Rates & Barrels - Surgery for Bellinger, a cure for Luke Voit's foot stuff, and a hitter stats draft

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Eno and DVR discuss Cody Bellinger's shoulder surgery and relief for Luke Voit's 2020 foot trouble before drafting hitting stats. Rundown 1:34 Cody Bellinger Undergoes Shoulder Surgery 9:22 A Cure for Luke Voit's Foot Stuff 14:11 A Hitting Stats Draft! 18:28 DVR's First-Round Selection 26:45 Eno's First-Round Selection 34:32 Round 2 Begins 48:07 Round 3! 64:06 Matt Chapman and an Altered Approach Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access memberships separate. Terms apply. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Wednesday, November 18th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris on this episode.

We've got a few news items to pass along, but then we are going to have a hitter stat draft. We're going to try and choose stats in the order of importance for us as we try to evaluate players. If we're trying to paint a complete picture and you know want to figure out how we're going to do that what do we want on the palette so to speak what do we want to look at first as we're starting to build up that profile of individual players you know how's it going for you on this wednesday it is good it is good my county went into purple and i'm just praying that the school stays open um but uh and i'm and i'm hoping that uh everybody is healthy and happy that's listening and that

their loved ones are in good good standing with uh regards to all this mess we're in but um otherwise we're doing all right yeah that's it's kind of the same over here. I mean, I don't have children trying to go to school or anything. So that's one stress I do not have. But it's scary to say the least. And hopefully, at least we can serve as some sort of distraction from that chaos in the weeks and months ahead. Let's start with the news that we learned in the last 24 hours or so. Cody Bellinger had shoulder surgery.

So initially, we saw the shoulder bump or arm five or whatever you want to call that. I don't know what that is actually called. Everyone can picture the celebration. It always looks like it hurts. It clearly hurt Cody Bellinger when he did it. That was in game seven of the NLCS. Then he homered in the World Series. I thought, maybe the shoulder's just okay. He actually did have shoulder surgery to repair a dislocated right shoulder. It's about a 10-week recovery window,

so he should be back to normal or close to normal when spring training begins, and that's assuming that spring training begins in February when it normally does. That's certainly not a guarantee at this point. So my question for you is, is this news actionable with regard to how you would look at Cody Bellinger? I mean, with the rankings I put out earlier this week, he was still a top 10 hitter for me. There was really no concern, even though in the shortened season, he was not nearly as good as he was in 2019. What do you make of this injury as you look forward with Bellinger? I have to think of him in opposition to Kristen Jelic. Both had major injuries, Jelic, right? Like both had major injuries, both coming off of down years, both going near each other in drafts, both, you know, peak, great, you know, young talents that we'd all want in sort of

a top five pick if we knew they were going to be healthy and knew that we were going to be playing at the top of their game. And I wonder if this, you know, I don't want to make too much of a big deal out of this because it was a dislocated shoulder and it wasn't a torn labrum. It wasn't like, it wasn't like a repair in that, in that regard. And this was actually to prevent any labrum injury. Like if you actually keep popping a shoulder out like that, you can create issues with the labrum and that's that's a real problem uh so this is a lesser problem um but you have to think he's now going to be coming off a surgery where uh you know yelich is going to have had the surgery and had a year that was weird um

and be more closer to 100 i mean i have to have to think, is this happening in drafts? Is Christian going ahead of Cody? He's been going a little earlier. The early ADP on Jelic was 10 overall. For Bellinger, it was 15. I had them two spots apart among hitters. I only had Trey Turner between them. And the main reason I had Jelic higher than Bellinger prior to this news some

of the underlying numbers with StatCast even though Bellinger had the much better k rate in the shortened season Christian Yelich was still hitting the ball very hard yeah and I think that was to me a sign that he was closer to himself than Bellinger was in the circumstances but again we're talking about guys that are two spots apart on the hitter list. I think, accounting for the injury, this is a question of how much risk do you want to invite onto your roster in the first couple of rounds? You don't need Cody Bellinger to win your league. You could take a couple guys I have behind him.

You could take Trevor Story over him. You could take Jose Ramirez and Francisco Lindor or even Freddie Freeman. And I don't think you're necessarily making a mistake given the unknowns of any player coming off of a surgery like this one, even though, as you said, it's not labrum, but it's significant enough to significantly alter how much he's able to do in preparation for spring training. Yeah, that upside of the 2019 is just so tantalizing 47 homers 15 stolen bases and a 305 average i mean that's just that's what we're all chasing the floor looks decent uh i think last year was probably the floor 239 240 average would have paced out to 30 homers um and you know 15

stolen bases that sort of deal. Still decent. And if that's your floor, I think you can still buy him. Is that his floor? Does it get worse than last year if he's hurt? I don't know. I don't think so, actually. I think that's your floor. Yeah, I don't see another level below that

as a true talent floor for Cody Bellinger and even with all the things that went wrong still hit 12 homers in the shortened season still had six steals still doing enough in the counting stats to not be a total drag they're clearly not a guy that returned value of a top five player but more to like than to dislike in how it fell apart and then the combined 19-20 trick you look at him compared to yellow in those numbers bellinger's got three more homers but that's in about 76 more plate appearances if i'm doing the math correctly uh yellow actually has 13 more steals that was the other separating factor for me yellow running a bit more i think i trust that part of his game

to be steady even though bellinger ran more in the shortened I trust that part of his game to be steady, even though Bellinger ran more in the shortened season. I think part of that... Well, six versus four is kind of like, hmm. Kind of a toss-up, right? And you look at the difference in... I mean, for me, it's like, Yelich was coming off a leg injury in 2020

also. That's probably going to give you some pause about stealing bases initially. I don't think that keeps him from running forever i think he can probably be a 20 steal guy still at this point and there's room for a bit more than that so all right so a slight downgrade maybe for bellinger i think i still like him in the second round though if i could uh get a pitcher uh and and bellinger i know there's probably a fair amount of risk in both of those picks, but I'm probably at the turn,

at the back end of the turn. I'm not getting a rock-solid top-five type bat between the two of those. Although, I guess, Jose Ramirez, I think I might have Jose Ramirez ahead of Bellinger. I don't know. Is that a crazy idea? It's not.

I think that's another one where you look at, you look at Ramirez, you probably feel better about the speed. He's got about 13 more steals than Bellinger over the last two seasons combined. He's comparable to Bellinger in terms of putting a lot of balls in play. The hand surgery thing, that was pretty fluky, right? I mean, he had that in the second half of 19 where he missed some time, but that's not the kind of injury you're worried about going forward. Yeah, I think I'd have Ramirez ahead of him. So wherever that puts him on the board, I think that still puts Bellinger in the beginning of the second round,

end of the first, because I think Ramirez is actually kind of like top 10, 12. So you'd be Bellinger over Francisco Lindor? Well, I didn't know we were playing a sneaky Would You Rather? Yeah, I snuck that one in there. Yeah. Lindor. Lindor seems pretty comparable to Ramirez,

so I guess I have both of them ahead of Bellinger. Okay. We'll do the Freeman one. Freeman versus Bellinger. Now there's no positional value difference. There's no speed. You wouldn't count on Freeman to hit 340. Dude, that's where I might go Bellinger.

