Rates & Barrels - Surprise Aces & Learning From the Past

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Rundown1:36 Eno is Still Chippy9:32 Awaiting a Proposal17:26 Are We Really This Divided?22:29 Follow-Up: What Makes an Ace?28:15 Surprise 'Aces'34:19 Reasons to Doubt Lucas Giolito's 2019 Breakout45:05 What DVR Is Learning From Retro Drafts59:23 Beer of the Week Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get 40% off a subscription to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How's working from home been going for you? Remarkably Remote from GoToMeeting will help you succeed in today's new normal. In just three minutes or less, we'll share simple but helpful tips to keep you on track. From managing your motivation, workload, and relationships, to hosting and attending virtual events that keep you connected with your clients and colleagues. So check out Remarkably Remote on your favorite podcasting platform, or head to gotomeeting.com slash tips. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 95.

It is May 14th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we have a follow-up to a question that became an article. It's kind of like the tweet that became a movie. Eno wrote a piece about aces and how they're defined. He talked to a bunch of people around baseball to get them to weigh in on that. We'll talk about how that piece turned out and some of the responses that he received while putting that together. We're going to talk about the retro drafts that have continued. Ron Chandler put those together a few weeks ago. We've done 1982 and 1990. Last night I was in one that was for 1999. So I'll talk about some of the things that I've learned going through different seasons and preparing for those drafts.

I've got a really good question about Lucas Giolito, but I think it's kind of a broader question inside that as well. Before we get to our beer of the week segment, Eno, happy Thursday. How's it going for you today? It's good. It's good. I'm ready to go do something. I'm getting a little stir crazy.

It's getting to me a little bit. I really wish, you know what I wish? I wish that they would open up hiking trails. I just really feel like there are so many. And maybe it's different when there's just a few hiking trails and everyone go to the same ones, but there are so many hiking trails. I live right up against the foothills here in Northern California, and there's so many hiking trails that I just can't imagine that we'd all go to the same ones. And if you see somebody on the trail, it's fairly easy to just be like,

okay, I'm'm gonna go stand a little bit off trail here and let you get by right um and it would just give me so much mental space so much happiness to go take the kids on a walk in nature and there's like three or four different places i could go you know even if one was crowded or was closed but i just don't want to go somewhere that's been closed and i could say oh i'll just go under the the tape or whatever i don't think that i'm endangering anybody by doing this the problem is that they could give me like a 600 parking ticket i mean just between it being closed and me not being able to park in the parking lot,

they could write whatever number they want down on that thing, and I'd probably just have to pay it. So that's a major deterrent for me, but I'm also sort of mad about it. I don't think that it's keeping anybody safer and it is harming my happiness. So I understand it as a portion of a larger strategy, but at this point, my area is well off compared to most of America. I know that Stanford Hospital here has single-digit COVID cases and plenty of beds open. So I would like to go hiking.

Sorry to get chippy. Chippy's been a theme for you for the last few episodes. I'm starting to get chippy. Understandable. last uh few episodes starting to get chippy understandable i mean there's there's a pretty wide range of possibilities between do nothing and release the hounds right like yeah exactly i did see your neck of the woods will open up and people were in bars and well yeah that i mean i would like to go to a bar but that's not first on my list because I'm like, well, that's pretty close. Yeah, so what happened, and I'm just recounting what happened.

I'm not taking a side in this case. So, yeah, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the governor's stay-at-home order. They deemed it unconstitutional. And within 20 minutes, there was messaging from the Tavern League of Wisconsin that it was okay to open your businesses, your bars again, which I'm very sympathetic to people who own businesses,

who work in those businesses. I get it. I understand. You need, that's your livelihood. You need to make money. I get it. I understand. That's your livelihood.

You need to make money. But it was strange to see a packed bar. I think the picture I saw was from a college bar in Platteville, which is west of Madison, southwest corner of the state. From Chris Drosner's feed? Yeah, it was a bar. I think it was called Nick's or something. It's irrelevant.

Not a single mask. Nothing, right right like none of that and it's like okay now they're that's released the hounds that's that's released the hounds like for for lack of a better description that's what it is and i'm not saying again i'm not saying everyone needs to just do nothing because we will lose our minds doing nothing but in the event that you are out in public and you're beginning to increase your activity, you can still use common sense and you can use precautions and you can do these things with the idea of doing them safely. And I think that was the troubling part of that. But I think there, you and I have touched on this.

I mean, this has become a politicized issue, even though it really shouldn't be. This is just a matter of keeping everybody healthy. And I understand that the time to, my most overwhelming feeling is a surprise at how little we know for sure, and how dirty the metrics are. And I've talked about how cases is a dirty metric, and so people are kind of slam dunking on Arizona for opening up based on their situation because cases is going up. However, cases are going up because they're testing more. And so there's that relationship that makes cases a not a great metric. If you

look at a crass metric that sounds terrible to talk about, but if you look at daily new daily deaths in arizona it's it's down and it's been going down for a week plus so you know i think and if you look at hospital capacity another sort of crass way to look at it but a slightly better snapshot of how a area is doing because we've already we've always known that more people had it than the case number suggested you know most of the antibody tests have shown us that and just thinking about it if we know that there's asymptomatic people and that there's young people that don't need to go to the hospital we know that there's people out there who had it that never tested positive so we know the case number is bad so you know as we case as test more, we get more cases and that makes certain places look worse

than they are. So just the fact that we can't come to an agreement on a common sense of metrics, you know, we can't, it kind of parallels the political conversation where we can't come to terms with a common sense, a common set of information. We can't like, you know, one side says you can't quote that organization. Another side says you can't come to terms with a common set of information. One side says you can't quote that organization. Another side says you can't quote that one. And then often we can't even agree on a common set of language, of ways to talk around things. We have different words for the same thing that are loaded words and uh get us all ready for a fight you know um and uh so just the fact that we can't set on a on on a bunch of metrics and be like okay these are the metrics that we uh that we agree on is disappointing for me. And maybe, you know, maybe it's a failure of leadership.

But also, there's a certain amount of we won't know exactly what was right to do. We don't know exactly what metrics are great. We won't maybe keep track of the right metrics until the dust is cleared on this situation. And we know more, because a lot of what we're doing now is based on stuff that happened in 1918. And if our metrics now are bad, I mean, I'm just going to assume that the metrics are worse in 1918. That seems like a reasonable assumption. So again, do nothing versus release the hounds. It's not one versus the other, really, even though people might be looking at it that way. It's gradually trying to get back to doing the things that we enjoy. And of course, we say this as the week has dragged on.

We thought maybe we were getting a proposal, a formal proposal from the owners of the players on Tuesday. They talked about safety instead. And at the time of this recording, late Thursday morning, I don't think a formal proposal has been sent to the players yet. There was some reporting from Jared Diamond today that there was a 100-page document that was sent to the players about health and safety. And there was some reporting from Ken Rosenthal that there was a presentation made to a select group of players, including Daniel Murphy, about health and safety. So there's some movement on the issue. Yeah, but it seems like that's the focus ahead of the economics, though, whereas at the beginning of the week,

we thought it was going to be the fight over how revenue is going to be distributed. I think it was a really silly idea, a really silly move by ownership to lead with finances. I think you engender a lot of have you ever there's this game theory aspect um and i wish i could point to a specific article but i've read a little bit about this for a while um some years back that um you know if you define like two basic strategies in negotiation one as the kind of hard line approach, I'm going to ask for the moon so that I get North America. You know what I mean? That's the sort of hard line, out for myself, go as far as I can, push it as far as I can in my direction.

That's one sort of theory of negotiation. And another theory of negotiation is I'm going to identify my opponent's needs and my surplus and sort of find a place in the middle that works for us both. And I read some analysis that the one where you identify a middle ground is a better strategy in terms of results. I think there's a chance of getting more deals done in the future, too. If future relationships are a factor, that's huge. And just think about this in terms of making fantasy trades. It's 100% right. I know there are people out there who are like, well, I've had a lot of success and really

trounced some of my teammates by doing these outlandish deals. I'll tell you, man, I've been on the other end of these and there are people that I like in real life who I basically don't even read their trade offers anymore. Yeah, I've had filters for that. If I read it, I read it completely differently maybe than they intend, which is, Oh, he has interest in this one player. I don't care what players he put in the deal at all. I just know he wants this one player of mine. And then I can maybe go to their team, their player page and start from scratch on my own because what he gave me started, gave me nothing.

Basically he gave me three, uh, you know, top 200 prospects for my, uh, 26 year old major leaguer, you know, where, you know, you're like, come on, dude, you know, so you just ignore the offer and all you get from it is he's interested in this player. So, uh, that's, that, that's where I've, that's how I've sort of filtered some people's offers because they're just so terrible. And maybe some people look at my offers as the same, but I will say that I try always to look at the standings, look at their needs, look at their team, try to put myself in their shoes, think about what they're thinking about, think about what they're worried about, think about where they'd like to go, where they are in the wind

cycle, think about what I have extra of and see if there's any way that we can make a deal that makes sense for both of us. That's how I approach deal making. And if I had been the owners, I would have said, you know what? Everyone's scared right now everyone's thinking about their health everyone's thinking about how to how to interact with each other in the future and masks and this and that why would i lead with money i think that's maybe where the heart of many if not all owners are i can't speak for for of them, but that's kind of how they got into their positions, right? I mean, to... Are they on plantations in New Zealand?

You know, and just... You know, they're like... They're just totally oblivious. They have no idea. They'd be in a rocking chair on the porch in that scenario. They wouldn't be, like, working. No, I mean, like... Just being like...

There's a bunch of people who who who fled to new zealand that might be a silicon valley thing but um uh what i'm just saying is like they they just told the oblivious to to the fear that that everyone's got if if if they feel it at all then they should say oh man dude do you know what they're thinking about right now? They're thinking about how do we even play this game? Yeah, and it's going to take a pretty unusual solution. I was talking to my wife about just my fears about the baseball season and the obvious connection to my employment. And we were also thinking about football season a little bit too. Less directly, you know, something that employs me, but definitely a factor since I have fantasy responsibilities for football.

And we were thinking about football with one game a week. If you really wanted to play it safe in football and say, you know what? We're going to stretch out our schedule. We're going to have 14-day periods after each game where we're not playing. We're going to stagger our schedules there are games being played every sunday but half the teams are going to play on on these sundays

and the other half are going to play on the other sundays and you're going to mix and match you could build in some isolation periods and then have a few days leading up to a game and do sunday thursday alternating with another group that's doing sunday thursday and you only have a few games on each of those days, but the attention on every game, like, again, thinking about this from the greedy perspective, you'd have more attention on every individual game this way.

So, the reason why... You might have to shorten the season, or shorten the preseason, which sucks. Oh, yeah, throw those games away anyway, which the players don't want. It's fine. Start the season in August. Yeah, they've been advocating for shorter preseasons themselves. And stretch it into March. I mean, you're not worried about the college season and the draft as much this year anyway.

You're doing something extraordinary in order to keep people safe, which is the thing the players and most people would want. And you're satisfying the owners by creating an environment that also generates them more money, which with their schedule is more possible. Baseball's solution is much more complex because of just the compact nature of how we normally get through a season. And if you try to stretch out baseball, if you said, we're going to play double headers on back-to-back days and then take 14 days off, well, that's four games in 15 or 16 days. It's not enough, right? That is a very short season,

even if you stretch it out over a long period of time. But then you start asking questions like, is it better to do that than to do nothing? Maybe. Do people feel safe in that scenario? I don't know. Do large sectors of the economy get going again and maybe pull some people out of poverty

and out of terrible situations financially? Like maybe? Yeah, I just think the solutions to these major problems that we're looking at beyond sport do require a, hey, maybe I should think about what it's like to be the other person. And that went out the window for a lot of people a long time ago,

for a lot of very powerful people who make a lot of decisions about how our lives are run. I just see it as a war all the time. It is. It probably even, it is legitimately bad when you read stories about it and see how processes are going down state by state and at the federal level, of course, too. I think we also get a feeling from Twitter that we're even more divided than we actually are. And I'm bringing this up because we had Joey Mellows, we had Baseball Brit on the Athletic Fantasy Baseball podcast last Friday. Joey's awesome to talk to, by the way. And he was

talking about how he learned a lot about America last year, because for those people who are listening who aren't familiar with him yet, Joey went all around to every major league stadium and several minor league and independent ball stadiums last year. Took the ultimate road trip over the course of a year just to absorb as much baseball as he could.

