Rates & Barrels - The Best Pitching Staffs in Baseball & The Worst Pitches of 2024 (So Far)

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Eno, DVR and Trevor discuss the best pitching staffs in baseball coming out of the 2024 Trade Deadline -- comparing the Stuff+ and WAR projections to effectiveness through the first four months of the season. Are the Phillies still an elite playoff staff? Will the Dodgers sort out their best rotation options before October? Does the crew have any faith in the Guardians or Royals staffs? Rundown 2:26 Ranking the Best Pitching Staffs in Baseball by Stuff+ 6:09 Disconnect Between Twins' Rotation Results and Projections v. Model Output 13:45 How Does the O's Top-Three Compare to Other Likely Playoff Teams? 18:01 The Phillies Still Look Great, Especially at the Top with Zack Wheeler & Aaron Nola 22:55 The Bullpen Depth Goes a Long Way in the Postseason to Mask Flaws of No. 3 and 4 Starters 27:56 Do We Have Faith in the Guardians or Royals' Staffs? 34:06 Is Everyone Sleeping on the Astros? 36:42 The Worst Pitches of 2024 (So Far) 55:00 Manipulating iVB on Fastballs to Keep Hitters Off-Balance? 1:01:13 Pitchers Employing Different Approaches Impacting Home/Road Splits Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper Follow Trevor on Twitter: @IamTrevorMay Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Join us at 1p ET/10a PT on Thursday, August 8th for our next livestream! Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Host: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris With: Trevor May Producer: Brian Smith Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that goal to beat your personal best? Keep chasing it. Drive your ambition, Mitsubishi Motors. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Thursday, August 1st. Nice, clean, new month. Derek the Ripper, Trevor May, Eno Sarah's all here

with the special shout out to the Live Hive watching us on YouTube. On this episode, we are digging into the best pitching staffs in baseball. We've got an eye toward the postseason, trying to figure out which teams will be the most dangerous if their current groups of pitchers are healthy and if they are playing in October.

We're gonna take a look at the worst pitches of 2024 so far. Good news, two months left. You could still be a winner in this category by the end of the season, but there are some current front runners that look like they may have it locked up, at least with a few different pitches. We'll dig into why.

Got a couple of great mailbag questions. We'll take some live questions along the way today as well. Trevor, how's it going for you coming out of this trade deadline? I just had a fried brain for an entire day yesterday, a little bit, I gotta be honest. It was, I did not know that it was gonna be like this, but it's a lot of fun.

I mean, it's just, man, there's a lot you can say about it. So, but overall, doing all right. I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around the fact that you just said it's August. My wife's baby, my wife's baby, my baby's due next month, which is, I'm in that moment. I'm having that moment. She'll be doing more of the work on that day. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, a lot going on, a lot going on, but I'm good. It's good. Everything's good. Life comes at you fast. You know, how are you doing today? It does. It is weird as a member of the media, huh? Like, it's a big day. It's, you know, you're on the radio at you fast. You know, how are you doing today? It does. It is weird as a member of the media, huh?

Like it's a big day. It's, you know, you're on the radio. You gotta do the, I'm sure you were on, you know, a couple of different places and you gotta do stuff yourself. You gotta tweet, you gotta write, you know, you just gotta, gotta do a bunch of stuff. And yeah, at the end of it, I was just like,

ah, like I need to just get a beer and sit down and watch a game. Like, let's just get back into relax mode for a second. Yeah, our stream on Tuesday was riddled with some hiccups on the output, so that was extra stressful. That made the edit of the episode extra stressful.

It felt like we had a week in the first two days of the week, so hopefully everything is rolling smoothly for us today. But we begin today's show ranking the best pitching staffs in baseball He's making an attempt to there's a lot of ways to go about this You could take a look at a projected war leaderboard Or you could look at something like stuff plus which we tend to do a lot on this show because I think this Opens up more dialogue war has a lot of teams you'd expect to be there, right? If you look at that leaderboard, it's the Phillies,

the Twins, the Dodgers, the Mariners, Braves, Orioles, they're all in there among the contending teams. We pulled out some of the teams that are below 10% for playoff odds for the purposes of this conversation because they are very unlikely to rally back and make the postseason if it happens. Of course we will talk about those rotations at the appropriate time. But you know, you put together a massive leaderboard here.

I am stunned that the Red Sox are number one in stuff plus as a rotation. You could have given me 10 guesses as to what team was in that top spot and I would not have used any of those 10 guesses on the Red Sox. Yeah, I snuck in your war projection with the depth chart rank basically. That's their what their overall rank is on Fangraphs. But this is the top three starting pitchers for each playoff bound, playoff contending team and what their stuff plus is, the Red Sox are killing the fastball and maybe rightfully so because later in today's

show we're gonna be talking about the worst pitches in baseball. There was one way in which I sorted the worst pitches in baseball and it was all fastballs. And so the Red Sox have seen stuff like that, results on fastballs, results on consecutive fastballs, results on fastballs third time through the order, all sorts of different results on fastballs, and they have cut their fastball usage more than any other team in baseball down to depths we've never seen before. That also helps your stuff plus, because your slider has a better stuff plus than your fastball most likely.

And what we're seeing there is kind of modern pitching at its finest. The reason their ERA isn't projected so amazingly is that's a tough park. And you have that a little bit with the Yankees too. Those are two teams that I think if you just focus on projected ERA, you would miss the fact that they have really good starting pitchers. They have a really good playoff starting pitching situation. Just look at the Stuff Plus for the Giants and how that links up to such a different number when it comes to ERA. So I think this passes the sniff test mostly.

One of the big surprises for me is down at the bottom, the twins have, you know, by the depth chart, you know, the second best rotation in baseball by ERA, only an okay number by Stuff Plus, a number that fits between the Cardinals and Mets and Royals. That's not, you know, Cardinals, Mets, that's passed the sniff test. The twins get there on location. They have the best command among all of the different rotations. But if you think about all of their top three guys, they have home run issues.

Maybe not Pablo Lopez so much, but you know, you're talking about Ober and Ryan, they've had home run issues. So I think that's just a really interesting result that you have the twins near the bottom, despite, I don't think, if you were doing just sort of a blink assessment, if I just asked you off the top of your head, would you put the twins in the bottom of the sort of playoff eligible teams? Sort of a question for you guys,

but Trevor, you're kind of a twins homer. Yeah, I mean you could say that. Being towards the bottoms a little bit interesting I would have if you would have been like guess I would have said probably middle of the road but you know it doesn't surprise me that the stuff plus isn't crazy high for those top three guys you know even even Pablo Lopez is the ace, is at times kind of, a couple of his pitches are kind of just average. Like forcing fastball, for example, is just kind of an average fastball. It's more on the dead zone than not. And he has to use the other stuff off of it. And then Joe Ryan and Bailey Ober have ride, but they don't throw overly hard.

And they don't have high swing and miss on that either. So like having to depend solely on other pitches, you know, I know we just talked about the red sides but like that makes the command so important and that's why they focus so heavily on it. So it's like an example of like they know, they know they don't have that power arm at the front of the rotation and they use their stuff. They're just really, really efficient and really optimized.

And that's why they keep getting guys coming up that are super optimized. So it's not super surprising for me, but that's an issue when you get to the playoffs. Because some of that stuff goes out of the window, your sample sizes are just smaller by their nature. And so we see this happening constantly where you have three solid pitchers going out there

and then two of them have slightly worse days than they've had all year or Worst than average and then you lose the series and it's over So the problem is you got to have a I think you need a number one guy who can take over a game and then use The momentum and the pressure of a playoff series to enhance their stuff I think that's always gonna be what you're looking for at At least one guy, the game one guy that just goes. The Madison Bumgarner guy. Yeah, Madison Bumgarner. I grew up in Atlanta and we had Glavin,

we had Maddox, we had Smoltz. I always liked Smoltz so much, especially in the postseason because he was the fire-breathing monster. He was the guy that could get that extra tick of miles per hour and become more dominant, whereas Glavin and Smoltz relied more on carving people up, relied more on the umpire.

What if you got the if you got the right umpire? We saw Glavin with Eric Gregg. I think it was, you know, that was a crazy game. Glavin versus Livon Hernandez with Eric Gregg giving them like a foot outside the zone. But, you know, but at the same time, like Smoltz didn't depend on anybody. You know, he was the guy who was just going to throw nasty stuff in the zone and and dominate. That's your kind of your kind of playoff monster, I think. But I do think it is interesting to see the Red Sox so far near the top because I don't know,

I guess is Pavetta their playoff? Like, who's their who's their ace? Like, they almost seem to be a similar team where it's like you have three pretty good guys, I guess, but to see them up there is a little bit surprising. The Giants have been made fun of for saying they have the best rotation in baseball, but they're not far off. In terms of ERA projection, they're second to the Dodgers.

In terms of stuff, they're third. You going out there with Webb, Webb, Snell, and Ray, that's pretty nasty actually. So I think they're getting too much hate for putting it that way. But you know, I do think that this does represent a little bit of a problem when it comes to the Cardinals, the Mets, the Brewers are near the bottom, the Guardians are near the bottom, Diamondbacks are near the bottom. I don't know that I would say this immediately makes them underdogs in any postseason series, but that is my tendency to think that way.

Yeah, yeah, this is a good point. Yeah, Uncle Ted in the live hive, Rangers didn't have an ace last year and they won. It happens. It just puts pressure on the rest of your team, right? Like it just needs, your bullpen needs to be great and your offense needs to be great. With the Rangers, the offense was great and the bullpen was just good enough.

That bullpen. Just barely. That bullpen was not like the traditional fire breathing great bullpen that you look at and say, oh, okay, fine, starter went four and change, starter went five, no problem, it was bumpy. And Jordan Montgomery, as Steven points out, jumped in and pitched kind of like an ace in October, even by results, even though it wasn't necessarily

overpowering electric stuff, right? He just, he had that kind of run for them. He did it, but would anyone have predicted that he was gonna do it? No, you'd never bet him again. It's just one of those things like, again, He did it, but would anyone have predicted that he was going to do it? No. You'd never bet him again. It's just one of those things, like again, Bailey Ober could just go and be just absolutely lights out in the playoffs.

And then we're just like, oh, well then we just didn't anticipate that happening because that's just not necessarily what he does. All the time he's had moments, like he's done that. So it's all about timing too. But you want the guys you can count on that do that more often, the Garrett Coles of the world, the, you know, the Justin Verlanders, the, I mean, I made E of Aldi, it's not like they didn't have a guy where the,

you guys will step in the box, like, I got 96, 97, the guy throws seven pitches, like I have to, you know, it's not like everyone was throwing 91 and just dotting the edges, right? They had a guy that could take over a game, he didn't, not necessarily, he threw well, he threw fine, but like, he could,

he's a guy that could be that guy on any given day. And you at least want a guy who could be that guy on any given day. Yeah, I know a lot of people have been disappointed by what Pablo Lopez did for most of the first half of this season relative to what it took to get him back during draft season. There's a question here from Steven,

Ober, Ryan, Pablo Lopez all have good changeups and splitters which could maybe hurt that stuff grade a little bit because it's interesting if you compare that stuff number to something like the K minus BB percentage of the starter so far. The twins lead the league in that again. I think they lead it last year or they were right there near the top of that leaderboard. So there is something in how stuff is spitting out a number that is a little bit misaligned with what the twins are doing. Yeah, at the same time, you know, as they are great in K minus BB, you know, they are also

great in home run rate. Yeah, they're, nope, they're not, they're, they're pretty bad. They're six, six worst. Yeah, that's their flaw. I think that they kind of fill up the zone and have good command. Some of the stuff that comes up with change-ups and splitters is that like a guy comes up and he pitches two games and then everyone says, why is the splitter grade bad? It looks good.

And I have to tell people it takes longer. But once you have as much sample as you do with these guys, change-up grades is, here's another way of saying it. We're doing bad pitches later. And you know, one of the things I was looking at was who throws a bad pitch a lot by stuff plus. And I didn't find a single splitter that someone threw 15% of the time

that had worse than an 80 stuff plus. There are other pitches, we'll get to them. So, you know, it is So you know it is I think it is good to have if you trust the splitter and you throw up 50% of the time it's probably gonna be pretty good. The question is is it gonna be is it gonna really line up with the results or you know I don't know. So it's possible they're being underrated it is totally possible. It is also possible that they understand some of that command. That is hard. I think that command is one of the hardest things to really nail in metrics.

And I bet you that teams have some better numbers behind the sauce. I've got a question for you both about the Orioles. We talked about them a bit on the stream on Tuesday. They added Trevor Rogers as the second rotation addition. Of course, Zach Efflin is the guy they previously traded for from the Rays So it's a good deadline when you add two guys that are in your rotation and one of those guys efflin should be a playoff Starter he should be their game three starter behind Burns and Grayson Rodriguez So as a trio Burns Grayson Rodriguez Zach Efflin for the purposes of exercise

Where do you think they belong in terms of quality are they? is this exercise, where do you think they belong in terms of quality? Are they top end among playoff teams? Are they kind of middle to pack among playoff teams? Are they kind of bottom third among playoff teams for you guys, just based on what you've seen from them over the course of this season, and maybe even going back to last year a little bit too,

because Zach Efflin's performance going back to last year is a little bit uneven. So we don't really know which Zach Efflin we're going to get down the stretch and in October. I mean for me they're top four or five among the playoff contenders. I've got them six by stuff plus they are second by third by ERA projection. They have good command. If you're asking me like just to sort of assess without the numbers, Burns and Rodriguez,

I think are really solid. I think you could make a case for like third or fourth maybe. I mean, I think it'd be really like I have the Pirates in this mix, you know, because they're, they're technically, you know, still playoff eligible playoff contenders. If you're coming at me with Snell and Jones and Keller, uh, I know the numbers don't have the number one, but. You mean skeins by the way. Skeins, Skeins, Jera Jones and Mitch Keller. No, he said Snell. Snell. Snell. Nice. All right. I was looking at the Giants. Uh,

yeah, if you, if I'm doing skeins, uh, Jones and Keller, like, does there a team that beats that? I think it's as good as any trio you're gonna put out there right now, yeah. Yeah. I would take them in a three game series. Actually, to be honest, the only one that I think that a matchup would be awesome

would be Giants and Pirates. Yeah, that would be pretty intense. Because I wanna see that, I wanna see the way that that plays out. Also with their offenses, feels like one nothing wins those games. So with the Eflin thing the interesting thing about the Orioles I'll take Burns against anybody I think he's just as an ace as the aces get and I

think Grayson Rodriguez though has been up and down and had some clunkers that have inflated his numbers in my opinion he's another guy who just take over a game and has that type of stuff. So I take those as one too. The thing is, like you mentioned with Eflin, Eflin's a big command guy and he's not a take over the game guy and he's the type of guy that in the playoffs, if he's not feeling really, really, really good, it might not go great. I don't think he has that dominant pitch. talk about burns got the cutter Graceland Rodriguez, I think probably the fastball, but you know, he has a bunch of different pitches I think with Eflin there was a time when the curve was really going well And then this year for some reason the curves really falling off and I think that's

Left him without a dominant pitch that he can go back to if something's Going if he or if it's the playoffs we We see that in the playoffs a lot, right? Guys just going, this is my, like, no one can hit this today. I'm just going to throw this. Like, this is the plan and you could got it. Like you got to be able to go there. Someone's got to beat this before I'm changing. Yeah.

And then honestly, like I always, the big comparison I always do for Ethlin because of the way they pitched and the way their demeanor was, it was Gibson, Kyle Gibson. Like, Gibby's a great guy to help you get to the playoffs, but he tends to go to the bullpen for the playoffs. Just because of the nature of how he pitches, he just doesn't take over games. He eats innings.

And in the play out, it's just a different beast. And it's a different, you gotta go to a different place. And that's not, like just throwing everything out the window and going to the best two pitches you have that day, it's just not the way that they pitch. It's just not, they're not comfortable doing that. That's, that they don't feel like they're doing everything they can. And there's just, that's a completely valid way to approach things. It's just not, it doesn't fit very well in a playoff

kind of mindset. And that's why we kind of see that. The Phillies don't do amazingly by a ranking of stuff plus, but they also have great command. They've got, you know, by Fangraph's death charts, they're number one. And if you just, if we, again, step away from the numbers, and I'm telling you, you go Wheeler, Nola. Ranger? Sanchez? I mean, Ranger if he's healthy. Ranger. Ranger?

Yeah, who do you like better out of Ranger or the same pitcher in my opinion? I'd take Ranger. For experience, honestly, at this point. And this might be controversial, but I get a little bit more of the Eflinish vibes off of sticking Ranger in there. But Wheeler and Nola, I think you could put up against anybody. The weird thing for Nola for me is just the year to year changes are so wide.

You know, like, oh, that's a good point. You know, I think, you know, there's some home road splits here, which we'll talk about. But Nola's year to year splits are so wide. If he's just good in the years, he's good. Then this is a good year. Then good Nola. Then I think he deserves to be in the conversation with the pirates. You know, the pirates and the Giants.

I think the Yankees have a similar thing with Cole, where it's just like, if it was last year, Cole, you know, Cole Rodin, Heel, which is the trio I put together, could be number one. Yeah, and at times it feels like it's so far away for the Yankees, but it's not. I mean, Garrett Cole just rounding into form after missing time in the first half,

that's not a difficult story to tell yourself. And even if Rodin is halfway in between the guy he was with the Giants and the better versions of himself that he's been with the Yankees, that's still a really good pitcher to have in a playoff rotation. Trevor, what do you think of whole body soreness? He was sick, man. He was just sick. Didn't Joe Kelly go on that for an IL for that for like a month?

Total body fatigue? General body fatigue, yeah. I saw a follow-up on it. You're just not getting over it, but yeah, that's what it comes up. It was a follow-up. Yeah, he just feels weak and like no energy and lethargic. Yeah, he got a flu or something. He probably had COVID.

He probably did. And they did like this. And it's just the flu. Like it just looks like the flu completely now. So, but that's why it lingers. But again, he, it's one of those years for him where you just keep taking it in the chin. Like you come back. I actually had the same thing. You just seem to be getting right again. Yeah. In 22, I came back from my arm and they got COVID like two weeks coming back and then I had to take 10 days off again It was just like one of those things like I felt good I think it was getting going and he was too so but

Fortunately, there's still too much left. I get those vibes from Snell sometimes where it just sort of sometimes the injuries just sort of like He's like what the heck man steamroll what now my groin now like He seems like he's back to being himself now. We talked even before the struggles happened, we thought, hey, maybe this is going to be a little bit of an adjustment phase, just having a new catcher and just looking back to what he did even in San Diego. His first year in San Diego was his worst year. Once he got settled in, then we saw Cy Young Blake Snell again. So if that adjustment has already taken place he could be that guy down the stretch. The Giants are so fringy for this conversation. 11.2% chance of making the playoffs according to fan graphs but just enough to hang around.

Yeah it seems a little bit you know disingenuous to be throwing the Giants and Pirates in the mix when you're just like I don't even know if they'll make it, you know? So among the like, really, like among World Series contenders, I feel like, because their offenses, it's not about their pitching staffs, it's more about their offense. But if you're thinking about World Series, you know, contenders, I put the Phillies, the Yankees, the Orioles are in the mix. I think the Dodgers have too many question marks in terms of health and who's there and what they're going to look like. But the only one that we haven't mentioned yet is the Mariners, who I think, you know, it's a collection of guys where you're not sure. I don't actually know.

Screw it. Kirby's an ace. It's not necessarily stuff forward. It's more like command forward. But I think Kirby's an ace. It's not necessarily stuff forward. It's more like command forward. But I think Kirby's an ace. Logan Gilbert's pitching like an ace. And whoever you put in the third spot is gonna be better than most people's third.

If you're putting Miller in there or you're putting Wu in there, they're gonna be better than people's thirds. Castillo. Oh, sorry, Castillo, I didn't even mention him. So their fourth is gonna be better than anybody's fourth. That means that if you take Castillo out in the third because he just doesn't have it, you might stay in the game because it's Bryce Miller coming in. And the other part of this equation is you kind of look at the quality of every team's best three or best four if they

have a fourth they want to throw in a longer playoff series is how good is that bullpen? How many relievers can you rely on? A team like the Pirates, I feel like their A bullpen would be okay, and they may only need to use their able pen if they were to get in and their starters pitched really well. They're going to take the Rangers path to success and then three guys is good enough. Nationals did that one. Yeah, there's there's a handful of teams that have had success that way. But then for teams that have more questions in the three and four spot,

do you trust your fourth, fifth, your sixth reliever to come in and keep games close and pitch well in the deeper? That's where I think the Dodgers and Padres, if you think of a whole staff, which honestly, every game in the in the playoffs is whole staff. You know what I mean? Like there you can take a guy out in the fourth. It doesn't matter what his name is. You can take Garrett Cole out in the fourth.

You know what I mean? If it's a big part of the moment, a game and you're not sure. So, you know, the Padres bullpen now goes six deep with quality, quality pitchers. And I think the Dodgers, if they move River Ryan to the bullpen and if they move some of these guys that won't make their starting rotation to the bullpen, that bullpen gets a lot better. And I just think that sometimes

that doesn't go as well as people want. Think go move into the bullpen in the playoffs. I'd love to hear Trevor's idea on this. Like if you've moved from starting at the bullpen, what if you had to do that for the first time in the playoffs? It was easier for me than most people and I would have preferred to do it

in the regular season first. It's just- Or spring it in the radio season first. Or spring or the playoffs season. Or at any time other than then. Not the playoffs. Yeah, there's a nerves thing, there's a turning it on kind of thing you have to experience because starting is just such a slow ramp up, burn, like you know exactly when you're going to be in. Not knowing, managing those nerves is a skill that some guys struggle with a lot or they don't really like it.

And that's just random. Like I can't tell what type of guy it is until he does it. I thought Tyler McGill was gonna pick up relieving immediately and he just didn't. It's just not the way he functioned. And so it's not as easy as just throw them out there. There's certain guys with different temperaments, but you know, especially in River Ryan's case, they'll probably be, have an opportunity,

at least for the last couple of weeks, to give them some opportunities out there, just because. I would say about those Trevor Rogers, I thought that Trevor Rogers could at least be maybe a slightly better Trevor Richards, if it came to it, like really good change up, get the passball up. But there's an amount of training you have to do also to be max for 12 pitches and then do it again the next day, right? Like I bet you if we looked at it, people who switch to relieving gain more

VELO in the off season, like the next off season. Like they go to the bullpen, they don't actually get, they maybe get a tick or something because they just throw nearer to their max, but you really get more like gas if you have a whole off season to prepare for being a reliever, right? Did you see a VLO increase right away? Maybe not right away, but it was quick.

It was quick just because I just leaned into the, I already had that ability as a starter. I would have an inning where I would get really keyed in. And I think we saw, we were during Sunday night baseball there and Rodone did it towards the end. He was just like, the Velo was climbing in the sixth inning because he knew it was getting close to the end. And he just like, I could see it on his face.

He's like, just keep blowing heaters by guys until they. Freddie Peralta in the fifth inning the other day. Yeah, so. It was all 96. Yeah, so those type of guys, if they moved to the pen, they would have a hundred and, like, Rayln could throw a hundred and one out there, I think, I do believe that. Well, he kinda did when he relieved at the beginning,

he threw really hard, so. Right. But some guys are built that way, and some guys are, like, I hate to use Kyle Gibson again, but he doesn't add any Velo in the pen because it's just not the way. Yeah, you're not gonna put him in the pen

and be like, oh, he's 95. Because he's not gonna try, that's not what he's gonna do. That's not what he's gonna try to do. So, yeah, I just went out and I, basically I got the green, someone, Kevin Jepson, there's a deep cut for you. Oh, I know him.

He was my kinda mentor at the time because Glenn Perkins was hurt and he was a closer. So I went out and I kind of became the eighth inning guy because I added Velo. But basically he just said, dude, you can just see what you got. Like just, you're a fastball guy. Yeah, you're a guy who throws fastballs

and you try to get fastball swings misses. So I'll see what you can do. And then as soon as I saw like a 97 up there, because I hadn't seen one as a starter, I was like, let's see what else we got. And then it just went from there. And that's really what happened. I started to believe that that was how I was and then one as a starter. I was like, let's see what else we got. And then it just went from there. And that's really what happened. I started to believe that that was how I was.

And then I went for it. But I had the luxury to do that because my team was 20 games under 500 every year. And you also hadn't been a starter in the big leagues for many years. Yeah, I wasn't. I didn't have a lot of good starts. Yeah.

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Download the free Rakuten app and never miss a deal or go to rakuten.ca to start getting the most bang for your buck. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Got a couple questions here coming in from the LiveHive. Jamie wants to know, do we have faith in the Guardians starting rotation? I love Alex Cobb to death as a person, but no.

What about the other guys? What about Bybee? What about Gavin Williams? Gavin Williams, I was looking at him recently. It's very strange. So he comes into the big leagues and he has a certain fastball shape and he has a certain release point and he has a certain VELO. And ever since that first two or three starts, it's been changing. He's just been losing shape on the fastball, losing VELO, and it just hasn't been as good. There's been some injury concerns. I don't think Gavin Williams is the same guy

that we saw when he busted out of the gates. So no, I don't trust Gavin Williams. Tanner Bybee is gonna be on the wrong side of the list that's coming up. Yeah, he is, but he does a lot of things well. He has a really, really good slider. I'm not saying Tanner Bybee is bad. I'm just saying he's on the wrong side

of the list that's coming up. And then Alex Cobb would be your fourth or fifth guy or maybe your third guy in a pinch in the playoffs. He's suddenly like their two and he hasn't pitched in the big leagues yet this year. So no, I don't have faith in that rotation. Just erasing Ben Lively right there in real time. Oh, he's gonna feature heavily on our on our bad list coming up. How about the Royals though? They made the additions to the bullpen. They kind of quietly got Chris Bubich back. He's been working in relief too. So you take the

good relievers they had the relievers they traded for a guy like bubich. You look at the rotation. Reagan's and Lugo at least as a 1-2 look like a solid 1-2. I think the questions for them start to pop up in like a game 3 and game 4. Do they have enough to work through the longer series? That's where I think they would be the most vulnerable in the postseason. Lugo is a wide arsenal, a little bit more of a Gibby type. I like him and I was big on Lugo and kind of expected a little bit of a year like this. But when you get to the playoffs,

the lack of Velo changes things. Although I do wonder, he does have a ton of pitches. He's a Chris Bassett type too. So maybe he can just get in there and be fine in the postseason too. Because in the postseason, the hitters probably are trying to key in on that fastball,

get hyped and hit homers off the fastball, and he's gonna say, oh no, that was the cutter or the slurver, he says he's had nine pitches actually. Of course he does. Okay, you can be like, wow, you got eight pitches, like actually it's 10, he'll just add two, so that he can, it's just very Seth, that's very Seth, he's like, actually, it's more.

I like Seth in the playoff series, especially with the number of breaking balls, because I think you're right. I think he could dip. Like, I think that they won't be able to get a, if he's dialed in and commanding it really well, getting a bead on that and squaring anything up is also an-

Anticipating the right pitch, I guess. Yeah, yeah. You can't guess with him. You can't guess with him. And if he gets the off balance, it could be a really quick, like, oh, wow, Sembitting, we're't guess with him. You can't guess with him. And if he gets you off balance, it could be a really quick Like oh wow, seven inning. We're getting shut out Situation and also I don't like I've not heard a lot about Brady Singer But the guys having a really good year really good year

Results are there obviously metrically. He's never been Projectable in a big way. They improve their bullpen Maybe as much as more than anybody improve their bullpen maybe as much at more than anybody at the bullpen at the deadline? Absolutely. So the addition of the bullpen, it's almost as if they know, we're going with the 2015 Royals five innings, try to get to the pen type situation.

Especially with our third guy. I mean, as much as I like Singer, if you can take him out in the fourth, and you've got enough relief arms to get to the end of the game, then I think that makes him even better. First sign of danger guy. First sign of danger. Red light goes on.

We gotta get somebody up. Sub-3 ERA so far this year, 15.3% K-BB for Brady Singer. And well, we had the... Big addition was the four seamer, was the sinker, no, the four seamer, just to give him another look on the hard stuff and the sweeper. So he was kind of a sinker slider guy with a traditional slider and he added the four seam for lefties and the sweeper

Variety so he's more of a four pitch guy So we kind of have a few tiered groups. I think the Dodgers not having their Clear cut like these are our three guys right now, especially with Kershaw last time out didn't look good last night There's plenty of time a really hard time deciding when we were talking about this in the production meeting. Like we had a really hard time even deciding who the top three were. Yeah, they'd need these final two months to sort it out from a health perspective and just see like where are things at?

I mean, I think there's a world where River Ryan has to start game three for them if injuries continue to be a problem and if he's pitching well, he could be their third best option. We had that sort of Bobby Miller moment last year. This year, I picked Flaherty Glass now in Kershaw as the top three, but if you know, you're kind of hoping Yamamoto comes back and I think maybe you could make Kershaw be cool with that? Like, it's so weird. I don't know. And he's very competitive and he wants the team to win. I get a real good teammate sense from him, but also, you know, a little bit of Max Scherzer competitive fire where he might be annoyed that you didn't start him.

Maybe you just, you start him off. Yeah, I say you start him. If you're gonna piggyback, piggyback someone with him as opposed to the other way. I think that you're just better off that. Even if you think he's only gonna give you three and he still start him off. Yeah, I say you start him. If you're going to piggyback, piggyback someone with him, as opposed to the other way. I think you're just better off that. Even if you think he's only going to give you three innings, still start him. Because I think that's just the, like, he's just-

Because you're building Yamamoto back. So you're like, Yamamoto, we believe we need you. It's you and him. It's just, we're going to let him start for two innings, and then you go in. I think regardless of the number of questions about health and role, the amount of talent the Dodgers have stockpiled give you enough where you

You can kind of comfortably say yeah, we'll figure it out later. It'd be pretty good There's some things you can't say that about like maybe the Guardians are in that bucket We're like stone starts a post a playoff game Wouldn't it be better than anybody but Tanner by beyond the Guardians and I didn't have them in a playoff rotation We haven't talked about the Astros at all as part of this conversation. Like Verlander still down with an injury, but Framber Valdez, Renell Blanco, Hunter Brown, they added Kikuchi at the deadline.

We know we'd like at least four, maybe five relievers in that pen. They've got a lot of experience in that group. Overall, a little more experience in the bullpen than the rotation right now as far as playoff experience goes. But this is a pretty nice collection of talent as well. Overall a little more experience in the bullpen than the rotation right now as far as playoff experience goes. But this is a pretty nice collection of talent as well.

So where do you see the Astros right now? Are they mid pack among these teams or actually a little bit better? Are they perhaps even a little underrated right now? I mean I have them seventh by stuff plus but behind you know guys like the Giants and Pirates so if you take them out you know top five among playoff rotations, that feels right. You know, I don't know that I'd make them number one. I didn't have Verlander in the top three. I didn't have Verlander in the top three.

I also don't. Kikuchi Brown. I mean, it's just questions. It's supposedly just a neck thing. And when he went on the IL, it was like, oh yeah, he'll miss a turn and he'll be back. And it's just like, oh, he's old, old. I mean, yeah, it's not not only baseball old He's he's getting close to my age is old old now

Just the neck thing when you're our age is it's not usually Necks and backs guys take that seriously especially when people get older. Yeah Yeah, it seems like it could linger a bit longer, but I do like I'm gonna if you if you ver lander comes back and is somewhat vintage Then Brown is your floating guy or fourth guy like that's pretty exciting or Blanco I think especially the good float Blanco around too. I wonder if Blanco in the final Yeah, we bring a change-up guy in off of a guy who's like, you know big breaking ball fastball guy You bring this this guy to the change-up, you know, big breaking ball, fastball guy, and you bring this guy with a change up, you know, who's just gonna soft toss you.

I just think with Blanco, I look at the workload and I wonder how effective is he going to be, not only in the postseason if they get there, but just these final two months, are we gonna see him hit a wall? He's been great for them, sub three ERA, even one whip, almost a strikeout per inning. I mean,

This is for a guy who supposedly has 45 command. Yeah, it's incredible. And he's basically at the lowest walk rate we've seen from him at any point as a starter over a full season before. I would call them underrated. Dangerous team to underrate in October, I think. Red Sox, Astros underrated in the top five.

If we're taking the Giants and Pirates out of this, it's like the top three are Phillies, Mariners, and Orioles, I think. But the Yankees are right there. So it's, you know, that six is really hard to kind of sort through. Let's get to the bad place. Let's get to some bad pitches, the worst pitches of 2024 so far. A lot of ways to do this. We were looking at run value. So looking for the most extreme negative run value. The worst four seamer in baseball we learned for this season belongs to Tristan McKenzie

who has spent some time at AAA. So if he had been up in the big leagues all year, that number could be worse. He's allowed 16 homers on his four seamer this year. But we're not going to watch watch video of Tristan McKenzie because his teammate Tanner by B is the most surprising pitcher of all on the leaderboard of pitchers with a negative pitches have a negative run value He throws his four seamer a lot and it does not get good results So we are gonna watch a Tanner by B four seamer. This looks like a good pitch to me, you guys. Watch this one, this is gonna be up top of the zone, not in real far.

Jose Miranda takes it out, crushes it 97 miles an hour. And that was a one-two count. I don't know why he was looking high fastball there, but it seemed like he was. I mean, stuff says it's not a great pitch. What's wrong with it? But it doesn't say it's a terrible pitch. He's got a little dead zone fastball.

It's a little bit dead zone. It's, yeah, it's, he throws it as if it has ride and it doesn't. I mean, it does, but it doesn't. And he lives at the top of the zone. So, and his command's good too, but he's got a little cut and it doesn't ride a ton. It's like a little, not a real cut.

It's more of a true straight force team. So you either need a little bit run or you need a lot of ride if you're gonna be throwing that type of, it's like a 14-4 here in terms of inches of drop, which is just getting into the dead zone area. And all of his breaking pitches have good horizontal movement, including a sinker.

He's above average in horizontally and he's trying to go vertically with one of his pitches and that's the one that is not performing as well. Yeah, maybe it's spotable too then, right? If everything else is sideways, it's got some sideways stuff on it. It might look a lot different. Oh, for example, there's the one. Yeah, that's the one that's straight. So, do you change eventually over time? I don't know if he's going to do this on the fly, but but do you gotta go to a two seamer if you're Tanner Bybee? I think adding another fastball would be amazing for him. Lean into whatever works, like if there's a cutter,

yeah, then it's like something that looks like your fastball but has a little bit of sideways movement. I bet you could throw a pretty good cutter. The question then is, if he throws a pretty good cutter, what happens to his slider, what happens to his four seam shape? Because sometimes, like Garrett Cole was always worried that if he threw the cutter too much,

that it would affect his fore seam. So, you know, the two seam, I think, may affect your fore seam less, because it's more of a grip thing and not being on the side of the ball. You're just sort of letting the grip do it. You get on that eduatronic, and you try to find some seam shift wake on your two seam,

and then you give something that is hard and they think they read hard but then it goes somewhere different. So the other question I have with Bybee then, you look at how effective the slider is, opponents are getting 136 against it, slugging 233, the stat cast with percentage is like 34.8% right? So it's a really important pitch. Does that make you more inclined to try the two seamer first given the Impact that adding the cutter could have on that pitch Trevor is that is that the better way to go into it?

I would say that is a big factor and also determining I would I would look at splits and see if Usually it's like lefties either killing you right is killing you now because it's got right So then if you add the sinker, like you just get another weapon against righties. Against righties, and if he's not having a problem with righties, sinkers to lefties just don't, unless he's throwing like front door up and in or whatever,

and that's just not a place to stay. So cutter might be a better situation to get lefties off of your fore seam. That might be the thing. 452 slugging against lefties, 311 slugging against righties. Yeah, so I would say cutter is a better option and you try it and a lot of times when guys have a really good feel for breaking balls,

which he does, he looks like, from watching him pitch too, he looks like he rolls out of bed and he just can flip stuff up there. Like it's just natural, because he's a supinator too, he's already on the outside of the ball, so that kind of movement pattern is also kind of natural. That's probably where it starts to, you can't differentiate what you're feeling as well with the fore outside of the ball. So that kind of movement pattern is also kind of natural. That's probably where it starts to, you can't differentiate what you're feeling as well

with the fore seam and the cutter. That's what happens usually. So he is in danger of them melding together and him losing like both pitches that are either side of that movement profile, the fore seam and the slider. But if you have the type of feel, maybe he's a, the guys with that type of feel for breaking balls though,

tend to be able to do that more so than needing pitches to feel differently. So that's what I would say. But other than George Kirby, most of this is off season stuff, I think. It's not probably a good time to do it. I think what we'll see out of Tanner Bybee in the post season is he jumps that slider percentage

up to like 40%. And you see that a lot in the post season anyway, where I've seen hitters be like I didn't see a Fastball today. Yeah, Lance McCullers just literally just scrapped every pitch. But yeah Yeah, so we got a few other candidates here for worst pitches in baseball I mean some of these are not surprising Patrick Corbin sinker has a minus 14 run value We don't need to watch a video of that. We've seen that pitch for a few years. It's just not working for him anymore. But the surprising one that Eno mentioned earlier is Zach Efflin's curveball

being down to a minus nine. That was a good pitch for him and using it more as one of the things the Rays had him change when he got to Tampa Bay. So this pitch was a plus 10 in run value just a year ago. It's a pretty so this pitch was a plus 10 in run value just a year ago it's a pretty massive swing to go from plus 10 to minus 9 with your one of your offerings like that I think you see a whole lot of that and we do have a video this one he tries to throw one to Tyler O'Neil down and in Tyler O'Neil just hammers it up to the top of the monster over the monster so what's changed for Eflin with the curve ball this year?

Is it a V-Low drop? Is it a movement profile thing? Are hitters looking for it more? It's just, how does it get so bad so quickly? I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on. He's definitely dropped in V-Low about a tick this year. And there's not too much of a change in vertical movement, but it has lost some horizontal movement over time.

So I think part of it is some changes in movement. And part of it is, you know, when he got to the raise, the big change that they made with him was to feature the curveball more. He jumped from Philly, you know, 2021 and Philly 11 percent, 2022, 20 percent, 2023, Tampa 26 percent. And I think when you're at 10 percent, that's like sneak and cheese by a rat a little bit. Like nobody's nobody's really prepping for the pitch you throw 10 percent of the time. They're not really thinking about too much.

When you get to 20 percent now that's in the scouting report. Everyone's like when's he do the curveball. What counts. When am I thinking about it. When you get to 26 percent somebody might even sit on it. You know because that's a quarter of the time he throws this thing. I might I might anticipate this one. I might in this count be like I'm sitting curveball. And I think if you sit curveball it's it's a pitch that major leaguers can hit

If you're not sitting curveball, it can freeze you can get freeze takes on it You know, you get a lot of fewer swings on curveballs I think curveballs are easier to spot and so you see lower swing rates generally But we see with Eflin is some change in the swing rates too over time So, you know when you look at swing percentage by year on the pitch, which I'm trying to get up here. Yeah, this year, 59% swinging percentage on the curve. He's never had it so high and the league average is 40. So whatever's happening mechanically on the pitch is one thing. I think people are just keying in on it now. I think so

too. I think he's having a classic it's popping situation going and he's not he doesn't elevate on purpose very often. Cutter a little bit up and into the lefties but the four seam is not really it's not something for his four seam up is not something guys are worried about, they're just like fouling it off or just taking it, and so he works down in the zone and he throws a pitch that's big and starts high and then comes down, and so it looks differently than others.

The more he shows it, the more different it looks than everything else, I think it's the same situation as Bybee, and by the way, Bybee had a plus 10 run value on his four seam last year and now he has a negative 12. So that's a big swing too. So it's like, I think there is a, it's your approaching tipping at that point. And it was something I had to worry about

with my slider kept getting bigger and slower. And so it got farther away from my fastball. And the more I did that, the more guys were like adjusting mid swing and fouling it off and not missing it and the whiff rate kept going down. So he, cause his commands the same, commands really good on his curve ball. Bottom of zone the whole time.

He's like, got really good command. He always has. It's just interesting cause it might be popping and there might be a shift like, Hey, when Evelyn's come up here, he's throwing up every one of every five pitches is a curve ball, no matter what, lefty, righty. And look for something popping out a little bit.

And then if that's the type of pitch you want, then crush it. And that's, and then, and want, then crush it and that's, and then it just takes like it getting crushed four or five more times to flip this like this. Like giving up two or three more homers than he did last year, it can completely change the profile

of how the pitch is performing. Yeah, that's true. And then, you know, in Philly, he did throw the four seam 15% of the time, even when he had, was an increase in the curveball usage. So either the four seam or the cutter up, I think, could do, could sort of do that eye level thing that people talk about. Just sort of, so they can't, they say, see something up, they're like, oh, that's curveball.

Even though I see it, I'm seeing it up. He has to like hide some hard stuff in there so that they don't, oh, that's, that could be the curveball or the cutter, you know. Rodone did it on Sunday, opposite though, he's throwing fastballs up and the Red Sox were jumping him and then he just started throwing his curve ball a bunch and they just got off of it. And then he started swinging, they swung a miss like 30,

he got like 30 swings of misses or something. So it was like, but that's the prime example of noticing that the problem is, Eflin's not like a curve ball, now I got my four seam, like he doesn't, won't go there, that's just not his game. Four seam isn't like good enough to make. He's gonna go back to stinker or slider or sweeper, which is like, you know, that's not a great adjustment.

But you know what he doesn't throw very often is high and tight cutters to righties. Yeah, never. It's always up into the lefties. And that would look, that would look like a curve ball a little bit. The Phil Hughes. Yeah, the Phil Hughes front door. No one does that anymore.

It's not like people throw, yeah, nobody really does it. But in this case, I think it'd be interesting because it would look kind of, it would kind of look a little bit, oh, this is kind of bendy, it's kind of high. This is the curve, isn't it? Oh, crap. I think you're right.

That's off your handle. I get a lot of freezes on that too, potentially. Yeah, but it's also really dangerous. You pull it a little bit, now it's a cutter right down the middle to a righty, and that's perfect. That's the thing, it's high risk, high reward. But if you have the command for it, which I think he does,

like that might be an option. He could try to get guys off of that curve ball a little bit. Maybe try it a couple of times with like a three run lead, nobody on, mess with it a little bit, see if it works out. Yeah, just dog, I guess you got a little time. All right, you know, you pulled this up by Stuff Plus to look for the worst pitches in baseball.

We were talking about run value before. I did it a couple different ways, and this is, so the first time I did it, I just looked at, I just take 300 pitches, because I wanted to be like, you throw this pitch a lot, and then worst stuff plus, and of course, it's all fastballs. So like Matt Waldron's fastballs on there, of course, Zach Lattell's, you know, it's all fastballs. So like Matt Waldron's fastballs on there

of course, Zach Lattel's, you know, it's all fastballs. Cole Irvin's fastball, Carlos Carrasco's, even Trevor Williams fastball. It's all fastballs. So what I instead did was go through each pitch type and get the five worst basically and put them up here. And like I said, there's no splitters on here. There's very few sliders. So what you see at the very top is Chris Flexon's Fastball. Interestingly enough, it has 18 IVB, which is slightly above average. And you'd think that's good, except he has a very high release point.

And so he actually has less vertical movement than the release point suggests he should have. Or it's just, in other words, it's pretty vanilla. People see the release point, they think, this is what it's gonna do, and it does it. He's a 5.06 slugging against, and he has poor vertical approach angle. It's a bad pitch, I don't know,

minus two is a little aggressive. How does that even happen? I'm interested in how do you get a negative and stuff less. It's so bad. I mean, it's just it's all about deviations from the mean. So this is this is like four standard deviations from the mean. It's it's a real true outlier. But it's not come around to the point where you're like, Oh, is it so bad? It's good. No, it's just it's just really bad. With Taiwan Walker with the slider, it's a little surprising. The slider's 86 miles an hour. I think it's a cutter though. So 86 is a bit slow for a cutter. Five miles an hour off of the

fore seam. He has a 590 slugging so I can't say this is wrong. And I also think that if you know Tywon Walker you don't think he has a really good breaking ball. So that's not too surprising. Chris Flexen comes back on the list with another hard pitch. 4.55 slugging on that. I don't know. It's hard to like have a rule of thumb about why these are bad. They're all bad in different ways. Hayden Wazninski has a 12 IVB on that fore seam, which really really low. The only person on this list who has less than a 450 slugging on this pitch is Taylor Scott's change-up which has a

209 slugging. Maybe that's just a miss by the model but everything else you know the Logan Allen four seam at the bottom 617 slugging with a 15 IVB and very poor extension and 91 miles an hour. So a lot of these pitches are thrown softly with poor vertical movement. That could be your rule if you wanted a rule of thumb. So the question then is Ben Lively has two fastballs on the list. Those are his two most thrown pitches combined. He throws them like 60% of the time and 450 slugging combined it's so far working. He's got the home run problem, but he doesn't walk a lot of guys getting good results Is this just something that's gonna continue to fade over time by results or is there something really strange?

The Guardians have the worst fastballs in the big leagues and they throw them the second most yeah I almost wonder if they'll see how aggressively the Red Sox changed up their fastball usage and say, hmm, maybe we should implement something like this. I mean, they've had some guys like that in the past. There were soft tossers that threw the sliders a lot. I don't know why. Lively does have maybe some deception

that we're not picking up. He was a person that came up in the invisible discussion. You use the mirror, Petit has been lively. This is an interesting mechanical thing I wanna ask you, Trevor. So the concept known as layback. So when you're coming through and this thing, yeah, right?

So Petit and Lively come through really far back, have a lot of layback. And so you lose the ball as a hitter and then it pops up last minute. I was talking about that and some pitchers and other analysts said, well, everybody has layback. So to some extent. Yeah, to an extent. But some people have more layback than others and that could be a source of deception, right? I don't feel like I had a ton. Yeah, I think that even getting back to the flat,

I couldn't do that, and there was other guys who could, and I could definitely see. You're petite, you don't see the ball, you see elbow. Yeah, when you lead with your elbow, I've heard guys say things like, it looks like the ball's coming out of their shoulder. It's like a very, there's no swing or anything to track. It's like, everything's like,

Yeah, it's ball here and it's half. Like being casted at you. And it just feels that way. And yeah, that is like the, that combined with ride is the invisible, I think, feeling. It's like a, But 15 IVB from Lively, it's like, Yeah, so then therefore, then it's not really ride.

So if he, but if he didn't have that deception, that it'd be even worse. So maybe he's just getting enough deception to make it work. And there might be a chance that like, a guy like Bybee doesn't have it at all. And that could also be, it's very like, like you said with flexing,

it does what it looks like it's gonna do. And maybe with Lively, it doesn't quite look like it's gonna do and maybe with lively It doesn't quite look like what it's gonna do what it's good what it's supposed to do You know at 90 miles an hour with this sort of deception I think you do run the risk a little bit of hat of running into somebody in the playoffs that has seen you Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's you know, especially if they've seen you recently and they're just like, okay, you know, I got I'm just gonna stare at his elbow I'm gonna stare at his shoulder and the ball is gonna come come out there eventually. And I'm not going to not going to look in other places. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see if the teams that have seen lively a little bit more, if they start to hit him better over the course of the second half.

We had a mailbag question that could relate to this, may not relate at all. But it was a question from Finstic and Discord wondering if a pitcher could play around with two different four seamers, one with good IVB, one with bad IVB, one with bad IVB, and then just trying to manipulate that on a pitch by pitch basis by design, just to create that pitch, hitter thinks it's gonna do this,

but it didn't do that because it was manipulated accordingly. Like that seems like a very fine adjustment that might be tough to do, but do you think that's something that some guys can actually do effectively? Trevor, maybe not consciously. I don't know if the the value of doing it like purposely throwing in. I think that so if I'm understanding this right, starting from a high IV person, IVB person, a person like I think Seawalt's given,

which actually Seawalt doesn't actually have that high of an IVB. He's got a he's funky and just a weird release. His release point. And then his, his approach angle is like kind of low enough. So like, let's say Pavetta Pavetta has a high release point, high IVB. What if he threw like a dead zone fastball on purpose? So that's the, that's the interesting thing. There are probably better options, like seam shifting wise, to get the,

you rely on movement more than you rely on deception. Throw a cool cutter, throw a, yeah. And I think that staying away from a bad IV, bad IVB is, you want it to be a sinker. Like you want it to be really bad. Like you don't want to just be like in the dead zone. There's very little value out of throwing a dead zone fastball.

But like a pitch that maybe spins similarly, maybe a cross between, I'm hearing that a little bit. Like I was messing around last year with like a 15-15 like fastball, seeing if I could get it. And I don't really, that's kind of more of the two seam up and in. Shamanaya before has said that he wanted to have his X matches Y.

So maybe that would work, but again, that's pretty good horizontal at that point where it's a true, like. It's more like a true two- It's like a reverse cutter, frankly, like a little bit. So it moves like the opposite of like Kenley's cutter, which if you could pull that off, I would say do that. And I think guys are more likely to be able to do that,

maintain their carry while adding horizontal. I think that that maybe would work. And that might be something that we see, especially for guys who can't figure out how to throw a seam shifter or even a true sinker, but they want something to stay up. So maybe that, but I would say not a true four, not two four seams, no, I don't think so.

It requires a little bit of level of savantism too, like, you know, just to be like, I'm gonna take two inches of IVB off this pitch, you know, just to be like I'm gonna take two inches of IVB off this pitch, you know, like maybe Kirby could pull it off but you know, but I think it would be you darvish would try that I'm I do I do have a piece on my cutting room floor about a pitcher who told me he did it on purpose And I talked to the hitter that he did it to and the hitter said yeah I noticed so Alex Bregman was like yeah I was really pissed I even have the video where it's Trevor Bauer he throws he throws a low IVB pitch to get a

grounder from Bregman because Bregman's really good at targeting the the top half of the ball you can't go above Bregman swing you can't it's really really hard I tried it too. Yeah. So he just throws like a dead zone-ish IVB fastball to him and Bregman pounds it in the ground and Bregman actually looks up at him on the way. What was that?

As he's running it first. Like, yeah, yeah. He has like a, what was that? So I guess it's possible. And we do see it with like Justin Teal's slider, right? We do know that like people take breaking balls and be like, oh, I wanna add three inches of horizontal. I want this to be more sideways.

I want this to be more vertical. So I just think with fastballs, fastballs are like, that's your bread and butter. That's your thing. If you're messing around with that too much, you start like we were just talking about the cutter, start getting inside of the ball. I don't know.

Velo's the thing anyways, really it is, when it comes to, when you're throwing your fastball, you're trying to get the Velo, that is what's causing you most of the value most times. Even difference, even if you don't throw really hard, 92, when you're throwing slider, slider, slider, slider, 92 plays, you want the 92, it's not the movement you're going playing on as much.

What's the average fastball on my list, what's the average Velo on the fastballs on my list? 89. It's going to be terrible. Yeah. So why do you know people say, oh, you get 89 with location. Sorry, dude. Like that's those are the worst fastballs in the big league.

And then Steven here has a great question. Does IVB drop as the season goes on and weather gets warmer? I don't know if it's the weather that's getting warmer that does it. But yes, I found a piece, a little thing from Max Bay, if you want to look at it, he's choice underscore fielder on Twitter. He showed that IVV peaks early and then goes down and it actually comes back up. So there's a weather component to that.

I wonder if there's an injury component to that too. Fatigue too, probably a little bit. Fatigue, yeah, fatigue. But I don't know why it comes back up again at the end so that that speaks to maybe weather being a factor but the general course of IVB over the course of the season he did it by like percent of fastballs with more than 20 inches IVB and it started high and like went down low and then went back up again. Interesting. It also has been changing over time and there's actually a slightly lower percentage of 20 IVB fastballs over time, partially because of sticky stuff enforcement and partially maybe maybe because teams are now, teams are now working at.

Punching air over there? No, just the dang it, the dang it snap. But also because I think teams are now chasing different shapes. You're starting to see more seam-shifted wake sinkers and cutters and so that's, the teams are trying to add those to the mix and so if you don't have, they're not,

if you have like a 16 IBB fastball, they're not saying, we need to push this to 18 or 19 anymore. They're saying, hey, let's look at what kind of a sinker you can throw. Got one more question here that we should get to. This is a question they want to Trevor's take specifically on home road stats. But using Nick Pavetta as an example, is ERA and Baput at home been higher every year since 2021, which makes sense in Boston, a park that has mentioned as being notoriously painful for starters, psyches, et cetera. The odd stat about Pavetta's splits is his home walk rate is almost double his road walk

rate this season and last season, as if his plan is to walk more guys versus give up contact at home, which still seems to be hurting him. Conventional fantasy wisdom says to ignore pitchers home road splits, but if an approach is different or as a human being, something is different, then shouldn't we pay more him. Conventional fantasy wisdom says to ignore pitchers home road splits but if an approach is different or as a human being something is different then shouldn't we pay more attention to it? Absolutely it's more of a I feel like that's just more of a 201 level of looking at it and but yeah there's a ton of stuff that goes into it like just like if you if you go look at your at the half for example go look at how a pitch is performing. Even if it's performed well in the past,

I did this with my curveball in 2019. And I'm like, this thing is just bad. It's just like not doing well. You're probably not going to throw it as much. I just scrapped it. I just stopped throwing it. The same thing is if he's getting crushed at home by the wall, probably, mostly, he's like,

I'm going to stop giving them opportunities to crush that wall. And that might lead to more pitches that are balls, or trying to get guys to chase a little more at home. And you're aware of it, especially guys that are really in tune with what the things they're doing and what are making them successful or not. They make those decisions more often.

So that is a big, big part of it, the park factors. There's a part of like some guys, the pressure is different from place to place in their division and being on the road, they feel more comfortable being supported versus being teared against. That's a thing. But obviously some guys love that though, like they're the opposite, like they love throwing on the road. And there's a bunch of that little stuff, but in terms of decision making, and it's

you can tell based on sequencing and the way that, like how misses are in like three, two counts or whatever, that he's very clearly would rather walk the guy than give up a double off the monster. That's 100% viable. And it's about survival and just winning the game. If you can avoid that, you're willing to take those chances. A guy who actually has said this explicitly to me

that he is more open to walking certain guys in certain situations, or like there's out days, he is like, he knows his stuff isn't moving like Ottavino knows when things aren't moving the way that he wants them to move and he was more likely to be okay with a walk or two that day as opposed to giving up the big damage it's about avoiding the damage maybe against lefties right yeah exactly so like making that some guys have been around long enough that they can make those decisions in real time and it may

look like they're pitching differently than we ever have but they know something that you don't know. And that is something you can pay attention with guys like Pavetta, who have been around a lot, I would say. Now, if it's a guy's rookie, like he just might not know what he's doing. That's why I want to jump in is just like, you know, what you're doing when you do home road splits is cutting your pitcher in half. Right. So you're cutting your sample in half.

And a lot of times you'll have, you know, basically a relievers a sample then. And so if you look at Cut cutter Crawford at home last year he had a six ERA and you can say well you know the babbip wasn't that bad 317 he just walked a lot of guys and didn't strike out as many guys as he struck out on the road so he's just not as good as home well this year his ERA at home is a 4 and he's just cut his walk rate a little bit and the BABIP is a little bit different and you know he went from a one four whip at home to one one whip at home. So you could have thought oh Cutter Crawford is doing the Nick Bavetta thing

where he's just trying to walk guys and you know he's afraid of the big monster and you know blah blah blah but like green monster I know but it's a big monster. It's a big monster if you're the pitcher there. You know, I just caution looking too heavily, especially the young player. I think maybe the older they get, the more sample. But then you kind of start to know who the guy is generally. And I don't know what the I don't know what the good sample is. I would say I would want to be looking at like 200, 250 innings at home before I was like

You know gonna say he was different at home guys change teams so much You don't always have the luxury of even getting that sample. Yeah in order to make your decisions You're just kind of wondering with something less. Is this a thing? We've talked before to the park factors You know having some that boost strikeouts some that depress strikeouts Coors being the obvious one that depresses them the most, but there are other parks that deflate strikeouts for a variety of different reasons. So I think on a skills-based level, you do need to account for some of that

just within the differences. So you shouldn't ignore home road splits. You should try and use them carefully, I think, with the appropriate context. Bryce Miller? Bryce Miller? 281 at home, 527 away. Is this slugging? That's a little, I don't know. Home, he. What number is that? Batting average? No, ERA. Oh. Yeah, 281 at

home, 527 away. And what he does is he strikes out nine. He strikes out 26 percent of the batters he sees at home. He strikes out 18 and a half on the road. Wow. Right. And as we know, T-Mobile, that's hitting with the park second strike

out park factor. So you get that 10 percent boost compared to a neutral park. And that helps a lot. That's in a hundred and forty one home inningsnings, so it's kinda close to my sample. It's a pretty good sample. That's, I kind of almost believe in that a little bit, I don't know.

And knowing that too gives you confidence too. You get confidence and it helps a little bit. Like you're willing to throw pitches knowing that you feel more confident that it's gonna give you the thing you want and maybe you don't throw it in the road because you're not certain. There's a little bit of that too. But I don't know that I believe that it's gonna give you the thing you want. And maybe you don't throw it in the road because you're not certain. There's a little bit of that too. But I don't know that I believe that he's a 5 ERA true talent guy on the road.

I don't believe that. That's inflated in my opinion. So it is interesting. It might be... I would look like sequencing. Is there a big difference? Home run rate to 160. See, and then that's interesting. So if you're looking at different at different process bits

then you have to think about each of these little things that's different on the home the road has its own requirements for sample. So the fact that he has a 160 home run rate, 1.6 home runs per nine away from home in 130 innings, that's not enough innings to believe that number because home run rate is really noisy. 130 innings, that's not enough innings to believe that number. Because home run rate is really noisy. He could go five more starts and give up one homer in those five starts away from home. And he's also in different parks in each of those places. Right. So that's 140 innings

of him being in different parks. So what if so many of those were in Colorado? They're not. But like, you know, the parks themselves are adding noise to it. So I'd just be careful. Strikeout minus walk is a really powerful thing. So if you see differences in strikeout minus walk, like Bryce Miller, that becomes something that kind of catches my eye in a way that I didn't expect before I looked it up just now. Yeah, that just seems a little more extreme than what you'd expect. You'd bake something

in, but it wouldn't be as much as what you're seeing on Bryce Miller's player page right now. So great question. Thanks for the questions today. Finstick, you got questions for a future episode? Hit us up in Discord. It's the best place to send those in. The link to join the Discord in the show description if you're not there already. You can find us all on Twitter. Trevor is at IamTrevorMay, Eno's at EnoSaris, I'm at Derek and Riper, the pod is at Rates and Barrels. If you enjoyed the show, smash that like button for us. It's gonna do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening.