Rates & Barrels - The impact of enforcement, Marcus Semien's excellence, and emerging deadline sellers

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Eno, Britt and DVR discuss how MLB may try to implement the enforcement of rules outlawing sticky substances, the impact on different players, Marcus Semien's excellent season, Arizona as a clear-cut trade deadline seller, seasonal park effects, and more.  Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow Britt on Twitter: @Britt_Ghiroli Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels, brought to you by Topps.com and Topps Project 70. Check out Topps Project 70. Some awesome cards are up right now over at Topps.com. Derek Van Ryper, Eno Saris, Bridge Rowley, the whole band is back together for the first time in weeks. It's amazing. We're actually starting earlier than usual too, just to sort of break the fourth wall. We never start the show early. It never, ever happens, especially after a stretch where we don't record with all three of us together. So I'm actually really proud of us. I feel like we're growing as a show, being able to say we are recording early today. Yeah.

Yeah. We've been everywhere, man. I know. I mean, I just missed you guys. So I take all the blame for the early banter because it's been way too long without – I mean, I have been listening, but it's way too long to not hear my own squeaky voice in these Raisin Barrels podcasts. How is Alaska? Amazing.

You see the moose behind, I mean, the deer behind me? Brought it back. Full circle. I like, that's the best backdrop, really, I, that I've seen for anyone at the Athletic Brit. Thank you. Thank you. Dead animal. Very well done.

Very well done. Thank you. Thank you. Lots to talk about on this episode. Of course, the never-ending saga. Can we call it a saga of sticky substances and the impact that is having on the game? It's something we've talked about on this show going back to the fall. I think Eno started writing about it in September, October of last year.

And now it's reached the point where everybody has decided enough is enough. Major League Baseball needs to do something about this. So we're going to talk about actual solutions and what the enforcement might look like and which players might be most impacted by some changes to the rules actually being applied. We're also going to talk about a few other interesting storylines. Marcus Simeon, perhaps the best free agent signing value-wise of last winter. He's off to a fantastic start in Toronto. And then we'll take a look at the Arizona Diamondbacks as a clear seller. We're going to take Diamondbacks, we're going to put them on other teams because that's the only way to make the Diamondbacks interesting right now, guys. So I want to start, of course,

with the lead story, the sticky substances. I want to know, how will enforcement actually be carried out? Because I have the fear that we're going to have all these breaks in the action where umpires are going up to pitchers and checking them out like UFC fighters before a fight where we're checking forearms and we're checking behind the ears and we're doing all this stuff. Like the TSA pat down is going to be part of the ritual every time a pitcher comes onto the field. Is it going to be like that in actual practice or is it going to be some other way that this actually starts to get enforced? I actually have some sympathy for Manfred in the front office on this one a little bit. I don't think it's a super easy thing to figure out. Are they going to draw the line between sunscreen and rosin and the more harder, sticky stuff?

Are they going to... I think one of the hardest things, too, is are they going to stay within the regular model, the current model, which is have a manager sort of point it out and then start this whole back and forth between managers and bad blood between teams. That's still been the model with the collecting of balls. When they started happening in Oakland, that still came from a team that was like, hey, collect these balls sort of thing. So I think that's a terrible model. And the only model that I can think of hey collect these balls sort of thing so uh i think that's a terrible

model and the only model that i can think of that has its own problems and the only thing that i can think of is to get out of this whole catching them in the act idea and this definitely has some problems because you know someone could be doing it and then get busted for what they're doing a week later and so somebody could get really mad about that. But my theory or my proposition is this. Collect the balls. Maybe collect them randomly. Maybe just collect 10 balls every game.

Just say, we're going to collect X amount of balls every game and we're going to test them. And if your balls show up in two straight appearances or three straight appearances, you know, or one uh then boom 10 games i mean that's the only that's the only thing i can think of is to like link it to the ball look at the ball they've been looking at the balls they know from looking at the balls that there's a lot of stuff going on and that way they can also be like this has sunscreen on it we're not going to be that mad about it this This has, and from my reporting, it's not even spider tech anymore.

So that's the craziest thing is that like there it's beyond spider tech. So there'll be like, this has some like new, like this has some like rocket fuel on it. I think we, we got to pop this guy. I think we got to pop this guy. And last thing, spin rates have been going down around the league, especially among a certain handful of really high spin rate stars. If you want to look around, you can find it pretty easily. There's a couple guys on the Brewers, Dodgers, Yankees that have had pretty large spin rate decreases.

I've had seen some pushback from some writers that these aren't big deals, but I'm sorry. 85 to 100 RPM is a big deal to me. It's over a standard deviation of difference. It's around the order of effect that we're seeing from these sticky substances. If you drop 100 or more RPM, it was a little bit complicated for Roldis Chapman last night because his VELO was also down. So I'd have to look at RPM versus VELO. They're linked. But he was down 200 RPM. So if it's 100 or 200, I'm paying attention. So there's been a certain amount, I think, of people trying to kind of stop using a little bit or weaning or something because we've seen some RPM go down around the league already.

So there's a certain amount that just happened by them saying, we're going to do this. And I think the thing that really has struck me is that in Brit's piece earlier this week, I didn't realize teams were employing actual chemists at this point to make their own substances. I thought this was more of like the clubby is just messing around with all the random ingredients around the ballpark and trying to get something that works. But we've reached the point where people who specialize in this stuff are on the payroll trying to craft the perfect substance. Yeah, it's getting out of control. But to be fair, you give teams an inch, they're going to take a mile. I agree that it's a tough spot for MLB to be in, but I don't have any sympathy because they created this position by ignoring it. Trevor Bauer, Eno wrote this article in 2018 with Trevor Bauer where he talked about this. They waited and waited until it blew up in their faces.

