hotel room. Goodnight kids. Goodnight mama. Life's a trip make the most of it at best western more to come on the old pitcher injuries topic but we wanted to focus today a lot on the mailbag and then of course power outages we've got players who as we are in the middle part of june now are approaching the middle part of june who have disappointed from a power perspective michael harris is part of that group we talked about him a bit on project prospect last week the underlying numbers still look so good with harris that he screams target and trades like if you're trying to win now or trying to win later makes sense really in both scenarios but what really got me thinking about power this weekend is i watched a lot of that white Sox-Marlon series

and Tim Anderson is just not Tim Anderson anymore. He is so broken right now. Tim Anderson is still looking for his first home run this season. He's up to 200 plate appearances on the year. There were some warning signs last year around the lost time.

A 395 slugging percentage was a career low for him. A 5.8% barrel rate was a step back from where he was in both 2021 and in the shortened season in 2020. But everything seems off right now. Tim Anderson is crushing the ball onto the ground. He's got a 63.8% ground ball rate. So we have one major problem working against him, even though the hard hit rate is up 44.7%. So it leads us all to a question about Tim Anderson. Is this fixable for the White Sox or potentially for another organization

if he ends up getting dealt at some point this summer? I mean, I think so. There's always been the ground ball rate has always been an issue for him but you know he found success in 2020 and 2021 with a 55 combined ground ball rate so do i think he's necessarily going to get back to the 207 iso that he had in the shortened season in 2020 no because that looks like a very much an outlier. But do I think he can get back to the guy who hits 15 to 20 homers a year? I think so. Unless there's something, you know, that's just been really hurting him for a while. You know, the hard hit rates are an example of why the long term, you know, the long term prognosis of, you know, what the backwards baseball card

says is another reason why. But I guess, you. But I guess the flip side is he's 29. And interestingly, he's always been a guy who in the past has sort of beaten up on sliders, has been a big part of it. And this year he's not doing anything against sliders. Sliders usually are low in the zone, right? And so if you're hitting sliders hard into the ground, you're not going to be performing well on them. And you're this, I mean, that could be just what he's doing.

He's just hitting sliders hard into the ground. Now, did he lift those same sliders before? I don't know. ground now did he lift those same sliders before i don't know i feel like i think this is missed time not allowing him to get into a groove that's how i would read it yeah he had that knee injury that cost him time to begin this year it was a hand injury that shut him down at the end of last season i think my reason for still believing there can be a rebound is that hard hit rate right it's not that he's pulling the 32% hard hit rate underneath the lost barrels

and the ground ball rate spiking. There's still some quality contact in there. It is interesting for another player coming off a knee injury that he's seven for eight as a base stealer. The thing that you'd expect to not be there is there. It's the power that's gone missing. It's a good sign that maybe his knee is healthy.

I mean, it makes you think that it's not the knee causing the power to be a problem. What was the hand injury? Was it handmade again? No. I don't remember if his was hit by a pitch. It was a fractured hand, I think, right? Hit by a pitch.

Yeah, hit by a pitch, I think, last summer. Looks pretty good. It seems like a pretty easy player to get, and maybe some of them in some shallow leagues might end up on some waiver wires in the near future because the slash line is bad on the surface. And as far as the bounce back goes, are you expecting him to sort of split the difference between his pre-2019 averages before he became a threat to win a batting title, it seemed like, every year?

Is he going to go back to being like a 250-300 2020 guy if he gets back to the 2020 level? I think he can hit. I mean, he's hitting 263 while he's struggling, right? So I think he can hit 260, 270, 280. I think he can do that. He can have a good batting average. And, you know, all the projections have reduced the amount of expected power out of him.

So, you know, I think the projections do a decent job in this case, you know, six, seven more homers, maybe take the higher projections for stolen bases, because that actually is kind of sticky. You're, how often you attempt to steal becomes stable pretty quickly. So you see the bat and giving him 16-17 more steals, whereas other ones are hanging back at 9-11. I'm going to give him 17 steals, 8 homers, and he's going to end the season with a 275-280 average, 7 homers, and 25 steals.

It'll be okay by the end, I think. Not bad if you're able to hold out or possibly end up getting Tim Anderson onto your roster. Former teammate of Tim Anderson, Jose Abreu, are there any signs of a turnaround now that we're almost 200, almost 300 plate appearances into his season? Three homers on the season,

down to a 289 slugging percentage, one of the biggest fallers both in slug and in barrel rate. And I think this is where the situation is really different. It's not as though Jose Abreu is still hitting the ball hard and just not lifting it enough. The ground ball rate looks the same as it's looked for a few years, and the hard hit rate has fallen all the way to 38.9%. That is the lowest we've ever seen from Bray. This looks like a guy who at 36 is finally showing signs of being a guy well past 30. There's a pretty steady decline from

