Rates & Barrels - Rapid Changes

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

Rundown0:27 Rapid Changes to Day-to-Day Life9:12 Finding New Escapes16:58 Finishing the Outfield Preview20:18 Avisaíl García's Role in Milwaukee23:50 The People's Sleeper: Brian Anderson29:32 Mark Canha's Encore33:42 Making Sense of Cincinnati's Plans for Senzel & Akiyama39:26 Did Injuries Curtail Hunter Renfroe's Best Season?44:07 Buying Ian Happ?51:49 Jo Adell & Dylan Carlson61:34 Other Late Names of Interest Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail]   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 77. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. It is Thursday, March 12th, 2020. We've reached a very strange place, I think, just based on recent news events that we're seeing, of course, as it pertains to the coronavirus, COVID-19, the impact that's clearly going to have on everybody's lives. And frankly, I think it's just something we're going to talk about for a while on this show and we'll see where things go. Because there's really been nothing in our lifetimes that has reached this level in America that I can recall. And I think of like H1N1 and some of the other outbreaks that have happened in our lifetime, I don't recall the level of response from professional sports and other walks of life getting to this point when those outbreaks occurred.

No, and over the next week or so, I've got a friend who's a doctor in Seattle, and he's in quarantine and his mother's in the hospital. And I think over the next week or so, everyone's going to have a story like that. Um, if not closer. So it's, uh, it's a difficult time. And I think what's even weirder and more difficult about this, at least in our space, and I hate to be to navel gaze, but, you know, we are who we are, is that a lot of times when there's something difficult going on internationally or nationally, we turn to sports to not think about it or to unify, to move on.

to move on. There's something about the way sports seem to have been played forever, you know, and that we keep the records of them and we just kind of assume they will always be there, you know,

and like I'm thinking of like 9-11 and sort of, you know, different shootings and different things that happened in the past where we have a grand moment of silence and then, you know, eventually play ball. And so I thought that, you know, maybe we'd be playing in empty stadiums because we're going to be home and we're going to need that distraction. We're going to need that unification. We're going to need that feeling again.

But, you know, the thing is, I made a decision earlier this week to not go to Arizona. And it was, it was, I just made a decision like two days ago, but it seems like, it seems like a year ago. And the decision came down to the fact, it wasn't, like, I had a cold, right? And I was like, I think this is a cold. You know, there's too much snot. It's too much of my nose. I don't think I have the virus.

But is there a 1% chance that this is the virus? Sure. You know, does't make sense for me to try to elbow my way to the front of the line and get a test and get the test results so I can go to Arizona? No. Does it make sense that if I have a one percent chance of having this, then I should go travel and touch things and shake people's hands and cough in front of people like i'm coughing still so i was like this is this is almost a no-brainer and it's not about me i will survive most likely it's about the one percent chance that i go and spread this and someone else who has a compromised immune system or an older person dies that would be be, that would, that would just break me. I would,

I would feel so terrible. And playing in empty stadiums, I think it does give us that distraction and we're going to need distractions. And so we're going to do our best to, to, to, to work towards a season. We don't know when it'll start you know but playing in empty stadiums still has that risk you're still flying players around from place to place and those players by this point are likely to have the virus some of them and if you're flying them around from city to city you're spreading it you're flying them around from city to city, you're spreading it.

You're adding stress to the overall health care system. You're generally spreading it. You're making it worse. So my assumption is that there's going to be an announcement today. We haven't heard it yet, but I'm assuming they're going to bang the rest of spring training and maybe leave opening day up in the air. Because there's some sense that maybe this will slow down and maybe the warmer weather will combat this somehow.

We're exactly two weeks to the day from opening day, and I think there's almost no chance of there being games played that day. And it's for the greater good. There's no doubt in my mind about that. I was having the exact same thoughts you were about potentially going to New York for Tell Wars. I mean, I was supposed to be on a plane right now going there. And I think it was Tuesday afternoon. These days have been some of the longest days I can remember. It's only been two days and it feels like it's been a month. But the thought I had was very similar to yours.

I thought about my father-in-law who has an autoimmune disorder. And I thought, you know, I will probably be okay. I can rationalize statistics and I wash my hands a lot. I'm very careful, but I could easily be a carrier. And you go to a place that's very densely populated where you're in close proximity to your friends, strangers. There was no way in my mind that I could justify taking that risk, even if that risk mathematically is still relatively small. And I think part of our collective duty in a time like this is to err on the side of extreme caution for the benefit of everyone. We all want to have normalcy. We want to have baseball and fantasy baseball and go to movies and go to plays and do things with our friends and go to concerts. And yes, it is frustrating and disappointing when time if the way that I can help provide some value to society is just to give people something that makes them happy.

If this show or the articles I write, the things I do bring people some joy and divert their minds from otherwise difficult situations, then that's worth something. It's maybe not the most important thing in the world, but it's at least worth something. So it's difficult because, yeah, this is what we use to escape. And it's probably not going to be there for us for a little while. But if we do the right things, I think there's a very good chance that it comes back sooner rather than later.

It might be a month. Just kind of seeing the pattern of what the NBA has done, what the NHL has done, what Major League Soccer, I think, just did this morning, I would be surprised if we saw April baseball this year. I think it would be prudent for the league to shut it all down and reevaluate things in a few weeks see how things are trending and try to make a decision about the rest of the season at that time like that that kind of seems like where we're headed at this point yeah yeah um and it's a it's a weird thing too with fantasy it's so like we're in draft season, you know? And we're all drafting with these

assumptions in mind. I have two drafts left next week. I assume we'll do them, but it's like with a show, it's like... Like, do we analyze based on this? Is, like, James Paxton suddenly a better play in drafts?

It's such a weird space because you don't want to go there. Yeah, it feels strange talking about it in that light where it's like, well, the season's going to be shorter because of this deadly virus, so the guys who had innings restrictions are now more valuable. That's the type of analysis we'd be doing in that case. That doesn't feel right. But at the same time, I think to divert our minds.

We're going to be home. We're going to be home. We're going to be home. I've been trying to rack my brain. We're going to be home. I've been trying to rack my brain. You were part of a really cool exercise that Pierre Bequet of ESPN put together. It was historical rotisserie baseball.

And you talked about it. Well, actually, I don't think you were allowed to talk about it on the show. Yeah, we scrubbed the mention of that. I cut that little mention out of the show a couple weeks ago. So two weeks ago, we were in Florida, he shared the results. And that kind of exercise, which for those, I guess no one knows what I'm talking about, I should explain it a little bit. Well, you should explain it because you actually did it. I was thinking something like that could actually be a way we can still just divert our minds a little bit. We still want to pay attention to news.

We still want to know what's going on in the world around us, but we're going to need pockets of, of downtime to kind of be ourselves. And then something like this could help. Yeah, it's, it was, it was a funny experience,

even though I ended up second to last and after the twist dead last, um, the, the idea was to just look through, like historically look through different baseball seasons and basically pick, make a rotisserie lineup, make a fantasy lineup based on picking players, picking player seasons from 1980 to 2010. And the rules that made it interesting were that you could only have

one player from one season. You can only use a player once, you can only use a season once, and you can only use a team once. And you had to have an even spread through the decades. So I think it turned out to be like, you had to have at least five players from every decade.

And that was fun. It was fun. It's a draft that you can have. It will probably teach you something about, I don't want to talk too much about the results because maybe you can go do it. It's not too hard. Someone has to kind of tabulate at the end.

But you basically... It becomes a puzzle. It's not quite like how we do fantasy where you're drafting for the future. You already know the results. It becomes more about a puzzle of how... And one of the hard parts, without giving too much away,

one of the hard parts is you don't know the targets. You don't know what's enough homers or what's enough stolen bases. And so you have to kind of make these decisions. Oh, you know, there's these years, 1997, 1987. There are some years that for some reason created amazing pitcher and hitter seasons. And so you have to decide, do I take Pedro from that year or do I take Piazza from that year? And so you have to build this lineup. I recommend doing two catchers. It forces a little scarcity on the exercise and brought something interesting to the table.

And then you just tabulate it up and you make a standings. And believe me, this could take a couple weeks to do. I wanted to bring it up because I thought, hey, we all love playing. We can't play right now. We want to do something that we enjoy. I just dropped in on the presentation about it. After you explained it to me, I was pretty excited about it anyway. And I was more excited about it after kind of seeing some things, how it played out. correctly you were not supposed to use algorithms correct like you're not supposed to just take a big database and parse through it and and basically have a computer actually solve the problem this is like you working through leaderboards on fan graphs and using the play index on baseball reference i will have to say that some some people had a bit of an unnatural advantage. I only had historical values to 2010 or so

because we did that Fantasy Players of the Decade podcast. I think Ron had them all the way back to 1980. He was making

those going back to when he started doing this forecaster at least, and maybe even before. Yeah, so but I would say Ron Chandler didn't win. And the one person who didn't win

that got closest to discovering how he could win made a bunch of different lineups and looked at how each one did against each other. Yeah, that was a really good tactic to not say, I'm just going to build one team. I'm going to build five or ten teams

and see if I do this, if I do that, what kinds of different totals am I going to get? Yeah, it's not a bad idea for, uh, for, for how to get through this. Um, I hope, uh, I hope people didn't disseminate exactly how the winners won. Uh, there's a couple of different strategies you can take going into it. Um, and, uh, uh, I, well, I obviously took the wrong one. And, well, I obviously took the wrong one. And in fact, the twist at the end was, now that you, and you can actually elongate the game.

This is the twist that Pierre gave at the end was, now that you know what the board looks like, can the last place team build a team that beats the first place team? And then once that, once it's beaten, the next person goes, the next person at the bottom tries to go to the top. It's sort of like, uh,

we used to do training runs like that when I played soccer, where the people in the back would sprint to the front. The whole team would basically be going at like a jogging pace. And then, you know, there's, if you do varsity JV, 40 people in line.

So the two people in the back, you run in pairs, they'd peel off and sprint to the front. And the people in the back would sprint to the front. You could do that for a while. You could just go around the field in circles if fitness was a problem.

But same principle, where once you're in last, you go again and you try to beat. But it takes a while. To sit there and break it down, it's going to take days, maybe even a couple of weeks in some cases, to pass the current leader. So I just think it's a really cool exercise. That could go on forever.

And having gone through it myself, if you have questions, we have the email inbox. What's the email again? Ratesandbarrelsat theathletic.com. If your email's there, we can provide some guidance on if there are any rules that I missed, any questions you have on it. If anyone wants to start doing this,

wants to start doing a league, but they don't have enough people, we can maybe facilitate getting together leagues on this. I don't know. And we could report some results from different leagues that are doing it

and talk about it a little bit. If that's interesting, we should do it. Otherwise, I think we have to prepare ourselves for the most awkward segue in the history of fantasy baseball podcasting. episode we said we had more outfielders to talk about so we are going to deliver on that promise and um you know going from talking about a deadly virus and how to spend your potential like weeks in basically like a lockdown scenario and engaging your mind um you know transitioning from that to hey let's talk about outfielders who are not being drafted inside the top 200. There's no easy way to say that. There just isn't.

At least online things are not being canceled. And actually, I think this should be much worse like 50 years ago. Oh, even 20 years ago. The internet in the early 2000s wasn't not much going on. It wasn't prepared for everybody working from home streaming or streaming and watching and doing. I mean, I I've,

I've been thinking about that. I mean, um, for, for people who have like church services or something they go to, you can do that online. Now for college students, you can get your lectures online.

Like it's a great thing to have at our disposal, especially a time like this when you're staying away from from gatherings is essential to making things get back to normal right like having that technology is is a very fortunate thing yeah yeah um so we get to stream watch. We get to draft. The drafts will be weird, and maybe the high-stakes drafts. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those, right now they're going online only, but because of the potential of sort of gaming the league based on either knowing more about what will happen this season,

possibly, than other players in the league, or because we don't know when the season will start, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point NFPC halted drafts until there was more clarity about when the season would start. Right, and I think what could happen in a lot of scenarios, too, if you're thinking about your home leagues or leagues you're a part of, you could postpone the draft until one week before the season begins. I know you're relying on the schedules of 10, 12, 15 people

in a very uncertain time, but I think we're going to see some of that happening too. Yet another doodle. Another doodle poll. That's actually become one of the best ways to find a common time for that. By the way, I don't know how many people know about that at this point, but for the leagues I'm in that have used that,

we come to a consensus date probably within like three days usually. And the email threads of yesterdecade when it would be like, I can't make this day. And it was like reply all after reply all like those those are brutal those are fortunately you know no longer a part of the leagues that I run but as promised let's talk about outfielders I was gonna do like old-timey interlude music but that didn't even doesn't feel appropriate either that's usually what happens when something really bizarre is happening behind

the scenes like they're fighting over the projector but the technical difficulties exactly pinstripe candy stripe curtain and the old-timey piano music play me off johnny the outfielders out to the top 200 the late outfielders and not necessarily sleepers but the types of players that round out your roster. I think I mentioned this on Tuesday's episode. This group of players generally has something to offer in just about every category. There's even a few sources of potential cheap batting average sprinkled in to this group. Usually it comes with injury risk or uncertain playing time.

But if you're chasing just about any category, you've got a shot at finding it in this range. I think we closed things out on the last show talking about Justin Upton as a really nice value option at his price. Let's pick it up with Abisail Garcia, who I think is probably one of our favorite players on this podcast. You've been kind of banging the drum for him as a undervalued free agent prior to his decision to sign with the Brewers. Seeing him land in a more hitter-friendly environment has made me a lot more interested in what he could do this year.

And I think the thing I keep coming back to is that StatCast page. It's just way better than I would have ever expected at the beginning of his career because in part because of the nickname being Baby Miggy, I think there was always this air of disappointment in Garcia, which wasn't really his fault. It was kind of the fault of whoever gave him that nickname.

Yeah, you know, it might be surprising to people, but he's top 50 in barrel rate. You know, he's got the same barrel rate as Edwin Encarnacion, you know,D. Martinez. We and other people have yelled at him for not lifting the ball better, but in the last two years, he's increased the barrel rate and he's always been a guy who hits the ball hard, runs real fast, has a rocket for an arm. He's, he's very athletic. And yeah, he doesn't run the best routes. And yeah, he doesn't have the best plate discipline. And yeah, he doesn't lift the ball as much as he could. But you know, just a raw athlete like this is still still pretty

valuable. And I think, I don't know that he'll steal much more than 10 bases. But you know, there's a possibility gets more than 530 PA, or maybe he only does 500 plate appearances again, Abacel Garcia. But he might still be able to repeat a good batting average, 20 homers, 10 stolen bases. Maybe in weekly leagues, it's a little bit lesser of a pickup, but in daily leagues, a great player to have on your team.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the playing time does come in a bit higher than people expect. I think with Ryan Braun, he's going to be managed very carefully. We saw Lorenzo Cain play through a lot of injuries last year. Garcia occasionally played center with the Rays, so he's an option there,

even though it's a pretty big downgrade defensively from Cain to just about anybody. So they do have a few paths for that to to really kind of be a regular role or almost regular role for Abisail Garcia well you'd figure that like anytime there's a DH I would actually you know Fangraphs has Gamble at the top of that but I think anytime there's a DH I would figure that Smoke or Braun would DH yeah I think Braun's kind of like the the default dh um maybe maybe like if yelich is at that point where he hasn't had a day off in a while and interleague play falls in the schedule that way he'd get a chance to do it for a day because they try to monitor him carefully with that back injury that kind of pops up from time to time as well right so, so I just feel like there's,

I don't know if it's 600, but like five, 550 seems like very doable. Let's talk about Brian Anderson for a moment. He's become the people's sleeper. Like in a lot of the My Guys and sleeper pieces I've seen on The Athletic, Brian Anderson's name comes up a lot more than I would have expected.

I think he's a nice player. I don't know. I don't know if there's anything more there than what we saw last year, short of maxing out playing time because last season, Brian Anderson had 520 plate appearances, hit 20 homers, hit 261 with 342 OBP. The underlying numbers, XBA, X slug generally support what he did. Makes decent contact. 89.9 average exit velocity, 8.9% barrel rate.

Is there another level here, or is this sort of a what you see is what you get and we're buying at this price because we think maximum plate appearances are a possibility because he's an everyday fixture in the Marlins lineup? You said an 8.9% barrel rate? Yeah, that's what they have on the... Oh, I see. You're quoting barrels per batted ball event.

Yeah, that's what they put on the page, the player page at Savant. Oh, they use barrels per batted ball event there? Yeah. Oh, I see. The default sort on the leaderboards is barrels per pa i like i like the pa one better actually though it accounts a little bit for plate discipline and strikeout rate you know yeah i think it is a little bit better because you could have a guy

who merges the ball um you know but doesn't ever make contact. For fantasy purposes, we care more about the whole package, I think. It's weird, but it's the same. If you were a major league team, you could be like, oh, we can work on the play discipline. We can improve the strikeout rate. We just need someone who can hit the ball hard or something like that. Anyway, Anderson to me is, I doubt that there is much upside left. I would say that what does remain between him and his ceiling

is the fact that he's just turning 26, or he's in his 26th year, so he's in whatever his peak year. The Marlins have moved the fences in, and he's just such a steady producer that you could easily see him having a year where he has the 10% walk rate, the 20% strikeout rate, maybe like a 220 ISO and steal five bags that would probably produce like a 275 average, 25 homers and five bags. It's, it's, um, it's the kind of thing where like, if you looked at the auction calculator

values, like across the line, it wouldn't be, um,. In fact, he's a negative in each category. But that's a negative from average. So he's slightly below average or average at everything. And you add that all up, you get value. You know what I mean? He doesn't hurt you anywhere. And that's a nice player to get when you're talking about double-digit rounds. I mean, you're getting him probably in the round 12 to 15 range,

depending on the number of teams in your league, with ease. He's not getting pushed up that much, even though people seem to like him. It's interesting to me, too, looking at his barrel rate per plate appearance. He's at 6%. Nolan Arenado is at 6%. Chris Bryant's at 5.8%. Francisco Lindor's at six percent nolan arenado is at six percent chris bryant's at 5.8 francisco lindor's at 5.8 and i don't think you'd love to see that number be a lot higher but i don't think it's necessarily a bad barrel rate i think it's just kind of

slightly above average four and a half is about average yeah so it So it's average-ish for a better player. One other thing I would say that's interesting also about his profile is he speaks a little bit to the value of keeping your team well-rounded as long as possible. Because if you come to the end of your draft and your team is well-rounded, you just need more plate appearances, just need more someone who won't hurt you, then you can pick Brian Anderson. If you come to the draft with real needs, you're going to reach lower than him.

So his value right now by ATC is $5, right? So if you have an unbalanced team, you going to reach down for scott kingery because you need steals right his scott kingery's value is is two dollars and eight cents or three dollars so you put left two dollars on the table because your team context needed the steals which is it's fine you can still build a well-rounded team in the end. But if you kept your team well-rounded long enough, there are these vanilla guys like an Adam Eaton or Brian Anderson or Brian Reynolds. You know, guys that like don't give you a lot in a lot of places, but might have more overall value than going down and being

like, oh, my batting average sucks. I'm going to take Luis Arias. That's great. He's $2. So if you chose Luis Arias instead of Brian Reynolds, you left $7 on the table. Yeah, I mean, Reynolds, as you said, he's just kind of steady across the board, too. I think Reynolds and Anderson are very kind of similar-ish players. Like, you know, they don't,

neither one of them is going to be your star. And as you get better, the further they get from the middle of the lineup, you know? Yeah. But if you had a team full of Andersons and Reynolds, I feel like you'd have a pretty good offensive team, actually.

Yeah, I think they're pretty likely to hit their projection. They're probably not that likely to exceed it, but they're young enough where they're likely to just do the mean expectation and that's yeah that's that's what makes them pretty appealing uh let's talk about a couple other players in this range mark canna i don't know what to do with mark canna i'm not going to make a pun and say, can he do it again? Because I'm not the pun guy. Cabin house cheeseburgers. I mean, I assume playing time's not a concern to begin the season. What he did last year was just a level that I didn't think he was capable of.

I don't think anybody necessarily thought he was capable of putting together an OPS over 900 in nearly 500 plate appearances. Is that real? Is there any reason to believe that this is a new baseline? Or are we going to look back at 2019 and say, yeah, that was an age 30 career season. There's really nowhere to go but down. I think what stands out to me is the plate discipline. You know, he always had a fairly good barrel rate.

He always had a good exit velocity. He's always lifted the ball. You know, he's always showed these skills when it comes to power. But there was a real step forward with the walk rate last year and supported by the swing discipline. And then having talked to him about this a lot, he just basically said that the playing every day gave him the opportunity to really zone in on what he wanted to hit. This is something that happens when you get older is you take more pitches and you reach at fewer pitches.

You get worse at hitting pitches because your athleticism goes down, but you get better at swinging at the right pitches. So his swing rate last year was 40%. His career swing rate was 45%. In 2016 and 2017, he was swinging at half the pitches he saw. So he's really cut that down. He really cut his reach rate down, Mark Canna did. So what you're seeing is, I think, the evolution of plate discipline to match the plate skills in terms of power. I don't know how that intermeshes, though,

when it comes to how long he can do it. I think of guys like Ryan Ludwig and... That's a great pull, Ryan Ludwig. And I remember there's a discussion about late bloomers like this. And my general feeling on late bloomers is it's going to go away quickly too. And my general premise is that they had to have their peak season to be relevant. You know what I'm saying? And I don't mean to be rude to anybody.

I like Mark a lot. But I'm basically saying it took his peak season in order to be an everyday player. Right. His normal baseline was that of a part-time player. Right. And it took a lifetime's worth of adjustments, a career's worth to get to this point.

So if the athleticism is beginning to wane, and it has to be because he's 31, if the athleticism is beginning to wane, then he's going to have less time at the top and he's going to be here for less time. Now, I've had people disagree with me on this theory. I'm just not sure that i can really give you the opposite side of the argument i mean ryan ludwick had that breakthrough he was 29 with the cardinals in 2008 hit 37 homers drove in 113 runs hit 299 his career average was 260 so he significantly exceeded expectations got on base at a 375 clip career 330 best plate

discipline of his life i mean similar stuff where he'd shown power but people thought he was a right a righty only platoon guy played every day and showed them he could hit lefty he could hit uh righties as well right and the following, in about 70 fewer plate appearances, hit 15 fewer home runs. Wasn't a bad player, but wasn't close to the level he was at before. Four more good seasons, but that's it. Four more good seasons. So maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe Kanha can have four more good seasons, but also doubt he will have one necessarily as good as the one he just had. Let's talk about a couple of the options in Cincinnati.

Nick Senzel and Shogo Akiyama. Senzel's going around pick 227 since the start of March. Akiyama going around pick 261. I heard Trent Rosecrans on one of the pods. It was the Fantasy Baseball podcast, the Athletic Fantasy Baseball podcast, doing a division preview. And his take is that nick castellanos will play

every day and everybody else in the outfield mix will have to platoon or mix and match in some capacity so as you think about what that might look like do you trust either one of senzel or akiyama at their respective prices and i know you've compared akiyama from a skills and production expectation standpoint to Adam Eaton. He's about 55 picks cheaper than where Eaton is right now, but Eaton doesn't really have any questions about playing time, whereas Akiyama does. So how do you break down these two guys? Yeah, I mean, the thing that's so awesome about Eaton is that he drops in drafts because he's so vanilla. He's boring. He doesn't stand

out in any category. He doesn't give you enough steals to be like, oh, I need late steals. It's just a few steals, a few homers. The kind of guy like Brian Anderson that'll be available to you if you have a well-rounded team, I feel like. But also, when he's healthy, he'll play. when he's healthy, he'll play. Whereas, you're right. This Reds situation is a bit of a mess. And I wish they would just say, oh, Senzel will play on the infield too,

because then I could give, I could finally find Senzel like 500 plate appearances because Jesse Winker is going to need a full-time platoon mate. And since Senzel hits righty and Winker hits lefty that's that's good but that gives senzel what 200 plate appearances now he can't platoon with akiyama and winker because they're on the same team like he just didn't work that way uh but let's let's just say between the two of those let's push that to like 300 plate appearances. Now, Cassianos, they're going to play him as much as possible.

You get a little bit of backup there, 350. Can you push Senzel past 350? DH, 400. It's still not that much. Yeah, and I love Senzel, man. So I don't... Yeah, the depth charts are putting him at 470. I think that's...

I don't think you can push it much harder than that. I mean, I just tried some back of the envelope and got him to 400. And the nice thing about that is that in 400 at-bats, if you're in a daily league, you can get an Adam Eaton player. You can get a 15-15 guy with decent batting average and good OVP.

And then I guess the last 70 or so plate appearances is an injury. Other people's injury. But you would want to actually, I think, take some of his injury risk off of that 470, right? You have to. Because he's been injured a lot. So, I don't

know. I think I would revise it down to whatever you can get in 400 plate appearances and probably make him like a 10-10 guy, which makes him very borderline in most leagues. But if you're in a daily league, you know, 260-10-10, kind of plug-and-play guy, I could see it. I keep looking at the other players in between these two guys. Shinsu Chu, I think, got a mention on Tuesday's show. Power should come down a little bit because of the park changes, but playing time,

not really much of a concern there. Nomar Mazzara should also play a lot more than both Senzel and Akiyama if everybody's healthy in the Cincinnati outfield. The other solution in Cincinnati is someone other than Freddy Galvis playing shortstop, but I don't know who that would be. We haven't mentioned my favorite guy in this group. You were kind of getting to Nomar Mazzara, who I like, but the one thing about Nomar Mazzara that's interesting to me is I don't know why I like him. You know, I know that Mike Petriello does not respect him that much greatly, and I understand a lot of it is the defensive

shortcomings. Yes, he's been pretty steady at what he's done and it hasn't been great. But I do see the incremental change in barrel rate last year. I do see a guy who hits the ball pretty hard.

He's had a variable approach too where he has a two-strike approach and has a pretty good strikeout rate. I just like him as a hitter. When I watch him, I think he's a good hitter. I don't know about all the other parts of it. So I actually like Mazzaro. I have a couple places where I've kept him at slightly overpriced.

I've drafted him in places. I don't know. I like Mazzaro. I wish I had a better reason for liking him. Sometimes you just think a player is going to be good. I think it's going to be a slightly less hitter-friendly environment than the one he's played in in Texas for his career, but he's in a good lineup. There's not a big question about playing time against righties.

He's a big side platoon guy. And I think because he hits some of the longest home runs of anybody in the league, you can see that growth potential in the power category. I think he's been playing through some injuries in recent years, especially the floor is pretty clear. He's almost had four consecutive 20 home run seasons to begin his career, which we used to get excited about when a 21-year-old would come up and hit 20 homers and then do it again a few times, that'd be like, oh, wow, this guy's really good. I think everyone expected 30. And because of that, a little bit of the Abby Sale Garcia thing where it's kind of like, oh, we just thought this guy would be better. And I think there's still a chance he becomes that better player. Yeah, fatigue, but he's 24.

So I'm still in. I don't think you're wrong're wrong to um to be interested um hunter renfro crowded situation in tampa bay we just talked about the cincinnati mess a little bit and i think with renfro i just i i don't know i don't know what his actual ceiling is in in batting average like i think he's got plenty of raw power. That's been obvious throughout his career. But look at the slash lines. 231, 284, 467, 248, 302, 504, 216, 289, 489. Buying on Hunter Renfro to become a better hitter is just buying into the Rays process, which generally is smart. But I'm struggling to see what they see until it happens and i don't like that i want to be able to kind of reverse engineer it at least when they when they go after a player i want to be able to figure out why they went after that player and i can't quite figure it out with hunter renfro you know i wonder if it has something to do with the uh the splits the

first half second half splits for him because he had a wrist injury diving for a ball after the first half. In the first half, he had a 132 WRC+, in the second half, he had a 51. He went from hitting 252, 308, 613 to hitting 161, 263, 299 in the second half. So I wonder if they see that first half number and say that's the guy he can be when he's healthy. The other thing that I saw that was interesting was that he showed up on, in the

second half, he showed up as the one, two, three, four, five, six, seventh best O-swing improver. Like he, Renfro swung it at fewer pitches outside the zone in the second half, uh, compared to the first half than, you know, in the top, he was in the top 10 in that change, and Margot was there too, so maybe they, they like what they saw in terms of improving plate discipline, of course, the OPS difference didn't support that Renfro was doing something great, but maybe the injury made him sort of zero in on what he could do more damage with. And so if you kind of take that second half plate discipline and put it together with the first half power masher, maybe you get a kind of a peak season for Renfro. And I think the Rays also think at the very least we got someone who could murder lefties.

Yeah, that's the floor for sure. He's done that consistently since coming up, so he has that carved out. But I think they're going to give him some chances against righties as well and see what happens. The thing that happens, though, is if he struggles, they have depth. They have so many other ways they can go. They can pull him into that smaller role if they choose to. So that's where I think I'm a little bit more pessimistic about playing time when it comes to Hunter Renfro.

I mentioned at the top you can get some batting average late, and I don't know if I just like this guy more than most people or what my deal is, but David Peralta, coming off an injury-plagued season in which he only played 99 games last year, was still an above-average hitter, had a 107 WRC plus, hit 275, only hit 12 homers with 423 plate appearances.

People were skeptical of the 30 home runs that he hit in 2018, and for good reason. But we're talking about a career 290, 346, 478 hitter, and one who should play a lot as long as he's healthy. I had back-to-back seasons with 140 games in 2017 and 2018 before the injuries last year. Are you in on David Peralta?

I wish the barrel rate was better. They took the juice out of the ball in Arizona with the humidors. I don't think the 30-homer season is coming back, but I do like his contact skills he's a bit of a sprayer athlete, used to be a pitcher

kind of a fun story do I believe he can hit 280 with 20 homers? Yeah I think he's kind of a Brian Anderson-esque player just older and later so somebody who won't hurt you anywhere, someone who can put some good stats up, a little bit more valuable than maybe in mono leagues, and a good player.

But a lot of times when you come to this point in the draft, either it's because your team is unbalanced or because you're a shallower league, you're more likely to want to take a shot on upside on a lot of potential, like someone who could, you know, start for you. Like, let's say you're taking bench.

If you're in the bench pick area and David Peralta is there. Yeah. You can be like, okay, yeah, I can take this vanilla player or I could take someone like, I think who's, who sits like right next to him in terms of ADP-ish, is Ian Happ,

who murders the ball. I mean, Happ was 23rd in barrel rate. He's right there with Matt Olsen. And yeah, he has contact issues, but last year was the best strikeout rate of his career. And give him a full slate of at-bats, and he could steal 10 to 15 bases. And Albert Almora is a very weak-hitting competition for him.

And so far this spring, Ian Happ is murdering the ball with a.481 average,.815 slugging, whereas Almora is doing well for him,.276,.323,.517. But given the park effects, the uneven competition, and their respective backgrounds and their projections, I figure Ian Happ is going to be the starting center fielder for the Cubs this year. And he's been creeping up the board a little bit.

ADP is still fairly cheap in March. He's a snipe, man. Yeah. I mean, the plate skills you mentioned are the thing that really jump off the page for me. It does seem like something clicked for him last season. Even at AAA, 26.3%. It's a little high for the level for a guy who's been there before,

but it was a nice adjustment from what was happening to him in 2018 at the big league level. Steals a few bases, too. I mean, he was 11 for 13 between AAA and the big leagues last year. Because of the OBP, might end up a little higher in the order at some point based on injuries and things going on in that lineup so I'm with you on Ian Happ I think it just makes sense for the Cubs to let him be a regular fixture in their lineup maybe against you know a really tough lefty or something El Mora gets out there for the starts but it should be Happ at least four days a week if not five days a week this season as a switch hitter I don't at least four days a week, if not five days a week this season.

As a switch hitter, I don't know why most days of the week, man. That's sort of my bold prediction, I guess, if you want to call it that. I don't know how bold it is even. I guess Steven Sosa Jr. being there complicates matters, but I see him as a potential platoon mate for Jason Hayward. Yeah, Hayward and Schwarber both being the lefties, I think, kind of steers Souza to the corners. Yeah, and I don't think he really wanted to play center, so I would see Amor as a perhaps defensive replacement for Hap late in games, so maybe he fritters off some plate appearances there, but otherwise, mostly Hap

playing. You know, Kipnis, if you want to build a bench, so maybe he fritters off some plate appearances there, but otherwise mostly half-playing. You know, Kipnis, if we want to build a bench, it's actually a little bit easier in Chicago because I think they have more depth than Cincinnati. If we build a bench, we're going Sousa, Almora, Nico Horner or Jason Kipnis, whoever doesn't start, David Bode, Caratini, we're done. Yeah, easy, clean lines when it comes to lining up that depth chart. All like a very good bench.

That's, I think, one thing that kind of separates the Cubs from the Reds a little bit. I know the projections have, at least the Pocota projections have the Reds ahead of them. But I see a plus-plus bench in Chicago. And, you know, yes yes the rotation has some questions but if you is who you was late in the season um and Chatwood can be you know a decent starting pitcher and that that relief course steps up I don't see why they couldn't do a Milwaukee Brewers thing where they take their starters out early and win games 7-5 based on their bullpen.

They definitely could do something like that. I think they may have to because I'm with you. I don't really trust that core in the rotation at this point. That's probably the biggest weak spot when it comes to that roster. I'm doing a piece on pitch spring training velocities, and Quintana is down. That's never good.

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Just suspending operations indefinitely. Yeah. I think that's the right move. I think the up indefinitely is actually kind of hopeful. If they say something like they're shoving opening day back and

moving it to May 1st or something, then there's no flexibility. I would expect spring training is done, no more of this going on, and then we'll see how things go nationally. I think the over-under on starting the season is probably April 15th or something. Like you said, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't play until May, but maybe things slow down. We've seen in some other countries like South Korea, there's been a plateau effect already in terms of new cases. And maybe if we get to that plateau effect, there's some sort of all nationally that, uh, allows things to start up again. So,

um, I would say that, uh, we're talking about, uh, at least a month of, uh, filling the airwaves, but I do hope that I do really hope that we can be part of what you're doing to get through this. You know, we're going to have some pretty cool content, I think, that it'll be more evergreen-type, off-season-type content because we won't know what we're building towards. We won't have new information. But I do think we can be part of what you're going to

do when you're stuck at home. Yeah. We're still going to pod. We're still going to write. We're going to do things. It'll just be a little bit different for a little while. And as you said, we kind of thought something like this we talked about the beginning of the show was was coming today tomorrow soon um so to officially have that news uh i think that's that's the right step it's it's just necessary at this point and hopefully it's the the first step towards things eventually getting better as quickly as they possibly can. We can talk a little more baseball, right?

We got a little more time. Okay. Let's get to a few more players. I was thinking about a few prospects in this range. Joe Adele, whose playing time outlook changed a lot when Jock Peterson, for a moment, looked like he was coming to the Angels. And, of course, that trade hasn't happened and probably will not come back at any point does give us a signal maybe of like how they feel about him playing a lot this year yeah to me i've been a little bit hesitant to target him since that trade went down because it just made me think that the angels want to give him most of this

year at triple a he finally struggled at a level last year when he got there. The power went away, 355 slugging percentage, 32.6% K rate. We're still talking about an extremely talented player with a very bright future. With the trade not happening, maybe we do see him sooner because it's basically Adele versus Brian Goodwin for the third spot in the outfield next to Upton and Mike Trout. Yeah, the other thing that's like news that was happening coming out of Angels camp is that David Fletcher is playing some center field. And I don't think that means a ton in terms of him playing center field. I think it means something in terms of him playing outfield. So if Fletcher can play the outfield, LaStella can be more of a full-time second baseman. And Fletcher can be the backup.

Fletcher can be the backup. Renkifo can be the backup infielder. And Fletcher can be the backup outfielder slash backup infielder. So I think Fletcher will find his way to 400 plate appearances with this thing set up the way it is. I think Goodwin is an okay player that can play for a while. And I think maybe the first injury will be the impetus for them to call up Joe Adele. I have one share of Joe Adele, and I paired him with Malik Smith in my Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational, where I illustrated two concepts at once, which is the concept of compounding error,

straight two concepts at once which is the the concept of compounding error where i made a bad choice in picking malik smith who i think will lose his job this year and then i made it even worse possibly uh by picking a guy who i don't know who'll play this year but in my mind i also think i feel like i mitigated the malik smith problem with joe adele because i'm hoping to sort of Frankenstein two halves of a season together and get maybe a half season with two homers and 20 stolen bases out of Malik Smith. And then another half season with 10 stolen bases and 15 homers from Joe Adele, smash it together and get a decent player out of it. So if you can get Adele late enough where you get them into your util slot, and then so my backups in that league are going to play. And so I had to pick, oh, I wish I had that off

the top of my head. I picked, oh, AJ Pollock was a guy. And I forget who the other guy was. But I picked some boring veterans, like some Bryan Anderson type players, in order to take Joe Adele's place in the lineup until Joe Adele comes up. So it does put me one player behind in terms of having to fill a starting slot with someone that I'm picking in the bench rounds. in terms of having to fill a starting slot with someone that I'm picking in the bench rounds. But I think it's possible that Joe Adele's ceiling is so grand and so exciting that you do want to do that.

I do think he's on the short list prospects, and we've talked about it with injured players on our shows. You can stash one injured player and maybe one prospect if you don't have IL spots and you don't have very deep benches he's good enough to hold on to for a few weeks and you just have to draft him knowing that if the right combination of things happens to your roster you may have to cut him loose before he debuts that's in the range of possibilities but i think the payoff could absolutely be worth it because the talent is just there.

Similar to on the pitching side, I would say like Paxton and Clevenger. Verlander, his injury strikes me as maybe the most worrisome of the three. Yes, I would agree with that. I think because of the nature of it, I think he's had something similar before too. It's a throwing injury. It's an arm injury. It's had something similar before too. It's a throwing injury.

It's like a, it's an arm injury. It's not an arm injury, but it's an arm injury. And Clevenger's his knee and Paxton is a back. Paxton was already throwing. Clevenger's already throwing. So,

uh, I like the fact that they're already throwing is a big deal. Whereas Verlander's in the non-throwing phase. So, um, yeah, those, I think you could have one of those guys and a Joe Adele, is a big deal whereas verlander's in the non-throwing phase so um yeah those i think you could have one of those guys and a joe adele and that's about the max you can have yeah otherwise you're not gonna have enough flexibility on your bench more injuries are gonna happen and you're gonna have even more tough cuts to make later on the other prospect kind of in this range inside the top 300 between 200 and and 300, is Dylan Carlson.

He's having a big spring. I don't think it matters in the sense that I don't think it really pushes up his timetable to be a guy who's on the roster from day one, whenever day one is going to be. But I do think he's up within the first couple of weeks of the season. I've believed that all along. It's a big part of why I threw a few bucks on him in the auction for NL Labor a couple weeks ago. I think his players were on the team. You think he's played his way on the team. You think he's just on outright and they're just going to say, we don't care, we'll sign

him to an extension later? I think they'd rather have Edmund in the infield and there's enough question marks with Tyler O'Neal, Harrison Bader, and Dexter Fowler. I mean, it's not like we have question marks with one of our outfielders. There are huge question marks over every with one of our outfielders. There are huge question marks

over every single one of our outfielders. Age, bat, contact. Age with Fowler, Bader just sort of overall battled. I like his barrel rate, and he's a guy that I'll take late, too. Tyler O'Neill, can you make enough contact

to make use of his prodigious tools? I think you throw Carlson in that mix, and you feel better about the whole thing. And I think Carlson's ahead of Joe Adele all of a sudden for me, just in terms of what I've seen, in terms of his at-bats. I really like Carlson, but one thing I did do was leave Carlson and Adele on the board, and as soon as Carlson was taken, I took Joe Adele. I think they should be closer in price than the ADPs suggest.

What is the ADP situation? 274 for Carlson in March and 235 for Adele. They were talking 40 picks. In my league, Carlson went first and I took Adele next. You could push it the other way, but

just have them both on the board and hope that both don't go right before you so one other name I want to talk about who I was kind of staying away from for the first part of draft season now I'm a little more interested because he's been playing and and playing well and I think it matters in this case because the nature of his injury Gregory Polanco he's played eight games this spring he's walked as much as he struck out he's got a home run He's got a few other extra base hits. I've liked him a lot as a player, and I just feel like the injury popped up on him

right as he was putting all of the pieces together back in 2018. Last year was almost an entirely lost season. Only 42 games played a year ago. What do you think about Gregory Polanco, given that he's outside the top 250 overall right now price wise? Yeah, I like him. I have Polanco and Trent Grisham as somewhat similar players that I have plenty of shares of actually. I think that they're both guys who can hit 250 to 260, 20 homers and 10 stolen bases with decent OBPs. They're not flawed to the point where their defense or their offense or, you know, their OBP

or something is going to keep them out of the lineup. They're on teams that need them to play. They're on teams that need them to play. I might have Grisham just a notch ahead of Polanco because of just health and youth. But Polanco has a little bit more of a track record on his side. There's another sort of Adele Carlson situation where if you like them, you can probably leave them both on the board. But if you wait too long, you're going to end up with Polanco instead of Grisham, I think.

I think we've maybe mentioned this during the positional preview series. You get to a certain point in drafts where we're absolutely talking about players at that point. If there's someone you really like, just take them. The ADP gets thrown out the window the further into the draft you go. I've ended up with Grisham over Polanco a couple times just because I've decided, you know what, I'm going to go for it. Grisham is 23, and I think he's going to start every day.

He doesn't have the specter of a shoulder injury sitting over him. I like his zips projection, 240, 20 homers, 10 stolen bases. I also worry that Polanco is not going to steal many bases. It's just stolen bases age terribly, and he's got the shoulder injury. I don't think he wants to be sliding into a lot of bases. Yeah, I think anything you get in that category is probably a bonus, but I like the way the plate skills were developing before the injury. If he's an 8% to 10% walk rate guy, 20% K rate guy,

I think 25 home runs are still in play for him just it's nice to see him healthy uh as it pertains to that shoulder injury over the course of the spring there's plenty of other late names that i like i don't think we have a lot of time to dive into why i like them so i'll throw a few names out then you can throw a few out there as well and let me know if you think any of these are just terrible calls but here's where i'm at i think kyle lewis who's basically free is pretty interesting along with jake fraley yeah like lewis is big power and injuries i think have really taken away some of the luster that he had as a prospect he was an early first round pick a few years ago healthy now and i saw him homer the other day. It was an opposite field bomb. He just crushed the ball. I just think there's a lot of power potential there, and he's basically an endgame-free sort of player. But even Jake Fraley, who's also had injuries coming up, former Rays prospect, now in Seattle, I think both of those guys are going to play a lot as they try and piece things together to begin the season.

piece things together to begin the season. Ender Enciarte, I've mentioned him before. I'll mention him again. If you're looking for cheap average, cheap speed, I think it's important for the Braves to give him a lot of playing time, in part because I just think the defense with Marcelo Zuna in one of the corners is a bit more of a priority at the other two spots.

And Marquick is as old as dirt, dude. Make him DH and maybe Freeman is going to be hurt to start the season I mean he's that's he's been kind of ginger this spring um I don't know if that means Yonder Alonso plays or maybe Mark Hickey's play some first or something but you know there's there's uh there's some injury possibility there I think it's your table play some yeah so those are a couple guys that I'm on AJ Pollock you mentioned him earlier I'm all in on Pollock just being the old boring type you can draft at his price and end up being pretty happy with what you get on a per game basis a little bit more interested in daily leagues i think where i

can shuttle in and out yeah definitely pushes up the interest there so you got to watch the schedule a bit more carefully in weekly leagues as far as laid out fielders for you, who else is catching your eye? I tend to sometimes gravitate towards okay players that I wouldn't like otherwise, but are on really bad teams. So Jacoby Jones and Kristen Stewart have their obvious flaws, but I could see them playing a fair amount. Jacoby Jones can give you some stolen bases too,

whereas Kristen Stewart would be a low batting average slugger type. I think Adam Haisley is going to start in Philadelphia as the starting center fielder. And I think he could be sort of an 18-10 type guy with a decent batting average. I'm not calling the Phillies bad. There was a segue there I meant to make. And then Sam Hilliard is like my favorite late sleeper

just because, you know, Colorado, he hits the ball really hard. Colorado, he hits the ball really hard. He kind of strikes me a little bit like an Ian Happ type, so it may not happen right away. But in terms of bail rate and exit velocity, it's all there. And I don't know. I think there's a chance he plays. And if he plays and gets some of that glorious, glorious Colorado

Babbitt, I think he could hit 250 with 20 homers and 15 stolen bases. Maybe even go 20-20. That's something fun to pick on your bench. Right now, he has to beat out Tapia, basically, and Des desmond which doesn't seem that hard

no i'm right there with the unhilliard i mean there's tools on tools and the park can mask a lot of his flaws the park masks a lot of flaws for players in colorado you can have more swing and miss and get away with it because the balls you do put in play uh become hits more often like that's that's the beauty of the ballpark or or the worst thing about it, of course, if you're a pitcher. As always, you can reach us via email, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com. Be sure to spell out the word and if you go that route. You can find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. I am at Derek Van Ryper.

That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. Stay safe out there. We are back with you on tuesday thanks for listening and subscribing and stay healthy