Okay. That would put him 11th among hitters. I'm guessing Bellinger over Bryce Harper. Yeah. That's a little bit easier for me because if you think that Bellinger over Bryce Harper? Yeah, that's a little bit easier for me because if you think that Bellinger's major risk is batting average, that's a risk for Harper year in and year out. Yep.

Okay. So, yeah, you're looking at top 12 among hitters for Bellinger. Throw a few pitchers in the first round and there you are. That's the group that's hard to pick one. And with Bellinger coming off injury, I think maybe he ends up third, but maybe he ends up right ahead of Harper. So that's my group. All right.

The other injury item that I wanted to get to at the beginning of the show is Luke Voigt. If you remember Luke Voigt at the end of the season and the postseason, his foot was pretty messed up. Luke Voigt was not running well at all. He really wasn't running. He had a problem with the foot stuff. The foot stuff, yes.

The specifics. He had some foot stuff. He had a platelet-rich plasma injection in his foot, and apparently... Do we know why? Planner fasciitis, I guess. Yes, I knew it. Knew it.

Well, that makes him at a risk. The planter is all part of the Achilles and calf. It's all kind of one continuum. So it does make him at a risk for a major injury. Albert Fuhls is the slowest person on the planet. No, sorry, in baseball and um he has had planner issues uh all this time um i think there were some planner issues uh that led to achilles issues that led to the calf tear for or the achilles tear for kevin durant so it's all kind of uh part and parcel and

so there is therefore a risk for him to have calf issues next year or a tear somewhere, and that has to be factored in. But I don't think that anybody that's projecting Luke Voigt is projecting Luke Voigt for 700 plate appearances in a full season. No, I don't think so either. I think if you knew you were getting a maximum amount of playing time from Voight, he'd be more like a top 25 hitter as opposed to a top 40 to 50 range hitter. At least that's where he'd be in my ranks.

I've got him at 44 pricing in injury risk because on a per plate appearance basis, he has more power than the guy I have ranked ahead of him. He has more power than Michael Conforto, but he's got, I think, more injury risks than Michael Conforto at this point. So you're talking about a 260, 270 type hitter, obviously a great place to hit, great lineup around him, and he's coming off an amazing, amazing 2020 shortened season.

ADP's 15.4. Hit more homers in 2020 than 2019, and he played in half as many games. But we talked about it, I know, at least on this pod, and I think we talked about it on Under the Radar a bit with Nando and Ian back in the draft season going into 2020. Luke Voigt had very clear splits from 2019. He had an abdominal injury,

and he was a different player once that happened. It was very clear in the splits. And I think that's one of those areas. I kind of put this in the process notes about the rankings. My mind kind of works like a Marcel projection when I'm looking back at players where the most recent season matters the most. The season before that matters a bit less

and the season before that is a factor, but it matters even less than the season two years ago, right? But where I'm different, since I'm a human and not a primitive computer projection, is I can look at different things like, oh, this injury happened at this time. This player, if it's a pitcher, added velocity. This pitcher added a new pitch. Those things that are not captured in projections, those are the types of things that we need to be accounting for. And sometimes they're very clear like that. Other times, of course, they're not.

So with Voight, I would say if we're doing the injury flag thing for hitters, it's a yellow flag. I mean, he's risky, to be clear. He doesn't play a position that puts him at increased risk. He's not a center fielder trying to chase down balls in the outfield, but he's the type of guy that wasn't playing a risky position this year and dealt with that foot problem and had the abdominal injury in the past too. So just seems like one of those guys, like all the Yankees mashers. I don't know if the current group they have is just destined to scare us and disappoint

us with all these injuries they're dealing with. But yeah, I mean, he's nearly Jordan Alvarez in my ranks. Obviously, risk there. A really young guy with two bad knees. Fortunately, he's been running on an anti-gravity treadmill. He's pretty close to Stanton in the ranks. Still a very good hitter, but still a very risky hitter. So it's kind of in this pocket where I'm comfortable taking on risk. In that 40 to 50 range among hitters, that's about pick 65, pick 70. Fourth, fifth round, I'm okay taking

risk there. I don't want risk in that first, second, or third pick, especially if I can help at it. Maybe I'll take on a little risk for Adalberto Mondesi, but that's a different kind of risk. That's not not injury risk that's skills risk and it's known going in and the payoff is having the exceedingly high value from that one category right so i don't know i mean luke voigt i think he's really good but he comes with major injury concerns so let's be clear when it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents electronically? The answer is FedEx. Okay. But what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments? How do I find all that? Also FedEx. Impressive. Is there a regulatory specialist

I can ask about? FedEx. Oh, but let's say that. FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. Well, I see a very good segue coming there. I'm driving up on my segue. So you pointed out that we've got projections and we've got varying degrees of quality perhaps and then they try to take

all these things into account and then we can add a sort of human layer on top of that and I did want to say a note real quick about projections I did say that I think that I will stick a little bit closer to projections than

maybe I have in the past at least for hitters this year because of the unique nature of the season last year. And so I did have a little back and forth with Jared Cross, the founder of Steamer Projections. And we talked a little bit about how he projected. And he said, you know, it wasn't so different was something he said. The system is already set up to handle players with fewer plate appearances, less information in most recent season for whatever reason. And it's never known why a player missed time. So in 2021, projecting a player with 240 plate appearances in 2020 is just like a year ago projecting a player with 240 plate appearances in 2019. They also have in-season projections. So when I suggested that they wait, they like in an in-season projection, you wait the things that are more meaningful in smaller samples.

Then, you know, you know what to wait more in your projection system coming off of a smaller thing. And I said, actually, here, this is where a your projection system coming off of a smaller thing. And I said, actually, here, this is where a good projection system should be able to separate itself from something like Marcel. The one you're talking about was just sort of wait, wait, wait. Because the better your projection system is, the better it separates the components and weights them correctly. And he said that's exactly it. and he said that's exactly it and because of that they're working on even more

better use of StatCast data because that helps them sort of weight these process things and in the past I've said that I really prefer the bat maybe to any projection system because of that because they weight

these sort of process things at the same time we're looking at these different players. And a lot of times we have to make a decision where the projection system spits out a value that's within 50 cents. And I don't think that that necessarily is meaningful. So within 50 cents or a dollar, I think the human part can come in again. And we can sort of look at these different things and say, you know what, for this player in this particular situation, I'm going to bump him up a couple spots. I'm not going to bump him up 20 spots. I'm going to bump him up a couple spots because I see this, I see this, I see this. So

I had this idea for us as a sort of way to do a 101 for everybody is to have a stat draft where we basically take turns picking a stat and and we just explain sort of what's good in that stat what's bad in that stat maybe some wins and losses that that these this that would have helped us predict in past years. Give us, give you a sample of why, why the stat is interesting and why we use it. And so we're going to go a little back and forth here. And I'm going to give you first pick. It's really generous of you. I was thinking about this this morning.

I was like, I was going to give, you know, the first pick just to be polite because in the spirit of just being kind and polite to everybody, not just your friends, I just think, Hey, you know,, hey, let's let you know I have the first pick. So, all right, I'll take you up on that offer. I'm not going to do the Midwest thing and throw it back to you.

No, no, no, no. You go first. No, no, you go. Two people stand in front of a door. One person holds the door open and they argue about who should walk through it first. Like a four-way stop in California. No, no, no, you go. No, no, no, you go. No, no, no, you go.

Yeah, we have those interactions here in Wisconsin where we're all sitting there. Someone was clearly first, but they're trying to wave the last person who got there through, and the people who got there in the middle are kind of like, what do we do? You guys should both go

because you're being nicer than we are. Life eventually goes on, hopefully without a little fender bender, but I'm sure that happens too. All right, so with the first pick of the 2021 hitters stat draft, the Los Angeles DVRs select WRC+. Ah.

Little Bud Selig in there for you with Los Angeles, which, by the way, there's a Tom Petty song in which Petty pronounces Los Angeles, Los Angeles, and as soon as I heard him do that, I felt like I had to let Bud off the hook for that. I'm not going to let Bud off the hook for other stuff, but if Bud pronounces Los Angeles, Los Angeles because he's a Tom Petty fan,

then we can no longer make fun of him for that. Oh, all right, all right, all right. You can make fun of him for everything else he did if you want to. That's perfectly fine. That's all. Okay, so WRC Plus. Here's why I like it. WRC Plus is a great catch-all snapshot of a player's total offensive value.

For fantasy purposes, it's going to come up short really with one category. It's not going to help much with stolen bases, but you're looking at the player's overall value. You're indexing it to get a sense for how good a player was within a league, and that accounts for park effects and run environment and things that ordinarily are not necessarily captured by any individual stats. Some individual stats have them, a lot of them don't. And what you want to know is just how much offensive value does a player create with his bat, right? That's a simple question. And I think if you looked at WRC Plus and you looked at something like overall roto value, I think they would track pretty well. And you start looking at the formula.

I mean, it's crazy. The Fangraphs glossary, by the way, is a good reference for these. If you really want to see how the sausage is made, it will make your head spin a little bit, but it's definitely worth doing. But if I look back at leaderboards and different evaluations and rankings, I'm going to find players who were elite in WRC Plus throughout the early rounds of a draft. That's going to happen year over year. It's rarely going to lead you to a player who isn't good from a fantasy perspective.

I mean, I think one immediate thing that comes to mind is a small sample. Sure, yeah, in a small sample, you can have a crazy good WRC Plus, or you can have a crazy bad one just because you only played a little bit, and that doesn't tell us much. But over a full season or even most of a season, I think it gives you a very complete picture

of just how valuable a player is with his bat. And I think it's going to count for power. It's going to count for ability to get on base. Those things are really important when we're looking for runs and rbis and it just gives you a really good one number snapshot of how productive a hitter can be yeah and i think i think it's a it's a good way to avoid putting a bad hitter on your team you know i mean you talk about the risk involved with Adalberto Mondesi, WRC Plus captures it. It's like he might not be a good hitter, you know? And so I like it for that reason. It's like, is the hitter good? Going into 2020, the 2019 leaderboard for WRC Plus, you'll notice that Elite is around 140, 138 to 140. That's an Elite WRC Plus, and there's almost not a single miss on this.

If you had just drafted based on WRC Plus, you would have had a team full of good players. The closest that it gets to a miss is Austin Meadows at 11th. The closest that it gets to a miss is Austin Meadows at 11th. Had a 142 WRC plus in 2018, and he did not have that in 2019. And in 2020, he had a bad season. I think we understand why that happened. I don't even think that much of that was predictable. I don't think that Austin Meadows had an injury history, an oblique injury history in particular, and then he caught COVID. That's definitely not predictable.

Another one that might be a miss is Cattell Marte at 8th. history in particular and then he caught covid like that's definitely not predictable another one that might be a miss is katel marte at eight uh eighth however katel marte didn't have a terrible season in 2020 um it just wasn't as good as we wanted from fantasy and then there's also uh this this idea of you know stolen bases not being captured you He stole 10, then he stole one. That's a big part of why his fantasy value tanked. So two misses out of the top 15 or 20, I don't think is, that's probably going to be one of the better rates

for the different stats we look at. So good pick. For qualified hitters, if you look at the bottom of the list, like, okay, who was bad in 2019? What did they do in 2020? Who did you miss out on potentially? Because if you were using WRC Plus as your kind of catch-all

offensive evaluation tool, you would have missed out on Dansby Swanson. He was at a 92 WRC Plus, so 8% worse than a league average hitter. I don't think you would have failed to win your league because you didn't have him. It's nice. He's clearly good. Part of the appeal is that he does a little bit of everything. And we had other stats that we liked him for that will come up later. Right, yeah.

You may have been drawn to him by something else, which is okay. You would have avoided Victor Robles with a 91 WRC+. That was just pain in the early rounds. There's a lot of wins, actually. You would have avoided some Robles with a 91 WRC plus that was just pain in the early rounds there's a lot of wins actually like you would have avoided some bad players in here I'm seeing some some ones where you would have really been happy to avoid them Ahmed Rosario Andrew Benintendi you know Cesar Hernandez is an interesting case you can argue way. But I see a lot of pain avoided. Chris Davis, Odor, Malik Smith. Malik Smith was 134th out of 135.

Do you know how mad I still am about that one? It was so out of – I'm still mad about picking Malik Smith last year. You tried to make yourself feel okay about it i remember talking to you at the time and you said uh when you took joe adele or the prospect you took later to combine him with joe adele but i just flamed out on both of those yeah that's uh that's how it goes sometimes i mean i'm thinking about the main player that you're going to miss out on in the WRC Plus, though. Is that player like Mondesi or a Jonathan VR? It's going to be someone whose stolen bases make them exceedingly valuable in 5x5, despite their flaws.

And I think if you're going to find a way to invest in a player like that, they need to bring something else that's concrete. We're not going to talk about defensive metrics, I don't think. I don't think those are going to be drafted. But if you're an elite defender, you can get away with being a below-average offensive player. And then you can be a good fantasy player

simply because you run a lot when you get on base, right? You're still skating on thin ice. We just have to think of the Billy Hamilton story to know that can fall apart pretty quickly. Even Ender Enciarte. Ender Enciarte is a good example. I had him late everywhere.

I feel like the risk on Enciarte at pick 250, not a problem. Right, right. But when you have to draft a player at 40, that's a totally different thing. He's a buzzy player for a lot of reasons and i understand what people don't want him you're out i'm out you're totally out i'm out i can't do it dude i i know that i know i know that i i've lost i've i've i've tried to learn this lesson many times but it's just so against like i guess that i play fantasy thinking like i am gm and maybe i can have alberto montesi

on my team but he would bat ninth for me you know and i would be looking to improve at his spot you know i mean a guy with that kind of uh walk rate and k rate and power combination, I just would be like, that's not an asset. If somebody wants to call me and trade for Adverde Lonsi from me, I will give them to him if they give me a good value as a regular GM. And so that just means I'm not going to pay 40 for him. I don't see him as that.

And I know the stolen bases are there and I know stolen bases are really hard, but I'll find them somewhere else. All right, fair enough. Well, it's your turn for your first pick so i will i'll kick it over to you right it is my turn indeed um and i'm going to use barrel rate as my uh first pick in this draft number two overall and um the reason i use it is I have this pretty cool piece from Al Melchior in 2018 about which stat cast stats correlate best with power metrics. And number one is barrel rate.

I have to sort of explain. There's a difference between barrel rate per batted ball event and barrel rate per plate appearance. And barrel rate per batted ball event did a little bit better on his thing because it didn't include the noise of your strikeout rate. It's just like once you make contact, how much power do you have? And barrels are like a description of a group of max exit velocities and launch angles that produce the best outcomes.

So yeah, I think barrel rate for BBE could be statistically superior in certain ways. I prefer barrel rate per plate appearance just because i kind of do want to bake in some of that strikeout rate like i don't there's a bunch of misses if you use um barrel rate per batted ball event you'll have more misses where you have somebody like jabari blash you know who will have a good barrel rate per batted ball event and just never make contact. So I kind of want to bake in the contact a little bit. And so a top 10% barrel rate per plate appearance is 8+. And going into 2020, you would have had some wins using barrel rate

if you had drafted Adam Duvall, who was 11th, Brandon Lau, who was 20th, Ian Happ, who was 25th. You would have correctly not drafted Shed Long at 257th, Joey Votto at 236th, or Willie Calhoun at 228th. or Willie Calhoun at 228th. If you'd used barrels per batted ball event, you would have captured somebody like Austin Riley, who was 30th there, because he improved his strikeout rate. He didn't necessarily improve his quality of contact,

but he improved his strikeout rate and made more use of his power. But that's not to say that a barrel rate is perfect. You would have incorrectly drafted Gary Sanchez, who was second in barrel rate, Mitch Garver, who was 13th in barrel rate, Josh Bell, 34th, and you might have missed out on Jose Ramirez, who was 225th in barrel rate in 2019. So the two things I think you should remember with those losses is, A, strikeout rate matters. B, you still want to kind of think about regression.

You still want to have probabilistic thinking, which is you still want to look at Mitch Garver and say, okay, he had a massive barrel rate increase over the year before. We talked about this preseason. We talked about this during the season. We've talked about Mitch Garver a lot. But I would say that you want to have probabilistic thinking, where you look at the barrel rate in 2019, you look at the barrel rate in 2020, and you kind of say, okay, if there's a major difference there, why? What does it mean? How much regression will it be? And that's the case for Jose Ramirez and Mitch Garver.

Gary Sanchez is a bit of a strikeout rate thing. But barrel rate, still a really quality stat to use. still a really quality stat to use yeah i think anything that's giving you a combination of factors that are important when you're getting hard hit balls with optimal launch angle put together like that's great because you're taking tools that in isolation have reduced value and you're optimizing their value by putting them together into one number i think that's the that's the common theme of some of these early stats that we're going to be choosing here. If you're looking at the 2020 barrel rate leaderboard, the barrels per plate appearance, the default that shows up when you go to Savant, you don't really have any surprises

among qualified hitters in the sense that you don't see a player and you're like, oh, this guy's actually not that good until you get to the back of the top 20 or so i mean like tatis seager soto eloy teoscar hernandez has been up there before and he just had the 2020 breakout you know snow i know that's a low average big power skill set but we think of him as a good power hitter at least you mentioned brandon lau harper belt chapman sal perez, Mitch Moreland maybe is that first surprise at 12, but he's been good in this area before. Nick Castellanos, Freddie Freeman, Jose Abreu, Jorge Soler, Marcelo Zuna. I mean, those are all generally very good hitters. So yeah, a rare miss at least up top. I think you are more likely to miss low with the barrel rate per plate appearance,

and I think it's a little trickier to figure out why. I look at the 2020 surprises on the bad side. Anthony Rendon only had a 4.3% barrel rate. That seems kind of weird. I'm not running for the hills and trying to avoid Anthony Rendon going into 2021. Yelich was not good, actually. It's kind of weird.

Yeah, well, part of it is the K rate went up so much, though, right? Yeah, right. Actually, his barrels per bad ball event are fine. Yeah, so that's the thing. If the K rate goes crazy, and I think you will have more players who have increased volatility in something like K rate in the shortened season that would cause something really helpful like barrel rate

to mislead us a little bit. So I think that needs to be accounted for forward looking. One thing that's fun too about barrel rate is that in one of the reasons I like it is that it's, it's useful in smaller samples and I'm not necessarily necessarily saying that 50 batted ball events is enough, but if you change it so that the minimum batted ball event number is 50, and there is some evidence

that some stat cast things only take 50 batted ball events, something like average EV only takes 50 batted ball events. So I changed it up so that my minimum batted ball event was 50 on the savant page. And then you start getting some guys where you're like, oh, I could take a chance on

this guy, Jared Walsh. Jared Walsh was 12th overall in barrels per plate appearance, if you reduce the minimums. And yes, he had some weird stuff going on in the strikeout rate. But if he's that good on quality of contact, he can survive a strikeout regression. Even if that weird strikeout rate thing that happened with him this year, he got really aggressive and it worked out for him, even if that sort of changes next year, the quality of contact is really good. So Walsh might be someone that you're interested in. Edwin Rios, 21st overall in barrels per plate appearance,

right behind Marcelo Zuna. If we get an announcement that there's an NLDH, Edwin Rios becomes very interesting. Or if Justin Turner leaves town, which I don't think will happen, but it's a thing. It's a possibility. Bo Bichette shows up up there in a smaller sample.