the beginning of 2021. If you look at the hard hit percentage on fan graphs and the rolling graphs is not the StatCast defined one. It's a little bit more amorphous and I think there's some bias and noise in there. However, if you do look at it, there's a really steady march downwards from the beginning of 2021 through 2022 into 2023. And though he's spiking a little bit in the last few days his uh spike is taking him to where he used to live you know so uh it's never good when you have to spike your performance to get back to where you used to be and so that's how i would make sense of you know a bray use what does he got he's got

two homers in last week or something he's you know you know, he's, yeah, he's got, he had back-to-back homers on the 9th and 10th over the weekend. So, you know, he's, he's hot. But the hot, the heat is, is just getting him back to where he once was. And, you know, I don't think that he's going to have a peak beyond that right so it's like that you peak your peak has become what you used to be and then he's going to go back down again right

he's going to get hot for a little bit and he's going to go back down again so he's he's not going to have a good season i'm not buying it this looks really bad if you've been waiting in a 15 team league for a bray you figure it out, I think he's actually a drop at this point, if you haven't done it already. Even with the three home runs that he's hit, going back to May 28th when he hit his first of the season, it's come with a 26.2% K rate during that span. That's not what Abreu was bringing to the table when things were going good. Walk rate has fallen to just under 5% as well, so it doesn't look good. This looks like a pretty big mistake by Houston going in and signing him to a three-year deal back during the winter and having a guy who's playing really worse than what Uli Gurriel was giving them over the last few seasons at first base. I didn't think it was going to fall off this bad, but there were warning signs in the second half of the season. How about Eugenio Suarez, man? Like, what's going on with him? Like, I didn't realize how bad this season was.

I have him in one league. I thought he was more of a set it and forget it sort of player, but it's a 2-13, 3-10, 3-19 line this season for Eugenio Suarez. K-rate still in that near 30% range, 28.8%. We've seen him live with that in recent years and be just fine. Last year and even 2021, he kind of showed us the floor, even with the batting average risk, was easy 30 home run power. I thought last year was good proof that he wasn't as dependent upon Great American Ballpark as people might have thought. But six homers now

through 64 games. Is there any end in sight to the power woes for Eugenio Suarez? Yeah, he's not lifting the ball as much as he used to. And you can see that he's hitting the ball about as hard as he used to. In fact, his hard hit rate is at a career high. is at a career high. But his launch angle was, you know, 18 and 19.

Average launch angle was 18 and 19, 20 degrees actually last year. So he's been a guy who's been really good at lifting it. And he's not been able to do that this year. So some part of it is is some uh some poor luck i think you know his expected slugging percentage is uh 422 against the 319 actual so there's some little part of bad luck because a 9.4 percent barrel rate as he's showing there are other people who turn that into good enough power but he's not a guy who puts a lot of lottery tickets out there in terms of making contact, right?

So that 9.4% barrel rate is not as good if you're not putting as many balls in play. He needs to kind of get back to that 15% that he's been at, 14, 15% that he's been at the last three years. So I don't know. A lot of times when you look at these things, it has to do with how they're being pitched and what they're doing with those pitches. But some part of this also has to be age. At 31, this isn't a guy who's necessarily elite

and so he's not going to maybe take that elite aging pattern either where he continues to be excellent into his mid-30s. He's been one of those players that I feel like has one of the most ridiculous power months of anyone at some point. It just happens. It's like 15 home runs in a month, and that ends up being half of his total for the year. The thing that's really strange to me is when you look at the spray charts,

if you compare what he was doing in 2022 to what he's been doing here in 2023, I mean, look at the homers. If you're watching us on YouTube, it's one to left field, three to center, and then two to right center. That's not what you'd expect for a guy with right-handed power like Suarez's power. You'd expect

him to be pulling everything if he only had one type of batted ball turning into a homer. Do you have his he only had one type of you have batted ball this is 2022 yeah yeah i mean there's a whiff of declining bat speed there that's part of what i would be worried about but i think it's this is for deep leagues probably someone that you would actually want to try and get if you're chasing power because the hard hit rate's still good. He's still lifting the ball. He's just not pulling it right now. So you have to decide, is it lost bat speed or is it a mechanical timing sort of adjustment that he can still make? That's the harder part to decide on for me. Last year,

he had a March and April with three homers, a July with three homers. If you put those two together and then give him his June with four homers, you got what he's doing now, right? Yeah. And then he had a May with six and August with nine. Nine, okay. And a September with six. August with nine, you know, balls fly the most in August. I don't know, man. I'd have to dig in and watch video

and try and figure out how much of this is an aging player who's not able to pull the ball because of potential lost skills versus a really odd cold stretch. It's not necessarily how he's being pitched. I'm looking at where his pitches are in terms of his heat maps, and they're in the same places. The book on him hasn't changed much. A little bit fewer

fastballs might speak to the declining bat speed. Did I say fewer fastballs? He has more fastballs now than he did last year. But it's not a lot more. I don't know. he's not my favorite type you know because of all the strikeouts i think the problem for me with suarez is i think back to 2019 12 homers in that july 10 homers in that august 10 more in september and october that was

32 over the final three months of the season. That's a season. That was in 2019. That was the year of the rabbit ball. Oh, yeah, the rabbit ball. But he loved August, right? Yeah, in May 2018, in July 2018, 8 and 8 in those months. So he has those highs that are really good. Career homers, 53 in August.

