Rates & Barrels - Qualifying Offers, New First-Rounders & Getting Right Back Into Drafts

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss the players on the receiving end of Qualifying Offers, as well as a few notable omissions including Clayton Kershaw, Carlos Rodón and Jon Gray, before examining the first round of their very early 2022 Draft Champions Leagues. Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Watch the show on YouTube and subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Monday, November 8th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. It is the most wonderful time of the year. It is qualifying offer season in Major League Baseball. Yes, this is what I live for. I live to know who and who did not receive qualifying offers from their respective teams. Who will have draft pick compensation attached if another team decides to sign these players in free agency. And just how messed up, health- health wise are the players who did not receive qualifying offers these are the things that keep me warm at night you know i was just

saying it's house shoot season those are the things that keep me warm i know the funny thing about this is uh is any of this gonna be the case in two months like it's like with the new CBA, will there be qualifying offers? I mean, there's, there's some, uh, I think there's at least one proposal from the union side that, uh,

basically gets rid of qualifying offers. Yeah. You don't want this. If you're a player, qualifying offers are not a good thing for you. You'd rather just be unencumbered going into the market. So I am of course joking. I am not as into qualifying offers

as it may seem but uh they're fun to talk about somebody was saying that um jd martinez maybe the best move for him was not the move he made he picked up his 19 million dollar uh option player option but that uh that the best move he could have made might have been to reject the $19 million option so that he gets the qualifying offer this year, loses about a million dollars, but becomes a free agent without the qualifying offer attached to him. Right, because another year older with

that profile having that compensation in the future yeah okay i i could see that being a part of the of the calculus there i think if i was his agent i say take every dollar you can right now because you're an old dh yep and teams increasingly are not interested in paying players like that but the number of players i think it was 14 in total that actually received the qualifying offer. I'll just lightning round, run through them real quick. This is an alphabetical order. I think it's the list from MLB Trade Rumors.

Brandon Belt, Nick Castellanos, Michael Conforto, Carlos Correa, Freddie Freeman, Rysel Iglesias, Robbie Ray, Eduardo Rodriguez, Corey Seager, Marcus Simeon, Trevor Story, Noah Sindergaard, Chris Taylor, and Justin Verlander. In that list, a lot of those guys aren't a surprise. Every great free agent like Correa and Freeman and Seager, those guys always get a qualifying offer. It doesn't change the market for them at all. Almost none of them will take it. It's a guarantee that they won't because they're looking at huge contracts much, much longer than a one-year $18.4 million deal.

much, much longer than a one-year $18.4 million deal. There's a few names on that list, though, that I think are interesting, because like Brandon Belt, for example, keeping him in San Francisco and him getting one more year at $18 million, he's the kind of player that's not probably getting a multi-year deal based on age and injury history. So it could be the best of all worlds for him to end up staying in San Francisco at that rate, Because even if, even if he only gets the qualifying offer this time,

gets the free agency next year and gets like four to 6 million for a year or something, that's probably more combined than what he'd get on the open market right now. Is he getting more than two for 25 as a free agent if he leaves? I don't know. I don't think so. And in fact, I think this could be the basis of a discussion started between him and the

Giants that leads to something like what Brant Crawford got, but less. So Brant Crawford got two and 32, I think. I wouldn't give a belt that much, but if you're already, if he's like, I'm going to,

I'm going to accept this. You're already, you're already in it for 18, maybe you do do something like two for 30, two for 24 or something, offer him, you know, six for the next year or something. You know, they've said they would do stuff like that. So anyway, I think, yeah, I think Belt might take it.

I think Rysel Iglesias might take it because, you know, you're probably looking at something like 3 for 30, 3 for 45 maybe at tops, 3 for 40. You could get 3 for 40 or you could get 1 for 19. I think he's borderline. 3 for 30 again later. Yeah. He could definitely do it.

Trevor Story, I never thought I would actually believe it was possible, but I don't think he wants to stay in Colorado, period. So there's part of that. He's already sort of said he won't. But I do wonder if it's more of like a Marcus Simeon situation where he does end up taking a shorter deal, proving that this year was just in fact a down year, and then he can come back and cash in the way we expected him to a year from now. That wouldn't be shocking.

Especially because he has to prove to some people. I think a lot of people in baseball are comfortable with the idea that there is a Coors hangover effect and that hitters sometimes are surprisingly good when they leave Coors right um but you could do something where you you you take a year and then you prove to everyone yeah I can still hit and maybe you have to prove to them that you're you can hit enough to play third or the arm is good enough to play third, because the arm is falling off. That sounds bad. The arm speed is declining. It's not like his arm is falling off. But the arm speed is declining, so maybe he's a second baseman or a third baseman.

Although the third baseman, you'd want the arm, right? Yeah, you would need arm so maybe somebody uh i think you know i think the giants are an interesting uh spot for him you know uh he basically becomes the everyday starter at second base and pushes um the other guys you know like listella and uh and flores. Basically, La Stella and Flores are a really interesting righty-lefty bench combo to have. Yeah. I think if you're the Giants,

you're trying to replicate the build of your 2021 roster as much as you possibly can and having that extra everyday infielder that can play a couple of spots. I mean, if you mostly play Story at second, but some days you want to play him at short because you want to give Crawford a day off, that makes sense too. And he's a right-hander, right? Yeah.