And to me, the fact that it's tough now to enforce, I don't feel bad. I mean, of course teams were going to look for the best sticky stuff they possibly could. Of course they were going to start giving it to their minor leaguers as soon as MLB said, hey, we're going to look for spin rate jumps. I mean, teams and players historically have always been a step ahead of the league. And it doesn't surprise me that they're ahead of them as well here. And the craziest thing to me here, guys,

is that MLB sends a memo in March. They said, we're going to start looking out for this pine tar and this sticky stuff, whatever. And the players basically threw the letter in the trash because what rule have they enforced? Okay, remember pitch clock? Players said no, so they didn't do it. Remember the week where the hitters had to keep their foot in the batter's box? Did that even last a week? So if you are a league and a commissioner that doesn't enforce rules, and there's never been retribution for players, because let's keep in mind the Astros players, nobody ever got in trouble, right?

So if you do that, how would you think that just sending a memo was going to be enough for guys who are making millions of dollars and getting record contracts using this stuff are all suddenly be like, you know what? The league sent a memo. I'm scared. No one is scared. That was the whole point. Yeah. There was also, they pushed back a little bit and be like, in 2020, we told the managers to tell the players to chill. I know, I'm not sure that every listener knows this, but I know that Manfred knows this, that the manager,

if you're like in a corporate situation, the manager is the Uber boss. I know the GM is typically the Uber boss, but GM is actually like the CEO of the company. If you have a corporate situation, an Uber boss is like your boss's boss. It's not maybe like the present

or the CEO of the entire thing, but it's like the regional manager or whatever it is. It's the boss's boss. Right. That's the that's the manager. Right. So you told the boss's boss to say something. The boss's boss is not hanging out in the workroom. The boss's boss is not, you know, in like taking breaks and having cake with you. Right. The boss's boss has no idea who takes like three hour poop breaks. You know what I mean? The boss's boss,

the boss's boss is like, okay. And then like, he like, he like sends out a memo of his own or something. Right. Or like he, he like mentions it at a meeting or something,

but he's like, he's out of like the manager is like the, the big guy. You, you'd have to tell is the pitching coaches. And the only thing that I heard from pitching coaches about this was once they got the memo, they stopped putting the smorgasbord out. You know?

Yeah. They stopped having the smorgasbord of different, like, things you could put on your fingers out in the bullpen. The buffet. You know, the charcuterie, you know, they put away the charcuterie plate, you know? And they were kind of like, you know know uh you know chill out a little bit uh you know you got to do it on your own i'm not getting in trouble for this right you know but none of them was like stop and my issue with that is you know mlb and i had heard the same thing oh

you know back when we had chris young at the commissioner's office in 2019 we said don't you guys want to stop and everyone said no and it's like well the it's already a we said, don't you guys want to stop? And everyone said no. And it's like, well, it's already a rule. So you don't need anybody's permission to enforce a written rule. And as I was saying with the bluffing by the commissioner's office, now we find out that all those balls that they took for research, nobody's getting punished. So they sent a memo out that was bluffing. They started collecting balls, hoping to scare guys. And players did what I said. They realized that, you know, this isn't real. They're just trying to scare us. And that's true. So if you've been cheating now, we're in mid-June, you still have those great stats. You might have a dip in the second half, but you're still going

to have a good year. So what are we doing here? You think Manfred really wants to be liked, even though he's not. It seems like everything he does has the opposite effect. And for here, it's like the players don't need to like the commissioner, but they need to respect the commissioner. And right now, they don't respect the commissioner because he never does what he says he's going to do. I don't think asking is a great way to do it because, you know, I saw Brandon McCarthy actually had a tweet about this that was pretty cool. It was like, if you're asking people inside the game about the

game, they are so wound up in it that they'll be, they're doing mental gymnastics to make their own behavior better, you know? And they don't always have perspective from outside the game. You know, they don't have perspective on everything.

They kind of have the perspective of like, every day I do the best to win, right? That's kind of their perspective. And so, for example, if you ask hitters, they still kind of believe this panned down idea that it's for grip, right? And the only hitters that I've talked to that are really mad about it are hitters that are forward on tech and data. So you hear Josh Donaldson talking about it and you'll hear people that I, you know, my sources talking about it

and those are the guys who, you know, hang out in front of the Rhapsode or the hit tracks and so therefore know, oh man, you know, when this guy throws with that stuff on, it's 500 RPM better and I know that's hard to hit. So, you know, like I feel like asking uh a bunch of hitters that are like oh it's okay it's for grip i mean like come on yeah that was that's what it was like 20 years ago yeah totally different time now of course given how much things have changed but i think the hard thing here is that even if you find the way to enforce this correctly, and I think the problem with the random sampling of balls, too, is that if one of my baseballs comes up and tests positive for having some combination of goos and potions on it, I can claim that someone else touched that ball.

Right? I mean, Yadier Molina was our example, I think, last time we talked about this. It's the age of Hawkeye, man. There's literally a bird's eye on the field that can track everything. They could probably be like, here's the video of that ball. They could select the one ball that was just touched by the pitcher and, I guess, the catcher. So maybe you can suspend catchers, too, for doctoring the ball? Or do a timestamp.