His most in any other is 43. Is that enough to trade for a monthly splits are dumb right they're very dumb except that the ball flies further in august and he's a fly ball hitter like it could be as simple as it's cold in these places and he's hitting fly balls that are hitting the warning track i'm in i'm reluctantly in on uh eugenio suarez a home run binge this summer if i'm again i'm desperate for power in a few leagues so hoping it works out are there a few early rounders people have been asking us about who have not been delivering power at the levels that uh were expected i think we get this kyle tucker question back May, and it's still relevant, I'd say, in the middle of June, believe it or not. Eight homers through 64 games, 429 slugging percentage, the lowest we've seen since that

first time we saw Tucker in the big leagues back in 2018. He struggled in a big way, of course, when he debuted, but has put together a really nice run, kind of going back to 2019 even with the exception of those k's eight homers 10 steals and 11 attempts they'll get you bags it's a 268 345 429 line is something wrong with tucker we're seeing a little drop in barrel rate hard hit rate still good ground balls are up slightly is this an adjustment that he can make and continue to provide something that looks like first-round value the rest of the way,

even though it hasn't been there so far? Oh, no. Now I'm going to do first-half, second-half splits for his career. Oh. I know. Is that the dumbest thing? I'm being dumb.

Don't let yourself be dumb. I'm not going to let myself be dumb because, well, his WRC plus in the second half is 17 points higher. His batting average goes from 258 in the first half to 282 in the second half. His slugging goes from 466 in the first half to 528 in the second half. It's dumb because nobody has shown that first and second half splits are predictive. And yet we had Mark Teixeira, who did have a pretty pronounced

first half, second half split over his career. And then I have this one little piece of knowledge about how he works. Kyle Tucker is a tinkerer and a feel guy. And I could see that just being something that locks into place. Maybe that locks into place less often than a video and science guy. You know what I mean?

Like possibly. Or maybe that's just been how it's worked for him. But in every case, Kyle Tucker looks good under the hood in the beginning of the season and then has the second half that you think he'll have. So I am fully on board. If there's any window for me getting him, I'll do it. I know the barrel rate is down a little bit, but in terms of the contact rate, the walk rate, the chase rate, the speed, the athleticism, it's all still there. And I think he's just a little tweak away from being back to where he was power-wise. Yeah, I think the good news, if you have been rostering Kyle Tucker, or if you're in a situation where somehow someone's going to trade him to you,

is that he could underperform power even for the rest of the season. Projections kind of have him in the 16 to 18 range between zips at the low end, and I think it's the fan graphs, depth charts, the high end. So I'd put the over-under at 17 and a half. If he hit 17, he'd finish with 25. He's probably going to steal another 15 bags.

A 25-25 season's not that far off from a 30-25 season like a year ago. Yeah, if you lost five homers, I don't think that's doing anything to your league. Not the end of the world. I think where you might be a little more disappointed, though, would be in the runs and RBIs because the Astros haven't quite been the Astros this year. And Jordan's hurt right now. You know that I saw some analysis that Jordan is sort of single-handedly powering that offense in a way.

The analysis I saw was which hitters are the best at hitting high stuff plus pitches. Oh, that's interesting. And Jordan, of course, was just like number one or number two or whatever. He's absurd. And the rest of his team and just like number one or number two or whatever. He's absurd. And the rest of his team and lineup wasn't great at it. So they were like, you know, if you're up against a buzzsaw, Jordan Alvarez is the guy who can solve it for you. And he's hurt.

So that's a team factor that's not great for Kyle Tucker. That's true. But it's not a bad team. And they were without Jose Altuve before. So I could see this team sort of getting healthy in the second half and that being part of Kyle Tucker's numbers improving. We're at this funny point, 65 games in for most teams, the Yankees and the Astros.

And with the Yankees, it's Judge. And with the Astros, I think to a large degree, it's Jordan, where you have these superstar, amazing bats. When those guys are missing, you look a lot more closely at the players around them. But the situation's not that different. Those guys are there every day. And the Yankees have a lot of guys who are underperforming

relative to expectations just by like 10% to 15% on WRC+. But that adds up. If it's four or five regulars, that makes a pretty big difference, especially when the superstar is not there. Houston, sitting right there with the Yankees, a 98 WRC+, as a team, a 246, 314, 396 line. Even with the Altuve absence, I would have had higher numbers across the board. It's just not something we're used to seeing.