And then DJ Stewart is Kyle. um you know bo bichette shows up up there uh in a smaller sample and then dj stewart is uh kyle dj stewart is luke voight's equal when it comes to barrels per bad ball event definitely not something i would have expected to hear yeah right i don't think they're they're not necessarily the same players void has a better max cv and i don't want to start using some stats that we might use later, but I would say that Luke Void has more power, but I would also say that DJ Stewart is sneaky interesting. Let's keep it moving. I'll make a pick here.

I want to actually take max exit velocity in this spot, and part of the reason I think I took WRC plus first. That just gives you such a great overall picture and gives you a good idea of floor. Max exit velocity to me shows ceiling. And as you've mentioned before, because it just doesn't take long for us to get a sense of what a player's true power ceiling is, this is a really good way to get there. I'm looking at the 2020 leaderboard right now. I'm going to go back to 2019 first to kind of see, okay, who among qualified hitters would have stood out in Max EV.

Vlad Jr., as we've said time and time again, he was first in 2019. The full breakout did not happen yet in 2020. Pete Alonso, Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge, Jose Abreu right there at fifth. Christian Yelich right there at sixth. Jordan Alvarez, maybe again, driving my faith in him is just that he hits the ball very hard. Top 10 overall. Kyle Schwarber, Nelson Cruz, Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and there's Cattell Marte yet again. If we're trying to say what went wrong with cattell marte the 2019 max exit velocity is proof that what was happening power wise that year wasn't a total fluke and that makes me more likely to believe in a healthy sort of bounce back from cattell marte in 2021 I don't think you can fluke your way to a 116.3 max exit velo. You have to

have legitimate above average power to hit a ball that hard. That's not just getting lucky. Like that's actually hitting a ball as hard as Bryce Harper hits a baseball or as hard as Mike Trout hits a baseball. That's a very granular skill that matters to me. Right, it's not hitting a ball 95 at the exact right angle and getting it 335 in a place where it's 334 down the line. You know, that's more what I think of as luck.

For max exit velocity, the top 10%, the elite number is 114 plus. We've seen that basically what max ev does is it fixes the parabola so um there's a where you hit your max ev like what angle you hit it at uh that becomes the center of a parabola and all of your hits then sort of cluster around it in this uh in this sort of semicircle um off of off of max ev and so that's exactly what you're saying it describes your your your entire potential um if your max ev isn't very high up there then you just don't get as many of those quality hits and it's hits as well as homers it's not it just sort of it all cascades from there uh stanton is the max ev god you know he's he's he's why we care about it but

he's also uh describes like why it can be so good uh to have just hit the ball really hard so um i i have down here listed as players that you would have drafted higher based on their max ev and 20 so wins for max ev i have jose breu nelson cruz marcelo zuna came off of an you know an okay season in 2019 but he had a 20 top 21 max ev going into 2020 rowdy telez is my favorite uh for this 22nd overall and then uh jd davis I would have had as a win. Losses would have been Vlad, I guess, but I still think it describes his upside. So I'm still kind of interested in him. I think in dynasties, it's a decent time to pick him up. Gary Sanchez, again, I think we're just talking about speed. I'll come up a little bit later and um and and contact ability could tell marty

avi garcia uh would have been a loss i guess i don't know what you might know more than i do because you watch the brewers but i don't know what i don't have an explanation for that one i just think he maybe he was injured or like he just wasn't good he never looked right at the play going back to like summer camp they had scrimmages on, like most teams did. They streamed them. He didn't look right then, and he never seemed to really find a rhythm at the plate,

which is just extremely subjective analysis. But I don't know. I couldn't quite figure out what exactly was wrong with him all year. I wondered if he was hiding an injury. He's one of those guys that was playing out of position. He was playing out of center field. I wonder if that had some wear and tear on his legs, and that was a problem for him.

But definitely a guy that I liked because of the park being the best park he'd ever hit in before and because of that max EV number. So certainly a miss in the shortened season at a reduced price for 2021. Yeah, I'm probably going right back to that well looking at 2020 for a moment could tell marty seventh among hitters with at least 50 batted ball events he's still good in that area even though we didn't get the total power we were expecting i mean that looks really good right i mean javi Baez was bad, but 1-16? He's sixth. Like, that's awesome to see that. My man, Rowdy.

Third overall, baby. Rowdy at three. It's wild, right? I mean, these are, again, generally very good players. Alex Dickerson is a surprise in this list, but he's always the kind of guy that, when he plays, underlying numbers look pretty good.

He just has extreme health issues, and just staying on the field has been his biggest problem. Yeah, as you can tell from each of our picks so far in the draft, I think one of the lasting lessons of this is

yes, a projection system is probably superior, and none of these is a silver bullet. None of these is like, yes, a projection system is probably superior. And none of these is a silver bullet. You know, none of these is like, oh, yeah. Because, you know, Rob Silver pointed out on Twitter the other day, like going into 19, if you'd use Max TV, you would have picked Daniel Palka. He had the fourth best. Or Hanley Ramirez.

He had the eighth best. Or Jorge Alfaro. He had the 16th best. Or Jabari Blash. He had the 18th best. But a lot of these, and this is my segue into my next pick, fourth overall pick, and this is really important

coming off of Jabari Blash, and I think if you actually put this stat in context with some of the StatCast stats we've used, you get really powerful results. And my pick is Strikeout Rate. I can't believe you're taking such a boring old stat. Yeah! Strikeout Rate. Jabari Bl believe you're taking such a boring old stat. Yeah, strikeout rate.

Jabari Blash, I mean, come on. You could be like, yeah, Maxie B, great. Can he make... I think it was Jabari Blash that was missing fastballs in batting practice. That's scary. So I would say that strikeout rate is just a really valuable way to get an insight into

somebody's hit tool, basically, you know, their ability to make contact. And it just flows down from there that they can have a better batting average. And so I wanted to look, you know, under 15% is now top 10 strikeout rate. Over 26% is bottom. And so I just looked at the top 30 and the bottom 30, and I grouped them and did an average. And I did this for 2019 plus 2020. And the top 30 in strikeout rate between 2019 and 2020

hit 283 with 30 homers and 12 stolen bases. with 30 homers and 12 stolen bases. The bottom 30 in strikeout rate hit 250 with 39 homers and 11 stolen bases. So it's still true that the power hitters will strike out more, but I kind of think that you can find that nine homers easier than you can find 30 points of batting average. Yeah, I would agree with that, especially late in drafts. You can find more late power. You don't find a lot of guys that hit for high

averages late. If you do, it's David Fletcher or Hanser Alberto or Jose Iglesias type players, the guys that they really don't bring a lot of power. And you don't feel great because there's not so much in the offensive profile that's going to keep them at or near the top of the batting order if things start to go wrong they become seven eight nine hitters really fast they don't become five six hitters or something along those lines they lose their jobs buried and yeah they get benched to become utility guys and then their drops so yeah i mean like keon Broxton is the number one guy in strikeout rate with more than 200 plate appearances between 2019 and 2020.

So, like, yeah, they'd lose their jobs, man. Evan White is a risk. He's number two. Chris Davis is number four. Chris Owings is number five. Then there's a bunch of catchers. Travis Demeritt, he's 10th. It's a big part of why he may not ever make it. Michael Chavis doesn't seem like super risky, maybe, but 33% strikeout rate, that puts him in a category, since 2019 began,

that puts him in a category here with catchers. I think you want more from, you know, the contact ability out there. And I don't think that I would necessarily draft based just on strikeout rate. But I also know that in shallower leagues, you have to protect your batting average. You know, the deeper the league goes, the more you can win with like a 220 batting average, I think. But in like a 12-team league, you need to protect your batting average. The deeper the league goes, the more you can win with a 220 batting average, I think. But in a 12-team league, you need to protect your batting average. And I think that I would try not to pick a guy with over a 24% strikeout rate for my first 10 rounds. Just because I'd be protecting my batting average, I'd be putting more balls in play, and I'd be more likely to have a better batting average.

Do you adjust that threshold coming off the shortened season though? If you set it at 24%, Ronald Acuna is not on your team. He's an elite player that you miss out on. It's fine to have filters like this for sure. I don't necessarily have

a hard fast rule like that. Definitely, if I did take him, I would want to have some balance. for sure i don't i don't necessarily have a hard hard fast rule like that but i would i definitely if i did take him i would want to have some balance you know i might want to have um you know somebody on the other side of it to balance it out like so if i took a cunio with my first pick um you know like a jose ramirez they wouldn't be there maybe he would rendon might be i mean you're talking about a floor guy that puts a ton of balls in play you're looking for a couple hitters like that to balance it arenado is a high hitter that doesn't strike out much freddie freeman in a shallower league

might be there coming back manny machado uh eddie rosario a little bit later so there's different ways you could balance it out for sure yeah it's interesting when you look for kind of 15 k rates that are available in that fifth to eighth round range right you see it a lot of course up top but uh you could tell martay on the bounce back i mean if you look at his combined 19 and 20 14 and a half percent k rate nice and low where he's where's he going to go? That's one of the reasons I've always liked Corey Seager a little bit is because the strikeout rate is low.

Plus good power. He's going to be in the first two rounds. He might be there coming back. If you took Acuna, you might be able to get Seager coming back in round two or early round three. He's going in the first two rounds? Yeah, I think his ADP is 26. Jeez, that is amazing.

He'd been there before too, which I do think enables players to sort of vault back into a position easier. Like if you've never been an early round pick before and you have a breakout, you get up into the fourth or fifth round range. If you've been up in the second, third round range before, fall out because of injuries. You go right back to to where you were you leapfrog that uncertain group the you know the

the rebears the but he could be he could be he could be and he'd be an interesting pairing with with uh kunya because he wouldn't steal as much but he would play an infield position to your outfield position have the better batting average um have the power, and I think he'd be a pretty good foil. Yeah, he would. But yeah, I'm with you on K percentage. I think it is still a good measure of hit tool. I mean, you can occasionally miss out on some guys that are really good if you avoid 30 plus percent K rates. Brandon Lau is probably the guy that jumps off the page the most to me that you could have looked at those underlying numbers and just said, yeah, he's 35% K rate in 2019.

I'm out. You would have missed out on the Will Myers rebound season. That wouldn't have been on your roster if you were staying away from the high, high K rates. You might miss out next year on Keston Hira or at least Luis Robert. Maybe a Javier Baez bounce back. Yeah, there's definitely some players. I'm not trying to exclude everybody. But I do think that Teoscar Hernandez and Alberto Mondesi,

two guys who strike out more than 30% of the time and walk less than 7% of the time, there's a buttload, as my kids would say, just a buttload of risk there. There really is. And I'm willing to take on more risk when it comes to getting steals, given the scarcity of steals,

than I am to take a power-first sort of guy like Hernandez. Yeah, but even still, take risk accordingly. Be careful. Be selective in when you're going to do it and what you're going to do it and what you're going to put around a player like that i'll make the fifth overall pick here i think oh swing

percentage is one of the next things i want to see it's definitely related to that tool you you snipe me well yeah you know i was stuck but it's related to strikeout right you know it's related between max ev and k percentage at the last turn, too. But these things kind of group together as you try to figure out, what is this approach? How good is it? Because you might see a great max EV, but then you see a horrible K rate. And you say, well, the next thing I want to see is,

why is this hitter striking out so much? Is he chasing pitches outside the zone? Is he actually striking out because he's swinging and missing pitches outside the zone? Is he actually striking out because he's swinging and missing pitches inside the zone? You might start to figure that out too, but O-swing percentage, it leads us to another group of players. I think we talked about it maybe a couple months ago, but it's still worth revisiting this a little bit. If you go back to 2019 and you look at players who were on the leaderboard in a bad way in O-swing percentage, I lowered the minimum to 100 player appearances just to get a lot of names on here.

Jorge Alfaro was first with a 50.4% O-swing percentage in 2019. He missed a lot of time with COVID, so whatever. His season isn't complete. You would have stayed away from Eddie Rosario, 46.3%. Javi Baez, 44.1%. Tim Anderson sandwiched in there. A good player you would have missed out on for sure. I mean, Tim Anderson is one of the hardest players to see going forward.

When you look at the advanced stats, it just doesn't fully add up to be a guy that contends for a batting title. But I don't think it's a fluke anymore either. Other guys in this range, Mondesi, 42.2% in 2019. You would have stayed away from him if you were worried about low swing percentage. It leads you to this other type of player though too, like a Jeff McNeil, 41.7%. You would have stayed away from him and you would have missed the disappointing season in which his power didn't come back. But Jeff McNeil is the kind of hit tool heavy player who can get to everything. David Fletcher is that kind of player too,

just to bring Fletcher sort of back into the conversation. So I think it kind of depends on what you're trying to accomplish as a hitter. If you're trying to hit 20 plus home runs, I think it's harder to do that when you swing as many pitches outside the zone as Jeff McNeil did when he had that power breakout in 2019. Yeah. And I want to say the mitigating stat. So the mitigating stat for stuff like Maxi Bean barrel rate

with strikeout rate, and in fact, the mitigating stat for O-Swing, I think, is age. Just to bring in a random sort of really old school stat. We've been recording age forever. But I want to send people to a piece called Hitter Aging Curves, Plate Discipline. It's by Bill Petty. It's from 2012.

