Rates & Barrels - Shōta Imanaga's Debut, Monitoring Pitcher Workloads & Mailbag Questions

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Eno and DVR discuss several injury updates, including a longer-than-expected timetable for Josh Jung's return following wrist surgery,Justin Verlander's progress to a two-start rehab assignment, Walker Buehler's rehab work, and a pair of prospects that avoided scares. Plus, Shōta Imanaga's debut against the Rockies, listener league strategy and roster rates, and several mailbag questions about Luis Gil, monitoring pitcher workloads, and Triston McKenzie's fastball velocity drop Rundown 2:17 Josh Jung: Lengthier Absence Than Initially Anticipated 5:41 Justin Verlander: Two Rehab Starts on Tap 10:38 Junior Caminero: Avoids Major Injury 15:52 Norfolk & Charlotte Light Up the Scoreboard in the International League 23:25 Shōta Imanaga's Debut 29:10 Listener League Strategy; Notable High & Low Roster Rates 39:15 Luis Gil: No Innings Limit From Yankees? 45:37 How Would a Forward-Thinking Organization Handle RP to SP Shifts? 55:42 Triston McKenzie's Fastball Velocity Drop in Start No. 1 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 for just $2/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Tim's new savory pinwheels. The perfect flaky and flavorful snack for those on the go. Like me, who's recording this while snacking. Ooh, delicious. Try the roasted red pepper and Swiss, or caramelized onion and parmesan pinwheels only at Tim's. At participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, it is Thursday April 4th, Derek the Ripper here with Inosaris on this episode.

We've got some injury updates to pass along. We're going to take a look back at Shota Imanaga's debut with the Cubs from Monday very impressive outing for him against the Rockies we're gonna talk about our listener league and some of the strategies that we tried to use some of the more heavily rostered players and some of the key less rostered players that might end up being the players that swing that contest in the direction of the eventual winner, because low rostered, high impact players are likely going to be the key in that format. We've got a lot of great mailbag questions that we're going to get to on this episode as well as we wrap up the first week, first full week of games of the twenty twenty four season. If you haven't joined already, join the Discord,

get the link in the show description. A lot of fun there. We've got team channels, we've got strategy channels, everything you want to kind of scratch the itch between episodes, after episodes, during episodes, if you want to. Also a possibility. So what's going on? You know you're still in San Diego. Yeah, we went to the game last night.

We got a little bit of sun. It was a nice, nice day in San Diego. Got the queso-burrilla tacos from puesto, which are they basically fry the cheese like the inside of your taco is like a fried cheese, like almost tamale inside your taco. So good. Just had a great day at the ballpark. Padres won, everyone was happy. The kids allowed us to stay for most of the game. So definitely good times I had by all. Excellent.

Well, glad you enjoyed some time in the sun and got sunburned while the last gasps of winter are occurring here in Wisconsin. I think I'm finally done shoveling for the season. I think yesterday was the last time. Well, there's some sixties lined up for next week. So I think we're finally through the worst of it onto some injury news, though. We talked about Josh Young a little earlier in the week and upon having

wrist surgery, it sounds like eight to 10 weeks is now the expected timetable. There was a bit more damage in there than initially expected. I just feel bad for Josh Young because it's at the point now where I think he's had one of the worst combinations of flukey injuries of any player since becoming a pro. There's so much missed time on the ledger for him, not only as a big leaguer, but even on his move toward the big leagues over the last five years. And we saw flashes of a player that I think still has one more level to reach, but now we're not really gonna get to see a chance

for him to do that until early summer at the soonest, which is gonna put the Rangers in a little bit of a bind. Justin Foskey is back up on the roster. So you add Foskey to Ezekiel Duran and Josh Smith as the internal options to cover that spot in the meantime But for those who have Josh Young in a situation with no I'll spots It might be a forced cut situation depending on what's going on with the rest of your roster Yeah, two months is a hard time to jockey somebody through this

I don't see any of the guys other than Ezekiel Duran I think you know I think he'll be the regular guy and we've expressed some love for the him on this podcast before he's having a little bit of trouble making contact, but still super early going. And I think at some point he will get to his sort of high powered, low contact approach and give you a poor OVP, but you've got an up batting average with power and speed and he's, I guess the winner here, I guess you could even make that switch one for one, you know, except that you, you'll want to get young back, you know, three or four weeks from now. So it's a, it's a whole game that you play in those leagues where, you know, you're trying

to, you're like, I need the flexibility for the next month and then you're gonna be like look at other people like who's gonna pick up young it's gonna be this week it's gonna be this week it's gonna be next week I played that game too many times I prefer IL leagues I think Josh Smith and Justin Fosk you are guys that make contact and can play around the diamond but and we've seen Smith even play shortstop in the early going. I just don't think that they will knock out full playing time anywhere.

And they'll just be kind of the utility guys that Duran was gonna be when everyone's healthy. Yeah, I think Foskey is the more interesting player for me. The hard hit rate ticked up a little bit last year, 34.3% at AAA. There's power, there's some speed. There's always been a good hit tool. There's always been pretty good plate skills. At least they were supposed to be all along.

And I think we finally saw that come together at AA in 2022, but the follow up last year at AAA, he was age appropriate for the level. Was at least good enough to believe he's a solid bench option in the big leagues. Probably fits better for AL only leagues or super deep keeper leagues for the level was at least good enough to believe he's a solid bench option in the big leagues. Probably fits better for ale only leagues or super deep keeper leagues for the time being but don't know if there's enough of an opportunity for him to take that job away from Duran. They're both righties so you can't platoon them and it's just gonna come down to who's more productive. It could be an ongoing battle for the entire time that that Josh Young is out with Duran

sort of being the incumbent who gets most of that time. Some other injury related items to pass along. Justin Verlander is scheduled for the first of his two rehab starts at AAA Sugarland on Sunday. So with one more turn after that, we're probably looking sometime around April 18th or so for him to rejoin that rotation. So far so good as far as Verlander's recovery goes. Might still end up being a value on draft day because.

Could be, if he comes back and he's healthy from that point forward where he was going, yeah, he ends up being a nice bargain. Yeah, you kind of assume the, I think the average starting pitcher, like I think it's like 45% of them hit the IL. So if you're basically a 50-50 on every single one of your pitchers hitting the IL,

Verlander just getting his IL out of the way might actually work out okay. Yeah, how do you feel if two or three of your pitchers have already hit the IL, hopefully getting that stint out of the way, and two or three have had their worst start of the season to begin the year, right? That perfect storm happens that you can,

it's not a good feeling. Oh, I believe in all these guys and they're gonna be healthy and it's all gonna work out. And it's like, oh, you're tested right away. If you get a combination like that. And once he's back, I think one of JP France or René Blanco will probably shift into long relief or possibly get optioned down.

There's gonna be a little bit of a crunch and everybody stays healthy in that Houston rotation. Also on the rehab trail, Walker Bueller is scheduled for rehab start number two on Saturday with Oklahoma City. I have Bueller absolutely nowhere. I hope he comes back. I hope he's productive.

I think his situation is just a little bit different than Verlander's also because they're trying to carefully manage those innings and backload them a little bit more. whereas Verlander was just sort of ramping up appropriately and just being ready to go for a normal start by start sort of workload. I mean, I don't think I have any shares, but I'll be jealous of them once he comes back. There is just also the question of the second Tommy John is, you know, just a little bit worse than the first. So interesting to see what his movement profile will be when he comes back.

You know, and Blanco deserves a little bit more attention there. Just sort of swung move past him. I mean, he threw a no hitter. Hey, we gave him a lot of love on Tuesday, but yeah, you've talked about JP France in the past as someone that may have been a little bit underrated. Blanco now has this third pitch that worked exceptionally well in his first start of the season and teams now know he has it, but who do you like better based on what we know about them right now?

Who do you think is more likely to keep that spot? I mean, if you're the Astros, it's really hard to demote Blanco after what just happened. Well, it's really weird. I don't know after what just happened. Well, it's really weird. I don't know if it's a schedule thing, but France lined up after Blanco, didn't he? Yeah, there were paternity list related considerations. I think for both players, if I read that correctly, in Chandler-Rome's story. Okay, okay. So I would assume that going into the season, France was the four, if you're slotting them

by quality and not, you and not schedule ramifications. France is the four, Blanco is the five, Blanco goes down when Verlander comes up. That would be what my assumption was. And in that no hitter, what we did see from Blanco was he threw three fastballs in 13, one and oh, and two and oh counts. That is a thing that he got away with and did but that the next team will know he's gonna do. You know and so I would expect a few more walks in this next Texas one and if on the flip side what France is doing is

he spent a whole year throwing the change up after spending years in the minors leading he led the the minors in strikeouts one year and that was mostly due to his breaking balls. So this year he's come back out and he's been throwing the breaking balls a little bit more. So, you know, is that, which one of those adjustments is easier for the rest of the league to adjust back to?

And I think the only way to answer that question is to let them start a couple times and see what happens. But the guy that was given sort of a 30 command grade is the guy that I would kind of assume would have a hard time once the league adjusts back to his strategy. Every time I see a player who's 30 years old and still has options left, I just think something needs to be tweaked. You can't possibly let guys get to this stage of their career and still be up and down players. The life of a reliever. There's so many relievers like that. Yeah, Steven Ocurt, I think, was one for a long time.

I looked at it and was like, this guy is never really going to be a free agent. He's just probably gonna burn out of the league before he even gets a chance to hit the open market, which is kind of a bummer. But other injury news to get to, we got Junior Caminero suffering a quad injury running to first base. That happened on Sunday. And initially, good news since. Yeah. So initially, he was the report was that he was helped off the field,

which he thought, OK, that might be like a fully blown like muscle, like a grade three full tear, major, major problem. It's been reported since as a relatively minor left quad strain. So he could actually be back as soon as next week. One thing about the Rays is that they look like they are hurting for offense.

I mean, right now 12th best offense, it's not really obvious in the overall, but if you kind of look at what their lineup is, you've got Yandy, you got Randy, and you've got Isak, and Brandon Lau, I guess, but the rest of the squad, especially the bottom of this lineup is looking like, you know, they've always been like, okay, we're okay with Siri and we're okay with like a Renee Pinto

because they're at really important defensive positions and they're really good at that. I think that portion of the lineup is growing. And so, like we'll have to see, right now they're being bullied by some hot starts. And though we like Richie Palacios here, and Jose Caballero is not terrible, they right now have decent WRC pluses,

often floated by high baboops. So if things, balls don't start falling their way, you may get a need for offense in Tampa. And that would be, I think the real reason coming here would come up. We spend a lot of energy on this show trying to anticipate what the rays are going to do mostly because the guys who end up playing usually were underpriced and super productive. It's so hard to decode their process from the outside. Richie Palacios is pretty interesting, had a combo meal on Monday, had the homer and the steal. I hope

they stick with him. I hope they give him a full opportunity, at least against righties. He sat against one of the righties they've seen so far, started against the other four, has been on the bench against both lefties so it really looks like a big side platoon sort of role for him. I know Brendan Lau was already a little bit banged up though so that could quickly change everything you know and that's been the other wrinkle. They've had a few guys they've wanted to rely on more who just haven't been healthy and I would think Lau is kind of at the top of that list and he's actually been hitting second for all of his starts too.

So if Brandon Lau is healthy, might be a player that's a little bit underrated coming out of draft season. Also a DH that has a minus 11 WRC plus, of course it's, you know, early going for Harold Ramirez, but you know, he's a 29 year old who has put up two and a half wins over five, six seasons, five seasons, and doesn't give you good defense, kind of a contact guy that without the better power ends up being a very close to league average bat, it's this just not a profile. You know, they're probably have been shopping him and it's just not a profile that anybody's interested in trading for. You know, this is the kind of player you pick up and you use for a while while they're productive and, um, sometimes it just gets pushed out of the way by someone more productive.

And so we may be seeing the beginning of that with Harold Ramirez. Yeah. And some other platoony team ends up scooping them up off of waivers when you eventually DFA him. That's usually the outcome with Harold Ramirez. It's not getting the windfall later on, especially a team that's so frugal like Tampa Bay. He's almost a $4 million player at this point. So probably not a guy you're going to see on the roster next year and more likely will

find his way off of the roster at some point in the next couple of months because they have other players they can mix and match under the roster. Curtis Mead, Curtis Mead's the kind of guy you have to figure out what he can do at some point. So why keep playing- And he's a right-hander that has more defensive value, you know, so any profiles similarly

in terms of like you have contact, what sort of power is gonna come with it? One other injury note, prospect note to follow up on, Jefferson Caro, a top catching prospect in the Brewers organization, got hurt in the opener at Nashville, diving back to first base on a pickoff attempt, which will probably give Brewers fans some flashbacks

to Jimmy Nelson once upon a time. Fortunately, Caro only appears to have suffered a shoulder subluxation, They're not talking about any other damage Basically, there's waiting for the inflammation to calm down before he has a treatment plan So it sounds like caro will have an opportunity to return at some point in the next several weeks Initially, he's just one of those injuries. He thought oh crap that could be a major injury That was suffered very early in this season if we're talking about minoraguers, we have to talk about this Norfolk tides game. The Norfolk tides played the Charlotte Knights and the tides won 26 to 11.

The tides are a Baltimore Orioles team. Jackson Holliday went four for six. Kerstad had two homers. Heston Kerstad had two homers. 10 RBI went five for seven. Kobe Mayo went five for seven. Kyle Stowers went four for seven with three homers. Connor Norby went two for five with a homer. So just, just a ridiculous night from them.

I am sorry to Nick Nostraini et al. They had a really tough night pitching. You know, another thing that I saw from JJ Cooper was that the Charlotte Knights are the AAA for the White Sox and they've had like a minus 200 or minus 300 run differential the last couple of years have been worst in the in AAA the last couple of years and are off to a minus 25 run differential this season. It's tough going for player development in Chicago in Chicago and then just you have all these players that are knocking on door. I've seen some people say like, you know, Kyle Stowers is better than Cedric Mullens right now.

And I will have to say, I disagree. You know, some of these players are beating up on subpar competition in the minor leagues. I don't think that Kyle Stowers is the defender of the Cedric Mullens is. I'm not even sure he's the bat that Cedric Mullens is because it's not the most aggressive case on that team. Jackson Holliday, I think has the most aggressive case for being on the Orioles, given that he'll be taking time away

from Ramon Urias probably. But there are some interesting questions like Kyle Stowers versus Austin Hayes. And Colton Couser on this team has not, what has he done? He has had one start. Yeah. He barely plays. Yeah. He had, he's had eight plate appearances in six games.

So Colton Couser having a hard time breaking that lineup. And when you have guys like Austin Hayes and Anthony Santander, Santander did not make our top 100 position player tiers. Some people were upset by that, but I think he's kind of just an average-ish player. And that's kind of true for Hayes and Santander. It's just really, it's a really tough thing for an organization to A, you don't want to give up on a league average player. That's an asset, right?

B, they're hard to shop. Nobody really wants to pay that much. I just told you, you know, Harold Ramirez, who's like a one-win player, nobody's gonna trade you. You know, even for a two-win corner outfielder, people are kind of like, eh, what should I give you for that, you know? And despite, like maybe the Padres need a corner outfielder.

Could there be a mix there where that would allow them to trade Hayes and then, you know, play Kauser and maybe pull up Stowers or something? Yes, those things are possibilities, but I don't think it's so clear cut. I think the only one who has a really clear cut argument is Jackson Holliday. I'm sure he's the first one that's gonna get called up.

Yeah, look at that lineup top to bottom. You have Holliday, Connor Norby, Hested Kirstad, Kobe Mayo, Kyle Stowers, all guys that would be in a lot of teams' lineups if they were in other organizations. It speaks to the quality of the depth. The other thought on Santander, as much as the Orioles might like him, he's a free agent at the end of the season too, which also really reduces what you would get back in a trade.

And it also changes the types of teams that would be interested. It has to be another team that is contending. So even if you wanna just clear the roster spot and get something relatively unhelpful in the short term back as part of the return, you wanna get a minor league pitcher that's several years away, you have to find a good fit from a contender

that is willing to take on close to $12 million in salary for the rest of the season too. So that's the other kind of log jam sort of situation. Hayes is cheaper, so maybe it's easier to move Hayes. Cheaper and also you get an extra year of team control. However, he kind of profiles like you're, it would be so much better if he was a center fielder. Yes. If he was a center fielder, he played good center field defense.

He'd be kind of a no brainer. He'd be gone already. Keep him in his like, keep him in his final arbitration year. I actually think Austin Hayes is the kind of player that's like a good player that could get non tendered. He kind of falls more into that bucket. But players like that, when they don't get non tendered,

they usually get traded each of their final arbitration years, like a hunter Renfro type player. Not much. Yeah. Mm hmm. There's always someone that wants them, but they don't want them for long. Yeah, I could see that. But that's usually something that happens in the off season. So it's not right now. Teams have made their decision. They're like, I'm fine with profile and as a car like not going to the budget.

Eventually for Hayes, They'll budge eventually. Actually, there's a story that just came out about the Padres from Dennis Lynn and Ken Rosenthal saying that the Padres have been knocking on Marlins door for Luis Arias and that just generally AJ Prowler has been calling everybody. My first reaction was like God it must be annoying to have to deal with him. You played in leagues where there's someone who's always on your phone or in your email or texting

you trying to get something done. Like everyone's played with someone like that. Yeah. Yeah. But then like he has the other thing where he's gotten in trouble for not telling the full truth about the health of his players. So it's like, you know, like, do I really want to talk to this guy? But you know, there's panic in Florida. So maybe any, but anything's on the table in Florida. They have really had a hard time putting together a rotation. You know, one thing that really stands out is that AJ pucks, you know, spring has not poured it over and they've, you know, right now they have.

Uh, I don't know how many, how many dependable've you know right now they have I don't know how many how many dependable you know guys they have in their loteration I have a Luzardo second star wasn't so great but at least you know he's there try Tyler Trevor Rogers is is pitching and you know got the strikeouts but also walked everybody so you know they've got two guys that I would trust in the rotation right now. So I can see why maybe three with Meyer. It's it's a little bit rough there right now. Earlier in the week, we talked about the five organizations that are best set up

for the next five years on Friday. We're going to talk about some of the teams that are in the most difficult positions to win, not to rip on those teams, but to try and understand why it's going to be so difficult for them in the years ahead. So the Marlins may or may not probably are already on that run down. Just a little sneak preview to what we've got coming up on Friday. Let's move on to the debut of Shota Imanaga. Very impressive results against the Rockies.

Look, one of the softer landing spots you can have is a home start in the cold against the Rockies right now. But put the opponent aside. I mean, I think the the fastball splitter combo, which you lean really heavily on, was absolutely working. And I was talking to you before the show. We've we've mentioned ride on a fastball and how it's kind of hard to see

when you're watching games on TV a lot. That's not the case for Shotai Managa. Here's a look at this, if you're watching on YouTube, this is absolutely ridiculous fastball that he throws to Chris Bryant. It looks like it's just gonna keep going forever and just at a slightly rising in on the hitter and on the hands sort of trajectory.

So this was something you expected looking at some of the numbers you had previously. And my question for you is did it great out as good as it looked in the debut? And how much do you think we'll start to see the other offerings as the season wears on? Because I didn't really expect him to be quite as dependent on the fastball splitter as he was, but he really didn't need to go much deeper to be effective in that start. Stuff Plus is an interesting model

because it's trying to keep up with trends in baseball. And so Stuff Plus still loves the sweeper and says it's his best pitch, but the batters hit 500 off of it. Um, although 500 means two, two of them were put into play and one was a single. So that's the kind of small sample where you're like, I don't know, you know, he still got whiffs on the pitch. I think it's probably a good pitch. It's 82 though.

So it's not, you know, the best sweepers are 85, 86, you know, breaking ball V lo matters as much as fastball V lo the stuff plus model did not love the split finger. But you know, again, that's 22 over 24 pitches, usually for change ups and split fingers, you want 30 to 40. And then on top of that, you just know that with arm action, with the way that pitchers sell these things, that there are secondary pieces of information that stuff does not have, like the arm action, the arm speed and how that comes through

and how well it looks mechanically next to its foreseam or what we can say there is, you know, okay, again, small sample with six balls in play, only one single and a ton of whiffs. So, you know, I think, you know, if you say the model's a little bit wrong on the, on the splitter and that the sweeper numbers will fit the model again, uh, you know, going forward, I think it was, it was a really good debut for him despite kind of spitting out a 91 stuff plus. Another thing that I would, I would caution people with is, you know, looking at 91 and thinking, well, that's, that's bad stuff. He's, he's not good. Because for starting pitchers, the average stuff plus is like kind of like 96, 95. So, you know, it's closer to average than you might think just by itself. And then in that kind of five point band around average, I think there's a lot of different

success rates. I mean, there are guys where that's not enough stuff because they just don't have the command or there's, you know, or guys that it's just two pitches and, you know, that's not enough stuff to kind of to pitch your way to success. He at least looks he has three legit pitches and the fastball is not it's not a zero There's a lot of you know pitchers out there trying to get by with a zero fastball And that is not a zero so I think that was a really good debut. I'm happy with that one It's a much more difficult test on Sunday for his second big league start with the Dodgers

It is also at home though which helps before going on the road to face Seattle for his third start next week The Dodgers are kind of like a trajectory home though, which helps before going on the road to face Seattle for his third start next week. The Dodgers are kind of like a trajectory. Team. There's like, this is kind of a hitting this, um, pitching machine trajectory that helps you. Not only does it project the week we saw this, uh, or a version of this at the winter meetings, but it projects like, um, a picture of the, of the pitcher so you can see what the mechanics and the pitch comes out.

But it's also very good at giving you the distinct profile of the pitcher so they can actually stand in against Iman Naga before they actually see him. So those teams, and I think there's like 15 to 20 of them at this point, are know, are a little bit better at seeing profiles I haven't seen before. Why on earth would the other 10 to 15 teams not want that technology? Like just, it seems like such a no brainer tool to use if you could have that at your disposal.

And Kyle Bodhi's been tweeting about how pitchers are starting to use it because they can change aspects of their pitches against live hitters so they can actually put themselves in the simulation and be like, okay, so what if I did throw a sweeper? Like, what would it look like to hitters and have hitters stand in against versions of themselves with different with different characteristics. So that's not good because the trajectory was one of the few things that the hitters had. Yeah, I like that.

The pitchers finding a way to use the tools the hitters are using against them. That seems totally fair. Let's talk a bit about our listener league that was set up over at Fantrax back before the season began in Korea. And it was a salary cap based game. We had several leagues fill 200 person limits, which is awesome. And I started looking through the roster rates. A few of our listeners did a great job putting together

some information about how heavily utilized certain players were. Have you looked at that chart yet? I saw some stuff, yeah. Okay, so it's not a total surprise. You probably saw the three most rostered players in our contest with pretty low salaries, understandably. Christian Encarnacion-Stran, because he was six bucks,

Wyatt Langford, who was eight, and Dylan Cease at 10. Encarnacion-Stran and Langford are rostered by more than half the teams in the contest, Dylan Cease at 46%. And then there's a big drop before O'Neil Cruz and Brian Bayo Up in the 32 and 33 percent range Bayo was a dollar and there was a lot of hype around Brian Bayo Throughout draft season. There also weren't that many starting pitchers with a role that had upside for a dollar I know I went shopping in that bin myself. Right, so the Eno Acolytes have a 25% share

of Set Lugo at $1. Makes sense, Eno contributed to that. Cutter Crawford also for $1, 31% rostered in the contest. So those were the bargain pitchers, Bayo, Crawford, and Lugo, at least the dollar pitchers that people really gravitated towards with Cease at 10 kind of being the underpriced potential ace. And then Cole Regan's at 15, also very popular, just under 30% rostered. Not a ton of surprises in that group outside of the Boston pitchers for me.

That was the part that I saw that was like, oh, OK. Like Cutter Crawford, even though he was a dollar, I thought would have been more like a 10% rostered sort of player. I tried to use some cheap pitchers that I just liked. I knew people would use. So I have said the Lugo and maybe Louis Varland and Trevor Rogers would be no surprise to anybody else. Um, but I also had Chris Paddock and Sean Manaya and Mackenzie Gore.

So I tried to be a little bit different. I don't have any overlap on those players. I was part of the group that had Dylan Cease for 10. I felt like the strategy was you're going to have a few of the most popular players because if the pricing works out a certain way, they're too good a value to pass up. So you get your differentiation elsewhere on your roster. And these are big enough rosters where you could have two or three of the highly rostered players

and still be fine, even though they're common threads across the entire contest. So I went with Glassnow as one of my aces, but I went heavy on pitching. I went Spencer Strider at 42 bucks. And I kind of wondered when we were putting this together, I started looking through and I was like, okay, Strider at that price,

like how popular is he gonna be? He's right around 15% rostered. Acuna was the most expensive player, $56. He was only 11.9% rostered in the contest. I went with Acuna. So did you find that it was easy to find enough players you liked even though Acuna was priced up that way? it was easy to find enough players you liked even though Acuna was priced up that way? I did I think we'll see if it's

priced out that way. I'm sort of halfway up the table but I kind of went stars and scrubs like you know I have Zach Wheeler, George Kirby and Shane Beaver as my studs on the pitching side and that that cost me you know I had to put Cutter Crawford and Trevor Rogers and Seth Lugo in for a dollar so on the pitching side and that that cost me you know I had to put Cutter Crawford and Trevor Rogers and Seth Lugo in for a dollar so on the hitting side the same thing was I've got Ronald Acuna and Bryce Harper as my foundations and then I didn't have a player that cost more than $11 otherwise and so I had Evan Carter and Sal Perez and Brian Hayes but I had to kind of keep everybody under. Yeah, that means I had dollar hitters. Sedona, Raffaella, Jordan, Westberg, Henry Davis, you know, was for two.

That's those are my cheapest hitters. I had to have those because of Acuna, but I still felt pretty good about them. Yeah, I ended up with Westberg as well. Just under that 12 percent roster rate mark. Looking at the bats I went with, I tried to be more balanced there, even though Encarnacion Strand was kind of a free square in my mind.

CJ Abrams at 21 and Nolan Jones at 20, I thought would maybe be a little bit different for our contest. I was hoping to get guys that were not necessarily underpriced, but were just going to be skipped because the builds were easier going other directions. And that at least proved to be right. CJ Abrams is rostered by just under 6%

of the teams in the contest. Nolan Jones, just above 5%. So I've got a couple of potential, if they go off first round type players, if it works. Lot of downside that comes with that as well. But I felt like that was how I could get my differentiation off of some of the obvious chalk plays that I had to have. Yeah, the one thing that's annoying for me is that

I know that everybody knows who I like. And so when I went with Colt Keith and Parker Meadows and MJ Melendez and Jordan Westberg and Sedena Raffaella and Cabrion Hayes, I like, you know, like, and I have Jeremy Pena and Ty France. Like it's like, man, I'm just going to be myself and just and pick players that I like. I don't know that I would surprise them. Maybe Brendan Rogers at second is a surprise to some people.

I also did Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter, which I thought might be a surprise to some people. But yeah, you can see why I'm struggling a little bit in the early going. Some of my young guys have not started going yet. You're outperforming me so far. I looked at the overall standings. They've got one of those sheets compiled as well.

And I was looking at some of the low rostered good players. Eric Judge is on nine total teams. He's rostered by less than 1% of the field. So what's the salary? 36. So not ridiculous. So that's a pretty big opportunity. I think part of what I'm trying to remember is this lock before the series in the KBO. So if there was uncertain health news about expensive players, I think they were disproportionately left off of teams. I mean, Justin Verlander was only 13. He's on 10 teams, so he's under 1%. So if he comes back in the scenario you described and pitches really well for 27, 28 starts, he could end up being a massive bargain and a high leverage player for our contest. And that's why I was trying to be boring.

You know, that's why I have like a, a shaman. I, the only one with any health questions that I picked on the pitching side was Nicola Dolo because he was five and we'll see how that goes, he's hurt. But I put a real premium on health because we can't make any changes. So I just thought it'd be better if somebody played poorly throughout the whole season than played great for two months.

That was the thought I had in my head going into it. I was just looking to see which of our users actually made these sheets because it's really cool to be able to take a look at overall standings across the entire contest roster rates. I know Jeff Good, Low Guppy kind of put all of the leagues together in the first place and a shout out again to FanTrax and if you're having difficulty with your commissioner service you can actually bring your league over for this season if you're a commissioner and want to run your league on fan tracks this season. But Max Fried, 25 under one percent Ozzy Albies,

under one percent as a twenty six dollar player. That was a surprise. Joe Underant at twenty two. I think injury news is a big part of the reason why people avoided him. Jose Altuve at twenty two, just above one percent rostered. So there were opportunities here. And wow, that's a big surprise. Yeah, I just I wonder.

I wonder how much this will change like in future iterations of this. How much people are going to look at the information if you want to see the full sheet in the discord. It's R&B roster rates and scroll through and find the players that are really low roster that you actually like that were for one reason or another just kind of ignored by the group. Yeah, we'll see what the winning strategy was. You soft punted saves. The one thing that I did.