No, I mean, there are balls that the umpire throws to the—no, there aren't. Usually the umpire gives it to the catcher to throw out. Sometimes the umpire throws it directly to the pitcher, though. Maybe that's a slight rule change you make and be like, hey, umpires, throw out the balls. Yeah, that's a good idea. I mean, I think the crazy thing here, too, is people kind of assume it's pitchers versus hitters. That's not the case. Multiple pitchers have complained about this.

White Sox closer Liam Hendricks talked about it just today. that's not the case multiple pitchers have complained about this white socks closer liam hendricks talked about it just today and i think like you know said it depends on how sophisticated they are and understanding like yes they need the grip maybe in certain parks at certain times of the year but most of them realize it's cheating and if they can pick glue strands off a baseball something is not right right so i think the whole like hitters versus pitchers, MLB is trying to create this big like, you know, rift between the players before you get to the new CBA. I don't really think MLB one is that sophisticated.

And two, I don't think it's as clear cut as hitters versus pitchers because many pitchers want this solved. Guys are like, you know what? This has gone too far. So I, again, I don't buy in too much of the Pete Alonso conspiracy theory. I don't know how you guys feel there. And I don't buy into the conspiracy theory that they're trying to get the players not mad at each other, both sides, before the CBA.

But it's a benefit if the fans are mad at players. It's a benefit if fans are, yes. But I think the players are smart enough to realize, like, hey, we can just push that to the side if people disagree. We've got bigger fish to fry here. Yeah, I think if the CBA came up and they tried to use that as something,

they'd be like, ah, let's swim move past that. You know, we'll deal with this later. Like, this is not, yeah, this is not, nope. Pine tar's off the table. We don't really care about it enough to make this some sort of leverage for you. Yeah, I don't really think this is a diabolical scheme by the league to fracture the players' association. I don't think it's like that at all. I think this is an unenforced rule that tech got better and the substances got better,

and now you have to find a way to put the goo back in the tube for lack of a better description. But I think what everyone's kind of wondering here, too, is which players are most impacted by the enforcement of this. If you do enforce it successfully. My theory when I was talking to Michael Beller about this on the Fantasy Baseball podcast yesterday was that the high spin fastballs in particular, it's a high volume pitch. You throw a lot of them, pitches that are up in the zone with a lot of spin in particular. If those aren't as deceptive, you lose spin on those pitches. Hitters might not swing and miss at them as often as they do. Guys that are living up in the top of the zone with a high spin fastball, that are living up in the top of the zone with a high spin fastball, maybe those pitchers lose a little something. But are we talking 5%, 10%, 15% performance reduction for those guys?

I think it's really difficult to go through and predict both who is impacted, but also the magnitude of the impact if you're able to enforce this. Because you're taking great pitchers and elite pitchers and very good pitchers and good pitchers and bumping them down a level or two on that scale. They still have other weapons. They still have other adjustments they can make that are going to keep them from completely falling apart. Yes. I think it's pretty big. Yeah. I think it could be pretty big. I mean, Britt and I are actually working on something like this. So we're not going to give away everything. But I mean, just one of the things, and I'm trying to work with Max Bay to model some stuff,

and we'll probably have some good stuff next week. But the thing that I can rely on is the pitching coach telling me that it improved effectiveness of fastballs by 10%. And that's actually from my own research. And then improved breaking balls by 30%. So I honestly think that if you look at the best breaking balls in the league, you could take 30% off them. That's how I feel.

So we're trying to source to see how pervasive the problem is. Because when I reported that 75 plus percent were doing it, I didn't differentiate between substances. So the real number of people that are using this kind of more advanced stuff is lower um and so we're working on sourcing that and trying to model it but um i like i do i do it's really a difficult place to be because i don't want to start scapegoating and sort of singling players out because to me, this is a little bit like the balk rule,

like the lefty pickoff rule or quick pitching. Both of those are technically illegal in the rule book and pretty pervasive, maybe not as pervasive. But that's why I'm, I'm a little bit sad that everyone's bending around the 75%, like 75% are using spider attack or, or harder stuff. I don't think that's true actually. Um, so I'm not sure, uh, that you can say that. I think this is actually on the level of the quick pitching. And if you look at a game, you'll see quick pitching and quick pitching is against the rules, even without anybody on base.

It explicitly says in the rulebook that you cannot quick pitch to throw the batter off, even with a runner or not on base. So how many times have you seen a quick pitching in a game? It's in every game, right? Yeah, at least once or twice, I think you see it. And it's not, like, we haven't turned on those guys. And we're not singling out quick pitchers and we're not like lock Johnny Quato up.

You know what I mean? Like, so let's not, I don't, I do. I know it's interesting to our families of listeners. And so I would peruse the top spin rate list because that's an easy place to start.

And there are a few names that are there for multiple pitches to Trevor Bauer, Walker Bueller, Corbin Burns, Dylan Cease. I think were a few that we talked about on the fantasy show yesterday. So you will find some common threads. Tyler Glasnow, I think, was on there too. Glasnow, there's a spin jump immediately when he got to Tampa Bay. Like just right away. It's like, okay, they fixed him, but what all did they do, right?