It's old, but it's really meaningful. It kind of shows all the different contact and swing rates and how they age. And the only thing that is super, super obvious when you look at it, the one curve that doesn't look like any of the rest and just takes off for the bottom of the page is O-Contact. And O-Contact at 28 years old just bottoms out, dude. It just flies for the bottom. And so I think if you just look at o swing now in the context of um you know how these guys how old these guys are and i've got this combined boards here somewhere here it is um okay so now take that information that o contact just dives through the floor at 28 and now look

at that same leaderboard of the people who swing too much outside the zone and highlight the people who are over 28 and i believe that these are collapse candidates eddie rosario 28 years old fifth on the list 43 percent of a swing rate kevin pilar i always want to call him pr uh kevin pilar 31 i mean he yeah i mean that's obvious i guess abisail garcia 29 donovan solano 32 which i think people would have probably put his collapse rate pretty high jeff mcneil interesting 28 years out jve, 30 years old, 15th on the list, Castellanos, Starling Marte, Yuli Gurriel, Randall Gritchick, Didi Gregorius, Eduardo Escobar, Jonathan Villar, Corey Dickerson, Jose Abreu jesus aguiar i i think all these guys are really risky yeah the only one that really stood out to me in that entire group was a breu near the end like i i don't think he's falling off a cliff but at the same time i think because of recency bias people are going to overpay for what just happened in the shortened season.

I'm more avoiding him because of that than because of the risk that comes from swinging at pitches outside the zone. Man, that's a surprising one. Most of that list, I'm kind of nodding along like, yep, that makes sense. I don't really want these guys. I don't really want these guys. Castellanos is 28, so he's right there. Eddie Rosario, he's 28. However, there is the thing I'd rather be. We've talked about it.

I'd rather be a year early than a year late, right? There's also a question of how much money you're going to spend on these guys. Eddie Rosario seems criminally underrated year to year. So if you're not spending that much, then fine, do it. He seems to be a bulk guy. But I do think that there are some collapse possibilities in there. And, you know, by the time you get down to Nolan Arnauto at 30th, you're not really in the worst O-swings anymore. And I would caution too much being like, okay, this guy had an O-swing of 35 and the league average was 31.

Like, you kind of want the big separation. Like when we're talking Eddie Rosario, 43% O-swing. I mean, he's almost swinging at half the pitches he sees outside the zone. And so, yes, it is a problem that Victor Reyes is second. It's a problem that Tim Anderson is third. It's a problem that Luis Rivera is fourth. Those are problems, but they're not problems necessarily right now. They're a little bit more problems when they hit 28, 29, 30.

Rafael Devers, you know, this is a really important stat, I would say, for dynasty leaguers. This is a really important stat, I would say, for dynasty leaguers. Can you track year-over-year changes and find any reason for hope in some young players? Is this something that you can improve a bit over time, at least in some instances? Well, for example, swing rates go down over time. That's something that's true. It's correlated very highly with age. So if you swing less, you're going to reach less. So yes, I do think these things go down over time. Um, and you learn the strike zone and stuff like that.

That's why that's another reason why it's more meaningful to see a 28 year old with a 42%, you know, Oh, swing percentage. Then you're, then you get a little bit more worried to see a 28-year-old with a 42% O-swing percentage, then you get a little bit more worried because there's not going to be much age-related improvement and their O-contact might just fall off the floor. Yeah, I was just starting to look at the... Fangraphs has a really cool page where you can look at year over year.

It's called Season Stat Grid. So you can pull up something like O-swing percentage. You can set it back for five years, six years, however long you want. And you can look and you can say, okay, here's the current group of leaders in 2020. The guys who are really bad at this or the guys who are really good at this. What did they used to do? It gives you an idea of some of the trajectories that you might see. they used to do it gives you an idea of like some of the trajectories that you might see it kind of looks to me like the elite of the elite like the people who are really good at

not swinging at pitches outside the zone that's a skill that you kind of have all along you don't become elite at that maybe you can just get better than terrible at it maybe you can improve somewhere in the middle of the curve but i'm kind of looking back at some of these old numbers and I'm not seeing massive turnarounds. One that looks pretty interesting and because of the shortened season, we just don't know for sure. Giancarlo Stanton, 23.4% swing percentage in 2020. Usually he's in that 27 to 32 range. I mean, if that's something Stanton has learned, my goodness,, the potential damage a guy like that could do swinging less at pitches outside the zone is just off the charts. I mean, I think they probably are, in certain players, the ability to make a single adjustment

that kind of puts things into clarity. I think of Adrian Beltre telling me that, you know, he started looking for high pitches and that allowed him to lay off of low sliders because they looked worse. But, you know, looking at his O-swing rates, there wasn't ever a massive improvement. He just kind of went from 39-40 in his early career to 35 in his late career. So he improved a little bit, but just not that much. I think his longevity is an argument against putting too much stock in this. But I think by the time he was mid-career and just reaching 32%, 33%, 34% of the time, 35% of the time, I wouldn't have put him on this list of people I'm worried about. Eddie Rosario is

rookie year Adrian Valtteri, except he's 28. With Rosario, I was just thinking about him compared to Castellanos because they both came up. There's a big difference in strikeout rate in those two players. I feel like I'm more concerned when I see

the elevated K rate that goes along with this. If you're getting away with it because you've got the ability to reach and expand the zone, Pablo Sandoval is my always default example because he's just the most extreme. Eddie Rosario doesn't have Pablo

Sandoval's body working against him either. Yeah, but Pablo Sandoval aged pretty poorly. Right. I think that was more for, at least as much for reasons of body type and how difficult it is to continue using that approach without working against you as it is just against the desire to swing at everything.

We got one more pick, Eno. Well, I have hard hit right on here. And, you know, it is instructive hard hit rate on here, and it is instructive, and it does give you a little bit more information than barrel rate necessarily because it's just who hits the ball hard, and it's not always about homers. So it would have pointed you to Austin Slater, Christian Walker, Jacoby Jones. It would have told you to avoid Chris Bryant. And so it is a useful stat but i think a

lot of it's captured in barrel rate and i just wanted to point to a stat that i don't use that often that i'm thinking about using a little bit more because of some findings that i had today in a piece on gary sanchez and that's sprint speed and there's just a lot of value in athleticism that doesn't come across necessarily and all and you know even when we're talking about what we're just talking about i think yeah yeah yeah i know that he doesn't seem like an athlete but hit tool is an athletic thing you know and when i was thinking a little bit more about Eddie Rosario, like his athleticism allows him to overcome some of these other issues. So if he was really slow, you know, then I would start to be like, okay,

the athleticism is going, you know, he, he reaches a lot. This is heading to a bad place. And I, in fact, I think with Pablo, like that's sort of what happened, You know, the athleticism went and so did he started being he started having health problems. He started being on the DL more often, couldn't make contact outside his own like he used to. And so it went it fell apart really fast. Josh Hamilton, you know, there was a similar thing where kind of the speed went and everything sort of went with it. You know, he just fell apart. But he also, he used to reach all the time. So sprint speed, I think, can give us an example of a sort of look into their general athleticism.