I do think the environment, the supporting cast, is something you have to at least consider with Kyle Tucker as not being at the level we're accustomed to, even though, as you said, it's not bad. It probably is better today forward, as long as that Jordan injury is not bad and it probably is better today forward as long as that jordan injury is not bad than it has been up to this point we should we should do a study on this maybe maybe that'll be my fantasy piece this week is do people that hit the hit hit the ball hard have a good hard hit rate but have a reduction in barrel rate do they uh regress towards their career barrel rate or to their established barrel rate better maybe i could do like last three year barrel rate or something so in this case would because his hard hit rate is better than it's been in the last three years um but his barrel rate is below where it's been in the last three years you know does that make him better off than say

someone who's not hitting the ball hard either? That's something we saw with Jose Abreu. That seems intuitive. This is why it's intuitive. If you're not hitting the ball hard and you're not barreling the ball, then you have to fix two things. If you're hitting the ball hard and you're not barreling the ball, then you have to fix two things. If you're hitting the ball hard and you're not barreling the ball, you have to fix one thing, it seems. Maybe I'll look into that for this week's fantasy piece,

but it certainly feels that way today. The trickiest thing of all is, of course, the unknowns with injuries. Manny Machado, we know, is hurt. He's playing through an injury right now. 41.1% hard hit rates. We've seen that drop. That's his lowest of the StatCast era. So there's a problem there.

Barrel rate, not surprisingly, down. We've seen, actually, a drop in walks, too. I think 6.2% for the walk rate. Lowest since 2014 for Manny. Highest chase rate of his career. Yeah, highest chase rate so far rate of his career. Yeah. Highest chase rate so far. I mean,

he's definitely pressing. I mean, this is the team that was projected to be, I think at some points when I looked at the best team in baseball, but definitely like a top three to five team when all the projections came out finally, and they have not played to that. And a big part of that has been the offense.

finally, and they have not played to that. And a big part of that has been the offense. So I know that he is cold as ice, and he looks like he never changes. His heartbeat never changes depending on the situation. But if you just look at the numbers, the chasing, that aspect, the walks going down, and just from watching him, I watch a fair amount of Padres games. down and and just from watching him i watch a fair amount of padres games he's swinging at pitches that are outside of the zone in situations when there are people on base it's like he's expanding to drive runners in uh because the team is having trouble driving runners in um and uh so

i think there's a team factor situation here along with the injury factor. He doesn't have that magic, you know, oh, well he's hitting the ball hard, just not in the air, uh, thing going right now. And he's currently still like, he's still dealing with pain from, uh, the, the fracture in his hand. Um, you know, it's not like it just went away after 10 days on the IL so I don't know that short term anything is going to change but I don't know this guy is 30 years old, it's not time for age related decline

the Padres have shown some sign of life with the hitting and I feel like that will be contagious and take some of the pressure off of Manny. And he still hit the ball 113 miles an hour, so the raw power is still there. So it's just more about having more consistent at-bats and not expanding the zone and just letting his talent fly.

I'd buy. I don't know. There's a little asterisk. Would you be less likely to buy in a dynasty league right now? He's hitting 30. This could go either way. Are we heading into an oft-injured glimpses of the great many of past, or is this just a blip at 30,

and he's got three, four more years of great baseball in him? It's a great question because when players like this begin to show some signs of decline, especially when they're 30, if this happens at 27, 28, it's very different. There's like a psychological part of this. Oh, he's 30 now. So I don't want to be holding the bag if this continues. Oh, yeah. What sort of dynasty value does he have? So, yeah.

So if the person who has Machado in a dynasty league or a keeper league is sitting there today and saying, Ooh, this is bad. It might not come all the way back to previous levels, so I'm probably not going to get what I would have got if I had just traded him in the offseason. Maybe I should take what I can get right now. You might get him for $0.60 on the dollar trade-wise, and the actual value should be $0. cents on the dollar compared to where it was. So this might actually be a really good time in keeper and dynasty leagues to go get

Manny Machado, even if you are all in sort of agreement that okay, the peak that he had, he's just past his peak, but these are skills that age really gracefully because he was running a sub 20% K rate every year of his career before last

season when he got to oh no 20.7 even now he's got a better than average strikeout rate than than the league yeah i just i have a really hard time looking at manny machado and saying he's fallen off a cliff and he's not going to get it back i think the hard thing about this season just imagine having a fracture in your hand. How would that ever feel good if you keep playing? He's an everyday guy. They gave him the IL stint. He has some sort of freakish ability to withstand pain, though, because what I heard was that many would have gotten surgery on the ankle injury he had last year, and he didn't even go on the IL.

So yeah, he's, he's a little bit crazy in that regard, but no, it's gotta be affecting him. I mean, there could be, I don't feel any pain, but then there could be a slight, you know, change to your mechanics because your body is just trying to avoid that pain. Well, to answer your question, I would probably be trading for him in Dynasty right now because I expect there could still be a bounce back where he's an easy 25 home run guy next year with non-zero speed and probably a good batting average with great run production. This core, even though it's underperformed through the first half now of this season,

they're not that old. They're not that old. They're all still going to be there next year. or near half. They're not that old. They're all still going to be there next year. So all the things we were expecting in these first two and a half months, I think we should reasonably still expect them running through next season and taking advantage of that.

Taking advantage of that now is something that you should really be trying to do as much as you possibly can. Yeah, that's true. You want to talk about Mike Trout? Mike Trout's barrel rate has dropped in the top 25 in barrel rate. His barrel rate drop is the same as Elvis Andrews. Sing it from the rooftops.

Mike Trout is toast. He's done. It's all over for him. He's 31 and that's it. Well, an interesting thing happens. When you're Elvis Andrews and you have a four percent bail rate and you lose three and a half percent of that bail rate it's a lot worse than if you're mike trout and have a 19.7 percent bail rate and lose three and a half percent off of that

this is you know three and a half percentage points is not the same for each guy. So Mike Trout still has a 16% barrel rate, which is really, really good. He's not showing any signs of missing pitches more often or chasing pitches. I don't even see a real problem in his ground ball fly ball mix. I have, I, I, I, yes, he had one of his worst months ever uh this year and yet you know he's still 27 better than the average heading into the second half when he could have a great month and get that back up to 140 150 pretty quickly yeah so the funny thing about trout um we've seen this coming for a few years he's only attempted five stolen bases since the start of 2020 he's not attempted a single stolen base with new rules so i think we know at this point that's that's not coming back don't don't bank on that as far

as rest of season home run projections go based on on the Bad X, where do you think Mike Trout is ranked in rest of season home runs? Number one. Tied for number one with Tatis. There you go, Tatis. Yes, so as much power as you could possibly want. It is funny just seeing Elvis Andrews losing all of his barrels and Mike Trout losing that much and still having... Still being near the top.

Still being as good as he is. Mike Trout lost a whole Elvis Andrews and was like, yeah, I'm good. I'm fine. Isn't the real story today at least that Mike Trout's played in 63 games this season after, was it August of last year? People were genuinely concerned that he may never be the same guy again yeah i mean i think last year when he hit 40 homers and 499 plate appearances maybe he just didn't play through the injured parts because he was injured

in the injured parts whereas this year he's like uh you know my calf doesn't feel great but you know i'm still trying to get shohei to stay here. So I'm going to get out there and maybe go one for four with a single. Yeah, that could be. But he's seemingly fine. If you have anyone willing to trade you, Mike Trout, by all means, trade for him. I mean, I think the power and run production is going to be there, and it's going to be as good as just about anybody in the league going forward. And unless you think that we just basically said for almost everybody they'll be fine and and pick

them up um i will say that when i look at this losers in barrel rate uh you know season to season grid which you can do on fangrass pretty easily um you just go to season stat grid, year-to-year changes. I put 100 played appearances in the current season, 400 last year. And you can just see who's lost the most. There's a lot of people on this list that I don't want. Jared Walsh being number one. He is one rib short of a full rib cage. And I think you're seeing in the numbers that he's not the same as he was so I had held on to Jared Walsh stupidly in in one league waiting for

him to come back and I'm ready I think I did just drop him or I'm definitely ready to drop him I did just drop him for corey jokes uh because of the the injury to uh jordan alvarez uh who else is on here luis urias i'm gonna give him a little bit of a pass because he's just coming back from injury i'm gonna wait a little bit longer on that uh luke voigt released michael chavis i'm not interested in as i used to be interested in and sort of a deep leak or a streamer and 15 teamers. Daniel Vogelbach is that's a real problem for him. Suarez we talked about Carlos Santana, I don't necessarily say I advocate Jesse Winker, definitely not advocating for his pickup. He looks like those surgeries have really taken a toll on him. Javier Baez, no for me. Jose Bray, no for me.

Trey Mancini is a short side platoon guy now. He's a no for me. Eduardo Escobar is a no for me. Colton Wong, I dropped in a 20-teamer. Yeah, he looks done at the plate, unfortunately. Yeah, so there's some ones here or there. Austin Riley, I'm not as worried about. There's a little bit of a case with Austin Riley that's trouty

and not that he's necessarily as good as Trout, but he had such great batted ball stats that he went from a 16% barrel rate to a 10% barrel rate. There's still a fair amount of barrels in that bat, you know. And, you know, Kyle Schwarber, not too worried about. Mike Trout, not too worried about. So it's not generally a good place to live, but we've discussed some of the guys that we think can claw that we're out of this list.

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A message from the Government of Canada. Want visibly glowing skin in 14 days? With Nuole Indulgent Moisture Body Wash, you can lather and glow. The 24-hour moisturizing body wash is infused with vitamin B3 complex and has notes of rose and cherry creme for a rich indulgent experience. Treat your senses with Nuole Indulgent Moisture Body Wash How about Jeremy Pena? Down from a 9.6 barrel rate last year. Had a lot of injuries too, and you could kind of cherry pick some good numbers from last year and talk yourself into another level still being possible. He's not walking a ton.

K-rate's improved a little bit, but he still chases a good number of pitches outside the zone. Yeah, is Jeremy Pena someone? Let's say you're not playing for this year and you don't have a shortstop. Are you trying to trade for Jeremy Pena and keep her in Dynasty Leagues right now because you think it's going to get better?

I don't know, man. I mean, he's 25. He's not as young as some other guys. You know, you're looking at somebody like a Zach Netto who has a better chase rate, better bail rate, better strikeout rate, a better chase rate better bail rate better strikeout rate some of the very similar terms of average obp slugging right i think i'd rather have netto you've got three years of improvement to where pena is now right wouldn't you if you if i could tell you that netto is going to improve for three years when you'd rather take then and they're similar now you'd

rather take the younger guy netto's already striking out less yeah he's only been in the league for a couple months so and and pena like next year will be his peak season in terms of uh what the research says and right now we have 800 plate appearances where he's been the exact same guy 250 300 425 like he's been that in every point of his life except for the playoffs last year i wonder are the astros actually in danger of finally starting to break down a little bit like it's we were just talking earlier in the show like if jordan's back sooner rather than later they're probably better than they've been so far. But even if they're not back at the elite levels they've been at, just kind of entering this new phase

where they have to figure out how they're really going to reload and regroup from some of the talent they've lost, it's just inevitable. To me, the Abreu deal is a big stumble. And yes, any team can afford to do this and make mistakes, but if we assume that they kind of do this, they have like one kind of older free agent

that they acquire and otherwise are built on younger guys, right? On guys they've developed. To have someone that they've spent this much money on and have for this many years makes you wonder are they gonna do it again next year and are they gonna do the same position again next year like like what's how does that fold into their plans financially going forward in terms of how much how active they'll be on the free agent market are they resting on their laurels a little bit from the you know and what will happen if they

you know this team does not i don't think right now profile as a world series contender they don't look like it right now i mean i would i would look at them and say even though they don't look like they're on that level right now they have so many guys who played at higher levels before that you wouldn't write them off either. That's true. But we're beginning to see this happens with any great team for three, five years. You hit this level, you hit this window,

and eventually that core ages, you lose players to free agency, some guys get hurt, and that next wave, it either has to show up as the current wave sort of moves out, or there's a little bit of a lull. And I just wonder if the Astros are in a little bit of a lull or a potential longer one.

And they're still in really good shape with Frambois and Javier and Hunter Brown. That's a really good first three in that rotation. They've still got a very good A bullpen out of that group. They still, like the pitching-wise wise they seem like they're still really good because you got a guy like jp france who you know uh you know fangraphs put a 40 future value on him um and uh it is interesting they put a 40 future value on him but they said he had a 50 50 fastball 50 slider 50 curveball 50 cutter and 45 command sometimes you look at that and you're like how does this all add up to a 40 then yes that is one of those numbers are bigger than combos wait a minute that math doesn't make sense to me yeah so uh he also like led the league led the the the minors and strikeouts

in 2022 or something um so this is a guy who I think I would count as a player development win again, where you've got a guy who has these multiple pitches that supposedly didn't have good enough command and they're making the most of him by sending him to the right locations and avoiding these other locations and not asking him to paint the corners,

but to just make the most out of the pitches he has. So I actually like France better than his rest-of-season projections, and I think that he's key for this team to stick around. But them stretching out Ronel Blanco, who has, I would say say 45 stuff and 30 command instead of brian abreu who has like 70 stuff and i don't know if i've ever seen a 25 command grade but maybe he has that uh it was an interesting interesting decision So that is where I agree with you. I'm starting to see cracks.

I'm starting to see cracks. Doesn't mean they're not good. JP France is like a total typical, we're the Astros and we just picked up France out of nowhere and nanny boo boo, right? But Ronald Blanco is a little bit more like what other teams are doing, which is like, oh crap, what do we do? Yeah, having only seen Jose Altuve in the lineup for 15 games this year

has definitely been part of the problem, but I look at Peña and I look at Bregman having another kind of prolonged stretch where it's just kind of okay. It's okay. It's working, but it's not working at the level that we had all thought it would, or at least that's what I thought it was. And this is after he outperformed all of his barrel rates.