It wasn't just any one thing that they did, so. That's another thing, right? Like, Bauer had, obviously, like, a leap forward, but he's a notorious tinkerer that, like, adds and subtracts pitches. So, like, I'm uncomfortable saying that every part of what Bauer did had to do with Pintar, you know? Yeah. And I also have a problem with the gotcha game,

like watching the Garrett Cole press conference. Like, are we just going to out some of the league's best players now for doing what the large majority are doing? I think that's why you saw Pete Alonso talk about the baseball, because I think players think there's a big faction of people, not just players I've heard from, who believe if the ball had stayed stayed the same we would be years away from getting to this point right like guys were using spider tech and other stuff in 2019 we just didn't have the baseball we have now so we handed very sophisticated cheaters a better instrument in a deader ball in higher seam better movement ball

and so we made it we hit it with a double whammy. And now we care because of all the no-hitters and, you know. Yeah. Now it's out of control. Well, nobody won our pool. So things have cooled off a little bit on the no-hitter front. So I think that's a step in the right direction. I got a little close to Shane Bieber.

You did. You had both sides of that game too. So it was the right place to be. Britt, have you ever used spider tack? You lift heavy things. Oh, that's right. I've heard of it, but you don't really need it in powerlifting. You need it to hold on to odd objects like Atlas stones. Yeah, the slick stuff, yeah. It's serious. Guys rip their biceps and stuff using that kind of stuff because there's a reason

why your hands can't grip it. Your muscles can't support that. So I would have never thought, and I talk to so many people now that are like i bought spider tech just to see what it's like like that guy is making a killing you know who's winning this scandal the spider tech guy he's definitely a great that was a great story though with nesbit nesbit wrote a great story about it you should check it out that's the guy's like what they're using it for what it's like who, who? Why would they do that? Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. Oh, and Nesbitt found a bunch of Reddit. I think he went on Reddit or something or was responding to comments.

And someone said, can I use this for pitching? Or is this detectable in the pitching environment or something? And he was like, well, until a couple of days ago, not at all detectable. Now, totally detectable. until a couple of days ago, not at all detectable. Now, totally detectable. I almost bought a tin of it to put in my backdrop,

but I decided to save the 15 bucks and, you know, I don't know if Carson listens, but follower and listener, I think Carson also is a sort of men's league player that records himself throwing and hitting and stuff.

And he just used Stick'Em. he sent me some high quality video and audio of him throwing with stick them and you could actually hear the ball coming off. So I had a pitcher push back on that comment in Brit's piece being like, you can't hear the ball coming off. Yes, you can. I don't know, man. Uh, if that pitcher is listening, I could hear this ball coming off that guy's fingers. So and there was even that that came up in MVP Machine, Sawchick and Lindbergh's book, where they said that, you know, with the craziest stuff, you could actually hear it coming off his fingers. And that was Matt Daniels, the pitching coordinator for the Giants that was doing that. So this stuff is everywhere. You tell that picture, I heard that from multiple people.

Like more than one person was like, you know what? You can actually hear it rip out. And if you think about Spider-Man, it doesn't surprise me at all. You can hear it like ripping out of their hands, especially. And we definitely had a rise in blisters. Yes. Around 2015, 2016. And we just played a game with no fans.

So absolutely, I believe you can hear it. Oh, right. Yeah. Absolutely. That was totally quiet. Yeah. Last year especially, you would have been able to hear it very easily. I think with fans back, maybe it's a little more difficult to pick up on that because there's a lot more ambient noise even when things are somewhat chill in the ballpark.

I just imagine getting banned from a rock climbing gym for using spider tack and making the walls too sticky. So I will not buy spider tack because I will only do stupid things with it. Is that a cheat code for rock climbing? Of course it is, right? I think like Britt said though, you'd tear up your muscles though.

Like you'd hurt yourself so bad. Because you'd just be hanging by a finger. You'd put yourself into some very awkward grip positions that your your body is just not prepared for and you're you might stick to the wall but you're gonna get hurt dude look at the wall there are handprints there are sticky handprints it looks like winnie the pooh was in here climbing the walls and eating honey knock it off you jerk oh my. I just had a brain fart. That Free Solo guy, what if he cheated? I mean, I think most people who do awesome things have probably deceived us a little bit.

But that's the thing. The Free Solo guy used spider tag. That's the thing. I guess fans don't understand why these guys cheat because even if you get caught and punished it doesn't undo what how what got you here um you know like lance armstrong that guy still made millions of dollars he's not destitute living on the street i just finished reading the this great book about steve cohen and how he got investigated for his hedge fund all those shady practices he paid millions hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, but he's still rich. So there's no – until like these people's lives are ruined by cheating or skirting the rules or getting into that gray area. Contracts.

Right. What if the contract was revoked? Yeah, it won't happen. But if there were real consequences, you wouldn't have prevalent cheating like this. That's just pretty obvious, I guess, at this point, but here we are. All right, I want to talk about Marcus Simeon today because I was looking at the war leaderboards, as I often do. It seems like a daily activity in my house. It's at least a multiple times weekly sort of thing that I'm doing. Marcus Simeon is on track for another really like seven-ish

win season. We saw it back in 2019 in Oakland. And I think when Eno and I were talking about the season after that one happened, it was all about how Marcus Simeon played every single game that season. He maxed out volume. And yeah, it was year over year improvement where the K rate kept coming down, the walk rate crept up. He just took all of his skills and consolidated them with maximum playing time in the year of the rabbit ball. And there was nowhere for him to go but down. And here we are 60 games into 2021. And he's putting up another season at that level on a one year deal for $18 million, no less. So we keep talking about the upcoming class of free agent shortstops.

