Rates & Barrels - Ronald Acuña Jr.'s Second ACL Tear, Carroll Questions & May Starting Pitcher Risers

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Eno and DVR discuss a brutal diagnosis for Ronald Acuña Jr., who suffered another torn ACL over the weekend. Plus, they consider the ongoing struggles of Corbin Carroll, Ángel Hernández's abrupt retirement, and a few May risers from Eno's updated Starting Pitcher Rankings.  Rundown 2:06 Ronald Acuña Jr.'s 2024 Season Ends with Another Torn ACL 10:43 The Ongoing Struggles of Corbin Carroll 18:43 Victor Robles: DFA'd by Nationals 27:13 Is Passing on Low Barrel Rate Bats An Easy Call? 31:15: Ángel Hernández Retires 35:24 Injury Updates: Cristian Javier, Jorge Polanco & Kodai Senga 46:49 May Risers: Eno's Updated Starting Pitcher Rankings ($) https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5513570 59:38 Jake Meyers & Colt Keith As Popular Weekend Waiver-Wire Adds 1:09:35 David Fry is Unbelievable 1:12:09 Casey Mize's Rapidly Declining Stuff Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Join us on Fridays at 1p ET/10a PT for our livestream episodes! Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to rates and barrels. It's Tuesday, May 28th. Derek and Rhyper Edo-Saris here, hope we had a great long weekend in the states full of grilling, gardening, going to a ball game, spending time with friends and family, something good hopefully from the long weekend on this episode. We'll discuss the unfortunate injury to Ronald Acuna Jr. We've been here before and it's it's not a fun place to be. We had a major DFA. Victor Robles has been let go by the Nationals. He's in limbo right now.

He's no. It's important on this show. The number of ways I was notified hit an all time high. It used to just be tweets. Now it's Twitter. Now it's the Discord. Getting the Discord.

Now it's text. I got some text about it. It's like, geez, like this is really important to folks. I put it second on the rundown, so we'll get to it. Angel Hernandez announced his retirement. That happened over the long weekend as well, so people are pretty happy around baseball because of that. We got some injury updates beyond Acuna. We have some news on Uroki Sasaki. We have updated starting pitcher rankings that Eno put up last week, so we'll talk about a few

big risers and followers there. And as we do to start every week, we'll look at where the money went from a fantasy baseball perspective over the weekend, talk about some players that were picked up and talk about a few players that were let go although this week's group players that were cut were pretty much all demoted and injured so might be a shorter drop zone than usual this week but lots of other stuff to get us through this episode as I mentioned get into the Discord. You can heckle me about Victor Robles as much as you'd like. Absolutely free.

You can connect with other people about other things too. That might be the better way to use our Discord. Let's start with Ronald Acuna Jr. It is a torn ACL, suffered while running the bases, kind of slipped between second and third. It's the other knee. It's not the same knee that he tore back in 2021, but his season is over. And I saw a lot of different responses on Twitter from Braves fans suggesting

that maybe Alex Anthopoulos should do a soft sell at the trade deadline, which given what happened last time Acuna went down seems a little bit of an overreaction. They ended up winning the World Series that year. Much harder without him than with him, of course, but there's a lot here. I mean, there's the short-term implications, the long-term implications. I want to just ask you first,

as we got more information about Acuna's season, we talked about it maybe three or four weeks ago, wondered where the power was. It really still hadn't shown up. And a 365 slugging percentage now will be the final number in the ledger for 2024, only the four homers in the 49 games he was able to play. Just a shell of the player that he was

during the MVP season that he put up in 2023. So just aside from the injury, what do you make of this? Because he was running. He was 16 for 19 as a base dealer and the knee issue he had back during the spring seemingly wouldn't have caused him that much problem from a power perspective if he was able to run that much. At least that's how my mind works. So as we try and kind of figure this out, like what's next for Acuna in terms of expectations once he goes through that long road of recovery? Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, the, the, the, the power outages is just a big deal. And if you actually kind of look back, the weird thing is that his ground ball rate has been slowly increasing since 2021. Um, and in the middle, there's a 41 homerun year. So I want to blame the ground ball rate. And I think that has something to do with it. There's something going on with the shape of his swing, but that's the sort of analysis that I think the hardest to do from the outside. I mean, maybe you could get some moving images up next to each other and spot something different in the swing.

My personal theory is that he's being pitched differently, has adjusted back to it yet. But we're going to have this big missing, you know, 400 plate appearances that he would have had in which he might have made the adjustment. And instead, we're going to be wondering what the reason was and if he would have made the adjustment and what happened in the alternate universe where he where he stayed healthy. But just the fact that he was able to have a forty nine and a half percent ground ball rate and hit forty one homers means that it can't you can't fixate too much on the ground ball rate.

The fact that he came back and stole 73 bases after the last surgery, uh, makes you think like he should be fine to come back again. There's another note on the rundown, uh, today that I, um, I'm not going to say just yet, but there's ample evidence that stolen bases is, you know, what? 50% ability and fifty percent vibes. There's a there's a there's a bunch of evidence that like you know if your team starts stealing in spring they're gonna steal all year and everybody is gonna be in the part in on the party you know. So I kind of expect that a coon you will come back and steal bases. You may be a little bit slower again.

He was a little bit slower after the last one. I mean, he'll come back. He'll be 27 next season. You think about the timeline when he got hurt in 21. It ended up costing him most of April. He got back in late April of 2022, so it wasn't a full season his first year back. The slash line looked a lot more like what we've seen this year. He hit 266 with a 351 OBP, 413 slug coming off the injury and was 29 for 40 as a base

dealer. That was the last season with the previous rules, the smaller bases, no limitation on disengagements for pitchers or anything like that. So completely different setup. But yeah, that's when that batted ball profile shifted and has kind of stayed in that that ground ball heavy mode ever since. And the other big difference, of course, in MVP season, he cut his strikeout right in half. How did he did that? I will never know. But everything else in his career points to 23% being more or less his skills baseline too.

So really bad news for the Braves, disappointing for just baseball fans in general. And it leaves them in a position now where Adam Duvall probably plays a lot more, I would imagine. Alex Anthopoulos will go the other direction. He'll do what he did last time. He'll find relatively inexpensive veterans to acquire

between now and the trade deadline later this season. He'll take some more time probably to assess the magnitude of the need, try to see what he can get out of Jared Kellnick, see what Adam Duvall has left in the tank, right? And try to make a decision from there. They have quality up and down this lineup. They can find a way to continue working around this.

And the other part of why they would keep going for it is look at how well Chris Sale and Max Fried are pitching right now. I mean, to me, that's a huge, huge part of the story right now in Atlanta is getting so much quality at the top of the rotation from those two guys in particular. Yeah, this is a really good team. I mean, you see they put Sean Murphy back in the lineup.

Austin Riley had been dinged up. He gets back in the lineup, uh, the day that they don't have Acuna in the lineup and you're like, that's still a pretty good lineup, you know, like, and even Acuna hadn't been hitting like a star version of himself and they are humming right along. I can't imagine that, you know, having the what is it the fourth most wins in the National League should be a reason to sell. So I think I think they'll be fine.

You know, I do. Sale is like, you know, on top of his game, you can see it in the strikeouts when it walks. He's back to where he was. He a little bit of the in my rankings, I had him fifth, a little bit of the like. You know, Tyler Glass now issue where you're like, yeah, it looks great right now. But the one question we had going into the season was a little bit less production, but a little bit more quantity of production.

And so you're just hoping he stays healthy. I mean, I suppose one more injury to either Fried or sale, uh, could set Anthelopolis on the selling, uh, you know, timeline, but I just don't think it, I mean, he's a guy that buys all the time, you know, like he, he wants to win every chance he gets, I don't see him selling, um, in terms it, he's a guy that buys all the time. You know, like he, he wants to win every chance he gets. I don't see him selling. In terms of Acuna, one last bit that I think is interesting is, you know, dynasty rank and, you know,

just a real early idea of where he is next year. You know, just when you pointed out 2022, 15 homers, 29 stolen bases. I think that is the risk that he comes back and does that, especially since. You know, he, he was kind of in the middle of that kind of a year this year. So I don't think he's a first rounder. He won't be a first rounder thinking about first pitch Arizona, right? Yeah, I definitely won't.

There's some drafts then that's gonna run from Halloween that starts on October 31st, runs through that entire weekend. Keep an eye out, baseball HQ by the way, if you wanna join us, really fun conference to go to every year. In those drafts, it'll be too early to know for sure. I think there could be a world

in which Acuna gets through the rehab, goes into spring training, actually could play some games in spring training. And starts to inflate. If he's looking like himself, driving the ball, stealing bases in the spring coming off the second surgery, then I think he could creep into the back part around one and be a top 15 player going into next season.

But I agree with you, I think at least for the time being, he'd be on the outside looking in at that group because this was one of those years, we just looked at it. There were 20 players that were probably first round picks by talent and it hasn't worked out that way. Okunha is not the only early first round pick who just by performance has underwhelmed to this point.

Oh, Corbin Carroll. I got a trade offer in mixed labor, 15 team league. This came in late Saturday night, I think. I was offered a Corbin Carroll and the ask in return was for me to give up Royce Lewis and Tommy Pham. And I opened the email at like two o'clock in the morning and I looked at it and I was like, at two o'clock in the morning, I thought this is a great idea. I should snap accept this, but you should never snap accept a trade at two in the morning.

No, you shouldn't. Never, ever. So I put the phone back down. I woke up. I looked at it later in the day and I said, there's no way I'm going to do this. And I pulled up the calendar year leaderboard. I pulled up the just the season leaderboards just to remind myself. I have Corbin Carroll in zero leagues.

When you don't have a player, you can know they're underperforming, but you don't really feel it quite the same way as when you have them. Corbin Carroll's season, since we last talked about him, has not gotten any better. It's unbelievable so far. He's at 188, 274, 284, two homers, nine steals in 51 games.

That's an all time colossal bust start for someone who is in the top five of pretty much every single draft. And I wouldn't give up a guy that's had multiple ACL tears and Tommy Pham, a late free agent signing to get him because I'm convinced Corbin Carroll's broken. I should have maybe seen more of the warning signs or taking those more into

account. I mean, I guess I didn't ignore them completely. I don't have them anywhere. But at the same time, I wasn't telling people to stay away. Right. If if I was really concerned, everybody here would have heard about it. I thought because he kept playing last year that was a pretty good sign that corbin carroll was healthy and Something just is not right. The k-rate hasn't jumped The batting average on balls and plays down a hundred points basically from where it's been

his first season plus in the league But how do you explain it? Nothing about it makes any sense to me. I don't know if I was as, uh, convinced as you are that he was broken. I mean, the one thing is, you know, we were worried in 2022 about the raw power, the barrel rate, you know, not lining up with the slugging percentage in a small sample. So we were, we were worried that he wasn't gonna have like a two hundred iso. And there's other people who had that worry that you know some of this is the legs and you know it's not.

It's not you know seventy raw power we've still got fan graphs scout ratings on his fifty fifty five raw power. That feels about right, you know. Obviously, that's not what he's doing now. 50 to 55 raw power is what he's projected to do from here on out. So another sort of 13 to 14 homers the rest of the way. And so I I still think that's in him. And what we've seen since 2022 is more raw power. I mean, better Max CVs. And then last year, a little bit better barrel rate.

So the speed is still there. The patience is still there. The strikeout rate is still good. The groundball rate is not through the roof. And we have him publicly saying that it's a swing shape issue. I don't know. I might have taken the deal. I'll probably regret not taking it if everything ends up being fine, but there's just something that doesn't line up for me.

And yeah, not a trade I would have expected to turn down. What was the part other than the fam? Royce Lewis, Royce Lewis. I mean, I'm convinced Royce Lewis on a per plate appearance basis has first round skills. He's just had zero health next to it. So it's it's a leap of faith that he's going to keep doing it day after day and actually stay healthy enough, right? Yeah, but every category, maybe a little light and speed powers a harder thing to find than bags right now

That was a lot of my thinking was I think Royce Lewis is healthier than Corbin Carroll right now Even though Royce Lewis has been on the high health the last several weeks. I Yeah The thing with the bat speed numbers that makes me not want to use them as much and I haven't been using them that much is that we don't have last year even. Right. You don't even have like, you know, so, you know, he looks fine in the bat speed numbers and that makes me think that he's not hurt. But, um, what if he was swinging a lot faster last year? I don't know.

So weird to me. Like he's getting more fastballs this year. Corbin Carroll is getting more fastballs and he's not, he's not really hitting anything. But last year he hit 296 with a 521 slug against fastballs. This year he's hitting 183 with a 287 slug against fastballs. He hit breaking stuff fine last year. 295 average, 528 slug, this year 180 and 260. But what's weird is that the swing and miss is not up on those pitch types.

That's the really strange part about it. Yes, the swing shape, maybe, maybe that is the- The ground ball rate is up, but it's not like, you know, spiking like, you know, like Ronald Okunha even. He's not up at 50%. Right, and he didn't get, you know, pole happy or, there's just so little in the underlying numbers that explains Why it's not working right now. I don't know why Rob Arthur hasn't done a drag update. I might have to prod him like I

Would like to know how the ball compares to the path we did have a kind of unseasonably cold April, but we are past that now and We did have a kind of unseasonably cold April but we are past that now and there's do seem to be a fair amount of people where you look at their lines and most of stuff is in the same place except for the slugging. And we know that from the overall game environment we know from the league home run you know home run rate that you know something's a little bit different this year. Sure is. But Corbin Carroll's struggles are a mystery to me. At least he just had like sort of, he'd never had no doubt power. So what if he was kind of a just enough guy and, you know, taking a, just a couple feet off of his bat a ball distance is part of the story. I don't know.

I like the hypothesis just as an explanation, but it's not satisfactory. It's not enough. It is pretty legendary. I don't think I have too many shares, but you know, I had him, I think like six or so in my rankings. It's just didn't never ended up picking there. Yeah. It did never ended up picking there. Yeah, I did consider a an early By low that I might still consider

Which was like a junior caminero? plus something for him in a 20 team dynasty Interesting not sure where I fall on that one as I think about that one for a day or two before I know for sure, but it wasn't a snap thing you did before. At least it was offered to you and you turned it down. No, it was a thing I banded about with my co-owner. Ah, you didn't put it out there. Okay.

And we just didn't have the energy. Like, there's not the energy. We were like, yeah, that sounds like maybe a good idea. You have these like battles between your brain and your heart, right? Your brain's like, yeah, this is a good idea. Go buy him low. Go buy him low. Dude, look at the projections. He's great. Go buy him low. He steals more bases than Kameniro. Come on, go, go.

And your heart's like, I'm just gonna do something else now. Well, speaking of the battle between the brain and the heart, Do something else now. Well, speaking of the battle between the brain and the heart of Victor Robles, DFA by the nationals. I mean like what, what went wrong here? Where did I go wrong? Did I go wrong because of 2019 and the super happy fun ball, making it look like Robles had game power they didn't have. Is that why I got tricked?

I think it tricked him too, because you saw a big increase in strikeout rate that year and he kind of wrestled with, am I a power hitter that can strike out that much or do I need to, you know, in 2023 he tried the, I'm going to just put this ball on the on the ground and not pull it and let the ball travel and see if I can be, you know, a speedster. Neither way really worked for him, I guess. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, there was a point people might remember back when they were both in the fall league together. Acuna and Robles were the headline prospects. And I think most people you asked had a clear preference for Acuna. But the question at the time wasn't absurd. So my questions for you.

Am I vindicated if a smart team takes the flyer on Robles now that he's available? Or do we have to get performance that mirrors 2019 again, like double digit homers, 20 plus steals in a season with great defense, do I have to get performance that mirrors 2019 again, like double digit homers, 20 plus steals in a season with great defense. Do I have to get results or do I have to get process to be vindicated here? I don't know. I think a smart team might pick them up just to be a defensive backup. So. Right.

You could treat them like a, he could be another Michael Taylor for real baseball roster construction purposes. And then the part about this, he's had some injuries. It's big part of the story. 36 games played last year, 107 back in 2021, only 14 so far this year. We talked about, you know, Seeger, the metric that Robert Orr put together.

It's a swing decision metric. It likes Victor Robles, or at least it liked what he was doing in the brief time he played in 2023. I think that's sort of reflected in some lower K rates that he's run. So there's there's a world in which he goes somewhere and has a back half of a career that's at least respectable. Could it be on a ceiling side? Could this be like the path jerks and pro far has taken to be the player that he is, right? A lot of injuries earlier in his career, got to the big leagues young with the Rangers, missed a bunch of

time, bounced around a little bit, but ended up putting together at least a few good seasons, having a great one to begin 2024. Like, is that the best case outcome? A little less swing and miss in Profar's profile, so probably just a better hit tool off the, off the cuff. But I think that's sort of like the highest hope one could reasonably have for real place at this point. Yeah. I got zero shares of profile cause I never really bought into that batted ball profile.

And it's interesting to mention that cause I was looking over at Michael Taylor and I was like, Michael Taylor has hit the ball consistently five miles an hour harder on the Mac side. Then Victor Robles and his barrel rates his worst bail rate is like Victor Robles is best barrel rates I don't think that's a great comp. The profile is a guy who has hasn't hit the ball a hundred and ten since twenty eighteen hasn't had a barrel rate above six percent since twenty eighteen no above 6% his whole career, he just did it once in the happy fun ball year. And he still managed to eke a career out, so that's why I think Robles needs to kind of maybe embrace who he was last year or more than when he's been trying to be this year. If you look at his pull rate, it's 67%. Last year it was 37%.

Like he's very obviously trying to hit for power again. And I think if he goes back to 2023 when he let the ball travel, that's pro far 14% strikeout rate 106 max CV 2% per hour. It's like not even as good's pro far 14% strikeout rate, uh, one Oh six max TV, 2% per hour. It's like not even as good as pro far, but that I could see, I could see something going in that direction. I think he might be more, uh, might be more beneficial for him to go to a bad team. I'm torn on that. I'm wondering if being around better players, possibly better coaches would actually get his approach to

be more aligned with his tools. Or if someone else could unlock something else, because we look at the nationals and we ask a lot of questions about their player development, at least we have historically. It might be better now than it was five years ago or 10 years ago, but I've never really wanted to give them credit for developing Bryce Harper and Juan Soto. Like they just, they were just sort of who they were out of the box for the most part. Maybe that's unfair to someone in the system. But I think a fresh start could be the thing that at least makes him deep, deeply relevant again, depending on the playing time. You're right.

If it's a good team, it's probably more of a small side platoon roll back of outfield situation. And we're not really talking about him unless he ends up on a playoff team and is the guy that goes off in October. It'd be amazing as long as it's not against the team that I'm rooting for. He's part of the reason why I care so much about bad ball outcomes in terms of process like barrels and stuff like that, because I think right now the way that I explained to my kids, because my kids asked me, is this guy good? And I have two two ways of answering was, you know,

oh, he strikes out too much, but he hits the ball hard or oh, he's good. He doesn't strike out too much and he hits the ball hard. That's how I sort everybody to the kids where I'm just trying to make it easy for them to understand. And, you know, at one point they asked me because I took them all to the kids where I'm just trying to make it easy for them to understand. And, um, you know, at one point they asked me cause I took them all to the game, took the little leaguers to the, to the A's game on Sunday. And they had a really great time. And I think at some point, uh,

one Felix asked me, you know, why do you, why do you always like mention whether they hit the ball hard or not? I was like, you know, I think the way that modern baseball is now is that you can fill every position on the field with someone who hits the ball hard. Almost like the pitching staff. You can just about fill every pitching staff with someone who throws hard. It's not up and down with starters, but with relievers, if you want to, you could have

all guys that throw hard. Yeah. Who was it that was, oh, and they had a question and answer with Eric Miller the week before. Eric Miller is the hard throwing lefty in the Giants pen. And he, they said something about throwing hard and he's like, yeah, like you kind of just have to now. Like, that's how I feel about hitting the ball hard. You just kind of have to now.

Like everyone can do it. It's sort of expected of you. You have to be Luis frigging Arias to not hit the ball hard. You know what I mean? So like I don't think Victor Robles is Luis Arias. If I miss on a couple Luis Arias' like first of all, there's only been one. I mean, I guess you could say Quan is one. Lee is close. But if I miss out a couple of those because I'm hyper fixated on, um, on.

Barrels and bad at ball stats. Then I am going to hit. I'm also going to miss some Victor Robles. You know what I mean? Right. I do think there was a player profile that existed at the not so distant past that worked like this. I think Whitmirefield actually had similar skills. I mean, in the in the distant past, there was a lot. Yeah, right.

But even just a few years ago, there were some players that didn't hit the ball hard that played just enough in terms of hit tool, made enough contact, did just enough skills wise there to offset it and then you know occasionally popped a homer Could steal bases and then the other key of course is playing great defense if you play great defense you get yourself a lot of slack in terms of the limitations of your bat like Stephen Kwan is a very good defensive left fielder a lot of teams Wouldn't accept that in left field. But if you have guys, other positions that can offset it,

or if that's the way you build your roster, then that keeps driving your playing time. So I do I do think. Players like this can can make it, but there's a few there's a few other boxes they have to tick in order for it to work out. Here are the quick just quickly here the barrel the top bottom 20 in barrel rates under the age of 26. These are the guys that I I'd be interesting to me to be like okay I'm gonna sell all 20 of these.

Who am I going to be wrong on right. I'm just going to just just gonna blanket sell these guys. Sal Freelick Mason win Jacob Young Trey Lipscomb Brian Rokeo Michael Siani Ezekiel Duran might be a temporary placement there. Nolan Shanwell Bryce Turing Kabrit Ruiz Oswaldo Cabrera Johan Rojas the Odie Tavares Luis Camposano Moreno, Spencer's Torkelson, Andres Jimenez, Elu Harris, Montero, Jung-Hoo Lee and Anthony Volpe. Like if you gave me, you know, three or four exceptions that I could pull guys out of this list, I would blanket sell. You know what I mean? Like if you if I could just pull out maybe the catchers, like

the catchers that make a lot of contact, especially if you put like strikeout right next to this, you know, I'd pull out three or four of this and I'd sell the rest. Yeah. I think that's generally the approach a lot of people would want to take. At least people that listen to the show. I mean, some of those guys are premium defenders up the middle. That's the, that's where the exceptions usually come from. You know, Volpe and Tarang. Tarang's a shortstop playing second base, Volpe's a legit shortstop. Later, I have a leaderboard where I put defense on and

you know, defense is something that we don't cite a lot. And it's something that you do you do have to think about it because it keeps them on the field. And, you know, the deeper your league is, the more you're excited that someone is just going to play all the time. And if you then also have a good strikeout rate, then, you know, the deeper your league is, the more you're excited that someone is just going to play all the time. And if you, they then also have a good strikeout rate, then, you know, they may give you some hits and, you know, luck there. Not luck is not the right word, but, you know, hit 10 to 15 homers just by squaring up a few, you know?

Right. And I think that's more or less what happened when 2019 occurred for Victor Robles. It was also a live ball. So that made the ceiling seem a little higher than it was. Since we're on nationals, they've had a few pretty interesting things happening this year. At first, I thought Kyle Finnegan season in their bullpen was the most unusual and interesting thing happening. It's not that. I submit this as the weirdest stat of the season so far.

Jesse Winker has seven stolen bases in 2024. He was three for six in his entire career entering the season. And for me, this is like, yeah, it's easy to steal bases, but Jesse Winker might finally be healthy again after a couple of really injury ravaged seasons between Seattle and Milwaukee. Yeah. But this is also what I was talking about earlier when I said that, you know, stealing bases is half ability and half vibes.

Like just free. The nationals were super aggressive in spring training and they've got CJ Abrams with eight, Winker with seven, Joey Meneses with two, Luis García with eight, which is, I think already his career high. Eddie Rosario, the old man with eight. Jacob Young has 16. La Victor, oh, it's La Victor Lipscomb here. That's interesting.

I thought it was Trey. It's true. He goes by Trey. Yeah. Trey has 10 in 122 play to parents. And Lane Thomas, our man 11. I mean, they are just stealing left and right. And I think that's as much of anything.

Yes, he's probably healthier than he's been in a while, but it's also team, team vibes through the roof. I mean, I would, I could give you one piece of evidence. He's not as healthy as ever been, which is he's only hit the ball 107 and then his best he hit it 114. Yeah. Well, that could be the long-term damage to the back, right? It feels okay, but it's not as strong as it used to be or you've lost something along

the way. And Nietzsche was wrong. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker. I agree. So we had a joyous retirement, I would say. I don't know if it was joyous for the man who's no longer a major league umpire, but Angel Hernandez has announced his retirement. He's reached a retirement settlement with Major League Baseball, effective immediately. Yeah, that's kind of amazing.

That's the weirdest part of it all. And then he had to like his his lawyer had to be like, he wasn't he wasn't like, you know, forced out. It's like, well, they took a settlement in the middle of the year. Like, it's not like this is not like, you know, September 28th. And he's like, hey, you see you guys. I'm going to go to my boat now. I also don't know why it matters.

Like he's clearly retired, retired now. It's not like there's some other place he's going to go be an empire. We're saying I wasn't fired. I left on my own. Like, it's not going to matter. I wondered, is this going to make people happy? Maybe he'll show up in the Mexican. No, no, this is real retirement.

I don't think, you know, I don't this is the thing I wonder. I wonder if they love what they do on the same level, because you will see like I think Martolo Colon is probably pitching somewhere. I think at this point, Angel Hernandez

just needs to be a retired human. Like he needs to play golf and go on a boat and just do whatever, whatever brings him joy. He's he's received so much scorn and so much. Oh, my gosh. Over the years. People like him.

Yeah. And maybe don't know much about baseball. And I think there's also the umpire who frustrates us and frustrates players and managers and everybody around the game. But there's also the person. And I think there's a good profile that Sam Blum and Cody Stevenhagen just wrote last week about Angel Hernandez. Definitely check that out on the Athletic. But it made me wonder, is there some other umpire who's going to ascend to this level?

People already, if you already, you know, bring out CB Buckner, which is... Is that the angry mob just going to the next umpire to be mad? I don't want to live that way. I got to the point, Angel Hernandez as an umpire, you just, you never knew when he was going to get thin-skinned about something. You never knew when the calls were going to go from below average to egregious. Maybe it's understandable, given the amount of racism that he dealt with in his life. Like you know, maybe it's just like, nah, man, I'm not going to, I'm not going to handle

this here. It's really hard to know. It's one of those situations like I didn't walk in those shoes. I don't know what that was like. I don't want that job, but the whole job of being an umpire is not to be things. Can really, it doesn't seem that way. Like it seems to be, you know, the turtle of the, of the, of the bunch. You don't want to have the big old, you know, thing on your back and not

taking it, not take it. It's a tough line to walk. We've, we've talked about it before where the temperament needs to be not to escalate situations. And unfortunately umpires escalate situations. Sometimes it goes beyond Angel Hernandez. We talked about it, geez, I think it was maybe a couple of weeks ago. Pat Murphy got tossed from a game and I thought the, I forget which umpire it even was in

that instance. The umpire in that instance escalated, kind of walked at him, leaned into him, right? And it's a hard job. I think there are times when players and managers say ridiculous stuff, fans say ridiculous stuff and you're human. I'm sure it gets under your skin. The lived experience of it is just like, Oh, I'm being attacked all the time. Right. That's got to be exhausting. So I hope he finds something that brings him joy and calm and no criticism.

If, if he's like a chair up for tennis at the retirement facility or something, some days, please don't do that to yourself. Just play tennis. Enjoy the other side. Yell at the umpire. But I did wonder, I'm like, is someone else going to ascend to that level? Now I hope not. I hope we just chill a little bit.

It'd be nice. Some injury updates to pass along just in passing. We got Christian Javier going on the IL now with a forearm strain. The Astros are just hanging on. And I think that's one of the areas where the roster's vulnerable. They just don't have that quality starting pitching depth right now, the way they're built. We've had questions about Framber and his effectiveness. Hunter Brown has struggled. Spencer've had questions about Framber and his effectiveness. Hunter Brown has struggled. Spencer Arrageddy is trying to find his way.

And they've got Eric Lauer. Rikiti left his rehab start. Yeah, Rikiti didn't get through the rehab outing. So we were talking about, is Arrageddy or Brown gonna go down after everyone's healthy and now it doesn't matter, they're both in. Both in unless they wanna throw Eric Lauer into one of those spots. after, you know, everyone's healthy and now it doesn't matter. They're both in both in, unless they want to throw Eric Lauer into one of those spots.

He seems to be the organizational depth option. It's waiting for a chance because JP Francis hurt. What is what is Eric Lauer doing in the minor leagues? He has had one start that went to innings. So I don't know if he's ready yet. So yeah, this is this quickly becoming a problem and they haven't had their sort of pop up, hey look we discovered another guy that we signed for $5,000 and it hasn't happened a little bit.

I do think Hunter Brown can turn it around and I think Eric Getty is kind of a replacementy so that means there will be some better days in front of him because he's been he's pitched to 70 RA basically so far, you know, Sierra is for four point one seven like that's kind of that's good I kind of believe in them but Yeah, this is bad news for for the Astros who were kind of getting going on the hitting side And and we're winning some games I Wonder if it just doesn't happen for them this year of getting going on the hitting side and and we're winning some games. I wonder if it just doesn't happen for them this year.

Right now, they are 24 and 30. This would be the time when you would have to, you know, you want to be sort of even the Nationals that year where they were bad to begin with. I'm sure they were close to 500 by the All-Star break. So this is the time for the Astros to get to that 500. And if they don't have any pitchers, they're going to have to do a lot of slugging. Yeah. Window is now for Houston to start making up more of that ground as they try and find their way back into the playoff picture.

Other injury notes, the pass along Jorge Polanco placed on the I.L. with a hamstring strain. I've been surprised. It just hasn't gone well for him in year one in Seattle. I think I'm selling on on bats that arrive to Seattle, at least the beginning of the year. Luke Rayleigh's kind of figured it out and turned it around. But I just feel like we have a long track record of, especially people, I mean, he bats from both sides,

but especially varieties landing in Seattle and not being able to handle hitting there. I thought Mitch Garver was a nice ad as a DH. That's not working so far either, right? Strikeouts are up. Another right-hander. And yeah, the strikeouts are up and you have Teoskers comments.

We've covered this extensively here, but I just, I wanted to like turn it into something actionable, which I do think is maybe avoid right-handers in their first year in Seattle. I mean, I haven't, you know, run the numbers to say as a blanket thing, but we do know that it increases strikeouts for right-handers. And we have two players right here that are struggling from increased strikeouts. And Polanco can't really afford to be the idol. I don't think he has the power to be a 30% strikeout rate guy, even if he kind of accesses old power rates.

So yeah, he's kind of a drop in a lot of places. I've been really trying to try and shop him hard before the season and devil's rejects. And now I feel like he might be the guy that I just have to hold on to for better days, you know, maybe in a different team. Yeah, you're just hoping he can get back to his pre 24 contact quality, right? Double barrel rates, three consecutive seasons. I thought this was good oatmeal going into the year, but your broader point about hitters going into Seattle,

the difficulties of hitting there, which we've talked a lot about on a recent Friday episode, it seems very real. So could be a group of players to be a lot more careful with in the future. You can't have the contact quality dip that much and then bump the KRA up north of 30%. Those have been the problems for Jorge Polanco so far.

Interestingly, the infield for the Mariners, Dylan Moore has been playing a lot lately. He's a bigger part of their plan than I expected. He's always had interesting tools that power speed combo. I kind of like what we're seeing right now. I mean, the K rates down under 23%. He walks. Yeah. It just took him six years of hitting in Seattle

to finally figure it out. It's that hard. He's always been cool because the power and speed is pretty legit. And he's kind of a cool athlete that can play all over the field. So I've always kind of thought of him as more interesting than

his number of played appearances suggested, you know? Right. You look, what would happen if he was not a small side platoon player? That was a good question to ask for a while. And he's hitting the ball in the air more than ever. He was always a consistent fly ball hitter. He is hitting it in the air a lot and he's hitting it hard frequently too. And he's pulling it.

And I wonder, you know, one thing that you can't know because we don't have alternate universes is I wonder just, you know, especially in like 2021, when he had a lot of things going for him. Um, and then, you know, 2022, like what if he'd just been given a job and been able to righty lefty be in the lineup every day? We just don't know what that looks like from him.

Right. The timeline could be a little bit different. So definitely interested in doing more where available because it looks like that playing time path is even wider while Polanco's down. It was already opened up enough even when Polanco's down. It was already opened up enough, even when Polanco was healthy. Last, the last little bit in like weekly lineup settings. Um, one thing that I've been thinking about recently is just like when you have that little red, you know, have that little health icon next to a player.

And you click on it and it says, Oh, we just missed a game. You know, manager says you'll be fine. It's like I've O'Neill's knee, Tyler O'Neill's knee. Lars Newt bar had something like this, you know, where it's like a hamstring. I think I've been saying to myself, I have to treat that person as if he's injured for the week. So when I'm planning for this week, I need to have, especially in like weekly lineup situations, I need to have someone that can play for that person.

You know, I can and if it's like or if it's like a draft and hold and I have to set him, even if it says he should be back on Monday, I'm like, Nope. Yeah, I'd rather not I'm like, Nope. Yeah. I'd rather not miss three games because you can, you know, a lot of these drought and holds, you can switch it. You switch on Friday, right? I'd rather not miss those three games.

You know, I'd rather, Oh, maybe he does come back Monday, but I'd, but if I have a healthy option that I know gets three games, I'll take the bird in the hand is what I'm saying. So I've been trying to be a little bit more cautious because I think teams are being more cautious and they say, oh no, he's ready today, but he'll play tomorrow. You know, and then you just lost one of your three games, you know, and you had an option that's going to play all three. So I've been kind of treating them as injured until they prove they're not.

Well, it's easy enough to get them back in a few days later, right? If you use a slightly less talented player for a few days, it's not going to sink you. You're more likely to lose that playing time sticking with the, the banged up day to day player, because I think you're right. I think a lot of teams are being more careful when players are banged up. I mean, Nico Horner, Austin Riley. Yeah. Didn't go on the IL.

It was out for like 11 days. Very odd, very frustrating. Cost me a couple of places. I was pretty mad about that. Yeah, not thrilled about that. Quick update on Kodai Singa, he may be out until the All-Star break, that is according to Will Salmon of the Athletics.

Had a couple setbacks. I thought the news was gonna be even worse. I feel like, I don't know, I feel like this is not headed to a good place. Every time he started throwing, he's like, nope, stoppin'. Yeah, kind of makes you wonder if he comes back this year at all, but if you were thinking about stashing him, it's not time to do that. It's good.

Wait, wait until there's a little bit of progress. Wait until a rehab assignment starts, because it's probably going to be a long rehab assignment for Senga. If he gets up to that point this summer, some news on Roki Sasaki, he is planning on posting this winter. It sounds like a Chelsea James and Washington Post, had a report. It's kind of confirming things that people have been reporting and suggesting. All along made a big ruckus last year about wanting to be in post last year,

which I thought it wasn't going to happen for a variety of reasons. But when you make a ruckus like that, I think it's, you know, the way that there's like this subtle thing that happens in Japan, which is you can put a little bit of pressure on your team in the media by saying stuff like this. Yeah. So he was just trying to ratchet up whatever leverage he had, which is, you know, I'm going to continue talking about wanting to be posted until you post me basically the team at some point is like, fine, fine. We'll take the money.

If you're in a situation where you've got an open player pool, I think he's talented enough where you'd want to try and keep her or dynasty, get them on your roster, like at the next possible opportunity. I think a lot of leagues don't let you do that. If you didn't do it already and leagues where you could get them, he's probably already gone. It's hard to make this one actionable, but it does, you know, if you were, if you're selling, I, yeah, the other team knows this now too

So there's not there's not a real way to leverage this But it does make him more interesting as a pitching prospect because when you hold Japanese pitching prospects a lot of times It's like well, when's he coming over, you know You know in this case you can be like now, you know So it makes him a a lot more attractive to to get in a trade and be So it makes him a lot more attractive to get in a trade and be maybe a lot more attractive to trade if you really need something for this year. But he's fond because he throws super, super hard and he has a good splitter. It could be a little bit like a Kodai Sengou, you know, sitting 97. Right.

And a little bit younger, so even more projectability. I don't think he's as polished as Yamamoto though, and he doesn't have his wife and arsehole. And so it's not, you know, I think that we'll probably enter some sort of hype mill where like, you know, he'll be washed through the same process and, you know, people will declare him the best pitching prospect in baseball, but I don't know I might have him Job is my best pitching prospecting baseball and then probably Kate Horton and Then maybe rookie Sasaki or yeah So easy second or third. I'm saying he's not first woof

hot take Is it? It could be. Around these parts, I guess. It's a hot take. Yeah. Let's talk about a few movers in your starting picture rankings update that went up at the end of last week at some movement, even inside the top 25.

I mentioned Chris Sale earlier on the show being at number five. That was a bit of a surprise for me, not because he hasn't deserved it, but I think it's the it's the way you described it. It is like the Tyler Glass now of, hey, this is working really, really well right now. And when it's all working, this is where he goes. We know the downside is if he breaks and he's broken often in recent seasons that it all falls apart very growing really close to also throwing really close to his max, but. Yeah.

Nevermind the torpedoes. It is aged 35 season two, which makes me wonder, like with this window out of 21, 22, and even 23, which is more like a half season, the other two seasons were a lot less, is he going to age, is Chris Sale gonna turn into a Verlander, a Scherzer type where we get this 35 to 39, eight, these next five seasons where he's consistently exceeding our expectations?

I would wager no, because he did not have the health outcomes, you know, in the early 30s that those guys had. Those guys were largely healthy until they started breaking. So if you got somebody who's already started breaking. Yeah, Verlander had the one detour for the core muscle repair surgery. That was a little bit. Yeah, but was he like 29 or something?

Yeah, it was closer to the time that sale was broken. But yeah, it's okay. But he's been remarkably durable. And even during that time, he like pitched through it. It just wasn't as good. Right. He just didn't get the same results that we were accustomed to. But I saw Paul Skeens landed at 15. That had to be some temptation to move him even higher.

I mean, it was it was after that great start. I'm glad that I had, you know, a little bit of reticence there because, you know, he comes out in the giant start and he's great again, but only three strikeouts. So I do think there's going to be something to watch in terms of is he like more of a sinkerish guy that isn't going to have the high end strikeout totals. But yeah, I mean, he looks really excellent. I also couldn't quite give him the same amount of innings as a lot of the other people in those rankings of that slot.

I do think he's headed for another. I think he has about 130 innings in him for the year and he's already at 43. So I think he only has like 80, 85 innings left. That's not a full workload. There's nobody ranked ahead of him that you'd look at and say, he only has 85 innings left. Everybody else could just go. That's where I, that's why he, that's where he's, I mean, he's right behind Logan Webb, who's like super boring in some ways.

I mean, has the worst came out as BB in my top 20. Um, and, uh, but it has a great projected ERA cause of the home park. One of the worst strikeout projected strikeout rates in the top 20. Um, but also doesn't have only AD and he's left Garrett crochet cracked the top 25 same kind of problem where you wonder like, how long do the white socks let him go? They as a rebuilding team, of course, have the luxury of shutting him down completely on the, these are the workload terms.

There's no tight roping it, trying to find a playoff spot along the way. So I just wonder like, what do you think their North Star is for his workload? When do we see Garrett Crochet call it a season? I've got 111 innings. I don't know. That's your number? That was my number. He's got like 50 innings left.

That's only eight to 10 starts. Yeah, it's real tough. I mean, maybe they just want to... They've got two years of him left. If they...if he breaks... Like, a lot of times I think these things don't show up in the same year. So it's like, they could probably let him pitch like 160 innings, and it's not like he would just be like, Oh, now I need Tommy John. You know what I mean? It's more like, well, you pushed him hard last year, so now he needs Tommy John in his second to last year.

It seems like Greg Crochet is gonna be traded off the White Sox, right? I mean, like, do you think the White Sox are gonna be good in the next two years? That's all they have before. I don't think they're gonna be good in the next two years. I think he'd be their most interesting player to trade in the moment with at least Robert Hurt.

And even if Robert were healthy, I think maybe Crochet brings back more. I mean, there's a lot of interesting possibilities here. What's surprising to me is he's averaging the same kind of Velo on his fastball as a starter, which I don't think lasts because if you look at Jordan Hicks, um, when he, so the, I know, I know, I don't tell me again, I know he was sick, but other than the, the, the one where he was sick, he still started the year 98, six, 97, five, 96, seven, 97, two, 96, six, 95, 95, eight. The one he was sick was 93. I got it. 95, six. So it's still going down. You know, it's still, he still can't sit 97 as a starter.

That's the craziest thing I think about Paul skeens is just how long can he do this? Even Jared Jones's below has gone down over time, um, from off of his debut. So I don't know that the the the crochet thing is super interesting i don't really have an answer for you because you they may want to massage innings in order to trade in this year. In order to give the team that's acquiring him more innings. This year but if you're buying him. Would you buy him this year no i think he's gonna get going to get sold next year because they're going to try and get him to some point and maybe in the off season or during next season, they can say, he's a full-time starter now.

He pitched 125 innings or 120 innings last year. 111 innings. Yeah. But if you're a team that's interested in trading for Garrett crochet, don't you want to be the ones to control what the rest of his 2024 looks like? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Don't you want to be the team that gives him instructions for the off season and a plan

instead of letting some other organization do it? Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't want to depend on the white socks. I mean, he's, he's great so far this season. 33.9% K rate control better than we've ever seen from him in the big leagues. I didn't think this was going to work when they first

announced it. I kind of laughed it off. I should have been more open-minded, clearly. This was a big game. He ended up being the best of the converted starters. And all of them have been pretty good, except for Puck. Yeah. And Puck deeked us with the fantastic spring.

That's the best part about it. Yeah. Puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck puck stuff range we go all year what hasn't been good is the came as we be so if you remember he started out he wasn't striking guys out. And the stuff ratings were good but he wasn't striking guys out and you know I should have said okay good stuff ratings good track record good health. I'm gonna ignore the came on speed because stuff beats came out as we be in the small samples instead I kind of ogled the strikeout rate too much and put him down too low. So this is actually kind of a return to where he was at the beginning of the year. Yeah, kind of interesting to me, his swinging strike rate hasn't gone all the way back to where it was in 21 with the White Sox or in 22 with the Giants.

So maybe the K rate comes in closer to where the projections are. I think projections are 25, 26%. He's been at 22% so far this year. So if you're expecting pre 23 Rodin, you might be a little disappointed, but I think you're pretty happy overall with what you got based on the draft day price. The stuff days projection say 26.9%. So yeah,

there's still something there and for what it's worth, his stuff has been going in the right direction. I have him as a stuff riser. How about Rangers Suarez up at 28 now? It's like two behind him. Yeah, I don't know, man. Like we've got a 406 ERA projected for him. I pushed him basically as hard as I could

with that projection before I was like, I'm not putting him ahead of, you know, like Logan Webb is a three three projection. You know, I like not putting Ranger Suarez anywhere near that. I had a hard time putting him against the head of Joe Ryan with his amazing came as BB. And even Cole Reagan's has great stuff plus and a similar projection. So I just, I put him in Jack Flaherty right by Rodin and just said, Hey,

this is where I'm going to put guys that my model doesn't like, but you know, they're pitching really well in the K minus BBs there. And you know, sometimes people just pop, you know, I don't know. What, where would you think? Like this. So this is, uh, 27 and 28. Like, is that just, I know there's some people out there like Rangers Swar is one is a top five pitcher in the big leagues this year.

And I'm just like, I, that's what happened. Doesn't mean it's going to keep happening. That's, I know that's a hard thing. It's, it's difficult tension to break, but I think you have him. I mean, if I had a set of pitching rankings, it'd be pretty close because, yeah, he's usually in. And we've seen similar flashes like this from him before.

I think his twenty twenty one season when he was in the pen and then he was a starter at the end of the year, put up the ridiculous 136 CRA, even one whip. He had good skills that year, right? 25% K rate, good swinging strike rate, decent control. This is the best control we've ever seen from him. A few more Ks. It doesn't seem completely out of bounds. No projection system wants to buy it. And this is why the lotum concept is such a big deal to me. And I'm, I'm such a doofus for not having any Rangers Suarez anymore. I had him only in auto new included them in a big bundle trade to get Wyatt Langford.

I gave up a lot of sell highs in that trade. So we'll see what the next couple of months bring baseball pods either fleeced me and is going to win the league because of the trade or you'll win next year. And I'll win. Yeah. That's the hope. I don't know. That team's pretty messed up, but is Ranger Suarez

similar to better than or worse than Justin Steele and why, because in my mind, they're very similar. I think Suarez might have a little more depth to his arsenal. That's it. I think that's, I think thatarez might have a little more depth to his arsenal. That's it. I think that's important. Plus, in terms of K-BB, if you're talking about this year, the strikeout minus walk rate for Steel is worse and pretty close to league average.

Even though it looks like he has a better than average stuff, plus he's he's a stuff plus dropper in steel. And then there's the fact that it's a two pitch arsenal and it's a two pitch arsenal that worked, you know, for a little bit, but also isn't strider ask and is now forced to go through the league another time after they've seen him. You know, he's not really surprising anybody anymore in terms of the shapes, his pitches and what he looks like. So the Suarez, he can emphasize a different pitch in any given game. More ways to pivot. I mean, I think I would prefer Suarez to steal, but whatever my comfort level is with steel, which is growing because he's finding a way to get it done. I just watched it yesterday. Did to the Brewers again,

the Brewers see him all the time and they really don't hit him. You have some recency bias, dude. Like look back a start before that. That was what? Second start off the IL? I don't know. I mean, he had three starts in a row off the IL, six runs earned, five, four runs earned, five runs earned. Yeah, Pirates got him a couple times in there too. One of those was against Atlanta, but yeah, it's a constant source of frustration. Justin Steele, I just can't quite figure it out with him either.

We'll get to the Fallers later in the week because I think some of them merit more than a minute or two as a flyby, so we'll save that for probably our Thursday episode. Let's quickly look at where the money went this weekend. It was Jake Myers week in leagues where he was still available. A lot of 12-team leagues where Jake Myers was the most expensive player available and you put together a group of metrics to look at some of the most well-rounded players in the game right now. I mean, Jake Myers is there. I wanted to put together, you know, strikeout less than average, barrel above average, base running above average, defense above average. I did not sort by WRC plus.

I just wanted to leave that in there for those of you looking on YouTube. And I just thought this would be an interesting idea because we're, especially the deeper leagues were always trying to be like, who's going to keep their playing time. And we should have maybe known last year, I like Chas McCormick and I thought, you know, Dusty Baker, you know, should play him more, but but dusty baker knows more about baseball than i do i just. And dusty baker was i think kind of fixated on chas maccord makes defense and i think you know it turns out probably the jake meyers is a better centerfield defender than jake than chas mccormick so you're having now is is Chas McCormick is a corner outfielder. Jake Myers is the center fielder. And so this is a moment where defense is like, Hey dude, you should've seen this coming. He was going to keep the job.

He's going to stay in the job. He was going to play a lot because of his defense. And on this, on this group, you can see, um, everybody is a regular and, uh, even Lars Newtt bar struggling he's on this list and his defense on sometimes is gonna keep in the lineup. You know you've got also Luis Garcia junior in here and part of the reason why he was given all the chances he's been given is that he's at least a capable defender that doesn't strike out a lot, you know? And so you you know, if you're building a team you say, all right, well, let's just put the guy who can who can actually glove it He doesn't strike out too much and let's see if he can grow and he's been not given the opportunity to grow The other people on this list are just mostly stars or high-end regulars Bobby with juniors on this list Will you Domus could tell Marte Max Kepler?

There's Bobby with juniors on this list. Will you Domus, Kittel Marte, Max Kepler, Carlos Correa? It's a really interesting list. I mean, it's it's within this year. So if you expanded it to be, you know, multi year, you would get most of the, you know, the two way stars in baseball. But it is, I think, cool that you make this list and you say, oh, Jake Myers and Luis Garcia, you make this list for next year, you know Jake Meyers and Luis Garcia, if you make this list for next year, um, you know, and you've got, you've got to keep the, uh, plate appearance number low because you're looking for guys for next year.

But if you do this at the end of the year and you, and you sort for 200 plate appearances, uh, and you do all these sorts, I bet you you'll find a couple of guys that play next year because of their defense like Jake Myers Yeah, that's a good good rubric to consider for looking for some future value Especially in deeper formats where just finding someone who exceeds on playing time ends up being good But Myers might be a notch above that that gets reflected in just how excited people were to Adam and 12 team leagues this weekend And I tried we we put some 30s out out there, you know, with my coworker, I forget what we put down. I think it was 30 or 40 bucks

and we should have put more and more down. Yeah, it might be. We just lost the end of Beauregardt's, we should have, I don't know if we should have gone all the way to 100 or whatever, but we should have put more down. Could end up being one of the better hitter pickups of the season, we'll have to see how it plays out for Jake Myers, but I think we talked about it going into the weekend.

Myers can coexist with McCormick because they have that left field spot open. Jordan Alvarez can be the primary DH. It's fine. The pieces fit right now for that. To work a little bit of a, of an issue with Jose Brau backup. I think yesterday played a Brau and Singleton. That could be a problem sometimes, you know, against righties. That would be the squeeze. But if either one of those guys isn't hitting enough, which is very possible, one of them sits instead. That's the it's kind of a merit based thing, I think, with that group of players kind of jockeying for time.

So Chas McCormick is playing for his job right now. Yeah, he is. I got him a lot of places to him to come through. I'm trying to hold. I'm trying to hold through this. I think this next couple of weeks is going to tell you almost everything. How about Colt Keith? It was kind of the late draft season, get a young player that's going to play and see what happens. Then he was a cut in early May. and now he's a re-add for a lot of people here in

late May. Last three weeks have been a lot better. He's got the K-rate down. He's doing everything as far as like a hitter, OVP, like real life, good offensive player profile. He's not getting to the power consistently yet. I don't know if Colt Keith is ever going to be much of a base stealer. He's got three bags and four attempts. If he's not much of a base stealer in these rules, it means 10, 12 bags would be sort of the expectation. That's fine. It's not zero. I think this is just

what it looks like now when players are adjusting to big league pitching. I think it's going to take six weeks, eight weeks, half a season sometimes for guys to start putting the pieces together because it's just different. You see so much more quality pitching after you get out of the minor leagues and how teams decide to be patient is ultimately going to be one of the things we have to learn, figure out what teams, which teams are going to be the most patient and which teams are going to be quicker to take playing we have to learn. We have to figure out which teams are going to be the most patient, and which teams are going to be quicker to take playing time away

when things aren't working. Yeah, if you look at his rolling stats, he's learned basically how to lift the ball a little bit over time. And that is something you'll see with guys who debut. You'll see, one of the reasons that I liked Ellie this year was that you'll see guys with like 40, five percent ground ball rates in the in the minors come to the majors and also fifty five percent ground ball rate in the in the rookie season i think it's just something about the way. Pitches in major leagues can pitch you i don't know the stuff whatever it is you know sometimes ground ball rate spikes then you see with the aging curves it just improves over time and. times ground ball rate spikes, and then you see with the aging curves, it just improves over time. And, you know, that's what Keith has been doing is figuring out how to lift it more over time, figuring out how to pull and lift it.

And right now his pull and lift rolling charts are in good spot. So, you know, he's he's accessing the power a little bit more. And this is something that he dealt with in the minors. If you look, he's got some weird, really low power years and years and then you know the pull rate jumps and he kind of learned to pull over the course of the miners so basically he just did what he did in the minor leagues in the first. Six weeks he kind of went through the whole process and sometimes I look at people's players people's player pages and I feel like I it's like the matrix I can see oh yeah all the problems they had as kids are coming back you know like if you ever like if Paul Goldschmidt just goes and suddenly is all oppo you know like that'll be how he came into the league you know like I just see certain things like you regress back to where you were at the beginning on the way out. And so we just saw Colt Keith work through all of the demons

that he had in the minor leagues in the first six weeks. So I think he might be ready to go. I didn't see him as available in any of my leagues. Yeah, I said him at least in one of my leagues and he was a priority ad. It's nice to have a middle corner Matt too, just as your first bench option. Looks like the Tigers are going

to stay patient with him. I thought Nick Gonzalez was kind of interesting as a pickup. His barrel rates way up right now. He's chasing a lot of pitches outside the zone. It's leaving 16 games up with the Pirates, but is there anything else different about him and his profile looks completely different, but that he changes swing? Did he go to drive line? Is there anything about Nick Gonzalez that makes him more interesting now? What I don't get is that his swinging strike rate in AAA this year was about the same as the

swinging strike rate in AAA in 2023. So 14.6 this year, 15.1 for Gonzalez. This year, the strikeout rate was 17.5% and last year was 26.6%. So I tend to think it's a mirage, but one thing that I've noticed is the walk rates are big, big different. So I think he's just being aggressive and instead of maybe watching strike three, he's just, it's a little bit more like I'm going to take three a swings, you know, and get to my power before you strike me out. It's a little bit more like I'm going to take three A swings. Yeah. And get to my power before you strike me out.

I think that literally describes most of it. Um, the fly ball rate is up, uh, and his ground ball fly ball mix has been all over the place and he is a guy who wanted to make a swing change. So maybe this is him finally being comfortable in that swing change. This is, you know, this is the most extended sort of high fly ball rate that we've seen from him in a while. Um, since double A in 2022. So maybe it's maybe it's coming together. I just tend to distrust somebody with a 14% swing strike rate. I tried to try to sneak

him buy an auto new to have a $1 shortstop and he got sniped away from me for like $4. I wasn't really willing to go to $4 in auto new. So if you can get them cheap, I like him. I don't know what I want to spend a lot of money on. Yeah, that's the right way. Like a cheap flyer, I think is the right way to describe them because you just want to see a little more. It's been so up and down, there's been a few injuries sprinkled in there as well, it's hard to know where the true baseline is at. As we've talked about, the quality of pitching in AAA, ABS, all the different things going on there have made it even harder to sort of translate what's happening there up to

the big league level. Shout out to David Fry, by the way, I don't think we've mentioned him at all. I saw him in some pickups. Unreal, 344, 488, 591 line now through 123 plate appearances, six homers, three steals. This is madness. What is this? Yeah, I mean, this is actually what he was doing

in the minors, right, in terms of strikeout rate. And I guess it's pretty aggressive power wise. It's this is this is really power. It sure seems like it. I mean, maybe this is a Cleveland thing, dude. I think ever since we had our AL Central episode with Brit, the guardians have like a eight 50 winning percentage. He has one, two, three, only three of his six homers are at home. This is a good projection. If you look at the rest of season numbers for him.

Yeah, this projection is pretty good too. Jesus. Zips is spitting out a 256, 340, 431. Yeah, that'll play for a catcher eligible guy. What the heck? Is he playing enough to make an impact at the positions in which he's eligible? Is Bo Naylor losing his job? No, because they're playing fry a lot. First base left field. I think of his last last eight starts, only one's been behind the plate. It's kind of like what they did with Eric Haas a few years ago.

He's the righty. Oh, a lot of these appearances have been pH, start with a pH. Yeah, but mostly left field starts, occasional first base, occasional catcher. So he's platooning with Manzardo and is, oh, some of this might go away with Quan coming back. They did catch a little run, a lot of lefties going back to the middle of last week, too. And Kwan is back this week But he plays that well and it's projected that well Maybe they send the Monsardo down when the Kwan comes back and David Fry's the first baseman. That is totally possible when Kwon comes back and David Fry is the first baseman.

That is totally possible. Yeah, mind blowing. Did not see this coming at all from David Fry. It would have been easy to pick up because nobody seemed to be on it, at least not in any sort of like big bid sort of way. A lot of drops, as I mentioned, of top injured players, guys like John Means getting a second opinion on his forearm, which is unfortunate because it was a strain that put him on the aisle to begin the season you mentioned Zander Bogarts the fractured shoulder it's a long-term

absence for him we don't have an ETA just yet Eloy Jimenez back on the aisle with a hamstring strain he's down for a month Jordan Beck broke his hand Jack Swinski got demoted so those were the primary cuts easy sorts of cuts I did see Casey Mize among the most dropped players though, in 12 team mix leagues. That was from the Rotowire online championship. And I think for a healthy pitcher to get cut, things have to be going very poorly,

given how desperate we are for pitching. The thing that's really caught me off guard, when we talked about Mize a month or so ago, I thought more K's were coming. I thought you could look at the swinging strike rate are for pitching. The thing that's really caught me off guard when we talked about Mize a month or so ago, I thought more Ks were coming. I thought you could look at the swinging strike rate at the time, the arsenal changes and say, it's there. It's going to be a 22% K rate going forward. It's actually gone down and it just doesn't seem like he's got the pitches working quite the same way. He had them coming out of spring training.

Yeah, he had the he was the biggest, the second biggest stuff plus decliner since the beginning of the season. If you look at the ride on his fastball, it's disappearing. And guess where it's going? It's going where it was before. I think it's just a testament to how hard it is to change. It's really hard to change. I think he's going to have to go down to Toledo and try and figure it out there. I mean, Matt Manning seems like a better option right now. Yeah, so I get it with with Mize. I just I really I think it's because I want to see him turn the corner.

I believed in spring training. I believed earlier in the season. I mean, he's a 1-1 too. So you just figure there's a lot of innate talent in there. Yeah, you're right. But that's it for the drops. A lot of injuries and we'll maybe we'll talk about Jack Sawinski and like a deep dynasty league at some point in the near future.

We have talked a lot about Jack Sawinski. You know how we feel. I think he could come back and be all right. But yeah, it wasn't going well. A lot of ground covered on today's show. If you want to check out the updated starting pitcher rankings, probably seen them already. But if you haven't, the athletic dot com slash rates and barrels

will get you a subscription. So be sure to check those out. You can also check out that feature on Angel Hernandez that Cody Stevenhagen and Sam Blum put together last week. It'll give you a better sense of the human behind all the vitriol. There's a person in there. You can find Eno on Twitter at EnoSarisme at Derek Van Riper, find the pod at rates and barrels.

That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Thursday. Thanks for listening. Bye!