And he's done that for a long time. Suddenly it seems like maybe he won't do that again. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not trying to rile up Astros fans. I'm more just asking the question of how long will it last before we see them actually miss the playoffs and then be more of a

question to play in October because it's been a certainty for the last part of the half decade. They've been that good for a long time. Lots of mailbag questions. We'll try to lightning round our way through it. Is there anything wrong with Jose Ramirez? We've seen this before. We've seen. Is there anything wrong with Jose Ramirez? We've seen this before.

We've seen a really bad first half from Jose Ramirez before. And it's funny because we got an email from Ryan last week and Jose Ramirez has homered four times since that email was sent. So I think the answer is really, if you're worried about an early round player, just send an email to rates and barrels at gmail.com. Just ask what's wrong with a player. And they'll hit four home runs in a week.

Games had three homers in and alone. Right. I do think that when you see career splits for a guy who's played in the same stadium, and you see that when their slugging percentage goes from 496 to 516, that's not a big jump, but I would say that that might

mostly be weather in Cleveland, something we've talked about before. The weather's getting warm. I would expect, even Josh Bell has shown signs of life. I would expect bigger scores coming out of Cleveland on both sides of the ball. Yeah, I think you look at Jose Ramirez. He's still not chasing pitches outside the zone a ton, kind of at the same rate as last year, which is only a notch above what he did at his peak. Maybe the stolen bases are in danger.

He's 5-for-8 so far this year in 61 games. But K rate's good, walk rate's good, hard hit rates are in line with recent norms, still putting the ball in the air a lot. I think this is ultimately a long, slow start that has already started to turn around in the last week or so especially. Thanks for that email, Ryan. Peter wants to know, what's going on with Ryan Mountcastle? Is there anything in his profile that you think means we should believe the results more than the barrels, or is he just someone who's had a run

of about 850 plate appearances of bad luck over the last two seasons? Ryan Mountcastle was more affected by Mount Baltimore than I think anybody else on the team. It is, Mount Baltimore was a huge change to the park factors for right-handed hitters in Baltimore. It is now one of the hardest places in baseball to hit a homer for a right-handed pitcher, right-handed hitter.

And so you see his barrel rates have gone up since 2021, and his home run rates have gone down. I still think he's kind of a true talent. I mean, I think he's a true talent 30-homer hitter who's now in a park that's going to steal five homers from him every year. So if you're the Orioles and you've got all these prospects coming up,

is it unreasonable to trade Ryan Mountcastle because he doesn't fit your ballpark particularly well? My in and out is here, sorry. Oh, well, we'll let you get to that here in just a minute. But if you move him, maybe that's actually smart because you're not going to be able to maximize his value anyway. He's a player with no real defensive value. So maybe you should flip him to a team that just needs right-handed power.

You think about teams that would be interested in Eloy Jimenez, those same teams would have an interest in Ryan Mountcastle so long as they don't have someone locked into the DH spot. Yeah, it's just awkward timing right now, unless it's for pitching. I mean, you know, the Marlins are always looking for power. Ah, there we are again, Orioles-Marlins. We've done this a million times. I'm not going to let it happen.

We're not doing that again we've done that enough times we know we'll have to take a victory lap it over it does happen though yeah if uh if i can get on a ticket to ride game again sometime soon i'll make sure i get the trains from baltimore to miami take a picture for everybody why do you want that card yeah i mean i don't i don't think it's a great extension candidate uh for the team and i think honestly for fantasy owners they may be rooting for him to go somewhere else but uh he's not a free agent until 2027 and i think in this ballpark you're just looking at a guy who's going to hit 250 or 25 homers um which is good but not great. And it's not

a standout in any way. He might have more trade value than actual intrinsic value to your keeper league team. Alright, we got one more question we're going to get to and then we will call it a show because soggy in and out is not good for anybody getting involved. I know, you've got to let me get up there. So we had a question about Bobby Miller, his slider velo and stuff, that his slider velo has been ticking up.

This was from Saturday's game in the first inning. So have you seen anything in the model on Miller's slider actually getting a little bit better as he spent a little more time in the big on Miller's slider actually getting a little bit better as he spent a little more time in the big leagues yes yes uh they uh there's a really cool uh regular sort of newslettery kind of thing that Lance Brasdowski does on on Twitter and I'm sure I just wrecked his name just awfully but it has a lot of consonants in it so lance brosdowski yeah i think you got that pronunciation right uh it's lance bras b-r-o-z on twitter and he does like a a daily like hey these are uh these are some pitch movement uh

changes that i saw so today, he shows that Louis Varland might have a new change up. You know, he looks at Taiwan Walker had another small velo uptick. And, you know, Braxton Garrett's slider, which stuff plus doesn't love a ton um but uh you know uh driveline stuff plus likes braxton garrett slider better than our than mine so uh that is something uh that he has access to so that's kind of fun you can kind of compare a couple of different models driveline um and and my stuff model are like their brothers. Uh, they're very, very similar structure, slightly different scaling. Uh, but yeah, Bobby Miller has been a guy that basically was my favorite out of all the young pitchers.