Simeon, of course, moved to second base when he signed with Toronto. I think he's going to be of value again relative to some of the other longer-term deals that are going to be signed. He's going to be 31 during the offseason, but I would imagine there's going to be a handful of teams that miss out on Corey Seager and Trevor Story, who see Semien as a clear upgrade for them at shortstop this winter. Yeah, everything I've heard about him, too, is that he's a great guy to have around. He's got those intangibles, like he's this clubhouse leader. I know Eno, obviously, getting to see him a little bit more when he was in the Bay Area would probably have a better read on that. But I think he's a guy who doesn't command the headlines. So you go to MLB.com's headlines and it's like,

DeGrom, Tatis, DeGrom, Tatis. You never hear about Simeon. And even in Toronto, when we talk about Toronto, he just somehow manages to be under the radar, even though, like you said, the war is really good. He's playing at a really high clip. And yet he still doesn't... I know right now we're dominating it with the Sticky Stuff headline, but still, there should be room for SpiderTech

and Marcus Simeon in the same sport. And honestly, there's not. I don't know why more people aren't aware of what he's doing right now. Yeah, I think the thing that sticks out for me is just like, I think some of the best work ethic I've ever seen. I mean, here's a guy that was supposed to be a second baseman forever, and he just worked his way into being a shortstop. And so I think, you know, in terms of how he'll age, I think he'll be on the better end just because he's, you know, he's going to make the most out of what he's got. He works really, really really really hard and in terms of how he is around the clubhouse you know it is hard for me um to uh i'm not in it every day like like a like a beat writer so i can't

um i can't say exactly how it how it works and we're and we don't get to see as writers we don't get to see like when things get raw or like when people are upset you know like we get to see when things get raw or when people are upset. We get to see them when they're at their best, basically, because they put on a little mask for us when we're in there. And now literally, I guess. But the one thing I will note that I think has been really important, and this is why I always thought A.J. Burnett, even though people didn't like him, I thought he was actually good for the clubhouse.

One thing that Simeon does is he hangs out with different people. There's, there, the, the, the glue for me in a clubhouse is, is, there's part,

part is I'm going to stand there and talk after a loss. That is big because you will take the pressure off of, you might even take the pressure off the guy whose fault it was. You know, you will take the pressure off of you might even take the pressure off the guy whose fault it was you know sometimes marcus simeon will stand there and answer questions about a blown save just so that the blown person who blew the save doesn't have to talk about it you know what i mean um and uh and so that's that's something he does but also just going around and hanging out with the different people sort of brings people together. So I've seen him playing soccer with the Latin guys. You know, I've seen him playing, you know, Nerf hoops with Matt Olson, you know, and Piscati. Like I've seen him kind of hang out with everybody in the clubhouse.

And that's I think that's important too. And then the last thing, I think he'll end up being a bargain because he won't take the $330 million or even the $200 or $150 million. Because he might take a three-, four-, five-year deal, I think that he'll end up like the person I think of is Curtis Granderson. When Curtis Granderson signed with the Mets, I immediately thought it was like 5 and 56 or something i immediately thought this is a great deal he impacts the game in so many ways he's a great clubhouse guy um and even as he peters out into sort of a part-time player he'll be useful

for your team and i think that's exactly how it turned out for the mets so if if if sammy and signs like a sort of 5 and 60 or something um a 4-60 or something like that, I'm totally into it. I think it'll be a good deal. Yeah, I wonder if it'll be maybe comparable to the deal that Yasmani Grandal got from the White Sox. Talk about a guy that plays up the middle who should age well on the wrong side of 30. Grandal got 4 for 73. Yeah, I'm a little low. I was thinking about that.

Also, what did Moustakas get? About the same, like 4 for 60 for 60 four for 65 something like that yeah i would go you know four for 80 i think would be fine five five to 80 something like that i think would be fine and i think it'll be a good deal i think it'll be better actually than those other ones because grandal is a framer we might get robo arms soon mustakas already had some injury problems and he's manifesting those really hardcore this year. I don't even know what's going on with him. I don't even know where he is. What's going on with Moustakas right now?

He's played 28 games so far. He's at four homers. Yeah, he's not himself. I think Simeon... One of the things I look at is, look at this. Eight stolen bases with no cots. Like, I don't think that, you know, he's the same sprinter he was, but he's still an all-around athlete.

Yeah. Playing up the middle, generally those players will age very well, and maybe he plays shortstop for a couple years of his next deal and moves back to second base for the last year or two of it, but still, he's playing somewhere in the middle infield for the next several years. And definitely a good story. And overshadowed in Toronto because Vlad Jr.

having an MVP caliber season. Bo Bichette, obviously a great young player too. There's just a lot of other great things happening there. But Marcus Simeon needs to be included in that conversation. We're going to try and upgrade a contender or several contenders, basically tearing apart the Arizona Diamondbacks because we're starting to see the sellers...

How do you focus on the Diamondbacks? Like for a second, I thought, we're going to upgrade the Diamondbacks? They're not a contender. No, you're like, no, we're going to pull apart the pieces. Yeah, let me fix the graphic because the graphic is like kind of misleading. Let's... I also thought that and I was like, wait a second. Yeah, let me fix the graphic because the graphic is kind of misleading.

