Rates & Barrels - Rookies of interest, digging deeper for surprises and making sense of platoon splits

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss the challenges of projecting MLB arrivals in the wake of a lost minor league season in 2020 before digging deep for some potential surprises additions to the 2021 player pool. Rundown 2:55 Impact Rookies: Retroactively Fitting 2020 Minor League Seasons 10:12 What If CJ Abrams Had a Clearer Path? 15:49 Prospects of the Month 22:41 Digging Deep for Surprise Players 32:05 When Can You Believe Platoon Splits? 41:34 Can We Learn Anything From Previous Shortened Seasons? 53:41 A Surprising Eno Rivalry 56:47 Beer of the Week! Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Please fill out our listener survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/athleticaudiosurvey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It is Friday, March 19th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. Britt Giroli enjoying some work in Arizona. Enjoying some work is rounding up. Enjoying downtime around work, I'm sure, but even that in a limited capacity. So Britt will be back with us next week and hopefully with a few great stories. So hopefully she's enjoying her time in the desert. How's it going for you on this Friday?

You know, it's, uh, it's, it's, uh, yeah, all right.

It's going, it's going. March is, uh, a crazy nutty month. It's a crazy nutty month. Um, at the end of March,

I'm looking forward to, um, a trip, uh, our first big trip since COVID, I guess. We're all going to hop into the car and go to the Grand Canyon. Nice. See my vaccinated mother and go to a couple sightseeing things around there in Arizona and then drive back. It'll be a weird time to take time off the first week of the year. But, in fact, how many decisions did you make about your fantasy team in the first week?

Not that many. And how little do I want to write short sample stories on the first week? Yeah. I mean, you have to pay attention. You do have to make moves the first week because there could be some pop-up players, especially in a year like this. But as far as reacting and writing about it,

there's not a lot to write. So it seems like kind of a really good time, especially if you can catch games at night and do some sightseeing during the day in the Grand Canyon. It's very grand. It's amazing. It's actually every bit as cool as people make it out to be.

Maybe better. TV, it looks amazing. I don't even know if that really does it justice. It's one of those things that's really hard to take a picture of. The bigger something is, the less the picture really captures it unless you really blow it up

and have a huge canvas and a really great camera. If you just look at a picture of the Grand Canyon, sometimes you're like, yeah, okay. Yeah, let the pros with the really fancy equipment do it because it's just not going to be the same. I know phones take great pictures now, but get a professional picture of the Grand Canyon. It's like, have you ever tried to take a picture of's just like a beautiful like i take a picture of clouds and then looked at it later i'm like what was i thinking i've not done absolutely not a

compelling picture like you thought you saw something in the clouds you're like i'm gonna get a picture of that that's a homer simpson cloud you look at it later and you're like i don't see it no idea what that is there anymore. A lot to talk about on this episode beyond our amateur photography skills. And I wrote the Rookies of Interest piece. Finally, it took me way too long to write it, in part because, as Eno said, March is crazy. So the time I had to write was less than I thought. But it's been a lot of fun doing guest spots on pods and doing this show and the Athletic Fantasy Baseball podcast. So I'm glad it finally is out and hopefully with enough time for people to enjoy it.

We'll talk about some players that were in that piece. We had a related question from a listener digging deep for some surprise players looking for the next Thai France. There's a couple of ways that we could answer that question. So we're going to go down that path. can answer that question. So we're going to go down that path. I had a question about platoon combos and research for those and the impact of previously shortened seasons on pitcher workloads. So a lot of ground to cover on this episode, probably a few other tangents along the way. But the rookies of interest piece, I mean, this is a year where you and I were chatting about this a bit yesterday while I was putting the finishing touches on it. It's almost like we have to take information we're getting now in spring training, kind of match that with the data we had from 2019 and sprinkle in reports from the alternate site for players that did not get to play in 2020.

It's like choose your own adventure. It's actually more like Mad Libs. And you're trying to fill in a bunch of these details, and you're just not quite sure what to do. Bobby Witt Jr., who we brought up on Wednesday's pod, was the guy we were going back and forth on yesterday. And I landed on putting him in the Jared Knick, Wander Franco range of the rankings, which to me is more of a game theory play than anything else. It's that you are hoping that one of those three guys ends up on your roster and just crushes right away. And it's a pie-in-the-sky sort of expectation where you could have one guy out of that group in a typical mixed league with a normal-sized bench.

And you can't really have more than that because if they're all in the minors for a stretch, you probably can't keep them all in those situations. So that's sort of how I placed Witt with those guys. The hardest part, though, was justifying it from a skills perspective. I was trying to figure out, are we surprised by what the Royals are doing with Bobby Witt Jr. simply because he didn't have a 2020 minor league season? Because if his minor league season had been, let's say, 50 games at low A and 50 plus games at high A, okay, we would have expected him to start this season at double A. And a guy that we expect to start at double A, making the big league roster is surprising, but not not stunning and if he'd played at three levels last year if he'd actually played some games at double a last year you know that wouldn't be that surprising if he was in camp and battling for an opening day roster spot so if you retrofit it based on the way that the royals are

talking about wit right now you know you kind of have to fit him into one of those two paths to sort of justify what's going to happen. But at least then, you're not just completely in the mind-blown phase of, oh, this guy was at Rookie Ball last time we saw him, and he had an 85 WRC plus when he was there. Because if you just look at that, none of this makes any sense. Yeah. Um, it's a really tough year for prospects because, uh, for evaluating prospects,

uh, for, for that reason. And, um, you know, even the kind of reports like it is better probably to consider the reports that we get through the people who track these things.

Uh, James Anderson, Keith law, you know, like, you know, the, the, probably to consider the reports that we get through the people who track these things uh james anderson keith law you know like you know the the people that are that are listening the people have rolodexes that you know we should listen to them because they are talking to people that are seeing these players and know something about them and we don't know anything at the same time um teams always have ulterior motives when it comes to releasing information like this, pumping them up for a trade or denigrating them because they're currently in contract negotiations with the player for an extension or something. There's all sorts of reasons to try to push or prod an evaluation public evaluation about a player in a certain direction like what if you were planning on you're very sure

you were not going to play Bobby wit in the major leagues then you could kind of do a whisper campaign of like well you know he didn't make that much contact at the alternate site you know like you know yeah I don't know I don't think he's ready you know and and then And then you get a couple well-prominent writers to be like, well, Bobby Witt didn't make much contact at the alternate site last year, so give him a little bit of time. It's like, but did Bobby Witt make a lot of contact at the alternate site? I don't know.