I did a soft punted saves, but it's James McArthur. So I'm like, I'm sitting there staring a hole into Will Smith. He keeps getting these chances, but Will Smith's VELO is down big. He's down to 90 miles an hour. So I kind of think, you know, I still think five saves from James

MacArthur is in play. If I get those five saves, I can see it right now. Even when I look at the standings because right now I have 15 points in saves, which means I have zero saves. You know, there's people I think who have one or two saves that have 45 points so I could just get 30 points with one save because I would get off the ground off of anybody that had 45 points. So I could just get 30 points with one save because I would get off the ground off of anybody that had done a full point pun and saves.

So that's what I'm hoping for. James MacArthur, give me five saves. That's the challenge. He's 5% rostered by the way. About the same. Oh man, about the same as Mike Trout and Francisco Lindor. That's when the price comes into effect. And Trout was only $21.

I bet there's some regrets out there, at least in the early days. We'll see, see what happens going forward. But the fun contest so far will check in frequently as the season rolls along. Lots of questions came in from Discord for the mailbag. So I wanted to dig into a bunch of different questions. A really good one came in from Grant Washburn. And Grant was writing about Louise Heal and just how the Yankees have said

that they don't necessarily have an innings limit for Louise Heal. Matt Blake, their pitching coach, was quoted as saying, I think we have a better way to determine how a pitcher is progressing than just setting an arbitrary number. The same piece also suggested consistent usage patterns are better on the arm as opposed to intermittent shutdowns.

So in what ways do you think the Yankees are monitoring Luis Heal's workload? Like what factors are important to them as they try and figure out how to keep him healthy and productive this season? I mean, there's some stuff that's not new at all that's out on the internet. If you just want to read Finding the Injury Zone by Josh Kalk on the Hardball Times, you can read a piece that I think might be 10 years old. Josh Kalk is, he was like a big part of the raise and now he's like the guru pitching in Minnesota.

Like he's had like two or three jobs in the industry since he was a writer for the hardball times. Like it's like, and if you read that piece, that basically says he's basically says that you can do a little bit of predicting of injury by looking at consistency of release points, especially the late game consistency of release points, V lo and zone percentage, those things that like, when I hear that, I'm like, wow, that's some real, like, you know, blunt instrument stuff, you know, like, they don't think that like, you know, I've also heard through the't think that like, you know, I've also

heard through the grapevine that like changes in spin rates are a big deal. So basically, you can follow the thread and though those things may not be the state of the art anymore, like they're so old, like what they could be talking about something similar where they are tracking the release point, just seeing if it's dropping. People will drop when they're hurt because they're trying to find a slot. Their body, they may not even know this in their head, but their body is trying to find a way to throw the ball that doesn't hurt. You'll find, I think, changes in the release point are a big deal.

But we saw Logan Webb's release point change a lot over the course of last year. We brought it up with the team and they're like, you know, we're monitoring it. I think the bullpen and October wrinkle is huge for them because if they're where they want to be mid-season and they feel like they need to add pitching, they have the resources to go do that. And that will be determined based on how a number of different things play out over the course of these next four months. As far as the first start from Heal, it was four and two-thirds, six Ks, all in all pretty

good walks, always kind of part of what you get from Luis Heal. We talked about that, I think, at the end of draft season. Did you come away overall with a positive view, positive view of the arsenal and how he was trying to navigate hitters in a starting role? I think it was a good start. I'm excited about him. It was annoying, you know, you're sitting there, you know, thinking, I got a win out of this and, you know, he gets taken out and out before. I still think that he's predominantly a fastball slider guy where the change, he has really inconsistent command of it. It's a really big movement change. I think hitters can see it.

It's a freeze take pitch. So he is a small arsenal guy. And so to some extent, I was more excited about Jared Jones' debut because Jared Jones showed more pitches. He made it through five innings. He's not coming off of surgery. So if I had to rank those two, I had a real hard time before the season. Everyone's kept asking me about those two, those two, those two. I know I gave inconsistent answers. I just gave an answer how I was feeling at the time. But I think most times I was I was leaning towards Jones and now I'm

very squarely in Jones camp. I mean, Jones threw one hundred and twenty six and a third innings last year. So workload monitoring will be moderate, I would say, for him over the course of the year. And by that, I mean skipping him around the all star break, possibly shutting him down early if the pirates aren't contending for a playoff spot, like those types of things, but not so much that you're really worried about it, especially in April. And I think the other thing is when you look back at Jared Jones' track record, yeah,

you don't get maybe the strikeout ceiling, but you also don't have the control issues either. And I think that gives you a much, much better chance of being successful in a starting role, consistently going five plus innings, and giving us chances at those wins that are just so valuable in our league. So I think I'm right there with you

as far as Jones being the better option of the two, even though Heal is pretty interesting. The other part of that, that question from Grant, is kind of pointing to how would a forward thinking organization handle a shift from reliever to starter? You mentioned AJ Puck earlier in the show, and it just has not been a good start to his season, even though he was fantastic this spring.

We talked about Reynaldo Lopez, Jordan Hicks, and Garrett Crochet, and their situations are all different for a variety of different reasons. I mean, injuries are worse Garrett Crochet, and their situations are all different for a variety of different reasons. I mean, injuries are worse for Crochet than anybody else in the group. Pox had plenty of injuries himself. Hicks and Lopez have had starter workloads like four or five years ago.

Lopez in the majors, Hicks in the minors. So what would a really cutting edge organization actually do to monitor a reliever shifting into this role? Because I saw a tweet from Kyle Bodie suggesting that more teams should be doing something like this, taking bullpen guys and actually making them starters. And there's this resistance to it for a variety of different reasons.

But I think keeping pitchers healthy is actually a big part of why some teams are reluctant to do it. And this is not something that I've necessarily seen modeled or discussed, but specifically in a kind of research point of view is that I think there are just some players that respond better to the schedule of a starter and some for a reliever.

We've seen people like relievers, you can go out there and throw 15 pitches and your day is done. You can throw eight. It's really weird. It's super high intensity, super low reps. And you can even take bullpens off because you're not going to throw as much during the season because you might be needed that night. It's just a really, really different way of living than the person who is like, I throw really hard one day and then I take four days off to figure things out and mellow out and starting pitchers are the ones that are out on the field with their socks off, you know, you know, getting grounded, you know, relievers are the ones who are slamming three Red Bulls and pacing around in the bullpen. So, you know, there, there is some sort of

the way you are makes you a little bit better for one or the other, I think. But we also have baseball kind of going towards the relievers ization of starting pitching, where, you know, even starting pitches now are just throw as hard as you can for as long as you can, and then we'll take you out. And it's not surprising to me at all that the Giants are one of the teams that are doing this because they already had Jake Junas and they already have like they're really into the hybrid pitcher role and just like, we just need to get outs. These are our pitchers that we get outs

with we figure out how to get outs with the pitchers the best we can. That doesn't surprise me at all. But I think Hicks, you know, I ended up like kind of falling into the hype a little bit and just really struggling with which of these guys are the best. My rankings, though, are like we're ended up being more sober than my like reactions because people ask me on Discord or on Twitter or I have friends even texting me. You know, it's like they're asking me for my opinion all the time. And those opinions are a little bit more like subject to the winds of what's happening right now. So times I was like, Oh yeah, Lopez or maybe

Puck or, you know, but my rankings, I think stuck with Hicks as the best. And now that we've seen a little bit, what is that? Is that what your favorite of them? I think Lopez had a pretty good start in Chicago. He might be the second best puck looks like maybe the worst of the group. Crochet is like maybe the best of the group, but also maybe the fewest innings of the group. So it's a it's an interesting group to rank. I think crochet is the absolute most difficult of that group to figure out right now,

because I would agree with your assessment that there might be best stuff, best ceiling. How on earth do you project a workload for him given his trajectory and his career? And I think there's a couple of ways to kind of solve the problem. One is to push it aside and say, it doesn't actually matter. I'm managing my roster for April and May. He's going to start until he can't start. If he's still starting and he's good in June, bonus, great. But let me just get to these first couple months of the season. Let me just enjoy this while it lasts. And I think that's a little bit of I've heard Nick Pollack give a presentation about streaming pitchers, which is

especially in like a 10 or a 12 team league. You can do really, really effectively. Don't overthink it. Don't think that every single move or every single decision you make is for the next 25 to 30 starts because it's not. It's usually just for the next week or two. So I think when you get down to this portion of the rankings, a lot of the relievers turn starters in many leagues are one of the last pitchers in your lineup or one of the last pitchers on your roster in a more shallow format So you don't have to go overboard?

Expecting too much like you kind of like make the problem worse on yourself If you think you have to solve it for the entire season It's a long way of saying I think I'm trying to play this year a little differently and take crochet and say if I think He's the best of the options put him first. Give till he's hurt. Keep him until he's hurt because the pool will change in the next six to eight weeks. And I'll have someone else I can consider if I missed out on the better long term option, and it might be crocheted innings while he has them are better than Hicks's innings, better than Lopez's innings. And Lopez might make up the season long value by getting 11 or 12 wins

because he's on a great team and he stays in the rotation longer. So there's a few different ways it can play out. But I think I'm crochet Hicks, Lopez and Puck. I kind of fell for Puck a little bit in the spring. I thought it was going to work. I thought going back to his time when he was drafted by the A's, I thought there was a chance he was going to be a good productive starter. I thought it was mostly injuries.

I had a spring training start and was like this guy's the next Randy Johnson. The height certainly helps. But I mean, there was a run through their minor league system as lower levels where it was really just six strikeout rates, good enough control. There were reasons to believe it was going to work. And I at least want to, you could think what you want about the Marlins, but I at least want to be optimistic when a team believes they have someone who's good enough to handle that role. And I think when you look at what Puck was doing as a reliever, the results last year probably weren't

as good as the underlying numbers. 32% K rate, 5.4% walk rate, plenty of swinging strikes. I mean, 35.3% CSW as a reliever, that's a elite, elite number. If you look at that and say, hey, why not try to get more out of him? I don't think you're wrong for trying. They look goofy right now.

Especially when they had a need. They had a real need. They ended up with a bigger need than expected too because of the way the spring played out. It got worse, you know, Yuri getting hurt, Braxton Garrett having the shoulder stuff. It ended up being like a very bright move just from a numbers perspective, even though the results haven't been there.

So, yeah, Puck is last of the group. He's probably going to get cut by just about everybody in mixed leagues this week. It's probably justified. I'm curious to see how long they stick with it. If it's just purely by the necessity of, well, we don't have enough healthy starters till the end of April, he's going to get a few more turns. And then what happens if he comes back and

actually turns in a good starter too? Like there's not a lot of reason to believe it based on what the model is spitting out. So I understand the willingness to cut him right now. But people just see saw so much on players that are on the bottom of their roster because it's so hard. It's so hard to remain sober about what they really are when you start getting crooked numbers thrown up on your pitchers.

Like who a hundred percent to the, to the model. Like I said, there's, there's gives like there are 92 stuff plus guys and I'm not worried about, you know, but you do also know that the matchup and even just the specific day, like, you know There's a saying in pitching different arm different day. Like there's there's a specific just I think it's command I think command is the big noise and we've seen like with Ronel Blanco There was a pitch that he he kind of missed through a four-seam fastball and it dotted low and away. And it was in the second inning.

And when he got the ball back from the catcher, he had this look on his face like, oh, one of those days. And I was just talking to Kyle Gibson in the clubhouse on Tuesday night about Babov. And if hitters can actually suppress hits on balls and play, it's a big discussion, big theory over the years. And he said, if it's one of those nights where I'm hitting my spots, yes, absolutely, I can suppress balls and

play. And that makes sense because if you look at a strike zone, there are places in the strike zone where there are fewer hits and the exit velocity goes down. And so if you could hit those places over and over again, you'd be an easy street. And then he said, yes. And I also know that any day to day, my misses are on the level of 12 inches. So that's the thing. You can have a day where you hit all your spots and you're feeling froggy and you can do whatever you want.

And then you have days where it's just not working out. And that's why we hew closer to stuff. Cause it's like, maybe the stuff will tell you how he'll do the next time out. And Pucks doesn't have a pitch above 90 stuff plus, so I'm kinda out on him. Yeah, it's an easy, quick sort of decision. We had some questions about Tristan McKenzie.

This one came from M on Discord. What is Tristan McKenzie's value if his fastball is 90.5? My snap reaction was it's down compared to what you thought. I like Tristan McKenzie. My simple movie poster line for 2024, Tristan McKenzie was, he's good when he's out there. And at pick 200, you can do a lot worse. But 90.5 on the fastball,

I look back at his 2022, his last game, full healthy season velocity chart and 91.7 maybe 91.5 was probably the lowest we saw and a game from him So a full tick down you you always want to look at velocity At the same point in the season because there are some guys that start off a little cool They warm up they end up fine that really isn't an explanation that works in this case for Tristan McKenzie. So I think this would be at least kind of like a yellow flag player I'm worried about

and looking really carefully at the matchups for because I don't want to find out what happens if that fastball stays down, which is basically more like two full ticks from where he averages in a typical season. And he still has good breaking balls and he still is totally a guardians pitcher with an iffy fast ball and great breaking balls. I mean that's that's the guardians way but I will say that you know I tried to take VELOs and compare them to April VELOs last year and if I didn't have April VELOs I did April and May and if I didn't have April Veloz, I did April and May. And if I didn't have April and May, I just did full season. So some of these Veloz are inconsistent,

but it's the best that we could do in comparing like to like. And I have Tristan McKenzie as losing the most Veloz in baseball this year among starters. Next is Michael King. This is going to be in a piece that comes out tomorrow. Michael King has a little bit more of a story to tell, though, because he's going from relieving to starting. it's going to be his first four year starting. He wants to start all year. So maybe it's on purpose. Maybe it's a part of the process. We also don't know where he's at 92.7. Now, Michael King, we don't know where that's the where the normal curve for him will go in terms of being a start all year and what that VELO will look like over the course of the year. Kind of a similar way. Zach Lattell is the third person with the most velocity lost from 94.8 to 92.4.

I think some of those appearances were in relief last year. And so, you know, that's kind of tough. But then when you get to the next group, James Paxton, Zach Thomas and Tanner Bybee, those are all just for um, for me, unqualified, uh, negative flags for them because they should be prepared to pitch all year their veterans at this point. I mean, Tanner Bybee is younger, but he shouldn't be losing two ticks off his fastball as he has. So, uh, guardians, two pitchers in the top five in terms of velocity

lost on their fastball, not good. And we were looking at the schedule really quickly to make sure this wasn't like A, a weird gun in Cleveland or B, just super cold. We have seen even Shane Beeper and other pitchers have like really down, like in Chicago in the White Sox, like we've had games where people have pitched and it's been super cold and their VLO was down for that game and then they were fine later. But where did they pitch? McKenzie was in...Bivey was in Oakland. I was in Oakland on the road, yeah. So I don't know that there's a easy sort of culprit there.

McKenzie was at Seattle and so the only way that would be a satisfactory explanation would be if there was a massive loss in Velo, like for all the pitchers that were pitching in that park. There are some weird stat cast things going on behind the hood. I can tell you that this stack has data has been inconsistent, incomplete. But in this case, you're just comparing fastballs. So it's not like like, I do know that there are some stuff pluses that are weird.

Kenta Maeda is missing like 12 pitches out of his start. They're just not there. Just not there. And we think maybe they'll be there soon. We don't know what's going on. And so we're trying to deal with, and StacCast has publicly said like, you know, there's some things they're trying to figure out,

but you know, it makes it hard to like look at Kinta made a stuff plus and where anybody's right now and be like a hundred percent sure. So I'm in your boat. I'm looking at these same numbers and being like, I hope those are full. I don't think we have Statcast data from yesterday. And so that's why if you're waiting for an update

on Fangraph, sometimes it's, it's not our fault. Yeah, it's just waiting on the original source to get everything turned out there. But here, these are fastballs compared to fastballs. I don't think that they're misreading fastballs or other pitches as fastballs. It's not that kind of a problem. It's more of a software sort of engineering problem.

The bow on McKenzie would be, if he comes out again with his next start is against Minnesota on Sunday and the VELO is still in that range, he's probably a drop in more shallow leagues if there's someone out there that you can go after you think is an impact option. If you can't drop them, then he just becomes someone you're playing really carefully

matchups wise, start next week is home against the Yankees. I'd probably avoid using him if possible in that start, even if you have him on your roster for most mixed leagues. So keep that in mind with Tristan McKenzie. Thanks a lot for all the great questions. Yeah, yeah, he's off to a big bed right now. Yeah, they look ready right now. But thanks a lot for the great questions.

Keep those coming on Discord. You can also email those to us, ratesandbarrels.gmail.com. We'll swoop through that email inbox in the near future. Hazel's ready to go outside, so that means the time to wrap up the show has arrived. TheAthletic.com slash rates and barrels gets you a subscription to the athletic if you don't have one already you can find Eno on Twitter at EnoSaris, find me at Derek van Rijpervyler, pod at rates and barrels. Hit the like button on this video, subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't already and be sure to watch us live one o'clock Eastern on our YouTube channel. We'll have our live stream on

Friday with Trevor May. That's gonna do it with this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Friday. I put this in the Discord in the Padres section. I'm going to a show tonight at Winston's, but also meeting people at Blind Lady in Normal Heights on Saturday night for beers. You're welcome to stop by and say hi

if that fits your schedule. It's on Discord on the Padres channel. Thanks for listening.