Uh, once I got to see his, uh, pitch modeling numbers and, uh, I can look now, uh, thanks to Fangraphs at a last seven days split for bobby miller and i'm doing that as we speak um it has a 181 stuff plus on the slider in the last week and as lance put it in his newsletter when when he noticed it, he said that broke stuff plus. We like that. So interestingly, though, his fastball grades are not great right in the last seven days. I think that might just be a blip because we had them over 100 going in. We had them over 100 going in, and he was one of four or five pitchers that had four pitches over 100 by Stuff Plus.

So I think it's all there. 93 location plus in the last week is a little bit of a problem, but for the full season, Miller has a better number, I think, 103 location plus, and that's a bigger sample, better number, I think, 103 location plus, and that's a bigger sample, better number. So I don't really see any issues with Bob Miller. No, it looks good in analog to 23-7 strikeout. The Walker issue through these first four starts hasn't given up a home run yet.

Seems like a really important guy for the Dodgers right now with all the issues they've had in that rotation. If they can get him to pitch like a number two starter the rest of the way dumb arbitrary number if they get him to pitch really well though and every fifth day he's giving them high quality innings that matters like that's a huge huge thing for them right now i know they've got depth for days but they've just been really testing that early on this season i think we saw you know going into the season we thought this would be more of a step back for the dodgers more of a step back year for the dodgers than maybe even the astros what do you think right now would you do you think are you talking about my bold prediction well i mean yes but i'm not

trying to skewer you for another i'm just saying, if you were comparing the Dodgers and Astros, who have both found victories recently, both regarded generally as the two best, maybe, player development factories in baseball. If you were doing an organizational ranking, we were just talking last week on the 3-0 show about front office rankings. Which one would you have ahead of the other? I'd still have the Dodgers ahead of the Astros.

I think that's how it was before. They have the same record right now. That's amazing. I'm more worried about the Astros. I think you can very easily look through the Dodgers system and you can read about their minor leaguers and say, wow, they've got another batch of great pitchers in the upper levels of the minors. Some of those guys are going to probably contribute to the big leagues. Even everybody's saying, Otani's not going anywhere.

They seem like the team that's most likely to be able to put together an Otani package. I think the Otani situation, it's not about what Artie Moreno wants to do as much as it's about the Angels being right there in the thick of things for a playoff spot.

If they can contend, they're not going to tear it down while contending. If they fall apart between now and the trade deadline, I wouldn't rule it out. The wildcard race is going to be really fun this year, I think. It is. I'm pretty excited about it. We're looking at right now in

our, without being a team division leader is the Orioles, the Yankees, and the Astros are in. They're all in right now. The Angels, I think, are one and a half games back of the Astros. I wouldn't bury

the Mariners yet, even though they're two below 500 right now. The Jays are within a game of the Yankees. I don't know if anyone... The funny thing about the AL Central is that we're already kind of just committing to just saying,

ah, it's whoever wins the division. That's the only spot. But if the Tigers and Royals are bad enough, you can start to make up a little extra ground in the wildcard race, even with more balanced schedules by potentially having a weaker schedule. Yeah, you are going to going to play them you're still going to play them more so in the national league uh we've got the dodgers marlins and brewers in right now

with this could this is gonna be a little bit less exciting but you've got the giants phill Phillies, Padres, Mets. I mean, that's where it's interesting is that you have some really teams that were supposed to be good that are still within fighting distance of that wild card. So the Padres and Mets being three games out of the wild card right now suggests that that's going to get hairy, and it's going to be tough for the Marlins and Brewers

to hold on to their position, I think. It's going to be very tough with all the things that, well, we're not going to talk about the Brewers right now, but they just got swept by the A's, and that series was just like getting punched in the stomach. It was awful. Did you see that quote? People forget they're a major league team.

Who said that? Somebody on the Brewers. On that note. People forget they're a major league team, but they're pretty good. I think their lineup, at least at last glance, last time I opened up the old WRC plus team leaderboard the a's had a better

wrc plus than the brewers no they still do by oh my god still do 92 wrc plus 87 they've got real problems it's not just the injuries they have other problems they need to figure out and it's I mean, it's partially like their on-the-field results are better than Oakland's. And so part of it is the park adjustment, right? But Milwaukee is a nice home park for hitters. And you were hitting 229, 307, 376 as a group. That's a problem.

Your food's getting soggy. You can find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. You can find me crying about the brewers at Derek Van Ryper. Actually, I don't even bother tweeting about it most of the time because it's just obvious in there. It's just disgusting. I want nothing to do

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