So, you know, you could actually sit Crawford against lefties, which has been happening, and use that to keep him fresh and also regain the position advantage. All of a sudden, you've got Story at short, and Flores

at second. He's not a good defender but you can maybe make it happen yeah well flores is fine as uh as a part-time guy i think he's a really good part-time player on a per plate appearance basis uh the other position player that i think is pretty interesting for qualifying offer purposes is actually Chris Taylor because I just don't know I don't know what team is going to go out there and give Chris Taylor a multi-year deal that that three for 40 type contract that everybody in this group would be kind of hoping for other than those big big name guys who are going to get a lot more like I think so this is a copycat league though you know and like the chris taylor was a big part of why the dodgers were good there's there's been pieces written you know like actual like research out there that's you know about how he's worth more than what his what his war number is because of

his versatility so i feel like there's other teams to be like can i just buy some versatility you know um you know maybe i can't afford marcus simeon in toronto but maybe i can buy chris taylor and move him around a bunch um you know so i i think that chris taylor will will leave i mean or or be or signed to a long-term deal even in in la yeah i wonder i just wonder what that's really going to look like but yeah versatility for sure valuable i think the thing that gives me concern about taylor over a longer term deal is there's swing and miss even though he does so many things well yeah that strikeout rate if it ticks up a little higher we run into some trouble with him i i'm in a and we'll talk a little bit more about this later, but I'm in a draft champions league that's drafting right now. And we had a chance at, I'm actually, I assume he's a listener.

I'm co-managing with the listener. And we had a choice between Cronenworth and Chris Taylor at one point. And Taylor ended up going two rounds later uh either we reached on cronenworth but we just felt a lot better about cronenworth because of that strikeout rate and and the age yeah exactly so again chris taylor could be a great signing for any number of teams could end up being fine for the life of a multi-year deal. But I thought he was kind of in the middle in terms of maybe being tempted to take one year at $18 million, depending on what else is out there. I think Justin Verlander and Noah Sindergaard, two pitchers coming back from Tommy John, they're both interesting because they could end up taking it.

And I think if I remember correctly, today is the day, Monday is the day, that Verlander is supposed to throw at the Cressy facility. A bunch of teams are going to be on hand for that. The thing that makes Verlander interesting to me is we're talking about a guy that had Tommy John in October. I think he also had a better

health record than Syndergaard going into that. Just an overall better health record than Syndergaard, who had hamstring stuff? Yeah, I think lat stuff too. We're almost like 18 months removed from Tommy John for Verlander once we get to

opening day. The longer you wait, the better the outcomes are. Timing could be really good. I don't know. I think he makes a lot of sense. He might not take the offer simply because he can get more even on a one-year deal, even if that's what he's limited to. He might get one for 25 or one for 30.

But then, of course, again, the Astros would get that compensation if he goes elsewhere. So that's pretty interesting. Syndergaard, I mean, it is rare to see. It's almost a lock that Syndergaard takes that. You think so? Yeah, man. Here's the question, though. Two innings pitched in the last two seasons.

All he wants to do is pitch. We're not going down the Mets spiral today. We'll go down multiple times between now and opening day. But if you're him and you've dealt with other injuries besides Tommy John, and maybe you're among the people in that organization who have no faith in the medical staff, do you want to continue? I just want to go somewhere else.

Don't you want to go somewhere else? And if you're going to take a short-term deal anyway, pick your spot and go to a place that succeeds in that way. He probably gets more. He gets, does he get more? So there was a level of older pitcher on a one-year deal that existed last year. It was sort of one in 10 to 12.

That was Kluber, Paxtonxton hill like i know that some of them were less than some of them were more but it's sort of around that sort of 1 in 10 um cinder guard gets more than that because he's younger yes i think so i mean paxton and paxton's injury history i think was even even worse than cinderguards. I just think I bet he takes it. I bet he takes it. Then there was also the names that were notable for not getting one.

Number one on that list being Clayton Kershaw but number two probably being Carlos Rodon. Those are two that could have gotten it easily maybe John Gray throw him in there those are pitchers that you would think

most teams would just want because there's an interesting thing where people are like he's not worth 18 million well maybe not but you know the same pitcher that someone would pay 3 and 40 for they would love to have on 1 and 18 yep you know there's some there's like there's a there's a relationship between number of years

like part of why bauer got so much was because it was structured in a way that the dodgers would only be on the hook for two years, most likely. And so, you know, I think that that's meaningful in this discussion where I think most teams around baseball, if they thought they had a shot at anything, getting anything from those three players next year, they would give them one in 18. So I think it's bad news for Kershaw's forearm.

Well, yeah, and I think the simplest argument for that too is that which team's medical staff knows the most about Clayton Kershaw's health? Well, it's the Dodgers. And it's the same with Carlos Rodon with the White Sox. Those guys have only pitched professionally in those organizations. They know the medicals as well as anyone.

Rodon started having shoulder issues which are more more concerning than forearms and then kershaw really strikes me as some of those angels pitchers that um got that had like a forearm problem and then took the p that he got like a prp injection or something kershaw did, and he's hoping to come back. It just really reminds me of all those guys. I think Garrett Richards was like that. Who else got surgery from the Angels? But there was a few where they were like, no, I'm going to get this PRP injection, maybe even Skaggs.

But they had a couple of guys that chose the PRP injection and ended up getting Tommy John anyway. And I think, you know, just from reading the tea leaves, when he went down, like the kind of articles that went up, the kind of the way people were talking about it, the way he was immediately ruled out for the whole postseason, and there was no like, well, we'll give it a week and see how he feels, you know. I think I'm pessimistic about Kershaw's next season.

They're saying it's forearm, but you never want to take that at full face value. It could be forearm plus elbow, and they're only talking about the forearm. Unfortunately, it looks like relative bad news for Clayton Kershaw. Of course, we'll wait more. The kind of deal that he gets, I bet, is like, remember that Garrett Richards deal that he got with San Diego? Oh, it was a two-year deal, right? Like one year to get him through the injury and the second year sort of like,

here's what we expect you to pitch. So we're going to pay you a lot less for the year that you're hurt. We'll pay you some more when you come back. It might sound like insulting to someone of Kershaw's ability, but 2-15, 2-20? And what you're hoping for is you pay him $10 million to rehab, and then you pay $10 million for a $15- or $20-million pitcher the next year. Yeah.

I hope he's okay. I just don't really expect him to be based on on these developments at least for a while so rodona's a little bit more it's surprising because i mean he was throwing high 90s in the in even after the shoulder stuff in the in the playoffs yeah so um i think you've got to like if you're drafting or if you you're considering his future you got to think wow that's a little surprising that they kind of were so pessimistic about him. But I think while I can understand the injury-related concerns dictating the decision not to give qualifying offers to both Kershaw and Rodon, I'm very surprised the Rockies didn't give one to John Gray since they were trying to give him an extension. And innings are everything.

And it's hard to get pitchers to choose to sign in Colorado anyway. So it's an important tool to have in the box if you're the decision maker in Colorado to be able to keep a pitcher for an extra year potentially by giving him the best possible offer on the market. But I think he's going to get multi-year offers somewhere else because John Gray, for the most part, for the most part, has been pretty healthy over the course of his career. And he's not just a two-pitch guy. He flashes four pitches. And I'm just curious to know what you think about his stuff and how it might play not having to make those adjustments going in and out of Colorado because I suspect there are going to be at least a handful of teams interested in Gray on a multi-year deal.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that you notice if you look at his curveball stuff over time is that it just wildly oscillates. And so, you know, you can say, you know, he's got like a below average or average curveball. I think you could say also in the parlance of scouts that it flashes above average. I don't know if it flashes plus, but it flashes above average. Usually guys who can spin as good of a slider as he can can do something else with the ball, like either throw a cutter or throw a curveball. That's the trend in baseball these days is to have like three breaking balls. Um, and, and don't worry about the change up. Um, so I think that, you know, I think that curve, you know, if you

gave him a full season, uh, somewhere else, uh, could, could be a legitimate third pitch. And so, uh, you know, I think it's interesting that they offered him something that sounds like 3 and 30 and here i'm saying like if you're like it's really close that if you offer a guy 3 and 30 and you can have him for 1 and 18 i swear i swear that's the same thing you know so like i think that they they're not valuing things correctly because what's the worst case scenario? Also, the worst case scenario is you get him slightly too much for next year and you only value him. Let's say that you're three for 30, you actually value him one at 15.

Right? Maybe that's what your math is a little different than Eno Saris'. Eno Saris is an idiot and it's one for 15, not one for 18. No, you're still the idiot because one for 18 is the same as one for 15. And especially once you consider that on the other end, when he does leave,

you'll get some compensation for it. Like trading him, you know, or he declines the option and leaves this year and gives you prospects yeah because you draft picks so i think that that those outcomes are worth uh maybe paying the extra three million or whatever right well so the good news is we have opportunities to act on these things we have chances to leverage the possibilities of John Gray outside of Colorado. We did not wait even one second. The season ended and here we are. My wife is already rolling her eyes at me. She's like, what? I showed a lot of restraint by not pushing out rankings a month ago.

I'm still working on them. I decided I'm like, you know what? Let the playoffs happen. Just enjoy that. There's not that much of an appetite for rankings for the following season in october that's starting to develop now so now the target date is monday the 15th one week from today because then they'll be battle tested a couple of times i'll find flaws in them some of the flaws i'm not going to find all the flaws between now and then it's just not enough time but draft champions leagues have begun i'm on the clock right now. I'm literally on the clock right now in a league. Pick 307. And I have John Gray in my queue.

It's the 21st round. It's a 15-team league. And this is a league where you don't make in-season moves, right? 50 rounds where there are no in-season pickups. So just having healthy pitchers ends up being very helpful as the season rolls along. I kind of like John Gray in this spot. I kind of think it makes some sense to at least consider him here. Speed's hard to get.

So there's a handful of guys that I could maybe chase that were in the minors for most of last season or all of it. And in the case of Jeter Downs, I think it's too early for him. But Josh Lowe is sitting out there. So I think he's a consideration. Maybe possible sources of saves saves which are also hard to find you could throw a dart at devin williams around here i don't know i'm actually kind of torn as to what direction to choose here yeah you're you're you uh pieced out on on relievers

so uh that's always uh some consideration that you you have to you have to buy saves on some level so you have to have something i guess the thing that you will have to do is have something like 10 relievers on your squad instead of 7 or something, or 7 instead of 5 or whatever it is. You're going to have to do more quantity. And so the question for you is just like, when do I start accruing the quantity? Right. Is it too early to start taking non-closer relievers in the 21st round? Well, maybe not.

I mean, depending on the quality of those guys. Devin Williams is probably the very best of that. I think he's the only one of the guys I would consider to take here. It seems early for Green because I think if you miss out on Chad Green, there are other teams, Chad Greens, that you can get in round 35, right? The Yankees themselves have Jonathan Loizaga. Right. So I guess the question is, is John Gray worth taking here,

or do I take Devin Williams because I don't have any relievers? In the concept of Pitching Plus, which is a little bit better of an in-season tool than a season-to-season tool, you can see that in his away starts, Gray's curveball was basically like a 105. And then in his home starts, it was like an 80. That's a huge difference. It really

is, because if it's a 105, then he's got a slider at 110 stuff plus. He'll have a curveball at 105, and he'll have a fastball at 90-95. Yeah. And that's an above-average arsenal, especially with the show-me change-up that you're also betting on,

like pitching coaching at his new destination. We're talking about a guy that is over a strikeout per inning, even in bad circumstances, has ratios that don't completely ruin you, even though you don't want to use them all the time. And what is he capable of? Like a 375 and a 120 for the ratios with a similar strikeout rate,

maybe even a slightly better one and better team context means better usage and higher win probabilities. Is that expecting too much better one and better team context means better usage and higher win probabilities like is that expecting too much if i think he's a that sort of ratios guy like i think that seems pretty fair yeah i think uh you know i think he's an ideal guy to have near the bottom of your of your staff of your starting staff and that's what it'll be like he'll be my start 75 percent of the time for you or something yeah all right gra right. Gray's the pick.

That's the direction I'm going to go because the more people stop and think about what he might be literally anywhere else, the more people are going to say, hey, wait,

we should be taking this guy earlier. And in like a situation like this where it's a, it's like kind of a slow draft and the board is open, like any, there could be like

one little piece of news and then he'll get picked. Right. Like, you know, the right team, and then he'll get picked. Right. The right team. He's linked to the right team or whatever it is. Yeah. I do wonder what the pace of news will be. There's going to be, right now, we're kind of ending,

coming out of the moratorium after the World Series. So there is news. There's all this qualifying offer news. People can sign people. And we might get some teams trying to get out in front of the CBA or whatever and just sign someone now because it's slightly more risky, but maybe they think they get a better price for it or they get the jump on a player that they want

no matter what the details are especially a team like the dodgers you know who's like i don't care what this the the cbt taxes you know i don't care what the luxury tax level is i i've blown through it like like we're just gonna go do it again you know or a team like the giants who no matter what the threshold is we'll have a lot of money in between them and the threshold they have a lot of money in between them and the threshold. They have a lot of money to spend. And a team like the Giants could be like, hey, what if we just get in there and jump in there and get Story for $3.60? And then everyone later is like, dang, we paid $240 million more for our shortstop. Yeah, I mean, there is a benefit sometimes to being a first mover.

I think sometimes we see usually second-tier free agents that go. I think Robbie Ray was a quick sign with the Jays, I want to say, a couple of seasons ago. The top one wants to wait as long as possible. He wants to make sure he's getting the very best deal. He wants to get the mystery team involved. He wants to get three teams really battling it out for him. Whereas Robbie Ray is a guy like that. It's like, who's going to...

Like Andrew Haney. Andrew Haney, I bet, signs in the next couple of weeks. Right, because waiting it out for him could mean not having a job until March if he overplays it. Whereas choosing where he goes sets himself up a lot better. If some other team blocks him. Yeah, exactly. If one team with like a, maybe a nice home park for once, you know, for him,

or, you know, an NL team or a team with a great pitching coach that he really respects, you know, like, you know, he might sign in a second. Right. So we'll pull back to the beginning. I didn't mean to dive into,

hey, should I pick John Gray here? It just happened to, I literally went on the clock as we were talking about him. And it was something that was on my mind even before we started recording. I'm like, hey, wait a minute. We're only in the 15th. It's a little bit too early for Gray for us. Yeah. I'm not even all in on saying what I did was right, but I felt like if we got that good news on Gray and almost anywhere he could go, his good news in some

capacity, either a better team, better ballpark, better coaching staff, or all the above. Then excitement's going to tick up again. People were overdrafting John Gray for years in Colorado. I was never one of them, but there's enough there to be excited about him going somewhere else. Let's start at the top. Let's talk about how the first round has shaped up in a couple of these leagues that we've done. These are 15-team team leagues as i mentioned before if you're watching us on youtube we are blindfolded by the first round uh i can't move the graphic at least i have to make a different graphic to make it show

up differently so yeah it's a bit of a metaphor it really is uh this is this is how we live our lives in november so this is the first one on the screen. The first one we're going to talk about is the first round for my draft. It went Tatis, Trey Turner, Soto, Vlad Jr., and Bichette rounding out the top five. Let's stop there. That's five. Because I've got a five. You've got your five. I'm going to throw that up.

You've got Tatis, Turner, Soto. Soto, Burns, Acuna. Yeah. burns Acuna. Yeah, and I did a slow draft with Todd Zola at the end of September that ran into the second week of October. Acuna went at the 1-2 turn in that league, and he did not go until the 12th pick,

threw mine back up on the screen just now, the 12th pick of the one that I'm in right now. I don't think the question is, you know, there was some debate in our draft room, like when will he be ready? But I, I think he'll,

I think he'll, he'll make it back. You know, he had surgery on July 22nd. And I think for these types of athletes, like six to eight months is doable. I mean, he's not a basketball player. So I think he'll be doing baseball activities in March.

So I think he can make it back for the beginning of the season, don't you? I think it's possible. You wouldn't want to bet on it? I don't want to assume in the first round, early first round especially. And also how many steals will he go for? Always a question with a player coming off of just any sort of significant leg injury, how much extra running will they do?

But I hope the way players and teams try to think about rehab is more, you are healthy, play the way you want to play that that's almost as much of a mental barrier as it is a physical one and predicting who's going to trust a surgically repaired knee that seems really hard to do trust factors yeah i mean that's somebody you hear from tommy john guys is like what that first time you really let it fly right so there's a little bit of that but i don't know like i i wonder if we also think too much about steals specifically as it pertains to these injuries like everything else a player has to do stopping and starting in the outfield might be more rigorous

for acuna he got hurt in the outfield that might be the bigger block than taking off and stealing second base and i'll have to tell you something man i feel like this first round especially among the bats is like is one of the worst since i've started playing and i'm i'm not uh denigrating the specific talents like uh tatis uh an amazing amazing elite talent akunya amazing amazing elite talent. Acuna, amazing, amazing elite talent. Soto, one of the best hitters maybe of all time when it's all done. But Soto doesn't steal bases. Acuna's coming off an injury. Tatis is not having surgery for an injury,

so he may deal with that injury throughout the season. Turner is in some ways the most complete player but he also doesn't project to be the best player in terms of projections right so i i feel like i could play i i could like tell you the faults of every bat in the first round i think that's just a sign that you are becoming older and wiser and more of a curmudgeon. More of a curmudgeon. I think that's what's happening. Maybe. But you can do the same thing for the arms, of course.