And he saw every corner of America. He stayed with people on both sides of the aisle politically. He stayed with people from many different walks of life. And, you know, we're talking baseball and just about his trip. And I said, Joey, you were in every corner of America last year. Are we as divided as we seem to be on Twitter? And his experience was that, no, like as a group,

we are a kind. And I think warm was the term you just got. We're like a very welcoming and warm group of people, which again, if you're talking about someone who's, you know, hosting you and putting you up, they obviously have some,

some generosity just kind of built into the core. Right. But I just thought it was interesting because how many people have been all over this country that way at any point in the recent past and and and did it the way he did because like a beat writer has but doesn't necessarily go and talk to fans whereas he was walking around you know talking anybody would talk to him basically so um yeah there's a there's there's going around the country and there's you know going around the country and meeting people you know right like actually just experiencing america from a lot of different perspectives so i just thought that was a really interesting

conversation it made me i don't know it gave me a little bit of hope that it's not as bad as it seems even if it is in fact pretty bad yeah bad. Just think about the way YouTube promotes videos or the way Twitter works. A hot take, even if someone's making fun of it or disagreeing with it, gets augmented and gets blown up and gets seen by more people. So, yeah. Even with the financial aspect, I didn't write about it. I didn't really feel the need to tweet about it because, first of all, I just thought it wasn't going to fly, the revenue sharing thing. The problem is it sounds way too much like salary cap that was built in other leagues, and they're 100% against the salary cap. and they're 100% against the salary cap. But I'm just mostly disappointed that they didn't lead with the health aspect.

If they had led with this 100-page document and the health thing, then they would have created a lot of goodwill among the players being like, hey, they care about us. Right, and ahead of a CBA negotiation, which was already going to be, I think, a very strained negotiation,

to put it mildly, it's an olive branch. It's a way of trying to just make the relationship better. Like I, I just, I would have liked to have seen that too. And a lot of people have pointed this out. It's like,

if you're going to lead with trying to get the players to absorb some of the potential losses this year, you really can't do that in good faith without at least showing them the books, right? Like publicly, are we ever going to see that? Doubt it. But you really have to show, you have to show everybody you're in peril, everybody involved at least,

that you're in peril if you're going to ask for concessions like that. Yeah, and you have to show them in a way that engenders trust, like maybe include some sense of what the real estate stuff is that they're doing, you know, maybe show them what that means. Even if it means, even if you say, we don't think that's part, we don't consider that part of the revenue, at least show them how much it is. You know, if the owner is making billions of dollars off of, off of real estate revenue

around the stadiums that they got, you know know often given to them by local taxpayers then that's relevant even if they're not going to give the players a piece of the pie it's relevant you know yeah so you know i i uh yeah it's disappointing how that how that played out um I'm glad that there is a document. There is some sort of plan. I did say that I trusted that baseball was thinking about it, and this plan suggests that, yes, they had been thinking about it, but the optics of leading with the financial part was a poor decision. Yeah, one that if they could do it again, maybe they would do it just a little bit differently.

They dropped it pretty quickly. Yeah, they really did. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues across the U.S., more school districts are closing, and for the millions of kids who normally eat free or reduced-price meals at school, this means no longer having breakfast or lunch. You can help make sure children get the meals they need by donating now at feedingamerica.org slash coronavirus. Brought to you by Feeding America and the Ad Council. All right, you know, we talked about the Aces piece that you wrote up at the top of the show.

And I'm just kind of diving into that this morning. And I think it's really interesting. There's a few things that kind of jumped off the page to me. You talked to some players. You talked to people in the front office. And Trevor Bauer, you know, drew back the running back to cards, right? Obviously, an ace is in the deck of cards. And you have an ace in the hole, as he pointed out in the story.

And that made me think, okay, well, yeah, there are four aces in a deck of 52 cards. So one in 13 cards is an ace and that sort of implies a greater rarity than one per team or you know even 20 like a 30 on the 15 then he sort of brought that up yeah yeah and i think in my head i guess that that is more in line with how i've always thought about an ace like even even though some people do want to see one on every team in theory, I've never really quite viewed it that way. But as you talk to different people for this story, whose take did you find to be the most engaging? I don't know if this surprises anybody, but the scout. The scout.

The scout and the assistant gm for different reasons i'll start with the assistant gm but just because um it's less actionable for fantasy and i just thought it was interesting and maybe there is something that's actionable about fantasy but he basically said um let me see if i can find him uh here we go ah there's no reason to exclude some guys we think in archetypes but and maybe that's like strasburg or cole or whoever and sure guys who throw 99 with hammer breaking balls good control and big balls and the will to win oh i didn't even realize he had big balls i thought i thought he was talking about a pitch. I just put that in there. All right.

So anyway, so big balls in the world to win. But if that's your criteria, you might miss the fact that like Aaron Nola or Charlie Morton or Jack Flaherty may also be aces. The narrative surrounding archetypes of an ace isn't always the most helpful thing if you want to find an ace. And so guys like Scherzer, Sale, DeGrom, Bieber, they were not themselves seen as aces until they just were. So it's not necessarily useful to talk about ingredients to be a little bit harmful because the next Verlander probably won't be Verlander. He may just be like Brandon Woodruff or Mike Soroka. So that is an interesting thing. It's just tough to make actionable in fantasy because he's right.

They come out of the woodworks in different ways. And so I'll go to the scout next, and he describes my sort of heuristic for looking for an ace or looking for a really good pitcher. And so he's the one that I'm using. But it does get to the fact that, like, Brandon Woodruff is an ace, if he is an ace, because of a great fastball. And maybe that's good enough. I don't know if it's good enough to do it for five years, but maybe that's good enough for

now. Maybe he's a good enough ace just because he has an amazing fastball and good enough command of the secondaries to make them work. But Mike Soroka is totally different. Mike Soroka has only one pitch that was above average by stuff. Everything's around 98 in terms of stuff plus from driveline. So in terms of stuff, he has only one really above average pitch, but he has really good command, and all of his pitches are pretty good. And so that's a totally different way of being an ace. And if you focus too hard on Verlander as your model or whatever, you're going to look past too many people. So I liked what he said. He also said that

the talent pool doesn't go down in leaps and bounds. The talent pool basically goes down in little steps. So, you know, trying to cut it off at 7 or 15 or 30, you're always going to be like, well, you know, what about 25 through 30? They don't look like they should be on the same list as 1 through 5, you know? And so you make it smaller. And where do you cut that line off?

There's always going to be an argument about who's in that line and who's not. And at every point when I was writing, I was like, okay, so you say it's the seven. Well, what about this guy? You know? Oh, you say it's 15. Well, what about Luis Castillo? You know, you say it's 30. Well, what about this guy? So, um, you know, I think that those things were really cool, but the scout was the one who, one who said really succinctly what I kind of look for. And this is what he said. When you're looking for an ace, he talked about dominance, consistency, and durability.

Those are kind of harder to find. That makes it five or seven. But when he's talking about finding a new ace, he's talking about two well-above-average pitches, an above-average third pitch, and above-average command of all three. I think that's very well-defined. Yeah, and maybe it's... If we still have the AGM in our head,

maybe that's too well-defined. There's going to be aces that don't have those things. But it does get at how I look for good pitchers. I want multiple really good pitches. Maybe the third pitch is a show-me pitch, but I don't want it to be terrible. And I want them to command more than one, and at least two,

and ideally three pitches well because you have to be able to get strikes with more than one pitch otherwise you can be put in a box so i think then there's there's a natural question there's a table in the piece it has a lot of names on it you expect to find there. Bueller, Cole, deGrom, like of course they're there. Bieber's on that list as well. Verlander's on there. You know, he meets the criteria. Mike Clevenger, at least in fantasy communities, is treated that way. Noah Syndergaard. I think the outliers on the list or the surprises are really interesting. And there's a guy on here you've talked a lot about before because you're looking for these types of factors already

you know sandy alcantara like he hasn't put it all together yet but if you have all of those ingredients what's the what's the last bit that you need is it the experience and sequencing you know experience to me would be like having the ability to sequence in a way that takes all of your pitches and leaves the hitter just guessing all the time right if you have three average or better pitches and you can command at least two of them you can create combinations and attack hitters in ways that they are just constantly struggling with you right and maybe a guy like sandy alcantara hasn't been able to do that yet but with experience with more reps with time with the right coaching he can actually get to that level

yeah yeah i mean his uh his sinker really stands out with a 128th stuff plus. Even if that number is inflated, there was some talk with the creator of The Metric that sinkers might be inflated. It's a good pitch. Even if you take 5%, 10% off of it, whatever, it's still a good pitch. The changeup, 112, and the slider, 109, It's still a good pitch.

The changeup, 112, and the slider, 109. That's three pitches that break, or at least velocity-wise and break-wise, are very different from each other. He hasn't been able to necessarily put it together, I think, because he was focusing too much on the foreseam that he couldn't command well. And I think maybe being predictable and sort of just knowing when to throw, when to do. And then there's this just the idea of like having good game day strategy that can be worth a lot. I think Greinke has plus plus game day strategy in terms of knowing what he wants to do with every hitter, knowing what locations he wants to throw, which pitches and getting generally close to those

locations I think that's something you learn over time so Alcantara is a guy that in previous iterations of my strategy I might have missed because I would have focused too much on just raw strikeouts minus walks but there are pitchers that improve their ability when it comes to strikeouts minus walks and I could see that coming from Alcantara just because he comes preloaded with all this stuff, you know, and all it takes is just a little. I mean, just look at his strikeouts minus walks from the first 34 innings in 2018. He struck out eight per nine and walked six per nine. And I would have never have drafted that guy in the past uh before i

really started uh going after stuff and stuff and and command and stuff like that um i i would i would have said that guy is terrible yeah you know i would have been too quick to dismiss him with surface numbers i i that's yeah that's my pattern with him right be like too many minor league numbers and even yeah even minor league numbers, like his AAA strikeout rate, 7 for 9 basically, 6.9 for 9. I would have been like, this guy's not going to strike out enough. But then you realize that with a sinker that good, he's not going to give up home runs like everybody else.

He's just not, especially in that park. Those two things are not going to. So if you say, oh say oh okay so he's not gonna have the same home run rate as everybody else and then you start drilling in deeper you go wow like these pitches that he's throwing are good like what's what why isn't he striking people out with this like his whiff rate's pretty decent why does he have more strikeouts um so i think uh uh i think there's a lot of upside in him. And maybe more even than another surprise person on the list,

that's Spencer Turnbull. Just because Spencer Turnbull's velocity was up late in the season and in spring training too. But in terms of his best pitch, his sinker is a 114 stuff plus. And his slider is 111 his curveball is 105 and he doesn't have necessarily a change in above average change but he has a show me change and he has good command of all four pitches um and he could be a lot better than he has been in the past so um it was interesting to see sprenzel turnbull, Zach Gallin, Sandy Alcantara on the same list as these other guys. Frankie Montas.

But those are exactly the type of players I love. Yeah, it is funny that this list turned up guys that you've already been kind of banging the drum for in the last six months, if not longer in most of these cases. I mean, I think we talked for about 10 minutes about Turnbull on the episode around labor weekend. Like he was, he was a key in your plan. Like he was a guy that came up in,

in all the pre-auction conversations we were having about your, how you were going to put the pieces together. So it's really funny to see him based on that criteria, make it and pop up on the bottom of this board but you know also to be fair like these i label the the uh table potential aces because i do think um there is and this might be a good segue to our geolito question if we want to, but there is something about replicating it more than one year in a row. And the scout said,

it takes more than one year of dominance to become a true ace. Reason being, you need to show dominance after the league has had an opportunity to adjust back to you. Yeah, exactly. That was a question from Mike, and Lucas Gialito was the focal point.

And he wrote, I completely understand that he reinvented himself in 2019 Giolito in 2018 Giolito are in fact different people however two things still concern me heading into 2020 the first is just the mental hurdle of drafting a guy that was the worst pitcher in baseball in 2018 I hate early risk and this is just hard for me okay let's get past that g lito's era by month for 2019 530 174 250 565 245 521 that first number is march april combined i don't know i know these are arbitrary cutoffs but the point is that he didn't pitch like a 341 era pitcher for most the season sure roto you get what you get but is it repeatable you know he's asking basically if the if the good months the 174 and

the 245 like may and august if those are 320 era instead and he just brings back the five plus era in the other months you know what happens then um i guess there's two two different questions here though so the first is that mental hurdle of drafting a guy who's completely turned it around. Is a full season, with the types of changes that Giolito made, the velocity being up, the pitch mix being different, is that enough change where you can very confidently say, yeah, he is top 10 or yeah, he is top 15 now. It's okay to trust what we saw a year ago and to push aside what we saw in 2018 and prior to that. My general answer to the question, and if this was a chat and I was giving a one-line answer, is that I agree with his general take on Giolito and that I've been kind of the low man compared to others. I put him in my top 30 and maybe back in top 25 type in rankings in the past,

but other people have been more aggressive on the basis of that one season. And for me, it's not so much the stuff. I've talked about how with his changes to his arsenal, he does the fastball and the changeup or plus and the curveball is average. So there's your two plus pitches and an average pitch. It's the command side. And I think that he's going to have near a four walk rate next year because he doesn't command any of his pitches. He only commands one pitch at an average rate.

And he's lucky, or lucky, I don't know. It is good that, actually it says changeup. His slider is at 96 and his fastball is at 95. Those aren't bad. It's not like he's going to be a reliever uh there aren't they aren't sort of dylan cease level bad or or or um lucchese level bad uh but they also aren't necessarily uh what you see from other um aces and when we saw from the scout he said three pitches you can command above average.

Gilito has one that he commands at an average level. So I expect his walk rate to rise. That's my sort of general reaction to what he's saying. But I thought it was interesting. I wanted to just look at some pitchers and look at their monthly splits. Brandon Woodruff, I like a lot. Brandon Woodruff I like a lot March a 517 ERA May 1 ERA June 478 July 345 that's weird

Max Freed who I like a little maybe not as much as other people but I like him a fair amount 230 ERA in March 411 in May 568 in June, 528 in July, 351 in August, 386 in September. And then how about Mike Soroka, who most of us love a lot, 162 in March, 0.8 in May,

.8 in May,.371 in June,.307 in July,.267 in August,.4 in September. So there's a fair amount of month-to-month variance that comes with even the very best pitchers. And I think the durable, capital-A aces that are in the top five to seven, those are the kind of guys who mitigate the bad months and really dominate in the other months. And maybe Soroka's line is a little bit like that, where he had a 0.8 ERA one month and his worst month was a four. Maybe that's an ace-like progression.

But when you look at his underlying stuff, he's going to have to be more Greinke than Verlander going forward, and if that's the case, I might want another pitch from him. I mean, Greinke has like six pitches. Yeah, I mean, that's the key, right? It's either got to be more Velo, which I don't think is out of the question for sirocca given how young he is and his frame point like yeah he's that's the other thing he could do

if he doesn't add a pitch he can effectively use to get more strikeouts he could just start throwing harder but there just aren't there isn't like there isn't a large cadre of other aces that throw 92, have three pitches, and none of them is like a top 10 pitch for its pitch type. No, I mean, a lot of times for someone like Grinke, obviously he threw harder when he was younger, most pitchers do, the evolution of no longer being an ace is not having a way or a game plan or good enough secondaries to work without that velocity and that's what makes grinky so amazing is that he's been able to continue turning in these seasons well into his 30s you know without velocity like

a lot of guys fall apart in their early 30s when the velocity starts to go just because the rest of the arsenal doesn't play quite the same way. Yeah. But command of three pitches, look at Soroka's home run projections, and they vary from 0.9 to 1.2.

They're mostly positive that they mostly agree that he's going to suppress home runs um and that's going to go a long way to improving his era but also um he didn't show up on the top 30 projected aces um because mostly his projected eras are in the high threes right and i think a lot of projections don't like him because he doesn't strike a ton of guys out. Yeah. But, like, put him up against

Sandy Alcantara and it's like easier to see how Alcantara gets to more strikeouts with his stuff than it is to necessarily see Soroka with his existing stuff

getting to more strikeouts. What kind of odds, though, would you need to take Alcantara over Soroka for ERA and WIP? I mean, it'd be big, right? I mean, it's still a fantasy podcast. We're still talking about at cost.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just kind of funny how divergent those two guys really are. Totally different reasons to like both of them. You could like both of them, but you're not really getting there on the same track. I mean, I have three or four shares of Soroka. I have three or four shares of Alcantara

and one share of Soroka. And that has nothing to do with how I think of their talent level right away, but their talent level with respect to their cost. Right. Easier to load up on Alcantara. Even if you really liked Soroka at the price, it's still harder to get him, comparatively speaking,

because other people are more interested in him. That's why his price is higher. But I think generally this question is good because it is hard for me to uh push giolito given his uh group of he giolito and soroka are kind of like are actually kind of similar in that you know i see enough that makes me worried to like not go all in at the prices that they're at. So I have Soroka at $27. Wow!

I have Giolito at $26 and Soroka at $27. Right next to each other. And Montas at $24. I don't know. I don't end up with a lot of Giolito and Sorocco because I think more people have him at sort of 15, 16. You are quite a bit lower than most. I had Giolito at 12 a few almost months ago now, I think, with Clevenger being healthy.

That flips Clevenger ahead of him. The more I look at Luisuis castillo the more i like him so i think castillo over giolito is something i'd be doing brandon woodruff over giolito snap call in the moment i think i would just wait because i can get woodruff a little later and and just take woodruff later even if i had giolito ranked higher so he's just inside the top 15 for me but definitely understand where concern comes from with him. Mike, if you can't get past the differences in his performance in 18 and 19, and you see some of the things that Eno's talking about as concerns,

I would stay away at the price because he's got to do very well to return value at the 2020 ADP. Top performers in business and sports often attribute their success to their morning routine, whether it's waking up early, setting their goals for the day, exercise, or meditation. But not everyone has the time to do it all. With Hydrant, you can jumpstart your mornings. Hydrant creates flavored electrolyte packets you mix directly into your water to make hydrating your body easy and delicious. Each rapid hydration mix has the four essential electrolytes your body needs. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, and zinc help you hydrate quickly and stay hydrated all day. And Hydrant is backed by research. The formula was developed by scientists to provide perfectly balanced, efficient hydration. There's no

synthetic colors or artificial sweeteners. The formula is vegan, and you can choose between three different flavors or a variety pack. Hydrant starts at just a bucket packet for a 30-day supply. You can save even more with a monthly subscription. And for 25% off your first order, go to drinkhydrant.com, enter the promo code RATES at checkout. That's drinkhydrant.com, and enter promo code RATES for 25% off your first order, drinkhydrant.com and enter promo code RATES. All right, you know, I've been talking about these retro drafts off and on for probably about a month or so now, and I'm starting to learn a few different things from them. We've done three different leagues.

We've done a 1982 draft, a 1990 draft, and a 1999 draft. It'd be wrong if I didn't shout out first Ron Chandler for coming up with the idea and second Todd Zola has built an engine through Google Sheets that actually makes drafting and tracking the results in real time very easy to do from a user perspective. It was very difficult for Todd to do just to build it and program it, But that's made the experience a lot more fun. What are you testing then? Do you guys all have the Google thing and you can all see how your stats are doing in real time as it's going? What are you testing then with the draft? Yeah, that's what's happening.

So he's built a sheet that you type your pick into a window, into the actual cell, and it pulls that player's stats. It puts them onto your roster on a different page. So you can look at your roster tab and it also pulls all the stats into the standings table. So you have dynamically updated stats for every single pick. So you're, are you testing because we,

everyone can see how they're standing, how the standings are doing, how teams are doing, what teams are doing. Like you can see in real time if somebody's punting saves, basically. So in terms of strategies, everyone's strategies are laid bare. There's no projection of the players as a skill. So I think what you're testing is either the player's knowledge of the pool.

Yeah, it's a little bit of a pool knowledge test. And what it's forcing me to do, I've never had to sit down and write formulas that actually generate values looking at past seasons. And because these seasons are so different, 82 versus 90 versus 99, very different environments across the board, it creates a different problem each time. And I would compare it to, it's sort of like driving from the city you live in to the next decent sized city, right? Everyone's going to take the highway for most of the trip. And then when there's a traffic jam at the end, let's say you're going to a baseball game, whoever actually gets to the parking lot first is probably the person who's best at picking the right exit a few exits before and then taking all the side streets. And in this case, it's recognizing what the rest of the room wants to do in accumulating

all the stats and building the roster and counter-punching to that. So I think Peter Kreutzer and Doug Dennis have been in all three of these with me, I'm pretty sure. They have been punting starting pitching and trying to just dominate ratios and win saves. And there's some pretty interesting things you can do when you have seasons that are already completed. You can find a surprising number of wins from relievers when you know the outcome ahead of time so you know they they build their team that way and coming up with a strategy that either sort of blocks them while also effectively allowing me to maximize what i'm doing in other categories like that's sort of

the challenge is is reacting to what everyone else is trying to do or is likely to do with a better strategy that works because of how everybody else played it. It's kind of like we talked about with Project Goat. At a certain point, maybe there's diminishing returns with punting saves. Eventually, it becomes a good idea to not punt saves. That's why the Icon strategy became so valuable.

Right, and when you don't know exactly what everyone's going to do, even though the results are being run in the window next to you, you have to choose your subtle adjustments carefully along the way. So at the very beginning, everyone's kind of doing the same things. They're looking at the same 30 or 40 players in the first few rounds. And you plot your general direction by choosing which stats you want to build around or which positions maybe and in the 1990 draft last night i think fred zinke crushed in part because of piazza but he also did not take a full punt strategy on any stat no he didn't punt anything and he also drafted

it was pedro astacio i think was the player and it was strange because estacio and i ran my values which i i'm pretty sure i did not do perfectly but i did well enough i had like half of a map to to get to where i needed to go uh estacio had a really good strikeout season that year he had 210 strikeouts which in 1999 was actually a lot but he had a 504 era a 504 era he pitched in colorado and he had a 143 whip and that player was picked on a winning team but a 143 whip among starters in 1999 was pretty much like league average like if you give every team because it was the middle of the crazy steroid years yeah and, and a 504 ERA, it jars us because we would never

choose that. It doesn't hurt you as much as you think it does if you've built in the right cushion around that. And when you know what you're buying before you get him, you have that luxury and you get 17 wins.

The value of wins in that situation is more than you realize. We're so trained to not chase wins looking forward for good reason that it still kind of is counterintuitive even when you have the result. It's 17. It's counterintuitive to choose players because of wins even though it's a huge thing that gives you a lift.

It's very important. I noticed he also had one reliever, I feel like. Yeah, I'm trying to pull up the results again right now. I thought he had 17 saves, but maybe he got John Franco. But yeah, punting saves would probably be the most logical category I punted average last night and

the thing that I screwed up but it hurt you in runs in RBI it ended up hurting me in runs in RBI or something was off with how I was tracking players like I had a big spreadsheet with my projections in it had the values ran, ran the formula, sorted by value. I think what I should have done

is decided to punt average before the third round and built the values around that to then boost up the value of runs and RBIs. I think what was also happening is, normally, in the environment we play in now, a guy that hits 25 or 30 homers, drives in 100, scores 100, that's awesome. But look back at 1999 for a second. Oh, man.

A whole bunch of guys that did that. And I think I was just kind of tricking myself because of the way I was putting it together. Manny Ramirez had 165 RBI that year. And I think i screwed up i think i had a choice of of manny versus sammy sosa and i took sosa and i think i actually would have been better off taking manny because of where i fell short in the end like i won home runs by enough like i i it's the same thing as when i drafted ricky henderson in 82 just i just wasted production because i i got too much of a category again. So basically what you're saying in a way that could be actionable to other people who are

not doing historical drafts or going forward is that if you are going to do a punt strategy, and I think some of what we're learning this offseason with GOAT and these historical ones is that punting is a viable strategy even in in roto yes um if you are going to punt and and i'm sorry if someone's rolling their eyes and they already they always knew that but i've always tried to build balanced teams um and um the the the thing that the sort of ancillary part is if you are going to punt you know punt from your first pick well i think or or have consider that yeah from your first pick i would say make punting more of a like a plan a plan b you've brought it up as decision trees before right go into it knowing like okay if

this happens and i can get like let's say you're gonna punt saves like that that's what you think you're gonna do if this series of closers are available at these prices i will go ahead and pay these prices for these guys only if that doesn't happen i'm punting and in the i'm punting plan here's what i'm doing to counteract that. It does make your margin for error smaller, but it also gives you a chance to max out in the other categories. Instead of maybe being third or fourth in a bunch of categories, you've got more chances to win a greater number of categories. So it is viable. I just think you got to be smart about it.

And I know that's not actionable in and of itself, but you can't just go into these drafts, even knowing the stats in front of you and wing it. You have to be very calculated in your maneuvering. And I think Fred was really good at that. This was his first one too. And he came out and his, uh, the thing that made it really kind of stand out, the last player he needed was an outfielder. Everybody else was either filling their ninth pitcher spot or a lot of people were getting their second catcher. And he drafted, I think, Ryan Klesko with his last pick, who was still pretty good.

And I'm out here drafting Terry Steinbach. Pretty big difference in terms of the impact that the counting stats make in those two players. But he figured some things out ahead of time. Brian Klesko, for those who don't know, in 1999, hit.297 with 21 homers and 80 RBI. And Steinbach hit... Prepare to be underwhelmed.

Yeah. It was the last year of his career. He hit.284 with four homers. Right. He was like for me as a team that had an excess of foam runs and knew it, that didn't matter. The batting average thing didn't matter either. But 35 runs and 42 RBI mattered. my last pick came up. But if I could do it again, I mean, there's a few things that can help. In the 99 pool, if you look back at it, that was a great Pedro year. It was a great Randy Johnson year.

It was an awesome Pudge year. Any of those guys as building blocks, that steers your early strategy a little bit. Not getting those guys, you got to look at it a bit differently. I would have probably jumped Mike Piazza up as my first rounder because there were more players like Sosa, even though Sosa was awesome in home runs that year.

There are more players who could help make up that ground available late. You know, Klesko types, right? Relatively speaking, you could sort of make up that difference and gain an advantage by having a legitimate early round catcher. Like those guys were awesome. Pudge was the fourth overall pick for good reason. And Eric Carabelle did really well. He was owned on like 70% of GOAT rosters, Ivan Rodriguez, in 1999.

So I think that would have been really valuable. I mean, just look at him versus terry steinbach 332 average 116 runs 113 rbi 35 homers 25 steals that's that's nuts yeah and those numbers if you took away the catcher designation would still be comparable like like pudge was probably a little better than even albert bell who was a pretty early pick in this draft. And you get the catcher bump, too, and you look at the gap. Comparable to Bobby Abreu, hit 20 homers, 27 stolen bases, hit 335. Yeah, so to get that from your catcher when the drop-off, when you see it play out,

as extreme as it was, that was something that I did not account for well enough. I was a little bit too agnostic early on and it came back to bite me yesterday. Yeah, I think these have been valuable exercises. I'm surprised. How many of these

have you done now? I've done three. And you think you've learned something each time? Yeah. Sometimes it's just more random, like hey, this guy was really good back then. Not very useful for going

forward. No, but I mean, I went into I've kind of gone into each one with a little bit more prep work, and I'm trying to hone in on the optimal way to go about it and i think i'm getting close after three maybe if i would put more time into it i could have got it right from the jump but i'm i'm trying to also enjoy it and use it as like a a relaxation exercise as well but the the competitive juices start to flow a little bit if you haven't uh you've been

three and you haven't won one yet or even been near the top at the end, it gets you a little more fired up. So you've got a Jeff Erickson winner, a Fred Zinke winner. Yeah. And Brian Feldman, I think, won the first one. I think. I have to look back. But yeah, so they've been fun. And again, Todd's actually, I think, selling.

I think you can buy the sheets through Masters Ball, if I'm not mistaken. I should know for sure. But it's pretty cool to have that available. I know some people that wrote in to us actually were building a classic draft tool of their own. So, I mean, it's more fun than I thought it would be. And I am starting to learn some skills and things that will I think be helpful for future drafts. Yeah. What was that thing called?

The one we got from our listeners? Yeah. It was the live draft tool. It was from Seth and David and email didn't put the name in.

Yeah. That's those. Seth Webster. Yeah. Project Goat Live Draft. Google Sheets Draft Tool. Did tense. It was really well done.

He's at rotodash if you want to check it out yourself. If you want to check that out. If you got questions for Todd about his, he's at Todd Zola. Before we sign off, how about Beer of the Week? Should we do a Beer of the Week? Ooh, Beer of the Week. I will just go with my mother's favorite beer out of the package I sent her. And that was from Pure Project called Super Beta, I believe. Let me see here.

She just wrote me back. Super Beta Murky IPA from Pure Project. That was a favorite. And then I also had a box of Portland beers or Oregon Northwestern beers. And I wanted to highlight one that was not necessarily, I didn't pick it as my favorite going in, but I really liked it. And it was Cool Party from Boss Rambler Beer Club. and it was Cool Party from Boss Rambler Beer Club. I've never heard of Boss Rambler Beer Club, but it was a West Coast IPA that had a little bit of crispness to it. And it kind of made me rediscover.

We've gotten so far into the hazy thing. This one made me rediscover a love for West Coast IPAs. Sometimes I go back to West Coast IPAs and they seem very sweet. Yeah, they're almost a little sticky. Yeah, and that was the idea. The descriptors were sweet and dank. Those were kind of the things we talked about when we talked about West Coast IPAs. But this one was really cool because it had a little bit of sweetness and a little bit of that dankness,

but it also cleaned it up at the end with a little bit of crispness. And I think it was called something like a new West Coast IPA. And I kind of like that idea that there might be a revisit of the West Coast IPA when we come out of, you know, because at some point we're going to get tired of hazy. I sometimes look in my fridge and like, okay, what's not hazy in here? And so I like the idea that maybe we'll kind of revisit West Coast IPAs and make them a little bit more crisp. Yeah, I think that'll be an interesting development if we do get back to the more traditional IPA, since you're right. Hazies have taken over for a few years now. The beer I had, also an Oregon beer, I think I mentioned it for a previous Beer of the Week, but I finally got a chance to drink it, was Matryoshka from Fort George. It is a barrel-aged

Russian Imperial Stout, and it's a big hitter. It's like 12% alcohol, but it was good. You know, classic right in the molars. Really nice, like, bourbon chocolate flavor. I thought it was pretty comparable to Old Rasputin with some extra juice from the barrel, I guess, would probably be the beer that it reminded me of. It's another one from our friend Danny Kugler. He sent us, I think he sent both of us some stuff or brought us stuff at First Pitch Arizona. So thanks to Danny for

sharing that. But every single beer... Did it have a... It says here that a small portion of these barrels receives them out of love. Vanilla beans, coconut. And of those barrels, only a few will be blessed a second time with berries or coffee beans or exotic spice.

Did you have any of the special smaller batch ones? There was raspberry in this one. That was the other thing that came through. That's what made it stand out to me. It wasn't tart raspberry. It was just that extra little bit at the end, and it was nice. Oh, I bet you that was good.

Yeah. 12.8%. It's there from Astoria with Love, Hardy Russian Imperial Stout Seasonal, and then they put that back into barrels with some extra stuff. Ooh, I bet you that was great. Yeah, it was really good. So thanks to Danny for sharing all of those beers. I've had a few already.

I've got a couple still left. The Block 15 stuff he sent me was really good. So thanks to Danny for sharing all those beers. I've had a few already. I've got a couple still left. The Block 15 stuff he sent me was really good too. There was an IPA, I think, with spruce tips that I had. That was like right when the box got here. I had that one right away. Spruce tips are... We're going to have to do some trading with some East Coast people, don't we? Yeah.

I'm going to need to do some trading in the near future. I'm going to need to do some trading with some East Coast people to get't we? Yeah, I'm going to need to do some trading in the near future. You need to do some trading with some East Coast people to get... I'm on a beer chat. I'm going to hit some of them up for some trading because we don't want to have...

A lot of our beers are West Coast and Midwest. They are. Are you Midwest? What are you? I am Midwest. Okay. What region were you going to put me in? Middle?

Middle, yeah. I've never really heard anyone describe it as middle. Middle. What does Brick say? Brick's doing the weather in Anchorman, and he's like, compare that to 45 degrees in the Middle East. I think he points at, like, Kentucky or something.

He points to, like, eastern part of the Midwest maybe is where he goes. Yeah, the Middle East. Classic, classic Brick Tamlin. But I've got a few beers from Delta Beer Lab also that I picked up last week, so I'm going to get through some of those. beer lab also that I picked up last week. I'm going to get through some of those. They have Honey Red Ale, Mango Ghost. Kind of like you were saying with the

Great Hazies, I just want to mix it up a little bit. I think I saw a thread going on because you put a beer out there that was barrel aged with a ton of adjuncts. It sounded amazing. It was only 5.5 or 6% ABV.

And I do want lower ABV stuff because I'm at the point now, I'm trying to run a little bit, trying to get outside and walk and exercise. The weather is getting better. And try not to just go to sleep after a beer. Yeah, I'm trying not to just drop in a 500-calorie beer every time I drink a beer. That kind of makes everything else cool. I'll say it was good, but there was trade-offs. I mean, it had the chocolate and the coffee and a fair amount of taste that you wanted,

but the trade-off was without the alcohol and without what it said was barrel fermented, not barrel aged. And so you didn't get the oak thickness that you get from leaving it in there for a full year um or six months even and it didn't have um that sort of just thickness was a thing so it ended up tasting a little bit more like a porter you know where you you've got some you can have some flavors you have a little bit of bitterness

um but you don't have that kind of sweet thickness that you get from a barrel-aged stout. So it drank a little bit more like a porter with adjuncts in it. I didn't hate it, but it's sort of like... What are those? Sweeteners? Like aspartame?

It's sort of like drinking something with aspartame and you're like, well, that gave me the impression of sweetness, but not one that I enjoyed. I think the hardest thing about a beer... Makes you want the real thing? Yeah, the hardest thing about a beer like that would be the thinness, right? I think you put a note in the tweet

that it just didn't have the same mouthfeel, the chewy, the hits you in the molars feeling that you've described before. And that is part of what makes those really good thick stouts play up a little bit too is that the texture, it fits with the flavor. Like if you were to get almost that much flavor with a beer that's thin, it would mess with your head a little bit. Yeah.

Yes, I agree. So, not one of my favorite beers, but an interesting attempt. That was Dissolver Eat the Rich. Well, interesting stuff for sure.

As always, if if you got beer recommendations for us questions whatever it might be you can reach us rates and barrels at the athletic.com be sure to spell the word and you can find you know on Twitter at you know Sarah's you can find me at Derek Van Ryper if you're enjoying the show please take a moment to leave

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slash ratesandbarrels. And thank you to all of you for doing that. We really appreciate your support, especially in these times. That's going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Tuesday. Thanks for listening.