It's, in fact, a thing I've heard that he didn't that he might struggle with contact well he didn't struggle with contact in rookie ball i mean he had a pretty good strikeout rate so where did he struggle with contact um and so i don't uh i don't know where that came from i don't know why it's out there i don't even know i don't know how to believe it so it's a really tough time and at the same time you don't want to just be like looking at 2019 and be like well that's who this guy is you know like um and then uh every team's going to treat even when they start getting assigned right that will be a major um hint i think right when they start getting assigned there'll be sort of an idea of like oh how did this guy progress right

even then it's difficult because like, um, I was looking at Oswald Peraza. Uh, he's a shortstop in the Yankees organization and looks like a hit tool guy. I like hit tool guys. I'm not sure about the power, but like a hit tool guy at shortstop, uh, maybe he doesn't end up playing for the Yankees, but you know, uh, they always make trades and, uh, he's an interesting guy. And I found actually that I think generally J2 guys are, international guys are being undervalued a little bit in prospect drafts and in different places. In my Devil's Rejects League, for example, I think we got like three or four international guys from J2 signs because the information there is even lower,

right? A lot of them signed in the middle of this or the year before had like a tiny sample somewhere. And then we don't know what they're doing. They're all young, right? They all seem like they're really far away. But some of those international guys ascend quickly. And you see them like Juan Soto. Like it was here immediately.

You know, like, you know. So Peraza got assigned is a long story short. Peraza got assigned a high A, which I guess is decent. It gives him a shot at double A this year. And I think that says that they at least they weren't going to keep him back any worse than that. I think that that's a good sign for Oswald Peraza. But, you know, the fact that C.J. Abrams and Bobby Witt are

still in camp, even if you don't think that they are going to break camp, means that their teams see them as top 10 type prospects. I think you could almost use that as a proxy. I mean, I think it's pretty wild. It's just that if you think about C.J. Abrams and how I think you could almost use that as a proxy. ready for the big leagues now, then Abrams and almost any other organization would be on the cusp of making the opening day roster.

But because he's with the Padres, it's just not going to happen right now. And they'll kind of wait and see. He's 20 like Oswald Peraza, right? He's 20 and he's on a loaded team and he's still in camp. I mean, that's meaningful to me. I think it matters quite a bit. Like how teams handle players, the timing of the moves i

think that does give us some insight into what they're prioritizing from a development standpoint and i'm kind of anxiously awaiting details from the yankees about how they're going to handle jason dominguez where's he gonna go and how quickly is he gonna move i think if you're trying to predict someone who's going to move aggressively he's going to get a pretty aggressive arc based on most forecasts. But where does it start? Is it low A this summer? Is it actually high A or double A? I mean, the way some people talk about him, you'd think that maybe they could test him and move him pretty quickly. And I did look back at a couple other players when I was trying to figure out how unprecedented Bobby Witt's path to the opening day roster really would be, and kind of landed on two different players. Carlos Correa, who was actually quite a bit younger than Bobby Witt when he was drafted first overall. Witt's a little old for a high school kid, but not something really to be held against him. But Carlos Correa took a lot more time to get through the lower levels of the minor leagues, in part because he was 17 when he was drafted so that factored in

there was also like the questions about his defense and like whether or not he'd be a third baseman yeah he was too big for it and he had a leg injury fractured uh tibia i think in high a that cost him part of a year so that slowed him down a little bit he still moved really fast relatively speaking though if you look at his arc to the big leagues and then there's starlin castro who is one of the fastest moving players in the minor leagues of the last 20 years really because he skipped i think it was low a entirely and triple a entirely and it was pretty amazing to see looking back really good contact skills as a prospect. I mean, people think of Starling Castro as boring oatmeal now,

and I think that's obviously true at age 30. That's something to remember when you get all excited about prospects, that sometimes the best prospects end up as Starling Castro, and it's good. It's fine. Yeah. He's had a good big league career to this point. But, yeah, he skipped low A entirely, debuted at high A as a 19-year-old, played only 57 games at double A between 2009 and 2010

before jumping all the way to the big leagues and playing 125 games in 2010. That's really aggressive for a guy who signed as an international free agent too. So I do think the timetables in general are difficult to predict. It's one of the hardest things for us to do think the timetables in general are difficult to predict. It's one of the hardest things for us to do from the outside.

And we do have to really consider the various factors that are being passed along by people like Keith and James that have those at least secondhand accounts, right? They're talking to someone who was watching players that the rest of us didn't get to see last year. And we have to at least take that into account. But we also have to distill it accordingly because there could be narratives around that that are designed to mislead us or push us in a certain direction for a particular reason. I don't know how to do it right.

You know, I've just, I've taken, there's some lists I trust, Keith Laws, Eric Langenhagen, James Anderson are my, probably my favorite prospect lists. And then kind of triangulate them, look between them, look at, look at who's highest on, on one of those lists and and go for that i ended up uh taking in my 12 team restocking from minor league draft jj beleday who i think is um easier on the easier end right like college guy uh on a team that needs him uh didn't strike out that much when he first got a try probably Probably pretty close to the major leagues. You know what I mean?

Like, I like Bledé. And then I took Brian Rocchio and Oswald Peraza in the next two rounds as just, you know, teenagers that people seem to like. Like, I don't really, I don't even, there's not that much video out there even to lay eyes on for these two guys. So short stops in the Indians and Yankees organization. But if we're going to have like a prospect of the week, month, year. We can get back to the week if we want to.

Yeah, the year. That's an award. We can probably get back to prospect of the week once the minor league season starts. It's going to take a little while. Yeah, it's a lot easier when they're actually playing games and we can say, oh, look, this guy's really popped. But let's wait until the next segment

to do a prospect of the Week, I think, because that's going to be useful. Or you did Rookies of No. Do you have a Prospect of the Week off of your Rookies of No? Oh, yeah. I've got several to choose from for those who have seen the piece. I actually think the Prospect of the Month for me is Miguel Yajure. And he came up when the Pirates made that trade with the Yankees that sent Jamison Tyon to the Yankees.

Yajure, he is going to get a chance at this rotation sooner rather than later. I don't know if it's from the jump. So I don't know if he's necessarily draftable in a lot of mixed leagues. But use your watch list. Set up your watch list. Have players ready for when they debut so you don't forget about them, especially because if they get called up and they have no stats the time your waivers run, they're going to be totally buried in the rankings in season. We're starting to see a guy that really, I think, if he'd had a 2020, would have probably pushed his way up into a lot of maybe top 100 prospect lists.

I think that was within the range of outcomes. Overshadowed, of course, with Davey Garcia and Clark Schmidt in New York. And I think the Pirates are doing a legitimately good job of rebuilding their minor league system under Ben Charrington. That front office is at least putting the organization on the right track, as we've said before. I think with Miguel Yajure, is he an opening day guy? Not necessarily. But if he gets the opportunity this year, I think he stays in the big leagues for good. I think you're going to get a decent strikeout rate. It's four pitches with command, and it's all about opportunity in that Pittsburgh rotation. Just like we're always chasing hitters getting a chance in Baltimore as deep league pickups,

pitchers getting a chance in Pittsburgh, I think, are going to be an actual opportunity to get in. We talked about JT Brubaker, not a prospect, but a guy that's pretty safely in that rotation. Every opportunity to max out innings is there for a guy like Yahure in Pittsburgh. Yeah, yeah. And then, as is my want, I like Yahure, but as is my want, I pick old dudes that are barely prospects that might have an opportunity soon. I love those guys.

So Buddy Reed in Oakland, I think, is a guy deserving of some attention. He turned heads with some great defense. Two homers in his short stint so far in spring. They played him a lot. He seems like you've got Blaze Tom who's trying to make that team, Kai Tom, and he may be beating out Seth Brown for the last outfield spot because I think he's a little bit more valuable defensively. And he's got a bunch of patience and he shows some pop

in the spring. So if Tom beats him out, I think Reed and Brown are the next outfielders. And Brown could just be one of those types that just keeps getting passed over because Reed is more more exciting and if the A's go into a bit of a rebuild which is possible I mean they're getting to the point where some of their stars are getting more expensive and you know Oakland really likes to trade away their guys before they get too expensive if they trade away Chapman or Olsen I think that the sort of core positional, the positional core basically isn't there for them. So then all of a sudden they may be trading away a lot of guys. They never do a full rebuild though. So it's always going to be, it's going to be really hard to watch them. But I think Reed could get a chance. Power speed guy,

I'd be watching his strikeout rate this year if they start having minor league games, because it's all about if he can make some contact and he's got that power and speed, he'd be watching his strikeout rate this year um if they start having minor league games because it's all about if he can make some contact and he's got that power and speed could be the next center fielder yeah it might just be a starting job for part of this season and more of a fourth outfielder role in the future but definitely a guy that could do a lot for us as fantasy players with the the tools that you mentioned inching closer and steals bases i mean we're all i think a lot of times we're just looking for bags from the young guys because the old guys don't give us bags yeah and i think that was something as i kind of built out the bottom

part of the list like the dart throws really in the rookies piece guys like jared oliva and daniel johnson really sort of popped to me just because all they have to do is play and they're going to run if they get chances. I mean, I think I was reading Eric Langenhagen's report on Daniel Johnson. He's skeptical about the swing actually generating as much power as Johnson has shown in the minors once he gets up against big league pitching. But I think he's got a good eye at the plate and speed is a tool that he can leverage to stay in the lineup. And he's got a good arm too. So he's a good defender possibly in the corner. So maybe not prototypical corner outfield power, but if he's a good defender and he gets on base and he can steal some bases,

that might be enough for him to secure a lot of playing time in Cleveland. I think with Daniel Johnson, you get to see where Josh Naylor plays and whether or not they get rid of Jake Bowers. I think they'll get rid of Jake Bowers. I don't think anyone else wants him, so they could probably DFA him and sneak him through and keep him at AAA if they really want to have him around in the organization. But to me, playing Josh Naylor at first base,

back at his natural position, makes a lot of sense, especially if you can put someone like Daniel Johnson in the outfield instead. I'd rather play Johnson than Bowers, all things being equal. Yeah, with Bradley showing that power upside, I think he's a little bit more of a prototypical first baseman, and Johnson provides more versatility. And if you think about the worst teams around the league that would claim Bowers and play him, I don't think that many of them need a first baseman or a kind of light bat outfielder like this. I mean, he's just light for being a corner outfield first baseman.

And, you know, the Giants at this point have a few options at those positions. They're not, I don't think we're going to claim him. The Rockies, like C.J. Crone looks like he's going to be their best first baseman in years. And corner outfield, I mean, I guess that would be the cruelest joke of all, is that they claim Jake Bowers and play him over Sam Hilliard and just drive the knife deep into my chest. The Orioles seem to have like five first baseman corner outfielder six right yeah they got plenty of options there and and i think tigers none of those guys i don't know they're the tigers are okay depth wise too i mean the one thing that bowers

could do that some of their bench guys don't do very well is you get on base more potentially because they do have some very low obp bench guys so if they're moving on from Goodrum and Harold Castro and guys like that, maybe they see him as an upgrade. But I think it's just temporary until someone better gets DFA'd. They may just do the thing where they have Bowers make opening day, make sure that everybody else figures out their 40 man, and then bring up Bradley in the second week and DFA Bowers and hope

that he sneaks through that way. Yeah, that could be the plan. Related to the impact rookies piece, we had a question. I mentioned this in the intro. PCH is looking for some players like Ty France is for this season. So he's looking for non-prospect or peripheral prospects and late bloomers for the 2022 season. So guys, he should get now to stash away with the hopes that either playing time will open up as it did for France with the trade to Seattle, or that just, you know, an opportunity will happen because they're actually good players and their organizations are going to learn that over the course of this season. So digging deep for some surprises, did you turn up any interesting names that could kind

of fit the bill of being next year's Ty France? Yeah, you know, it's a bit of a problem of definition. I think if you think of Ty France as basically a part-time player that is getting a chance, which is part of what, like, he was going to make the Padres roster, right? He just wasn't going to have a starting role, and he got kind of traded into more of a starting role. Then, you know, I thought of David Bode in Chicago just having superior power to Nico Hor Horner could play his way into a starting role. There could be trades there. I doubt that the Cubs are really buying, but maybe they sell Bodie to somebody that starts him. There's some positional versatility there, second and third.

He's not just a first base type. And then the other one is Abraham Toro, who I think will either get traded when the Astros buy or find his way to the outfield or be like a big injury replacement for somebody. So I still think of him as highly that way. And I think Tyler Freeman used to be a prospect but now it seems to be an afterthought on most prospect lists still makes a lot of contact we don't really know what the power numbers would look like for the last year and we know that the

middle infield in cleveland is pretty fluid yeah freeman i know our friend James Anderson is still on him but definitely feels a little forgotten with Andres Jimenez in Cleveland after Lindor trade and Ahmed Rosario there as well Hernandez and yeah Freeman's not as far away as you might think if you're digging really deep I mean the Padres might have reloaded with another tie France in Brian O'Grady I know that's a Nando Dufino favorite from a couple of years ago, but O'Grady, he's already 28. He's a left-handed hitter, but he has power. He has speed. He has a ridiculously productive AAA season on the ledger, 126 WRC plus in 2019 when he hit 28 homers and stole 20 bases at that level. He was even a bit better when he first arrived at AAA

in 2018, a 157 WRC plus there. I'm just curious to see if he finds any playing time because he went from one crowded depth chart in Tampa Bay last year to another being a Padre right now. But if he ends up on a rebuilding team compared to someone like Jake Bowers, who I would say is just the purest form of organizational oatmeal. Brian O'Grady is the kind of guy that you say, oh, actually, what happens if we give him some playing time? There could be a Dylan Moore power speed combo that comes out of relative nowhere if playing time opens up. It just seems so unlikely that O'Grady gets that chance in San Diego. Yeah. Yeah. It's a combination of what you think of the player plus the chance.

I think that's how you define Ty France in the end. It's like not really a prospect, but enough of a prospect that somebody valued him and got him, right? Enough of a player that somebody valued him and got him and gave him a chance. So that's a really hard thing to define. But another way of defining it, I think, is you look at some prospect lists, you look deeper down on a prospect list for a team that might acquire talent. And so I, you know, I was looking at the Dodgers and behind Michael Bush, who I really want to see what kind of power numbers he puts up when they start playing again,

is Andy Pahez. You know, a guy that could put together at least the power. I don't know. France doesn't have that much speed. So sort of power and okay play discipline could come from Pahez. It could come from the Dodgers. But I doubt it at this point because they just keep acquiring noisy and, like, they just have such a loaded team.

At some point they may have to DFA him or just put him in a package and send him somewhere. But here's the name. I think I have Ty France. I think I have Ty France. And it's occurred to me over the course of this. I've got it. It occurred to me when you were talking about play appearances in the spring. Jason Vossler.

Oh, Jason Vossler. Okay. He used to be with the Padres. I think his prospect time just ran up. I don't have right in front of me what the transaction was, but now he's with the Giants. He's got something like

30 plate appearances this spring. His numbers in the minors when we had them show plate discipline, okay contact, and power. His projections look terrible because he's 27. But, you know, and there's a lot of age at level, you know, changes going on there. But he could be one of those,

maybe a little bit more like Mike Yastrzemski, but also I think like Ty France, a guy who was given an opportunity right in his peak age range and enough of an opportunity to make a name for himself. Now it's getting a little bit crowded on that Giants depth chart now with Tommy LaStella and Wilmer Flores and Donny Solano and all those guys, Dubon on the infield. And so Vossler may not make the team out of spring,

but Donnie Solano is a pretty big regression candidate. I mean, the Babbitt was super sky high on him. Wilmer Flores is okay, but he's not going to stand in front of somebody if they really think they've got something exciting, right? So I think, and there's enough guys near the end of their careers where an injury, a big injury, you know, might be meaningful. Like if Grant Crawford's a step slow already, you know, maybe he starts playing some second base for the Giants, as much as that seems crazy to think of.

Crawford was the oldest dude in the oldest shortstop in baseball last year. I got one more name to throw. Yeah, there's definitely Vossler makes sense because San Francisco, it's kind of wide open, especially in the outfield for some playing time and some significant injuries in the past of Alex Dickerson, too, could open up a lot of playing time if he unfortunately goes down at some point again Eli White in Texas is a name that I see popping up from Levi Weaver from time to time I know Leody Tavares is the future in center field but they don't have great center field depth if Tavares falls on his face

which isn't unheard of for a player that young he could go down and come back next year or later this season and then be fine Eli White would probably be the guy that's playing. And someone's got to play that spot. And White has power. He's got speed. A little bit more swing and miss than you'd like to see looking at the 2019 AAA numbers. The K rate jumped up to 27%.

But he does walk a little bit. And he's one of those guys. He's tooled up. I think there's a little bit of everything in the profile there. So I think Eli White could be a guy that comes out of nowhere twice the OPS of Leote so far I mean I don't want to ever just overreact to a spring but yeah right but Leote at price was a guy that I wasn't necessarily buying into for cheap speed, because I think when we first talked about him, I said the situation reminded me a lot of Oscar Mercado, even though I think Leotie Tavares is going to and play good defense in center field the way that Jake Marisnyk hangs around on Major League rosters, the way that, you know, let's see, Albert Almora is probably tracking at this point in his career. So there's a lot of value just in those tools alone.

But I do think in the short term, we are right to be a little bit skeptical of Tavares as a hitter, despite some of the success that he had in the shortened season. Yeah, that could easily happen. White was playing a little bit last year. I had him on my labor roster for a while. So, you know, they don't hate him. Yeah, didn't see a little bit of time last year. Didn't do a lot with it, but just getting there gives you an idea how they feel about him and the usage this spring has been, He cost me my title! No, no he didn't do a lot with it, but just getting there gives you an idea how they feel about him and the usage this

spring has been. He cost me my title. No, no he didn't. Luis Severino did. Oh yeah, Severino. Jake Cave almost cost me a labor title once, which would be a terrible way to know. By just being terrible when you had to play him? Yeah, I think I had to

throw him in because of someone being hurt and he had an 0 for 4 and it was ugly. It was really close to losing a point in batting average because of Jake Cave on the very last day of the season. Alright, you know, we had a bunch of great questions come in to the

mailbag over the last few weeks and there's another one here about Platoon Combo Research Leaderboards. This question comes from Andrew. Just curious if you have go-to queries or custom leaderboards for projecting or monitoring platoon splits for hitters or projecting good pairings. He also asks, how long does it take for a platoon split to become meaningful? This is particularly helpful if you're playing in a daily moves league where you can really mix and match and take advantage of how teams are utilizing players in those matchups. Thousands of plate appearances.

It takes thousands of plate appearances. That's not even just a D. It's an S. D-S. Thousands of plate appearances to believe a platoon split. And a reverse platoon split is almost never believable. You'd almost never project a reverse platoon split for a player because you need so many.

And it's not thousands of plate appearances overall. It's thousands of plate appearances in the split. It's just awful. It's mathematically awful. It's mathematically awful. It's not something you'd ever project. But at the same time, you'll see that teams use players certain ways. And you see that the Dodgers use Jock Peterson a certain way, you know, his whole career.

So there are definitely players that I don't know how teams figure it out. I don't know how teams figure it out i don't know how teams figure it out because the the math is supposed to be that you regress them to league average in platoon splits until you get past like 1200 plate appearances against lefties and and and or is it like more against lefties and right i forget which i think maybe it's 1200 against lefties than righties. I forget which. I think maybe it's 1,200 against lefties and 2,000 against righties that you regress it most towards the league average. But teams see something, right, in a way that a player plays. And I guess my guess is if you've got a guy who's projected to be overall kind of close to league average, then maybe you only play him when he has a platoon advantage.

Especially if they're in a position that doesn't give you defensive value. Now, if you have like a shortstop who's good defensively and projected for like a 100 WRC plus, then you're like, okay, yeah, fine. Go at it. I don't actually care about your platoon splits.

There aren't that many platoon shortstops. Nobody really does that, right? They just want to have a guy that goes out there but if he's like a left fielder like jock peterson right um then you kind of say you know what if we put him out there only against righties and get a 120 wrc plus which is kind of what they got from jock peterson um then we just find another righty outfielder is easy to find. So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying, I always end long-winded, me. But I would say that think about the position they play.

Think about the team they're on. Are they more like the Orioles or Tigers who kind of want to see what they've got and play them every day and then maybe settle into platoon later? Or are they more like the Dodgers, Brewers, Rays, where they're going to come up only within their good platoon advantage, right? Like, I've talked to people around the Rays that say that Mike Brousseau

has like a non-zero chance of playing full-time at third base at some point. But he's old, and he doesn't predict all that well, and they're probably going to be a competitive team, so the bulk of the opportunity is going to be for him to play against lefties wherever it is on the infield. So a couple things. The main thing that has the gears in my head turning is trying to figure out what teams care about when it comes to the platoon splits.

Because even if you got to enough playing time, the thousands of played appearances you need for those numbers to be meaningful, I think you could make a pretty compelling argument. The player is going to change a lot in that time. I think you could make a pretty compelling argument. The player is going to change a lot in that time. You're not the same player in the first 500 PAs of a 2000 plate appearance sample as you are at the end. Physically, you're going to be different, right? You might be bigger and stronger. You might be older and slower with worse skills. like worse skills like you could have enough skills growth or erosion to be a totally different player by the time you get to the the end of that window where it's meaningful that's on my mind

yeah it's a moving target right it's it's uh it's you maybe you maybe you could have had more opportunity early and right but then you're just bad late right like if you're brandon lau and i know he was a lot better in the shortened season against lefties than he was in 2019. In 2019, Brandon Lau had the highest strikeout rate against lefties for any player who got at least 60 plate appearances against lefties in the last five years. 52.9% K rate from him in 2019. I wonder if it's something granular like that that teams look at. But yeah, maybe. I think maybe you'd regress certain parts of a, yes.

I think that you might regress certain parts of a platoon split. Like I think, yeah, strikeouts and walks, I think because ISO, like an ISO on a platoon split is like, or like a slugging on a platoon split. It's like,

what? Like that's so much bad at ball noise. It's so few balls in play sometimes. But strikeout rate. But what happened with Brandon Lau when they gave him more opportunities against lefties? The strikeout rate regressed towards league average, right? Like the platoon split was not as dire when they gave him more chances. And that's probably because he's such a good hitter against righties that, you know, a normal platoon split would still have him be around league

average against lefties right like that's what you would expect i mean it's impossible almost to be that bad in the long run so just natural like even if the skills weren't going to change at all it seemed statistically unlikely that he would continue to strike out that much because it was such an outlier but i do think with with lao i think the thing that makes him different is defense right i mean like if you look at defense for for guys that are kind of on the cusp of losing that playing time a good defender shortstop is the best example of this a good defender at shortstop like you said will not lose playing time because of their platoon splits because you just don't mix and match that way. It's just not the way teams are built. But if you have a unique sort of defensive value based on the roster construction, you might

get those chances to play in the bad split. You'll probably drop in the batting order, right? You're not going to hit in the same spot against righties as you do against lefties. That's how teams can counteract it a little bit. You can still get that playing time, and then you do have that chance of skills growth. You do have that chance to make adjustments and to possibly get better. And you're upping your sample. You're upping your sample. You're just giving more chances to know

what your true talent is. Right, right. Yeah, you're getting more looks. How many left-handed pitchers are there? It's still like 18 or 20% of the pool, right? It's a relatively small number, so when you're coming up as a young player, you just don't see that many lefties.

So I feel like it's a really difficult thing to predict because some guys, it's just, it's going to click in. Something's going to work. Some cue, something they pick up on

after 500 plate appearances might actually enable them to sustain a new level. Other guys never find it. Like it's such an individualized thing that I wonder if, if trying to evaluate everybody through the same lens actually leads you to make more mistakes. Yeah.

I think it is something though, that you can look to the organizations for guidance, you know, just look at which teams traditionally get the platoon advantage the most often, which teams platoon a lot. It's interesting because the Indians lead the league in platoon advantage, but they don't actually do it with platoons

a lot of times. They just have a ton of switch hitters. That's one thing the Indians seem to really like. But the Rays and the A's and the Dodgers are teams that really platoon. So if you've got a guy coming up in those organizations and you're worried or you're thinking about it,

then just pretty much consider that they will play with the platoon advantage at first and have to play their way into full-time play. Edwin Rios is a right-hander, huh? Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I've only seen him play a handful of times. A little bit of cold water on how excited you should be about Edwin Rios is a right-hander, huh? Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I've only seen him play a handful of times. A little bit of cold water on how excited you should be about Edwin Rios, I guess. Wait, Rios is a lefty. I'm thinking of somebody else.

Sheldon Noisy is a righty. Noisy is a righty. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I use the splits leaderboard, by the way, for just breaking things down quickly. You can split it out by years. You can do multi-years together. I think that's probably the best tool out there.

It's a tool over at Fangraphs just to get a good snapshot of how any group of players does versus lefties versus righties, whatever it is that you're looking for. So I'd recommend kind of using that. Do you have any other tools you use for that? I haven't seen any.

There are some. Who has minor league splits? There used to be a separate site for it, and I think it went away. There are some. Who has minor league splits? There used to be a separate site for it, and I think it went away a few years ago. Yeah, like MLB Farm or whatever. Anyway, we'll look that up for you, see if there's anybody that has minor league splits. A lot of those sites go away because they're just scraping. Unfortunately, yeah. Thanks a lot for the question, Andrew.

Had a question here from OJ. He writes, your conversation about how the short season would affect innings thrown this year suggested a question, did losing nearly 50 games in 94 have any sort of impact on 95 starters innings or anything even in 96? And I think it's a great question, but I think the hardest thing about applying you know past stoppages and shortened seasons to the present is just that pitching is not handled the same way now that it was 30 years ago right like it's just a totally different mindset and so much of my concern I guess I'll say as far as how I think teams are going to manage pitching, comes from teams not having the most logical

or scientifically driven reason behind making these decisions. I just think it's still more of a feel thing than I'd like it to be. And that's why I think workloads are going to be altered because of teams messing around, not because of pitchers being unable to do what they normally do. Yeah, that was something that one person said in the front office to me was that even in the past, they actually didn't have that much science behind innings increases, and they would just kind of look at the data and say, oh, this guy looks like he hasn't been hurt

that much. Let's just add 20%, and nobody knew where that number came from and why they did that. So I think we're getting the better teams are going to be out in front in terms of monitoring every sort of little thing. So they'll have the modus sleeves on them. They'll have the Rapsodo in their bullpens. And if, like, the arm slot drops two inches or the velo drops off, they'll just stop them in that bullpen and. And if like the arm slot drops two inches or, uh, the velo drops off, they'll just stop them in that bullpen and say, um, you know, we're just going to skip the next

start. We'll say a little bit of fatigue, uh, something nebulous. Um, and we'll call somebody up or we'll use one of our long men out of the bullpen. I think there's going to be these Freddy Peralta-esque Julian Merriweather guys that are doing two-inning stints in the bullpen who, oh, hey, today, whoever's in the starting rotation, Lindblom's arm, something didn't look right in the Rapsodo. We want to just have him take a rest. Peralta, you're taking Lindblom's next start. uh peralta you're taking lin blom's next start and that's gonna be really hard for fantasy owners uh to take uh care of and to follow along because i think some of those things will happen on a on a daily basis right they're gonna have these there's gonna be data on a daily basis coming in that makes them help these make these decisions um and so even on a sunday you say oh lin blom

start is on wednesday and it's on the road against the Pirates. Love it. I'm putting him in my lineup. And then it's like, ah, nuts. I would have loved to have put Freddy Peralta against the Pirates in, but we didn't even know he was going to have that start. So that part I'm foreseeing is going to be really crappy. And that's why I kind of prefer daily leagues without thinking of the rest of my life

or my wife or my children or, you know, all that. I would rather have a daily league because then you could say, oh, you know, I'm going to put Freddy Peralta in instead. And you could maybe handcuff some guys. You know, if you have some Brewers starters, then you can get Peralta too and make sure that you have, you know, the guy who'd come in for them.

But in weekly leagues, which help us retain our sanity, because having something like 15 daily leagues would turn us all insane. In weekly leagues, we're also going to have that insanity where we're just going to. And that's that's why, like, I love when we had Nick Pollock on. in weekly leagues, we're also going to have that insanity. That's why I love when we had Nick Polican, I love him to death, and I love that he looks at early season schedules and stuff. He's, I think, one of the deepest divers when it comes to pitching schedules. I love the Ras Ball weekly forecaster that takes into account schedules and, and who's coming up and, and, and does it. And I, and I think on a weekly basis, you're going to be a little bit

better than on a monthly basis. And, and then you're going to be a little bit better than that. Then you are going to be in spring training when you say like, I believe that Alec Mills probably has an early, uh, good schedule, but there are certain schedules where he's like, oh, he's going to be our fourth starter instead of our third starter. And you're like, ah, and you throw all the papers up in the air, you know. You go, ah, darn it. Now he's in Colorado. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of that, I think.

There's going to be a lot of that. Yeah, it's going to be messy. There's going to be a lot of that. Yeah, it's going to be messy, but I don't think it's going to be as bad injury-wise as some people think. I think it's going to be more teams proactively messing with things more than anything else, and I don't know if that's going to have any sort of negative long-term impacts. I don't really think it will.

Lowering someone's workload from 180 or 200 to 150 or 160, does that change anything for 2022? Probably not. I think looking at the historical numbers too, I was looking at the year-over-year number of pitchers used back around that strike-shortened season, and there was already a trend happening a little bit where relievers were becoming a little more prominent around that time. We had expansion at a couple of different points. So the number of pitchers used by the league as a whole ticked up on a couple of occasions. It ticked up in 93 when the league added Florida and Colorado,

and it ticked up again in 98 when the D backs and raise joined the league. But we did see a little bit of an uptick in 95 relative to 93 with that 94 season, of course, being the strike-shortened season. So maybe. Maybe there is something to this. Lots of pitchers being used. Yeah. Lots of pitchers being used.

But compare today's game to that. It's insane how many more pitchers are being used now. In 1995, with 28 teams, there were 552 pitchers that appeared in the game. In 2019, 831 pitchers were used. So, yeah.

Different era. And the kid gloves will be on. I hope they don't overdo it. Well, it makes you want to take the fifth starters much more than the six starters, huh? Yeah.

They have the role at least to begin the year. It's almost like the idea of like, don't take that many people who are already injured because you're going to have a lot of people who are going to get injured or guys that are going to get skipped. Yeah. Don't take that many pictures that are, that are not even in the rotation yet

because you're going to have many people in your rotation that are not going to be in the rotation later. I mean, trying to wait on Gonsolin and May, it's like if you really do think there's going to be more injuries, then you won't have to wait as long, but it's a crapshoot. Who's actually going to get hurt, and are you going to be able to hold those guys when someone else gets an opportunity to throw five or six innings first? And I don't know. I'm trying to have any injury

optimism whatsoever on draft day this year because I don't want the headache. I don't want that headache in a normal year, but I want to have as much flexibility as I can possibly have. If I'm going to spend a roster spot on a player who's not playing right away, it's a possible star prospect. That's it. It's not a pitcher who's going to miss a month. I mean, Carlos Carrasco had a setback with his hamstring. Is he undraftable? No, I just don't want him because I don't want to wait three weeks or whatever it takes for him into the season to come back. So I probably won't have Carrasco, at least in my leagues that don't have IL spots. IL spots obviously change things quite a bit, but a lot of leagues don't have those. Yeah, I got the Luis Severino sharing IL labor because we have unlimited IL.

And in some of those drafting holds with like 50 round drafting holds, I took a couple shots on Luis Severino types. I took a couple shots on Luis Severino types. And I ended up with Luis Severino in a lot of places because Sale goes first. And then Syndergaard goes. And you can let Sale and Syndergaard go and take Severino almost like five rounds later. And it's the same play, right? So in those drafting holes, I have some Severino shares.

And then I have the same idea. You can watch Wander Franco go, and you can watch a certain amount of top prospects go, and then you can take Joe Adele pretty late. I've taken Joe Adele in bench spots in 50-round holds in TG FBI's in my bench slot. So I'm willing to take a shot on a bench slot when it comes to those guys. But like you said, I'm agreeing. One. One. And I think we had a Twitter question today about Gonsolin versus Paxton and Montgomery. And I, at first, liked the idea of having Gonsolin because he had Price. But you said, I'd rather have guys who are in the rotation to be in the season, just like we were just saying.

And I think you convinced me. So I think I might rather have Montgomery in that situation. Montgomery has looked really good this spring, too. Not the reason why I want him specifically, but I think having the job already is a pretty nice leg up to have. It's sort of like when people in fantasy

football season, they say, well, should I also get the backup running back too? My argument most of the time is, well, no. Get someone else's backup running back. That way, if their starter gets hurt, you've got two starters. Yeah, you're not... If they're both playing, you're splitting workload

if you've got two guys in the same backfield. You know what's been messing me up with that? Is that in the draft and holds, I don't mind some handcuffing. Because you're not... You have no pickups. Right, that's a totally different situation with the 50-round format.

I think that's what he was talking about, was the draft and hold. In some of these draft and holds, I like handcuffing because you're like, I own Dodgers SP5. It's a pretty good spot to own, and I own it. It took three roster slots to get there, which is not ideal. But when you're drafting really late, you know there's not that many options anyway so handcuffing uh so and i think bullpen handcuffing kind of works in those in some of

those leagues but i did have somebody say like uh that they they they drafted like four royals relievers and they're like they're and none of them was scott barlow and they said in the chat they said in the chat well if scott the chat, well, if Scott Barlow, and I think it might be a listener. They said if Scott Barlow gets the saves this year, I'm going to kill myself. I was like, DVR, I think it's going to happen. Yeah. Wow.

And then you had four roster slots trying to lock down the Royals closer. You got to diversify. You can't take four shots in one bullpen because there's a chance that it's the fifth guy. It's just the way it goes sometimes. I did take an only Paredes behind Ryan Presley, and I was just like, these are the two guys I like best in that bullpen.

Paredes is throwing 99. I don't know. I figured that was an all right handcuff, but you're right. Once it gets to like four, you're like, no, you're off the touchscreen. Use on this.

Yeah, try and take a couple swipes at different pens just to have multiple closers because you're only going to get one out of one team. What was the question? How did we get here? That was a Twitter question that you brought up from the Cutline Championship, which is ongoing. But before that was something else.

Platoons? Are we still answering the platoon question? No, it was OJ's question about pitcher workloads and how things changed after previously shortened seasons. Unfortunately, I just don't think there's a lot of guidance from those past years, but it's a good question.

The general piece of advice is take a guy with a role before the guy without a role, because it's going to be such a mess anyway. Right. You're not going to want to wait any longer than you have to for someone to get innings in a year like this i i went and looked at the bracket while you were talking and i well my alma mater is not on there maybe when they do get on there i'll be more interested. And because it's local here, I was a sixth man at Stanford all five years I was there. And went to all the games almost and saw Jason Terry and the – was it Borchardt? Were the Borchardt twins?

There were two sets of twins. There were the Collins twins and then the Lopez twins. I saw the Lopez twins, the Collins twins. I got into like verbal shouting matches with Richard Jefferson all the time. We didn't like each other. And I used to throw my hair out for games

and yell things like, get a haircut, hippie. You were yelling that? Yeah. Do you think Richard Jefferson would remember you? If you heckled him now, would he remember you from back then? I doubt it,

but there was a few times where we were looking straight at each other, yelling at each other. So I don't know, maybe. I doubt it, though. Probably just some other white dude from Stanford you know it's pretty white school so you know but the

fro might have might have helped I don't know I think you have a memorable look it's just it's a hard time for us to have bandwidth to like really sit down and research a whole bracket and really nail the bracket you know sometimes i just like fill out a bracket but

i was looking and like there's a number one seed called bay b-a-y baylor baylor Baylor? Baylor. I couldn't even figure out who it was. That's how far gone I am. I haven't done a sheet in a couple years. Power to you. Good luck. It'll be a fun weekend. It's a fun time. I don't speak ill.

I love basketball. I just don't have the bandwidth to do anything about it right now. Yeah, I'm not good at filling out brackets anymore. I don't know if I ever really was great at it, but I think leaning on other people is something I actually do now. I can just watch the tournament and totally relax and not think about it. Whereas if I'm watching baseball,

which again, this is not a complaint, I'm thinking a lot more about the implications of everything I see. I could watch college basketball and just be a fan. So I think that's kind of a nice little escape to have. That's how I feel about the NBA. I watch the NBA as a fan, and I'm kind of a local fan. And so I'm just like, I'm a Warriors fan, and it's fine.

It's kind of cool that they're not that great. I'm like, ooh, who's going to be, is Wiseman going to be good? Is Poole going to be good? But I don't have to spend too much time thinking about it and really breaking it down. I'm just like, yeah, they're going to be good? Is pool going to be good? Like, you know, but I don't have to spend too much time thinking about it and like really breaking it down. I'm just like, yeah, they're going to be good.

Go team. Well, before we go, uh, beer of, let's say beer of the week. We got, we are processing the week,

our beer of the week. That's a pretty retro episode, man. It's a throwback. And, uh, man, I need a beer like very badly.'s a pretty retro episode man it's a throwback and uh man i need a beer like very badly like i've got a keeper league auction starting in a few hours i'm gonna have to wait until we get far into that to crack a beer open because it's about a five hour auction so i don't want to i want to get loopy before the last hour or so but uh what do you what do you have for

us this week well i've got breaking news. I've got an announcement. It's the first time I've ever done this, and it's really cool, and I hope that I can send some to you, DVR, and we'll see what happens. But I have collaborated with a brewery, and so without having tasted it, I'm giving it Beer of the Month. And I told them what goes in it.

So I helped consult. It's one of those things where it's like, I don't want to take credit for it. I was just a bit of a coach on this one. But I helped. Together we came to the ABV, 5.2%. Crusher, spring baseball, here it comes. We came to a name, Ephus. Love it, Ephus.

And the brewery is Old Irving Brewery in Chicago. They make a beezer. And one of the things I said was, what if we made a half beezer? Because they have a beezer, double beezer, triple beezer. I said, what if we made a half beezer because they have a they have a beezer double beezer triple beezer i said what if we made a half beezer um and the idea is to do a crusher hazy pale uh that uh people who drink cellar maker would recognize um but the hop bill is a little bit different instead of doing um you know citro who's like the big bopper and building the lineup around that, we did more of a balanced lineup. It's Kohatu, Kashmir, and Motueka hops. Those are two New Zealand hops, and then the

Kashmir brings a little bit of lime and melon. So it should be pineappley with a little bit of melon. Smell great. It's fermenting right now. Ephus from Old Irving Brewery. And if you're in Chicago, please go drink it and rate it and review it. Because if it's popular, they'll do it again. And that would just make me super happy to have a beer that I collaborated with take off. And I just think that this is the kind of beer that I would love to drink. When I'm opening my fridge these days, all I want is either a 5% or 6% West Coast IPA or a 5% or 6% Hazy Pale. So that's where I'm living right now. Maybe it's more like 7% to 8% on the West Coast IPA, but those are the two beers I'm drinking right now. So Ephus, baby. I'm excited. Yeah, I'm definitely trying to keep it a lot lighter ABVY, especially now that it's finally warming up here in Wisconsin. Our friends at

The Athletic, Brian Bennett and Brian Hamilton, put together a beer guide with a local brew for each team in the men's tournament, which is pretty awesome. So from Madison, they chose Working Draft, a brewery that I've talked about a few times on our pod, Pop Culture, Hazy IPA is the selection there. Highly recommend that if you can get your hands on it. I don't know if it gets that far outside of Wisconsin, but the cool thing about that is there's a good chance that a beer mentioned in that piece is available near you no matter where you are, so long as you're somewhere in the u.s so plenty of good beers to choose from i think i've got one beer left from the beer box that you sent me it's um i think it's one it's got the starburst on it from baltimore

oh it's the uh one of those crazy sours yeah i got one of those left. One of the full tilt sours where they blended in some gummy worms or something. Yep, I think this was a pink starburst, one of those. So I got that to look forward to this weekend. It's not just on tap for me. It's going to be delicious, though. I'm excited. I'll have that probably about 11 o'clock tonight, and that'll be my nightcap. It'll be a one-and-done kind of night for me with a big keeper auction coming up. As Eno mentioned, lots of good stuff going on right now though at the site.

You can get in for $1 a month. Like my chat right now. Eno's chat. Right. So $1 a month to start. Go to any piece that Eno or I wrote and just click on it and it'll pop up as an offer for you. So that's pretty awesome. If you feel bad about $1 a month, you think that's too cheap. You can actually go to the athletic.com slash rates and barrels. And I think it's three 99 a month to start if you go to our URL. So, you know,

we appreciate that if you go the longer route, but a dollar a month is a heck of a deal to start out. If you just click through on one of our pieces, you can do that on Eno's latest article. You can do that on pitching rankings. You can do that on my rankings, my rookie piece. However you want to get there, all those places will bring you to that $1 a month deal. On Twitter, he's at Eno Saris.

I'm at Derek Van Ryper. Be sure to check out the Ding U, by the way. It's presented by BetMGM. If you'd like to get to know more about March Madness. They've got that covered on the Daily Ding podcast feed. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. Good luck if you've got drafts this weekend. We are back with you on Monday. Thanks for listening..