And the reason that it actually matters in a brass tacks sort of way is like Gary Sanchez, for example. I found today that only 13 players in baseball are played deeper at third base than Gary Sanchez because Gary Sanchez is slow as molasses and Albert Pujols is obviously the top of that list and I found that you actually start losing OPS against projected OPS you lose 10 points of OPS against projected OPS by being slow, just by being slow. And so the top 10% is 28.5 feet per second. The bottom 10% is 25. And I almost think it matters a little bit more when it comes to being slow than it comes to being fast, because there's too many fast guys where just the rest of the package is not there. You know, Anthony Alford is at the top of this list. Adam Engel, Roman Quinn, Tim LoCastro.

I don't know how that much this will help them. But in terms of aging, the fact that Fernando Tatis is up there. Tyler O'Neill and Harrison Bader are up there. Trey Turner is still fifth in baseball. Byron Buxton is fourth. That's going to help them when it comes to aging. It's going to help them at the plate, as we can see. People have to defend them differently. And so I find it meaningful up there,

but it's a little bit more to me to like, hey, yo, this guy's really slow. Rowdy Tellez, 25.3 feet per second. Vlade Guerrero, 25.3 per second. This is going to be meaningful as they get down the line in terms of how they're going to age. And then when it gets even slower, Luke Voigt tied in sprint speed with Gary Sanchez. Josh Donaldson, the athleticism is almost fully gone. Now he's relying on plate discipline and power, and that's it. Mike Moustakas is down here. CJ Krohn was a barrel rate god going into this last season. He was a miss, I guess, if you went with Maxie V in barrel rate. He's really slow, and then he ended up injured.

So, you know, down at the bottom here, Anthony Rizzo is one of the slowest people in baseball. He had a great strikeout rate. He has a great hit tool. He's going to have a great batting average. Well, maybe not, you know. And he doesn't, you know, year in, year out. So at the bottom here of this list, you know, once you get past 24, you get into 24, Paolo Sandoval is 24 feet per second. That's when you start getting really worried.

Yes, Manny Grandal is down here. Justin Smoke was almost as slow as Albert Pujols last year so I don't I will admit that I don't look at it very often I'm kind of putting it on this list so I can say hey maybe we should be looking at this more often yeah it definitely gives us some more insight into some I don't know just physical ability of the player that probably drives factors like playing time and the defensive shifting things really really interesting, right? You have the slow runners being able to play further back, being able to shift against them differently.

That is huge in the overall offensive value that's being lost, something I probably have been overlooking as it pertains to Gary Sanchez in particular. So our six-pick draft is up. WRC+, barrel rate, max exit velocity k percentage o swing percentage hard hit percentage and an honorable mention for sprint speed obviously there are other tools in the box but if you're limiting you know things you can look at and want to try and focus on a few things that will get you a long way I think that'll get you a pretty good picture of who a

player really is. We do have a question that relates to some of these stats and a few that we didn't talk about. So I want to throw this out there. And the question is, Matt Chapman went from a 16.4% launch angle in 2019 to a 24.1% launch angle in 2020. his strikeout rate jumped from 21.9 percent to 35.5 percent with his walk rate going from 10.9 percent to 5.3 percent he did however hit the ball hard top five and average exit velocity and his barrel percentage was top two percent of the league the questions are one when a player's launch angle makes a jump like that, what should we expect moving forward? Is that launch angle here to stay? So we'll start with that. I found when I looked into Manny Margot's launch angle that, like I said earlier, you have to think of regression. Regression still happens even on

these process stats. So you would expect him to keep half of his progression, basically. And so my projection for his launch angle next year would be 20 degrees. And in fact, I think that's ideal. I think 24, you start hitting too many 40 degree balls, which are not good. And at 20, you might see more contact. I didn't find a linear relationship between launch angle and strikeout rate. What I found was large increases in launch angle led to increases in strikeout rate. So it's not exactly the same thing, but I think Chapman could be an interesting pick next year because he still pits the ball really hard. He's a league leader in barrel rate if he brings that launch bag launch angle back to 20 and regresses and strikeout rate back to sort of maybe just his

career number 25 you could expect something like a 260 batting average with huge power so comes with big counting stats too because his glove keeps him in the lineup every single day help permitting he's a max playing time sort of guy too. So that's pretty appealing. But yeah, it's interesting that the second part of the question was what you just answered. Is the higher launch angle to blame for the higher strikeout rate and the lower walk rate?

I mean, it can be, right? I mean, it certainly can have that kind of effect when you're making adjustments to the swing path, you're going to potentially swing and miss more often i don't know if you can always with certainty say well launch angle went up therefore strikeout rate went up that seems like a notch too far yeah i mean it it was like an extreme launch angle change i think this is pretty extreme eight eight degrees is a pretty big one i wouldn't say somebody... Like the year before,

he went from 14.8 to 16.4. I wouldn't say that his strikeout rate would necessarily need to increase there, and it didn't. But 8 degrees is a pretty extreme change. It suggests to me that he was doing something mechanically rather than approach-wise, but

maybe it wasn't the approach. Either way. There's also this health component, you know, he did have to have surgery. It was bugging him. Amazing that he had an average exit velocity of nearly 94 miles per hour while being hurt. So, uh, I think these things point to, uh, a near term, uh, change for him at 27. I think he could have his peak year next year. Yeah. I think it comes back to what you said. It comes back to health for Matt Chapman. Thanks a lot for the question, Jared. There's also a beer question here. Have either of you tried Avery Brewing White Rascal? I prefer it on draft. Still worth trying canned if you haven't had it

before. I have not had White Rascal before. It is a wit beer. I like it. I generally don't go for the style. That's probably why I haven't had it. I haven't had it in a while, but I will dig on a wit. I don't love it when there's a little bit of a banana situation going on. But with white rascal and some other ones in particular, there's a bit of a, like a coriander or orange peel, uh, situation that can counteract that banana stuff. Um, and, uh, that's why I, why rascal stands out as something I've liked, even if I don't always, uh, have wet beers, the more common related beer. If you enjoy blue moon, you'd probably like white rascal even more.

It's going to be a better version of something in that style. So definitely worth checking out as you make your runs for Thanksgiving and prepare for that. We'll probably talk about beer of the week again in the near future. But again, thanks for the question, Jared. If you're not already a subscriber to The Athletic, we have a special offer going on right now. $1 a week at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. It'll get you all of Eno's work. It'll get you the rankings.

Everything else we do across the site as well. On Twitter, he's at EnoSaris. I am at Derek VanRiper. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening.