Rates & Barrels - Surprising rebounds, year-over-year barrel rate risers, and overcoming less than elite stuff

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss several surprising 2021 rebounds, the limitations of using launch angle as a standalone stat, year-over-year risers in barrel rate and wOBA, and more.  Rundown 3:00 Surprising 2021 Bouncebacks 10:43 Buying the 'new' Madison Bumgarner? 19:54 Launch Angle Changes: Kris Bryant, Mike Trout, and Ronald Acuña 27:24 Year-over-Year Barrel Rate Risers 35:47 DVR Sticking with JVM + Other Undervalued Bats 43:11 Great Deliveries & Spin Direction, Less than Elite Stuff Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Subscribe to The Athletic for just $3.99/mo to start: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels presented by Topps. Check out Topps Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards. Derek Van Ryper here with Enal Baller. We'll try that name on for size here. Got it on the screen if you're watching us on YouTube. We're going to talk about some bounce backs on today's show, some early surprises in that regard, and we'll try to figure out just how real those bounce backs are. We're going to talk about some launch angle movers

and some other stat cast shifts that have occurred early on this season. We've got a lot of great mailbag questions coming in every day, so we're going to take as many of those as we can on this episode, which is cool. Ask good questions, and we have thoughtful answers and segments about them. At least we try to have thoughtful answers and segments about them. How's it going for you on this Monday? It is good.

I'm going to have to tell Mrs. Baller about the name change. Your kids are going to like it. I don't know if your wife's going to like the name change. That's right. No, all is well. We went camping, which is to say that I didn't sleep. So I'm a little rough around the edges today, but it was fun. We went up to China Camp, which is this spot in San Rafael that's against the bay.

We were hoping that it would get hot enough to want to get in the water, but the wind did not cooperate. And so I'm really jonesing for a hot beach experience. I've had enough right now of the, I've got a hoodie and a long-sleeved shirt on at the beach, Northern California situation. So if people listening might be interested, I think the Friday, July 2nd, I will be out and about in San Diego, probably at North Park Brewing. If anybody wants to come by and have a drink and say, what up?

We are allowed to do these sort of things now. So I'm excited to do that. Excited to go to a beach in San Diego that hopefully I won't have a hoodie on. Decided to see some friends in LA and San Diego in late June and early July. Nice. We had a day that was supposed to be a nice day on Saturday here Diego in late June and early July. Nice. We had a day that was supposed to be a nice day on Saturday here.

It turned out to be 55 and rainy. So I think there were some people that were planning to get their boats out for the first time. I did see one boat just flying across. I'm going to do it anyway. Yeah. I was driving home from rock climbing and I was doing that indoors, wet conditions, probably not ideal for outdoor rock climbing rock climbing but i saw a boat just flying across lake monona i was like you know what i respect the hustle like you decided you're getting the boat out today and you didn't let 55 and rainy stop you so kudos to you boat owner for not bailing on your plans let's get to some of these

bounce backs though i want to talk about mitchager, among others. But Hanager, I know you liked him throughout the offseason as a guy that, with health again, should have had a prominent role in the Mariners' offense, and he's had that so far. get acclimated to facing live pitching again because of the amount of time that he had missed and the magnitude of the injuries also raised some questions about and how much power he might have right away but we're seeing some of the the best per game production of mitch hanegar's career he's got a dozen homers in 39 games already he's got a career high 575 slugging percentage so far he's actually brought his k rate down from where it was when we last saw him in 2019. And frankly, he looks like a really nice trade chip for the Mariners, given the number of younger outfielders they still have coming up through that system. So how did he pull this off? I mean, what makes you think that this could actually be somewhat sustainable? I know he's not going to club 60 homers this year, but this looks a lot like the guy we saw in 2018 and maybe even a slightly better version of that. Yes. I think

that the thing about Hanegar is, well, cards on the table. I was talking to him about this story that I've got that I've been working on for four or five months that comes out on Tuesday. It comes out tomorrow as of the time of this recording. And so I knew that he was doing something cool with his bats. That is the main part of the story. So I knew that he was doing something cool with his bats that would help him kind of reach the upper end of what was possible for Mitch Hanegar. And then I also knew that,

and you saw this on MLB Now, but I also talked to him about this a little bit, that he was obsessed with hitting the ground running in terms of having his timing. I mean, it was interesting that you brought that up because he talked about how he would do this thing where you turn the machine up to 98, 99 miles an hour, take a few hacks and take a step forward closer to the machine. Take a few hacks, take a step forward closer. And he would do that until he couldn't make quality contact anymore. So he's been in effect looking at 105 and 106 effective velocities seems to be, have done a really good job at preparing him for the high velocity we've seen

this year, the most velocity in the history of baseball, really. So between those two things, I just made a big bet on him. And so I have shares of Hanager everywhere. And I don't really, I don't know, like what's unsustainable? I guess, yeah, the power is on the higher end, the outcomes. But that can regress and he can still be a really quality player. And I guess the speed has gone. That's the one thing that went away in the surgeries.

I don't even know if he'll steal three or four bases. But the other story I did with Andrew Bagley about how teams are now stealing bases on the pitcher and doing it with math and are more effective than ever. I could see him still stealing three or four bases when they're just like, this pitcher is really slow. You can still make it. Albert Pujols stole like four bases this year. So I'm all in on Hanniger.

And the bat thing that's coming out, I kind of just want to tease it because I'm really excited about it. And I don't want to give it all away. But it turns out that in Major League Baseball players bat bag in the 12 bats that they get in one shipment from the bat manufacturer, there's a tremendous amount of variability in those bats. there's a tremendous amount of variability in those bats and uh without going into it anymore i can say that as soon as there's variability like that uh you should take notice because uh that is a potential for there being good and bad bats in the same bag, right? It's almost like identifying the good bats and using those and maybe identifying the bad bats and not using those

would be pretty important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's him and Jed Lowry were both on this one and in this story and are both seeing pretty good bounce backs. Both had very similar stories in terms of like wanting a surgery that the team wouldn't allow them to have and having a different opinion on their medical background, on the medical situation of, of their, you know, of their bodies than the team coming to an impasse and then eventually being allowed to do what they

wanted to do. And in both cases, the player was right about his health and got the surgery they needed to get and got right and also did this bat thing. So that's why I had a few shares of Jed Lowry and Mitch Henniger coming to the season. Just a little unfair, I guess. And I would have told you guys about it. I mean, I think I, I've talked about being, you know, interested in Jed Lowry and Mitch Handiger on the show before. I just couldn't necessarily talk about the bad angle because, uh, that was developing. Yeah.

No, you mentioned both of those players back during draft season in the appropriate context. So there was definitely some warning, some indication from you that those guys could actually turn things around in a pretty big way. I think if you look at the projections, the projections for Lowry are less optimistic, which makes sense given his age, right? I mean, we're talking about a 37-year-old who also missed all of the shortened season and only was able to play in nine games for the Mets back in 2019. So he's basically missed two years. And the 2018 season was really that new level that he found late in his career that I don't know if anyone necessarily saw that coming. 23 homers from a guy whose previous career high was 16 all the way back in 2012. That was a pretty

big step forward. So if you look at his projections the rest of the way, they're less than a full season's worth of playing time. And I think six to eight home runs is the range you're going to see if you look at the set over at Fangrass. I think there's a chance he could top that, but it basically requires him to just remain healthy all season. I think if he gets to 100 more games, then we're probably talking about 15 homers at season's end. Yeah, I mean, the best barrel rate of his career right now, 10% barrel rate. The best EV, average EV and average launch angle don't contain a lot of information. But how about this? The best max EV of the StatCast era for Jed Lowry. So I think it just all points in the same direction. He's healthy.

And I believe that 2017-2018 level is still in him. So I'm going to take the over on the projected homers. The Bat-X already has it up to 8. I'm going to push that a little bit more just knowing the backstory and knowing what's going on and knowing that he feels finally healthy. I think he'll finish with something like his 2017 season. 277 average, 14 homers, good amount of runs on RBI on that squad that's overperforming or just performing well. overperforming or just performing well.

Yeah, I think there's something about projecting the end of a player's career, the actual drop-off that is A, not fun, and B, somewhat difficult too. You never quite know when a player has truly lost so much that they can't make enough adjustments to be productive anymore. And I think if we're going to shift the focus over to the pitching side, Madison Bumgarner is a really good early bounce back story. The first couple starts this year were not good. I mean, he had the Padres, I think, on the road on opening day. Obviously, a tough assignment when that lineup is really healthy. And I believe he caught the Rockies in his start after that. Of course, he had the seven-inning no-hitter a little earlier this year.

If you look at the skills, the underlying numbers are as good as they've really ever been. 10 Ks per nine, two walks per nine, home run rate sitting right around one per nine. This is kind of a vintage Madison Bumgarner. Maybe it's not as hard to see it since he's only 31. It feels like he's about 41 because of how quickly he got to the big leagues and the workloads that he's logged to this point. Are you buying into Bumgarner pushing back and at least being the guy maybe that we saw during his final two seasons in San Francisco, right? If you look at those two years, maybe he could run a mid threes or high threes ERA with a pretty good whip again and continue to miss bats the way that he's been missing him to this point in the season. Wow, what a group of players who started this out.

Yesterday's stars. You know, I want to, like, go to, you know, the stuff plus numbers, and there's a couple interesting things in here, because Zach Buchanan just wrote a pretty cool piece about Bumgarner coming back to, you know, rounding back into form. And one of the things he said was that in the first three starts, Bumgarner, they were trying to brief Bumgarner and make him do the part of their game planning process. And he was kind of just either overwhelmed or not feeling it. He was either overwhelmed or not feeling it.

They made a little bit of an alteration for Bumgarner. Now, basically, his catcher does all the preparation and puts the sign down, and Bumgarner executes it. If you look at his location plus, it took a big leap up after that change. He was below average in location plus until the catcher took over, and he's had a couple 115s and 110s in that regard. So I think that was a good move. The added velocity that he's shown has increased his stuff

to the point where his stuff plus is league average. But this is where I want to kind of jump off from stuff plus because this is a guy with a demonstrated track record and 1900 innings on his ledger and i don't think he ever had amazing stuff plus numbers um he's had some pretty good command plus numbers and there's something about him his either his arm slot or the location strategies he has or the combination of pitches he has that's given us a great sense of his talent level. So in this case, I actually just trust the projections more than I would look at stuff and Command Plus and that sort of stuff. So I know that there's actually a fair difference in the projections. So there is going to be some non-numbers-based work here.

I get some intuition. So my intuition says Steamer is right. 4-2-6 ERA, 1-2-5 whip, 9 strikeouts per 9. I think that he'll give up a few more homers going forward, but he'll be a good pitcher. Still miles better than my expectations for Bumgarner coming into the season if he hits the steamer projection, and there is a chance he beats it. The other thing about Bumgarner that's always been pretty interesting,

his extension, right? He's one of those guys that's among the league leaders in terms of where he's actually releasing the ball. The stuff plays up because it gets on the hitter quite a bit faster just because of the way he's actually built. Yeah, extension didn't make it into stuff plus. I was interested to see if it would or wouldn't because when they chose the different things that would go into stuff, plus the feature selection extension made it in. So that is supposedly captured, but I don't know.

There's, there's something about his delivery that I think does make it hard, especially when you're talking about the difference between a curve and a cutter on the inside, because the curve will hit your toes and the cutter will stay high and maybe stay for a strike. And so you kind of have that like combination of like, do I swing or do I not? And he kind of plays with that really well. So, you know, I'm, you know, the last thing I want to say about Bumgarner is that he is a horse in terms of innings pitched. And if he pitches to like a 4-2 ERA but throws 200 innings,

he's actually going to end up annoyingly because it's not the type of pitcher that I will roster much. Even like a 4-2 ERA guy with 200 innings, it's going to end up being a top 30 pitcher. Yep, because the strikeout volume will absolutely be there. Even if that rate ticks down a little bit where it is, he'll be close to it. He'll be a volume guy.

Definitely a relative miss for me, and he was just free. There was really no reason not to take the flyer on him unless he just thought he was cooked, and I was on the side that thought he was cooked. Let's talk about Matthew Boyd for a moment because I think he kind of fits into this conversation as well the weirdest thing of all about Matthew Boyd though is that the effective version of him that we've had early this season has come without strikeouts we saw the k rate jump way up in 2019 even in 2018 and 2020 he was missing more bats than he is now he's under 20%

with the k rate for the season sitting sitting right at 7Ks per nine, but he's walking fewer hitters than ever, and he's not giving up home runs to this point. Do you think one or both of those changes is actually going to stick for Boyd? Yeah, you know, the Stuff Plus doesn't like him. He's got an 88 Stuff Plus. It says his changeup is below average, and in order to have a better Stuff Plus, yeah you know the stuff plus doesn't like him he's got an 88 stuff plus it does you know it says his change up is below average and and you know in order to have a better stuff plus he should throw the change up less but i think that part of his resurgence has been throwing the

change up more uh something that uh alex fast and i have been asking for he's throwing it the most in his career i think that's just contributing to fewer homers because it's just another pitch that players have to, hitters have to prepare for. And you could see how throwing a changeup more often

would lead to fewer strikeouts and fewer homers and across the board it's been a good decision for Boyd. So I wouldn't necessarily tell him to throw the change up less because stuff less says so. It'd be interesting if Boyd can mix back in some high strikeout games. This last one against the Cubs was kind of fun where he had eight strikeouts in six innings and

one homer. It also gives him a scouting report to play with, right? Because then teams will be like, oh, he's throwing the changeup more. You've got to watch out for the changeup. And then he has a game where he just all throws a bunch of sliders, right? So I think he's become a more dynamic pitcher. I think he also has a fairly established track record, but the pitch mix change makes me think that maybe I take the nicest projection on him again. The steamer projection. 4-2-2 ERA,

1-2-4 whip, 9 strikeouts per 9 innings, and a little bit of that homer problem coming back. Kind of like Bumgarner, you're talking about someone who's working a ton of innings, had the one meltdown outing against the White Sox back on the 29th of April where he only went one. It wasn't such a meltdown that he was just awful. I don't know if he got hurt and left that start early, if there was rain or what was going on there,

but five and two-thirds or more in every single outing, and you got a few sevens and eights on the ledger for Boyd, which is really hard to find these days. So plenty of volume. Maybe better in quality start leagues because he's two and four. Yeah. Because the Tigers are tough. Yeah, but maybe building back some of the trade value

that he lost from a couple years ago, maybe the kind of guy that teams that are hurting for pitching would be looking at and trying to acquire this summer. Yeah, he's got another year after this that the team would have control over him. So it wouldn't be a full rental, which helps his case. So I would expect Matt Boyd to be pitching for somebody else by the end of this season. Yeah, Twins, Red Sox, somebody, some team that's looking to bolster its rotation here in the near future. Definitely makes sense to me, but nice adjustments that he's made so far.

I'm really curious to see where those actually go in the weeks ahead. All right, you know, we had a question come in about some launch angle changes, and the question was about a few players who have been off to great starts. It came from John, I believe. Is there anything to the fact that Bryant, Trout, and Acuna have significant reductions in launch angle and have retained power but also hit for average? Obviously, they're adjusting to the high fastball, but is it something only the elite can do

or the leading edge of a league-wide approach in adjustment? So what do you make of these changes in launch angle from three guys that have been really productive to this point you know absent a major swing change i think mostly something like a median or even an average launch angle change probably just comes from them being pitched differently if you look at where launch angle comes from, I've had this in my pieces where a heat map of where a launch angle comes from, it comes often and mostly, I think, from placement in the zone.

High pitches go for high launch angles and low pitches go for high launch angles and low pitches go for low launch angles. So I would assume that those guys are being pitched differently and that the success that they're having on batted balls and their launch angle are not linked. It's like a sort of a case of correlation and not causation. The causation is that they are hitting the ball hard in the right angles and they're also being pitched a little differently.

But I doubt that... Brian actually is interesting to me because there's a health factor and there's a possible... He tinkers with a swing a fair amount. So there is a possible change there. But J.D. Martinez, if you look at him, has never been a guy who ever had like a high launch angle. And he's been kind of like thought of as the poster boy for launch angle and launch angle swing or whatever that is. And ironically, he's never really had a super high launch angle. And it's only about just hitting the ball hard when you like hitting the ball in better angles when you hit the ball hard.

And those angles don't have to be super high. They can you can you can hit a homer out of 25 degrees. have to be super high they can you can you can hit a homer out at 25 degrees yeah i think part of this kind of gets at something that i've thought for a while and haven't talked a lot about on the pod i don't know if launch angle by itself is all that useful to us as something we look at on a player page or as a leaderboard metric because there's a lot of ways to get to an average that looks good that might not be the profile of a good hitter. So I would say if you're looking for something that captures guys hitting the ball in the right angle consistently, that sweet spot percentage, which is right next to launch angle on the StatCast leaderboards,

that might be better because you're looking at percentage of batted balls that come out between, I think it's 8 and 32 degrees is where they put the cutoffs on that. And you want guys who hit the ball in that range of angles frequently because you're getting line drives mixed in there and you're getting fly balls that aren't pop flies and infield flies, right? You're getting actually quality contact balls in there. And when you sort by sweet spot percentage, you can glance across the board pretty quickly

and see if those players also make a lot of hard contact. You'll find some outliers on the board in terms of guys I don't have for power. Like Miles Straw is seventh in sweet spot percentage among qualified hitters. He doesn't hit the ball very hard, so it's not going to help him that much. If he starts hitting the ball harder, however, he could have some unexpected power because he's putting the ball in the right angles. Yeah, yeah. And just like you're saying uh that sweet spot percentage is

is a little better than uh is better than average launch angle i would say that like um hard hit rate is better than looking at average exit velocity um but then if you follow this along you'll be like okay so sweet spot and hard hit that's great uh do you know one stat that just like puts those two together oh yeah maybe it's that barrels thing we're always talking about yeah right so a stat so good we named the podcast after it um no so uh i do like barrel rate and you've heard me say that a million times so i don't need to say it again but um i do think that barrel rate also may have a bias towards power hitters where um if you looked at sweet spot and hard hit rate, you might discover some guys that just are good line drive hitters and will be good hitters for average and good guys that that are able to make the most out of the batter balls, even if they aren't a bunch of homers.

You know, like Jed Lowry is not going to lead the league in barrel rate but i you know he has a good sweet spot and he has a good hard hit rate yeah 45 hard hit rate and uh a sweet spot percentage in the 40 range that is good i mean that is a good combination of things that's that's why we're comfortable with that power i hadn't even looked but i was right yes yeah and the reason is that jed lowry is like and the and it does and it comes down to reach rate, our other favorite stat. Like, Jed Lowry is like, I'm not going to swing at the stuff outside, and I'm only going to swing at some of the stuff inside. And I'm going to only hit it in these angles, and I'm just going to make the very most out of my skills because I'm not Mike Trout. Jed Lowry is very definitively not Mike Trout.

Yeah, that's good. It's good to know you're not Trout. You can fit two Jed Lowrys into Mike Trout, I feel like. That's another Photoshop challenge for you for the future, by the way. Interesting leaderboard, though, because you look at the sweet spot percentage leaderboard right now. Robbie Grossman among qualified hitters first. not necessarily a guy you'd expect there but probably not totally dissimilar from jed lowry and just realizing hey this is what i do well and he's

always controlled the zone really well let me just maximize making quality contact on the pitches that i can do some damage on. We're seeing a different version of Robbie Grossman than what we saw earlier in his career, back when he was basically limited to small side platoons. We knew him as a guy that could walk. That was pretty much all Robbie Grossman did when he first broke into the league. Now he's doing a bit more than that. You see other good names here. Judge, Brantley, Bryce Harper, Jared Walsh, Nick Castellanos. I mentioned Straw before. Justin Turner, Mark Kanha. We are the A's and former A's.

You see a lot of those guys on this board. Yohan Mankata, Dansby Swanson, Jordan Alvarez, right? I mean, this is generally a very good group of hitters atop the sweet spot percentage leaderboard. Yeah, and Tyler O'Neill shows as having a huge increase. He's the leader in increases going from 23% sweet spot last year to 44% this year. You know, the strikeouts are back, but at least Tyler O'Neal is murdering the ball in the right angles this year. So I have a feeling that he could be a guy that can hit 220 230 with power and speed um and it's probably too late to pick him up and we should have maybe had this conversation a week ago but

you know he's still out there in some leagues yeah he uh he is so the other i guess related question here as we kind of look at different things that change that make hitters more productive barrel rate changes just from year to year we were looking at the there's a cool We kind of look at different things that change that make hitters more productive. Barrel rate changes just from year to year. We were looking at the, there's a cool page over at Fangraphs. We've talked about this before. I'll explain how to find it, I guess. Go to the leaders tab on Fangraphs and then hit the season stat grid.

And then you'll see across the top, you can change hitters and pitchers, but you can also go from normal, which is the default setting to year to year changes. And then you can lower the thresholds for playing time, which you kind of have to do to look at this season and last season to about 50 plate appearances for both. And you can look at all sorts of different stats and how they've changed for players year over year and sort by the biggest risers and fallers. So we were doing that looking at barrel rate or barrel percentage and it's

pretty interesting because Bryant is the biggest riser in barrel rate from the shortened season to the current one the other guys on this list generally doing pretty well right we have Chris Bryant Matt Carpenter Josh Donaldson Yadier Molina Tyler O'Neill inside the top five but you get a few surprises the further down you go. Shohei Otani, not a shock. He's killing the ball. Luis Urias is up a lot in barrel rate. We haven't quite seen it in the overall numbers yet.

But if you've watched the Brewers lately, you are seeing Urias make a lot of hard contact. Some loud outs, deeper parts of the outfield. So maybe he's getting his first extended try, too. This is it. This is the moment. And I feel maybe he's getting his first extended try to like this is this is it this is this is this is the moment and i feel like he's rising to it like i i'm i'm glad to have a few shares yeah he's still better suited i think for deeper mixed leagues not necessarily a 10 or 12 team guy right now but i think not looking over his shoulder and not worrying every day if he's going to be in the lineup or not and just being healthy all those things are that's part

of all that traded away rca i think so and it's just weird to me that the braves traded for them because they didn't really need shortstop depth in particular but i guess that's neither here nor there but uh so you look at the barrel rate changes you look at some i think you were looking at the wobah change leaderboard year over year two probably some overlapping names there but were there some other names that really popped that were up a lot in Woba? Well, Kelly is number one, Carson Kelly. We've talked about him a fair amount,

but Josh Rojas is third, and I think that's a fun one to highlight because if you checked in on Josh Rojas early in the season, you were probably like, eh, that one didn't work out, you know, and you kind of looked away because it's the Diamondbacks and because he's not going to pop on any leaderboards in terms of homers or steals or anything.

But, you know, look back at him again. You know, he's hitting 280 with five homers and two steals, and most of it, maybe the power's a little bit over his head, but most of it looks like right in line with what he could keep doing. You know, I think he can hit 260 and finish the season with like 18 homers and 15 steals.

Dude. And he's also eligible in a few places. So he's been saving my buttocks in a few leagues. But other other guys that show up on this uh they're interesting for different reasons in terms of a breakout byron byron buxton is interesting because he's got he's the one of the few guys on here that has three years in a row of improving his wobo uh he's the only one on there has done that um and uh so you know that he's done the same in barrel rate, right? Yes. And the barrel rate year-to-year changes, first thing you're going to notice, they do a good job of flagging the changes red for

negative changes, blue for positive changes, which seems sort of counterintuitive based on StatCast coloration. But the year-to-year patterns that you see with barrel rates tend to be, you go up, and then you come down. You go up, and you come down. You don't usually see year-over-year growth like that for Buxton. And some people are going to be quick to point out, yeah, but he was barreling the ball like 1% of the time three years ago. So he really started at the absolute bottom, gave himself a path to actually improve year-over-year over year over year. But now he's hit this level where it looks like Buxton's becoming the star that people expected him to be years ago when he was drafted. And I think I got to go back into some of the deep dives that Dan Hayes and Aaron Gleeman have done, looking at just how Buxton has changed his approach and

how the twins have maybe coached him differently compared to what they were saying to him earlier in his career. Yeah, because there is definitely a bad ball component for Buxton that's pretty interesting. Tom Tango pointed out, actually, that his average launch angle has gone down while his barrel rate has gone up. So this is right into our conversation that we're having about how maybe average launch angle is not that interesting. And the reason why it's working for Buxton is his mishits. Instead of his mishits being weak and under where he's hitting pop flies,

his mishits are now top and over where he's hitting ground balls. And since he still has excellent speed, he can make more out of that ground ball than he can a pop fly. And yet his barrel rate has advanced through even as he's made this decision. So I think that we're seeing the most, we're seeing a breakout happen. And even if you look at, he's the only one that has three years in a row improvement that's in the top 30. But even if you look at guys who've done it two years in a row there's an interesting group vlad uh mike's and nino which i can't quite explain but then cedric mullen's down there and

that's it so you know mostly what's happening is regression although it's people don't think of it as regression when it's progression or positive regression i know that's super awkward uh but it's regression in that you look at last year's barrel uh you look at the improvers they all had down years last year in barrel rates if you look at the woa improvers they all had down years last year in terms of Woba. And so I think that when we go year to year, we should really trust projections because they are building in this regression. And they're building in for barrels. You had this example. Read me the Josh Donaldson barrel line in terms of improvements. The Donaldson year-over-year barrel line is

absolutely wild. Let me get it here. He's third in improvers for this year, but he started in 2015. He was up 11.4%. Then in 2016, he was down slightly. In 2017, he was up slightly. In 2018, he was down 4.5%. In 2019, he was up 6.9%. In 2020, he was down 8.3%, and now he's up 10.2%. If you used Josh Donaldson's barrel rate from last year to project his next year, if you just really weighed on it because you're like, oh, Eno's always talking about barrels. Barrels are great. So Josh Donaldson had bad barrels last year.

He's going to be bad this year. You would have been wrong on Josh Donaldson every single one of those years. is going to be bad this year. You would have been wrong on Josh Donaldson every single one of those years. In the offseason, I trust projections mostly. Chris Bryant has been up, down, up, down, up, down, and the

projections are going to be more correct than following any sort of any of this up and down, even if it's barrel rate or any of these things. I love stuff, but stuff is better in season. It tells you, ooh, Shane McClanahan, after one start, go get him. Ooh, Daniel Lynch, after one start,

not going to be a big factor this year in fantasy baseball. But then going forward, the more data we get on a player, Madison Bumgarner, maybe stuff Plus doesn't matter as much anymore. Madison Bumgarner has given us... Can you imagine telling Tom Glavin in his 16th season about a Stuff Plus? No. Or Jamie Moyer in year 46. Yeah, right. I love stuff. I love barrel rate.

I love reach rate. And I think they're super valuable in season. Uh, but when it comes to season to season, you'll see this, just play around on the changes. And like, anytime you do positive changes, the whole leaderboard the year before was negative almost. So, you know, so like, it's just, uh, it's just the up and down nature of playing baseball, I guess. You know what this leaderboard, this year-to-year changes leaderboard has also led me to is a renewed belief that Josh Van Meter will be a useful big league hitter someday. I truly believe that. I'm not just sticking with them because we have Dutch ancestry in common.

It's not that at all. I'm actually intrigued. We got multiple years of improvement with the barrel rates, doing that in limited samples, of course. But this is a guy that just needs a run of playing time. It's probably going to come on a team either as banged up as Arizona is right now or on some other team going through a rebuild. If Arizona doesn't find time for him and he gets pushed off the roster,

some other team is going to claim him and give him that opportunity or he'll go on a really good team as a bench piece and need injuries again but if he gets the chance i think josh van meter can actually hit a little bit yeah and i like the barrel changers thing of in season again uh so here are a couple names that i that I think pop out for me on that one are Avisail Garcia. Avisail Garcia, sorry. He is a monster. I mean, he is just a physical, tooled-out guy. Every time that they show the sprint speed thing, people are like, he's that fast?

But yes, he is that fast. He just looks like a linebacker. And I think that they're going to need him to play even with christian yelich maybe a week away i uh have been picking up garcia as a short-term usage in in in shallower leagues because he's hitting the ball really well he's gonna steal some bags and he's gonna hit for an okay average i think it's kind of oatmeal-y at this point, but it's useful in all leagues. And then in deeper leagues, I think Austin Hayes, right above him at 13th in barrel rate improvement, is not necessarily going to hit for a great batting average

and maybe not steal any bases, but the power is real, and it's really nice to own Baltimore Orioles when it comes to July and August. But hitters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not so much to the pitchers. Well, and I think the thing with Hayes, it's pretty interesting, too. If you take a look at the batted ball profile, ground ball rate down quite a bit.

Makes sense, right? You're barreling the ball more. You're not hitting on the ground as much. So I do like some of the shifts we're seeing there. Holding his own with the plate skills, too, right? He's not striking out uncontrollably. He a little bit and he's a great defender so that drives his playing time the outfield can be a little crowded there but i think he's more of a priority guy for them as an organization to figure out how much they have there i mean i think they

could see there is a path where cedric mullins and both and aust Austin Hayes are potentially on a good Orioles team someday. That could be the carryover from their rebuild that actually makes it and does some damage when the Orioles possibly become good again. Yeah, I think that Stewart may have the biggest trouble once Anthony Santander comes back. Santander seems like he might be a week or so out. DJ Stewart is

probably, you know, he's not one of the top three defenders in the outfield. And he's not going to necessarily rest playing time away from Mountcastle. So I think he becomes a more definitive fourth outfielder

when Santander is back. But it's kind of interesting how that whole thing has settled down. I thought at some point Yuzniel Diaz would be up and they'd be cycling through new guys, but it seems like the Orioles have found the outfield that may be there, like you say, when they're good. Hayes, Mullins, Santander is a pretty good outfield. Yeah, and it's possible they have to trade

one or two of those guys before they become good again just because if the pitching doesn't come together or if they don't find enough talent up the middle. The middle infield is horrid. Right, they might not get those pieces in place quickly enough, but it's also not impossible for them to get those guys and then actually have some of their core already in place. So I think those are definitely some good names to think about

as you're looking at possible targets. I think they could be three years out, man. You already got Means. I believe in Kramer. You're just asking some of their guys like D.L. Hall, the prospect, Pitcher, Aiken, Bauman. You're asking some of their guys like D.L. Hall, the prospect, Pitcher, Aitken, Bauman. You're asking some of those guys to pop. If they do do that, then I'm seeing a future where it's like Means, Kramer, Hall as a 1-2-3.

Some of those guys will fail and go into your bullpen. You just need to find some middle infielders. There's not really an answer for that right away. Do you know the prospects well? Free agency, though. There's some shortstops coming up. There's a bunch of shortstops coming up. Grayson Rodriguez is in that mix, too.

I think he could move pretty fast. He could be a possible top-of-the-rotation type guy. Not a one, but at least someone who's top half of your rotation. So that's one more interesting name. The position player prospects there, Hested Kirstead, the early pick from last season. Yeah, another outfielder. I wonder if I should look and see

where he's been playing in the minors, if they're just committed to keeping him in the outfield or if they think he could maybe find an infield spot that works. I don't think there's anything in the profile that would lead me to believe he could be an infielder, but that's the other little issue. It's like if you see all those guys in the outfield currently is sticking, well, you don't have any spots

for some of your outfield prospects where you actually have prospects. Yeah, but just like I'm scanning for middle infielders and they've got a couple, a second baseman that Fangrafts gave a 45 future value in Jordan Westberg and Terran Vavra. But those guys are 22 and 23 and a rookie in A ball. So the age at level doesn't speak that well of them. And it doesn't seem like they're being tagged with high upside in the future.

And they are not shortstops. You go even further down the list to get to the shortstops. So I don't know. You know, one thing that does pop when I look at this team is like, maybe you don't always have to have a building block superstar shortstop because, you know, there's always a Freddie Galvis around. Galvis is fine if everywhere else is doing well. You just sign the next Didi Gregorius.

A lot of those late career shortstops are going to want to go to Baltimore. Even if it's just a short-term deal to try and get a longer-term deal somewhere else. Offensive stats and go get one more deal after maybe. Yeah. Well, it's also possible, though, with an early draft pick that you find that player in any given draft class, right? Quickly, right. Within the first top five. Because those are short stops a lot, right?

So you could just pick a college short stop with your first pick and he might be there in two or three years. Yeah, or you get a Jordan Lawler and you've got maybe an equivalent of a bobby witt jr type prospect in your system a year from now and suddenly people say oh you've got a shortstop now who's two years away oh that's pretty cool you just got that so i do think they could find that solution relatively quickly given where they're at in their rebuild where they're drafting and some of the prospects that are usually atop the board who can help in that regard but yeah i mean a few years away they're at in their rebuild, where they're drafting, and some of the prospects that are usually atop the board who can help in that regard. But yeah, I mean, a few years away. They're not totally hopeless at this point. All right, you know, we've got a couple more questions to get to. And this next one's really interesting to me just because I think it drives

that finding some more players where it's not always obvious that they're going to exceed expectations and maybe this kind of bumps into seam shifted wake and some of the things we've talked about over the course of the last few months the question comes from cameron he writes i know eno wasn't big on ian anderson after last season but it seems like he's going to stick as at least an above average pitcher his curveball and change-ups are still good but he's lost some rise on the fastball. The thing I noticed about his curveball is that he throws it at a six o'clock tilt and has only a half an inch of horizontal break.

It is, in a sense, a true 12 to six curveball. Do you think there are some other pitchers who may fit this ilk of not great movement, but an elite delivery and possibly spin direction? Thank you, Cameron. Yeah, it's an interesting question. By stuff plus, the curveball ends up average. The changeup is slightly above average,

and the foreseeing fastball is poor. So Ian Anderson right now is showing a 90 stuff plus, and in terms of command plus i think he's good but not great uh let me see what command plus says uh it's got a 100 command plus so i continue to be fascinated by him one thing i wanted to point out was uh in the feature selection for stuff plus we do have one called spin angle is in there spin rate matters um but spin angle does too so there could be something about that that's making the curveball um actually a an average pitch there uh when it doesn't go very fast.

Mostly the harder breaking balls do better here. So I would say that it's probably in there to some degree. But Anderson is just, to me, super fascinating because there is no consensus about him even now between scouts different like warring factions between scouts but also even in the numbers this is a weird he's in a weird spot because he's a guy who's had home run problems in the past who does not have a home run problem now he's a guy who struck out tons of batters in the past who is striking out fewer batters now and is walking a ton of batters. He's done that always.

In terms of K-BB, he's not exciting. In terms of stuff, he's not exciting. In terms of command, he's not exciting. His projections are actually okay. Like the bat, 386 ERA, 130 whip.

But that's not exciting. In a weird way, it actually kind of reminds me of some of the skills flaws that I've been tripped up with with a teammate of his, Max Freed. Because if you look back at Max Freed's career, the walk rate when he came into the league especially was elevated. He's actually done a good job bringing that down since that 2018 debut i think yeah and you know he's got a little bit more of a home run issue than anderson has shown right now so a different sort of flaw but i think coming in the walk rate was always something that gave me pause with max freed the results to this point are a little better than most the projections at least at least in terms of the ERA. I think the bats got him at 416 for a projected ERA. His career is 374.

Misses plenty of bats, though. And I think you might have some people who still probably fight a bit about Freed and his true ceiling based on what he's done to this point. Yeah, yeah. Freed's got a fair amount of seam shift to weight going on in his pitches. But, you know, he's having a real hard time right now.

Oh, how about a would you rather? I just traded for Freed in a keeper league, actually, because I feel like the inflation on starting pitchers in particular is just through the roof. And it was a rare opportunity to get a guy that I don't know if we'll ever see a full season of ratios anywhere in the neighborhood of what he did in 2020. But let's just say that Max Fried is the high three ZRA guy that he's been so far.

And maybe he brings the whip down into that 125 range. On a good team with plenty of strikeouts, you're really happy with that. We're looking at that as top 30, top 40 range starting pitcher in a deep keeper league who would you rather have out of these two guys though would you rather if they were both on the on the table yeah let's just say like a short term long term whatever if cost is just going to be like equal in terms of one for one who Who do you take?

I'm taking Ian Anderson. I think I'm taking Anderson over Freed. It's not by a landslide, though, because I still see that walk rate for Ian Anderson is a problem. You don't get by with an 11.3% walk rate year over year. You don't do that. It could get better. I guess that's possible. It's just

hard for me to construct the argument for Ian Anderson. It's like, okay, let's say he's a command guy. Because when you watch him sometimes, you're like, oh yeah, I could see him being a command guy. Well, why does he have so many walks then? Is he just

always throwing outside the zone on purpose? Actually, that inspires me to look at his zone rate. Well, while you're looking that up too, the one other thing that I'm wondering about here, it's like we're talking about a scenario where they're valued evenly. If you tried to trade for Ian Anderson right now,

it will cost you more than Max Freed. Which is once you throw that in, I'm taking Freed for sure. Right. With the discount, I think Freed makes sense. And again, I'm saying this as someone who doesn't expect him to be a monster. I'm expecting him to be a competent, consistently productive young pitcher, not a superstar. If he becomes a top 20 starting pitcher, great. I got lucky. He hit the high end of his outcomes, but I don't think you're necessarily banking on that based on the overall body of work that we've seen from him to this point.

Yeah. Projections are very similar on them too. But also, you know, there's very, there are variants. There are variants between the projection systems again. It looks to me like Steamer has a different run environment than the other projections right now because they have lower projections on every pitcher.

But I'm looking at Freed Stuff Plus. He's got a 103 to Ian Anderson's below average number. And the slide and the curveball are just rated really excellently. And the fastball's an 83. So, you know, I think I'm betting on that two breaking ball approach.

I'm betting on Freed. Do the Stuff Plus numbers like those breakers from Freed the same as they like Anderson's changeup, or is Anderson's changeup a more highly graded pitch? No, Anderson's changeup is a 102, and the slider from Freed is 142, and the curveball is 112. I have to tell you, Stuff Plus loves sliders. There are some wicked numbers on sliders here.

But it's kind of hard to disagree with that when you look at baseball and you realize that everyone's throwing their slider more and more every year. It could just be that sliders are inherently good pitches. Do you think the league as a whole is commanding sliders better, though, too? And that's what's made the pitches more effective, aside from the fact that the stuff is actually better, right? More movement, more velocity on sliders than in the past. But is the command of those pitches better than it historically has been? I think it's actually, I've talked to some players and, you know, beyond the fact that you practice your fastball more than anything else, sliders, I think, might be inherently more easy to command. People talk about, if you think about

movement, there are a lot of gyro sliders that are 0-0, which means that they basically are like a bullet shot. They're just sort of spinning and going straight. I think a straight pitch might be easier to command. You just throw it and it goes. Like an out-of-vino slider I think would be hard to command. I know that we're talking about different things, but I think you have to be specific.

If you're talking about like a hard cutter, that might be easier to command than a sinker. Well, I'm just trying to think about nasty pitches and why hitters chase them and it's because they look like they're going to be a strike and they're not and where exactly they go doesn't matter at a certain point like i have david williams airbenders like this like you see it coming out of his hand it looks like it's going to be a strike whether or not he commands it perfectly doesn't necessarily matter as long as it looks like it's going to be a strike coming out of his hands because he's just trying to get you to chase a pitch that you cannot hit. You could miss your spot by a couple of inches, but as long as it looked like it was going to be a strike,

whether it missed inside or under the middle part of the zone, it doesn't really matter that much. Yeah, that's why hard sliders, I think, are so effective is because you can throw them and they look hard. So now you're like, oh, fastball, right? And then they just drop out of the zone. So did you come to a firm conclusion on this? If cost were equal on Anderson versus Freed,

you're on Freed because of the breaking balls? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know why I'm on the Anderson side entirely. I think maybe it's the results, feeling like you got there somehow. The recency bias is a B, dude. It is, it is. I don't think there's that much that separates these two guys,

regardless of which side you're on right now. The projections are both for high threes, low fours with not great whips. I think as we were kind of hinting at, if you're looking at trading for one, Freed's probably the one to trade for though, given that relative cost will be lower.

Yes, I agree. If you have questions for us for a future episode, we we got a couple we'll save for wednesday fire them our way rates and barrels at the athletic.com you can see on the screen if you're watching us on youtube we still got that 3.99 a month subscription offer up at the athletic.com slash rates and barrels you can get in now read eno's feature piece coming out on tuesday you can read that zach buchanan piece that we talked about about Madison Bumgarner. Lots of great work coming out each and every

day, plus all the other fantasy baseball stuff that we do as well. Plus, we're getting close to the point where some of the early fantasy football content will start finding its way to the site. If you are a multi-sport fantasy player, good news, that's only really a few weeks away from rolling out. Hard

to believe we're hitting that point of the year already, but we are. When half the people on your fantasy baseball team start doing something else and your fantasy baseball league start preparing for another sport. That is going to be real this year because of all the injuries. I think people are getting frustrated and they're going to have kind of some injury fatigue. And we're going to get to July and August. And if they just feel like they've been fighting it for four months the quit level might

be a little higher in some leagues. There is something actionable about that. If you're in a league where you think some people might quit out try to acquire now. Try to make more deals now. You've got to deal with those teams that you think are flight risks now because you're not going to get a deal.

They're not even going to answer the emails. They might even feel bad about making a trade at a certain point if they're checked out. So you've got to keep an eye on that. On Twitter, he's at Inoceros. I am at Derek Van Ryper. That is going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.