Yeah, of course. But I think you are just looking at this through the lens of someone who's now in the market for life insurance. What could go wrong? What disaster could happen to me? Screw you. Basically, we're almost the same age, so this is not me picking on

Erickson or something. You're an old man. That's what you're doing. I feel the same way about the first round this year. No, the first round is supposed to be the life insurance. You know what I'm saying? The first round is supposed to be the life insurance. You know what I'm saying? The first round is supposed to be the rock-solid pick. Okay. So, like, Tatis, obviously it's the shoulder.

He avoided surgery. Avoiding surgery is supposed to be a good thing. I think we've talked about it on the show before. How long does he avoid it? It's a chronic thing that's going to keep popping out. I don't know. I would ding him more, you know, considering how bad Bellinger was.

I would probably ding him more if he got the surgery, but long-term, I'd be more excited. I'm not saying I wouldn't take Tatis first. We ended up in the 13th pick, which my co-manager wanted. And you got Mike Trout. We got Mike Trout, and then we got Mookie Betts coming back. That's a really nice start. In your league, Betts went in the first.

Yeah, more picks there. It's like they're multiplying. The bricks on the screen just keep growing. Betts went 10th overall. The way I look at the board right now, regardless of what you think about those hitters individually, I wanted the 7th pick. That was one of my higher priority picks for this particular draft

because having done one already, I thought there was a chance where I would get one of Soto or Bo Bichette or maybe one of the other hitters that goes earlier. Again, it was Tatis, Turner, Soto, Vlad, Bichette, Jose Ramirez. I thought one of the other hitters that goes earlier again it was Tatis Turner Soto Vlad Bichette Jose Ramirez I thought one of those six hitters would be there or I would have my choice of whatever pitcher I wanted I could take my SP1 which right now is Corbin Burns so it's weird I have two teams for this season and Corbin Burns was my first round pick on both of them and I'm not wearing my Brewers hat today. Yeah.

But having that seventh pick and having the choice between Bichette and Ramirez is interesting to me. I think Bichette and Ramirez, they actually kind of strike me, along with Turner, as like the traditional first round pick. You know, guys with really high floors who do everything. Yep. So those are, I think, in some ways, the conservative first round, like the, you know, the careful first round picks. The projections for Steamer are currently up over at Fangraphs,

the first of the public-facing projections that go up. If you look at Trey Turner's projection from Steamer versus Bo Bichette's, the difference is basically nine steals in favor of Turner, but two points of batting average in favor of Bichette. And Turner, I think for everybody, is maybe the safest early first rounder. Even if you believe in Tatis' skills, you worry about the health and you would prefer Tatis to Turner straight up, you're not feeling bad about Turner because overall there's a good track

record of health. He's shown good amounts of power for a few seasons now, still has the speed. Obviously being a Dodger might be in a position to pile up the best counting stats we've seen so far in his career. That could happen too. It doesn't even have to from being valuable there. I would agree that Bichette is now pretty safely in that first round group and

i was skeptical of him entering this season not because i didn't think his hit tool was good or anything like that i mostly was just afraid we didn't seem that much of in the big leagues i thought maybe he'd go through a phase of adjustments where the k rate would go up and the average would come down and he wouldn't be able to help in all five categories throughout a full season with teams making adjustments to him. I also just wasn't sure how many bases he'd steal.

You know? He'd only stolen eight in like 300 plate appearances going into the season. Right. And we wondered if the Jays, with the makeup of that offense, how much were they going to push guys on the base pass? How much would they have to? Could they be a team more like Houston where they really don't run?

And part of the reason the Astros don't run is because of who they have, right? But earlier in his career, we thought Carlos Correa was going to steal some bases. He doesn't really steal any. Bregman doesn't really run all that much. Altuve runs a little now, ran a lot back in the day, but I think there was reason to be concerned about a lineup that could do as much damage as the Jays,

not giving as many green lights as we wanted them to. So anyway, those were my concerns with Bichette. Those are gone. Beau Bichette to me is legitimately a solid mid first rounder who might even creep up

into that top five on occasion. I mean, if you, if you, you want the no warts guys, I think it's Turner Ramirez, Bichette, Soto,

and Vlad Guerrero Jr. Yeah. I think you can make a pretty good argument that those should be the top five. And I, but you know, Tatis is just, it's just so,

and Acuna are the chance of getting a top three guy, if they're healthy, is very exciting, obviously. But I think I wouldn't, I don't know. If you had the number one pick, would you take Tatis right now? If you had the number one pick, would you take Tatis right now? In any sort of overall contest, I think I would take Tatis because I think those extra bags mean so much. In a standalone league where I'm not worried about what's happening in a field of hundreds, if I'm just playing against 14 other people or 11 other people, I might be more inclined to take Soto

in those standalone leagues because I think Soto's projection is just kind of in a tier of its own in a way similar to what peak Trout was. Less steals, of course. More peak Miguel Cabrera, I think. Right, yes. I think that's the better. 330, 35, you know.

The better comparison for sure. Because we've obsessed about stolen bases in the fantasy community for years now. The last few seasons, it's been the primary theme of draft season. How are we going to get enough steals? Juan Soto runs a little bit, for one. Number two, the more I've played and the more I've tried to build teams around the occasional Adalberto Mondesi or Byron Buxton when he ran more, guys like that, when I thought,

yeah, I can get that guy that runs in the early round who's not a first rounder and I can get most of my bags from that player. It hasn't worked out. And I know that's more of a flaw to health in those players specifically, but to mitigate risk, injuries can happen to anyone, right?

I mean, Acuna can get hurt chasing down a fly ball. Guys can get hurt doing anything. I think just from a way of taking this scarce resource, it's hard to find in season. I want to try as best I can to scatter that around on my roster. I want a lot of guys that run some, and there are times where I'll take a guy that runs a lot and it's totally fine. I just don't want to, I want to make sure I'm not over paying for that one skill and giving up on surplus value in other categories. And I think with Soto, people might have some misguided understandings about what those counting stats are going to look like. Cause the first argument, I think you're going to hear against Soto as the first overall pick or an early, early first rounder, the line,

it might not be good around him. No, one's going to pitch to him. And I just don't know. I don't think I really believe that is going to be as much of an issue as some people are going to make it out to be. Yeah. I think they'll feel the representative lineup and, you know, over the course of a season, maybe in like a postseason, a postseason series, maybe they do some wild things pitching wise, but like over the course of the season, think you know people will pitch to him try to win games you know yeah he's going to get his so and i 100 agree with your idea of um of getting a little bit everywhere that's been our approach so we got trout bets just on the hitters trout bets story uhcie, Grisham, Cabrian, Hayes, Cronenworth, and Rizzo. So we feel like we have maybe 70 steals already in hand, maybe 75, 80,

and we're trying to get 100. So maybe we'd get somebody near the end just to pad it, but we feel pretty good about that, just getting a little handful from everybody. And that's the same kind of approach I ended up following here. I mean, after I took Burns at seven overall, I went Simeon, Machado, Tim Anderson, Springer, Buxton, Bellinger, and Yelich. So I went seven straight hitters before I went back to getting some arms. And that's a nutty little group there.

What was that? Say that again. Semi and Machado, Anderson. No, the next group. The four outfielders? Springer, Buxton, Bellinger, and Jelich? Woo! That's the kind of stuff that could win you the overall. Yeah, and I mean, I could also...

I don't think it would cost you that much. If it's a worst-case scenario, those guys are just like outfielders. They're all going to play. I think so, yeah. I mean, in Buxton... Okay, Buxton's health track record is on thing. Bounder has some risk of being platooned.

Some, but I don't know, man. The shoulder was clearly more of an issue than we all thought it was coming into the season. That's fairly obvious. No, I like buying low. It's just, you know, how much do was coming to the season like that's fairly obvious no i i like i like buying low it's just you know how much do you think about the concept of you know i wrote about lineup diversity um in in here but i but sometimes i think about the concept of um diversity of approach in in this so like we we were uh light on pitching right and we had sale darvish um and then we were looking at a third

pitcher and we were debating between kershaw and um and irkiti and like throwing kershaw on there like yeah you could have a sale darvish kershaw season next year that would make us like one of the best pitching or the best pitching staff in our division or like a really good pitching staff having spent almost nothing on pitching um but we were just kind of like are we really gonna do that again so going uh yelling yell at bellinger uh like double tap right there is like you went there again you you the same profile. You hit it hard. I'd rather do that with hitters than with pitchers. I think the, yeah, you can dream on that pitching trio that you mentioned, but Sale and Darvish is a very risky one-two, relatively speaking. Yeah.

At that point, I don't think your best flyers, like Steven Strasburg, I don't know. Strasburg might go late enough where it's a moot point, I don't think your best flyers, like Steven Strasburg, Strasburg might go late enough where it's a moot point, but there are certain types of guys that you don't necessarily want to stack on. Now we kind of want to buy some innings. Maybe I'm wrong about how much bounce back I have. Maybe it should be two out of three out of Buxton, Bellinger, and Yellich. Maybe that's going one too far.

I am fully ready to admit that's a possibility. What I got obsessed with, though, in the moment was with closers getting pushed up. Closers started going in the third round. Hendricks and Hader went at 3-2 and 3-3 in this draft. I was looking at Bellinger. The next pick was Jordan Romano. And I like Jordan Romano enough, but you're telling me I can get Cody Bellinger and the person next to me is going to take Jordan Romano

and I can't go 20 rounds later and take the next Jordan Romano or at least who I think could be the next Jordan Romano? Because Jordan Romano wasn't anything to start last year. It seems a little easier to me to find a replacement for a Jordan Romano, a knockoff version of Jordan Romano, my TJ Maxx version of Jordan Romano. That seems easier than finding the TJ Maxx version of Cody Bellinger. Especially since pitching plus beats projections.

We're going to have leaderboards for you guys, I promise. Da-da-da-da-da-da! Is that what you're going to do? What did I... What were some names that I was throwing out there? Paul... You want to take the players in my queue and throw them out there, and then the people in my league

can just snipe my queue if they like the guys they i don't think people that i'm playing against here are like well i gotta get ahead of dvr i gotta do whatever he's no no that's that's not how this works it's more of just them knowing who's in my queue that i'm worried about in time well here's a here's a here's a guy that's been picked um and that we picked that we felt uh strong about based on the pitching plus. David Bednar, I think, is in a good spot. I got him in the 14th, and the pitching plus is through the roof. It's like 109, 110.

Let's see here. He has the same pitching plus as Craig Kimbre bednar as craig kimbrough and devin williams it's good so uh so that's that's uh a name that has come up where that's near the end of the you know after him went like garrett whitlock and uh blake trinan where you like, there's a little bit more of a hope situation there. Bednar, I think, is pretty much locked in as a Pittsburgh guy. We kind of started this conversation looking at first rounders. We got partway through. We got through the first five, I think, and we kind of got spiraled. So I'll just run through them the rest of the first round.

Jose Ramirez, clear first rounder, I think, in most leagues. Corbin Burns among the first pitchers off the board. I took him at seven. Kyle Tucker, I think is frequently either late first rounder, early second rounder, but might even pop up. He went eighth in this draft. He went at the turn for us and we debated him against Trout. Yeah, I mean, there you go. So he belongs in the conversation for sure.

Shohei Otani, also, I mean, we've talked about... It's difficult for this setup because you're basically just buying him as a bat, which he projects as like a top five, top six bat now. Yeah, even if you just say, I don't care, I'm not going to use him as a pitcher. He's my UT and he's going to do everything. He's going to hit 270 with 35 plus bombs and he's going to steal 20 bases. Well, that's a first rounder. So a little bit of risk on that strikeout rate.

Probably one of the worst strikeout rates in this first round. Yes, eyeballing it across the board. Tatis might be close. Tatis is close, yeah. He'd be the only guy that's close. Everybody else would be lower. And Acuna, I guess, would be somewhat close. At least he was pre this season.

I think he's cutting it. Harper looks kind of like the new freddie freeman where he's the the safe boring late first rounder bets is kind of becoming that sort of player what are you doing with pitching in the first round i mean burns garrett cole walker bueller uh it's not jacob degrom because of uncertainty about his health but if you are taking the first pitcher off the board, who is it and which spot? How many hitters do you think belong ahead of whoever it is you have as your first pitcher?

Yeah, I think I'm a little bit more tempted to take a pitcher in the first round given how soft I find parts of this first round to be, but I think that Cole, DeGrom, and Scherzer, and even a little bit of Buehler have some question marks that make me a little bit uncomfortable taking them in the first round. I think Burns, Woodruff, and I guess Buehler are the three pitchers that I think belong there.

But Buehler really kind of fell off in the second half. I mean, there was signs of fatigue. The stuff was falling off. The spin rate was falling off. He's one of the biggest year-over-year volume changers. You know? I don't know. biggest year-over-year volume changers. I don't know. There's some sort of whiff of risk around there for me too.

Yeah, I think with Bueller, I don't know. I don't know if it's like all those things kind of combining into one where I'm like, oh, yeah, he's not first, but he's top five. I don't know if I just want to punt because I don't think there's a ceiling there, but I also was like, is he going to just be the same guy when he comes back next year? Is he going to try and tinker and find ways to get spin back or to bring something out of the arsenal more often? I still have a lot of confidence in that organization and how they're going to handle it.

It's good pitching coaching, yeah. Yeah. I still have a lot of confidence in that organization and how they're going to handle it. Good pitching coaching, yeah. Yeah, so even, like, we're talking about some in-season decline. Even with that, the final results were really good, and you're not dealing with, you know, the AL East. Now, one thing you have to think about, that edge that NL pitchers have had over AL pitchers,

I keep throwing the bricks up on the screen if you're watching on YouTube, because people, I don't know, probably find that more visually interesting than our faces. That edge might go away. That edge might go away. And then all of a sudden, you know, you're looking at Bueller versus, well,

I guess you have to go the other direction. Bueller versus Cole. I think it would smash everybody towards Cole, who I think is a back-end first-rounder. Yeah, I think that gap, like if you were on Buehler over Cole, because of the lack of universal DH, that switch might be enough to flip the order for you. So, to me, I'm comfortable considering a pitcher around the time when I no longer have a young mid-career stud bat looking at me. And I think that's basically Trout Harper Betts.

You would take a pitcher over those guys because you can get one of them coming back through? We went Trout Betts sale. coming back through we went trout bet sale but um i could see if burns was available to me or bueller or maybe woodruff all three were not available to us we did debate woodruff until he went two picks before us so i do think at sort of 13 to 14, if you have Woodruff, Bueller, or Burns still, and maybe Cole, still out there, one of them, I'd say consider doing it. Because the difference between Trout and Betts is probably not that big. If you think you can get Betts coming back, or you can get Harper coming back, or you can get, you know, in ours, Tucker, you can almost get going back. So if it's like a, you know, kind of a mid career used to be great outfielder, there's like three or four of them right there. Yeah. And when you take a look at

the first five rounds all stacked together, you can kind of see a better idea of what the foundation really looks like. It's, it's more than who are you going to get at one, who are you going to get at two? It's kind of who are you going to get in those first four to five rounds? What, what does it look like if you wait on pitching what's there if you push pitching early do you feel good enough about the mix of of power and speed that you're able to to put together in the rounds after uh there's a bobby witt jr nice in that deep blue shade round three wow i i mean ours is round nine that's a that'll be aggressive but uh i would recommend uh you know having an opinion on you darvish because he's fallen to the fifth and he

had great strikeout minus walk rates last year and just you know everything else fell apart uh if you think if you think that you darvish is is still good, he's got a good price on him again. Yeah, he didn't even go in the first five rounds of the draft that I'm in, which is surprising to me because... I bet he starts moving up as people start identifying him. But, you know, yeah,

he went right after Dylan Cease and before Alec Manoa, which, yeah, fine. Those are both good arms, but they have a lot more question marks around them than a tried and true veteran like you, Darvish, I think. Darvish is, to me, you could probably get away with him as a wait for my first pitcher guy. You're going to hammer a couple pitchers behind him, of course, to get like three in the first nine or ten rounds if you're doing that he's kind of an ideal sp2 though he's a great fit there if you had a burns we we took him higher because our sp1 was sale and so i agree with you i think that there's

should be volume there and so the sale sale was like well there should be quality there hopefully also volume i mean they're both kind of they're they're both risky i'm not going to say they're not but we we definitely we were the weight on pitching team there's only one team that waited longer than us that's a good thing though i think taking a different approach than the room is really good i think the question comes down to execution do you have enough late pitchers value wise that come back and exceed expectations do you do your sources of saves come through if you don't take a closer in the first 20 rounds like um you know some idiot that might be talking on this podcast right now was that thought out ahead of time? Well, no. It was a reaction to what was happening in the moment.

Have I done enough homework to save it? That's debatable. The Stuff Plus leaderboard is my friend. Yeah, exactly. For subscribers, if you just look at my last command and stuff report,

I think it's why should anyone care about Stuff Plus. I've got a link in there to the Google Doc that I've updated with the year, end of year stuff and command numbers, the location numbers. And I do think that given what we know, if you're looking among relievers, just look at Pitching Plus, look at Stuff Plus. That's a really good place to start. If you're looking at starters, the projections do beat Pitching Plus year to year. So the way that I would use Pitching Plus among starters is using Pitching Plus and Stuff Plus to identify sleepers. So look for small sample guys that pitched late last year,

people came back from injury, just people that other people don't know whether to trust or not because their samples are so small. You should know more about them because of Pitching Plus. So that's a process I'll be going through and of course I'll write pieces about it and we can do it that way but you can also do your own sleuthing with that sort of background. And we're working on getting a leaderboard up for the new year that you'll be able to sort and filter yourself

and do more sophisticated things on. Looking forward to that for sure. Now, a couple mailbag questions. One was a tweet that came in probably back when the playoffs started, back when the Rays were still a part of the conversation. It was a question about where we think Shane Boz is going to end up going in drafts. And I think players like that are among the most difficult to project. I have a reasonably high amount of confidence in projecting ranges for a lot of types of players, but pitchers that came

up late in the year and flashed excellent stuff, that is not the group that I feel confident in where I can say, I think the market's going to treat the player this way seeing a couple drafts so far i took shane boss in the ninth round of the draft that we're talking about right now yeah yeah 10th and yours i think he might have gone eighth in the eighth round of the one i did was where did how go where did how could go how tanner how went in the 12th round. So in ours, it went Baz Houck, which I think is right on line with what you were talking about, and Gilbert in the 8th. So basically, if you like a young pitcher of that caliber,

you've got to take him in the 8th or 9th. Yeah, at least in the higher stakes NFBC sort of situations. Where you've got to go get your guy. That seems to be the price. Now the subsequent follow-up question is does that make sense based on everything you've said about Pitching Plus and the numbers you've seen from Boz?

All three of them. Baz, Hauk, and Gilbert. If you want to put those three in a hand, in a group, in a tier and wait until one goes and then take one over the other two, that's a fine approach if you ask me. Yeah, and the order in this one, in a group, in a tier, and wait until one goes and then take one over the other two, that's a fine approach, if you ask me. Yeah, and the order in this one, it was Boz, then it was Gilbert

in the early half of the 10th, and then a little discount for Hauk in the 12th. But I could see those guys getting clustered up a little bit closer together. We had one other mailbag question about Pitching Plus. This is from Cameron. You know, recently tweeted that his Pitching Plus model likes Herman Marquez's curveball the best. Just looking at the stuff, I was a bit confused.

Savant says it has below average movement compared to other curveballs around its velocity. I understand that it's thrown hard, but what other non-command features do you think make it so favorable? We got one here. You know, we got some heat maps for the YouTube watchers. This is velocity against vertical differential off of the fastball. So he actually, he's in that group of kind of harder, flatter curveballs, if that makes sense. You can see that mostly curveballs over 82 or so do pretty well no matter what kind of movement they have right um on this one then the next one is kind of

interesting he has some seam shifted wake effects so axis delta here is the difference between your inferred, like movement inferred spin axis and your actual observed spin axis. So he has a 25 degree difference. He's in a group of other curveballs that have good seam shifted wake appearances there at the bottom left. And so there's something about uh his curveball that works i think it's some it's it's basically like a gyro curve it has very low spin efficiency um and uh that can work so um it's not something that really pops on a savant page you know they don't have this on the spot page the you know the axis delta spin efficiency integration uh but it does require uh having some gyro spin having a low spin efficiency breaking ball to have a seam shifted wake breaking ball that's something we know for sure

so in in in this case his low spin efficiency it benefits him uh I would say probably in some sort of deception. It's a curveball that acts weird. Think of Elisir Hernandez's strange-ass 80-mile-an-hour cutter he throws. That is a very odd pitch, as we've talked about before. Just nothing quite like it. Herman Marquez basically throws an 82-mile-an-hour gyro slider that he calls his curveball. mile an hour gyro slider you know that he calls his curveball but hopefully that sheds some light on what's going on with i i wish you know i wish these things were a little bit less black box but you know and we may not have the that feature integration aspect that we were just showing you

uh in version one uh on the site uh but i do kind of want to put it in eventually because it will help you understand why something is good. Because you can put different features together on the heat map and go, oh, his is good because it has the seam shifted wake deception or oh, it's good because of this. So hopefully we'll have that at least in version two, but I can always make grabs for people who are interested. Excellent. Well, keep the questions coming. We really appreciate those. Thank you for that question, Cameron, and thank you for the Shane Boz question.

I forget who asked that. It was that long ago. I just had a note to bring him back up when it came back around. You can tweet questions at us. He's at Eno Saris. I am at Derek Van Ryper. Be sure to barrel up on the like button if you're watching us on YouTube. You can get 33% off a subscription to The Athletic at theathletic.com

slash ratesandbarrels. That discount applies to your first year, so be sure to get that if you don't already have a subscription. Another way to reach us, of course, you can email us, ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com. Still time to get emails in before I get down to inbox zero at the end of the year. It's an ongoing effort that has resumed

now that the playoffs are over, so send those questions in. Just give up. Just give up and be free. I will enjoy the lack of weight on my shoulders more if I can just get the boulder off myself. If I get the boulder up the hill, I'll feel better.

If I just let the boulder roll down the hill into the village, that's going to be a bad thing. My athletic email email I got attached to all the like zoom press release lists game over that thing just delete all you're more likely to get me

on twitter than you are in my athletic email on that note that is going to wrap things up for this episode of rates and barrels but we have an episode coming up on wednesday with ito brit and myself so be sure to check that out live from the general manager's meetings should be a good time thanks for listening.