I also thought that and I was like, wait a second. There we go. Okay. We're not really doing that either, though. Destroying Arizona is not right. Just upgrade a contender. Trading D-backs. The Orioles, that's what I thought, too, that we were taking apart teams that can now be farm teams right essentially for other teams yeah yeah so we're gonna dismantle the d-backs that's what

we're gonna do right now they've got a few players that could be upgrades for contenders but this is not this is not a team that's going to get game-changing talent back at the deadline because i don't expect them to move the players with years of control. It's not a full teardown, right? It's not Cattell Marte. He's got a really team-friendly contract, right? It's guys like David Peralta. It's maybe Nick Ahmed. I think if you're the D-backs, you strongly consider trading Nick Ahmed. You have a young shortstop in Geraldo Perdomo who's defensively ready for the big leagues. And if the Yankees are going to give you a decent prospect for Nick Ahmed, who's a great defender, that might be the

kind of thing that you go ahead and do. But Eduardo Escobar, I mean, it's a lot of veterans that are going to be secondary pieces for their new clubs. So they're not going to bring a lot back for the D-backs. I mean, you got to think about Quetel Marte because that would really goose the rebuild. But at the same time, this has been a team that has worked on a year-to-year basis. They kind of try to contend every year and then sell when they don't. So I don't think that they're going to do the Quetel Marte thing. And if you think about some of their prospects, some of them are close. Alec Thomas is ripping up AA right now.

They've got a couple outfield prospects, and you could actually cross your eyes and see this team being good at another time with Zach Gallen healthy, Corbin Martin maybe taking a step forward, and some of those prospects like Alec Thomas replacing older guys. But I'll throw Cole Calhoun on there because he can help somebody now.

Got a club option for $9 million, so you can get a little bit more value out of him. So I think Cole Calhoun,oun david peralta who's also under signed next year um and um you know i guess any reliever really saria clipper davinsky if anybody wants those and then one thing that won't get them much back but it's dribble cabrera yeah i was gonna mention him as well he's a veteran he's a guy who kind of moves around a bunch. He's not a – Yeah, played a lot of different positions. You've got a team that's banged up on the corners.

Like the Brewers, they just lost Travis Shaw. That was a pretty bad injury. Dove for a ball and dislocated his shoulder. They don't really have a good first baseman. As Drupal Cabrera fits there as a guy that starts a lot maybe in the short term, and then you go out and add somebody else, and he becomes your best bench player. Yeah, yeah. He's a guy like fans don't get excited. Like that's our upgrade. A guy that starts a lot maybe in the short term, and then you go out and add somebody else, and he becomes your best bench player. Yeah. Yeah.

He's a guy like fans don't get excited. Like that's our upgrade. But then ends up quietly having some really big bats, really big games. Like he's been on. I know a lot of it is luck, but I think part of it too is just like the player, aka Johnny Gomes, all those rings.

I do think that there are certain guys who just find ways to win, I guess, or just find themselves in these winning situations and maximize them, right? Like, he gets the most out of his talent is Drupal Cabrera. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if they moved him. I think with Marte, you have to look at the front office group, and if it hasn't overturned, which it hasn't, they have never been ones who have done these crazy midseason deals, so why would they start now?

I think it was, you know, who mentioned it, like they kind of play to be okay every year. And if they fall into it, they fall into it. And so I don't see, it's similar with the Nationals.

People keep asking me about Max Scherzer, except I would love for somebody to give me the example. It's easy and lazy to throw out the Max Scherzer takes from April on. When has Mike Rizzo dealt a huge star at the deadline for the Nationals recently? When have the Nationals been sellers at the deadline recently? So it's great for clicks. It's great to make yourself sound smart and get all this talk and the spotter. But do your research because

there are certain GMs who are itching. You know, they got the trigger finger. They're the AJ Prellers and the Dombrowskis and they're going to make those crazy moves. But if you're not a GM like that, what makes you believe that these guys are going to all of a sudden like convert? Like these aren't chameleons, you know?

Like these are GMs. You might be working to resign him right now. Right, like they do what they do and they hardly ever stray from that. So I guess like the Nationals minor league, I know we're getting way off topic here, but the Nationals minor league system is terrible. Two months of Scherzer is going to net you like a decent prospect, but it's not a haul that changes your franchise. So what is the point? What is the point? And at least where no one's very good and as bad as the Nats have been, they're still only seven games out, and the Mets are in first.

And they can very easily do Mets-ian things, right? And just all of a sudden, bottom out. And didn't the Nationals, when they won the World Series, kind of start out kind of poopy? And they still didn't sell. They literally got Daniel Hudson, Hunter Strickland, and some guy who never pitched. So really all they got was Hudson, and people were like, and some guy who never pitched. So really, all they got was Hudson and

people were like, oh, that's what they did. They kind of did some stuff, but not really. And then they ended up winning the World Series. So again, they could trade Max Scherzer. I would just be very surprised. And I think that these rumors from like the second week of April on have been kind of ridiculous. Because if you look at this team and this organization and this ownership, the people who own the team don't like to rebuild. Why on earth would they be like, yeah, you know what?

We had a bad April. Let's get rid of Max Scherzer. I just don't see it happening. Now, they could have a terrible next month and then they kind of have to. Rizzo goes to them and says, we should do this. We're going to re-sign them, whatever.

But similar to Arizona, like you don't just change, like a tiger doesn't change his stripes, right? You don't just change these GMs. And they pride themselves on being competitive. And this is a huge white flag. So I think you could see the Nats with the Scherzer deal. We've talked about the Yankees as an obvious sort of suitor. I do think there would be a high probability of him going back as a free agent. It could be a lot like the Aroldis Chapman Yankee situation a few years ago that got them Gleyber

Torres. And I think trades like that are increasingly difficult to pull off because teams value their young players as much as they've ever valued their young players. But I do think this trade deadline could shape up to be a little bit more interesting because teams could make more internal mistakes than usual coming off of the lost minor league season. There's just a little bit more uncertainty around everything right now. Decisions to promote guys, decisions to demote guys, decisions about guys that maybe aren't bouncing back from the lost season as quickly as they'd hoped. You might have some guys who are struggling at low A, high A, double A,

first time they've reached that level and teams are having second thoughts about them. And that could be a great opportunity to swoop in and get a better prospect than you would have got in the last couple of seasons. Think about Tatis. The reason that Tatis got traded for Shields is that nobody had really seen him that much. He was kind of like a high A player that had been injured. And so there wasn't that much of a track record. That describes a ton of people right now. So you might trade Max Herschler for some guys in high A and people would be like, you traded for a couple of 19-year-olds in high A? Well, right now, what does that mean?

Those guys could have been in double A. And if they were in double A, everything would be different. So, you know, you're definitely right that that lost season, I think, does allow for some arbitrage. So I would expect a lot of A-ball players to get traded and a lot of people to be like, who? And then maybe years later being like, we got our starting shortstop when we traded this guy.

Yeah, that's a great point, Derek. I didn't really think about that, but you're right. And also, on the flip side, too, because there was no minor league season, you've got these opposing scouts and other organizations who are like, I don't know who that guy is. So on like both sides, I don't know. There's a wide variance, right? I think we're going to see some really good trades and maybe some really bad trades because scouts are getting cut everywhere.

People aren't laying eyes on guys. There was no season, like you said last year. So it's a lot of just guessing, right? It's just pure. I think the best teams will probably have a really strong R&D department that has a way to model that lost year really well and has sort of done some sort of cool modeling that accounts for that lost season and then also has had some scouts that saw them,

but don't overvalue the scouts that saw them once or twice. Kind of find a way to put those two things together. Be like, well, the model really likes him, and the scout that saw him said he was pretty good, so let's put that together and we like this player. This is the best you can do, really. I don't know. Expect teams that don't have

any scouts to just fall completely on their faces though because i don't think the models alone are going to lead you in the right direction right now given how strange the data is right now yeah imagine somebody who had a hot final two months of 2019 in the minor leagues you don't have any data in between and then started hot this year but it was just randomly hot you know what i mean uh then you you would be like wow this player is amazing the breakout happened and if we had 2020 would have been it would have been a clear indicator of this being real it's like no we if you would have watched them you would have known that actually that's not true in this case. So definitely going to be a fun deadline

for the reasons that we're talking about here. Oh, we didn't mention, wait, sorry, one guy, Merrill Kelly. I was thinking about Merrill Kelly and Caleb Smith both as guys that, like they have some interesting young pitching. Those guys are a little older. I would think if they're going to move starters, those two guys are both actually pretty movable. Yeah.

And Kayla Smith has three more years though. So Merrill Kelly is under contract this year and then a club option for next year, 5 million probably gets, probably gets picked up, but for an acquiring team, you don't have to necessarily budget that in. You can say,

we don't, we're not necessarily going to sign him for $5 million next year. And everybody's going to have starting pitcher injuries. Everybody's going to have a need for pitchers. And you could always, like, even the Yankees could be like, hey, we're going to buy Merrill Kelly just to get to Luis Severino. And, you know, if our whole rotation is healthy and he's a reliever for us, that's fine, too. So, you know, I you're you're talking so much crap.

But I was one of the April Max Scherzer to the Yankees guys. In my defense, I might have started that like April 1st. But now I'm going to switch over to Merrill Kelly to the Yankees. Here's my other thing, though, is that Max Scherzer has to approve a trade not saying he wouldn't approve a trade at the Yankees but the Yankees recent success has not been there and have they done much to instill confidence

that like Max Scherzer for two months is going to say like you know what this team is going to win the World Series right like he's going to move his family and his three kids for two months. You would hope it would be for a team that, I guess, looks better right now. Again, unlock and change. I think he'd just move into the Four Seasons for two months and leave the family back at home, right?

True. You're Max Scherzer. Go live at the Four Seasons for a little while. You can do that. But it is one of those weird things, like having to consider joining that team where they're not locks to win the division at all, like hardly.

They're not even locks to make the playoffs. The AL East is amazing. If you make the playoffs, it might be for one game. Yeah, it might be a wildcard scenario. How much are you guys buying the Jays? We've talked about Simeon and of course Vlad and a little bit of Bichette sort of in passing, but are you

buying the Jays as a team that legitimately has like a 50% chance of making the playoffs given how good the Rays are that they haven't even brought up Wander and Brujan yet. The Red Sox and what they're doing exceeding expectations right now. I mean, I don't think the Yankees are bad by any stretch. I'm continually defending this team even though I don't want to. I think they're doing exceeding expectations right now. I mean, I don't think the Yankees are bad by any stretch. I'm continually defending this team, even though I don't want to.

I think they're still pretty good. They're banged up. They're going to have to make a couple of moves. But is it a legitimate four-team battle in the AL East? And do you think it's possible that we'll see maybe both AL wildcards come out of that division based on the way things have played out so far? Yeah, I mean, the Yankees are going to get Britton back too, which should help. Right?

A late-inning lefty who hasn't pitched. So, you know, that's kind of equivalent to, you know, teams like to say, this is basically our deadline, guys. Going to give us a boost. And obviously in Toronto, I think people are kind of waiting around for George Springer. Like, the guy's been, I feel like every time I look for an update, it's like, ran the bases. Ran this. Yeah.

Well, is he ever going to? But he's close. Yeah. And that offense was already really good, right? When he gets back, it's like, ran the bases. Ran this. Yeah. Well, is he ever going to – But he's close. Yeah. And that offense was already really good, right? When he gets back, it'll be a big deal. That's what I mean. So that's why, like, if Springer's healthy and he's productive, then, like, yeah, I'm on the Blue Jays train, I think.

I'm driving the bus with the Blue Jays. Like, I'm in. But I think he's a big part of that offense. He's a big part of maybe, like, down the stretch, keeping those young guys from getting too nervous, from getting, you know, from kind of getting. I remember in 08 when I covered Tampa Bay, they had this huge slide in September and everyone was like, oh, God, sky's falling. Here it comes. We've been waiting for this.

And they had Cliff Floyd, a veteran. And he's like, who cares that we suck? We're going to get it right here. I've been on teams that have sucked two weeks before the playoffs. We're going to get it right here. I've been on teams that have sucked two weeks before the playoffs. We're going to get it right here. And I think having a guy who's been there, like Springer, who's been in these big games, who's been through this with these Houston Astros teams,

I don't think that shows up anywhere in the box score, but I think it matters. To say to, you know, Blatty Jr., to say to Bode Bichette, to get these guys where we can beat the Yankees, we're in front of them. We don't need to all of a sudden pee down our leg in September when we get swept. You know,

I think you need somebody like that. So to me, having him part of that team and having him healthy is a, is a big deal. Here's maybe a stupid question, but if the Red Sox stay up really high and we know their lineup's been good, and I will admit I'll eat a huge thing of crow on the Red Sox.

They've been way better than I thought they were going to be. What about Max Scherzer to the Red Sox? Would the Red Sox do a little boost? Because imagine the Red Sox with just a little bit better pitching. Scherzer and Sale? Yeah. That's nasty. Is that crazy?

Let's start with that rumor. Back as Sale, that is a nice one-two punch come playoff time. I mean, they certainly could do it. There's nothing preventing the Red Sox from going out and making moves. I think the interesting question would be, which prospects would the Red Sox have that other teams would want? It's a farm system I look at, and I think... Casas?

Casas is probably the guy. Would they give him up for a Scherzer rental? I don't think they'd give up Duran. Yeah, Duran wouldn't go in a deal like that. I don't actually think they'd go with Dahlbeck, even though he struggled a little bit. They seem to believe in him. A sell low on Dahlbeck, though, is probably closer to fair value.

We're talking about a corner infielder with contact issues, but he's big league ready or borderline big league ready. It's true. The Nats have a need. That sort of thing is fairly available. There's teams that would not care to acquire Dalbeck at all. Yeah. I think what's also interesting about the standings right now is that I think that the two wild cards will both come out of the AL East and that a good team won't make it.

And so if that's the case, I think the trade deadline becomes of oversized importance. So what we're talking about here seems kind of like, you know, pie in the sky. What if, what if, what if? I think this will matter. And if that matters, I don't think it actually favors the Blue Jays because the Mark Shapiro-led Blue Jays, I don't think will give up a big prospect to get much. I think the biggest prospect they would give up is Simeon Woods Richardson. Maybe that's enough, but Simeon Woods Richardson is not going to get you Max Serzer if they're offering Tristan Casas.

Right. And I think that's the other variable here too. The Jays could just as easily put together an offer if they wanted to. They could be contenders to trade for someone like Scherzer too. I think the other thing that's pretty weird about the shape of the league right now, is right now, A's Astros, that's a great battle in the AL West. Because the Angels are underperforming so badly,

the win totals for those two teams might be just a little bit higher than all the teams beating up on each other in the East right now. And I wonder if the same holds true. So second wild card might come out of the West? I think second might have to come out of the West, unless the A's fall apart or the Astros fall apart.

That means two good teams out of the East don't make it. It could definitely play out that way. Which means I don't think the Yankees would make it in that scenario. Do you guys? I love Alec Manoa. I did want to bring up Alec Manoa's stuff plus just because people find that interesting. He was way crazy in his first one,

but people get an adrenaline boost and I've actually looked at it. You get about an extra mile per hour on your fastball in your debut. And so, you know, his fastball has fallen off since then. However, in his third, and so he had like a really bad second start and Stuff Plus actually tracked that.

But in his third start, he settled in as a guy who has three above-average pitches. So I actually believe in Alec Manoa, and I think that Manoa Ryu is good. I don't know about the rest of the rotation. That might be the thing that keeps him from getting there this year. That's what I'm saying. I believe in the lineup, hardcore. And I just don't believe that Shapiro is going to spend to get it. So then it puts a lot of pressure on Nate Pearson, who has pretty poor command.

So Pearson has to get healthy and get command and come up and be useful, and that's a lot of ifs for me. So I'm guessing the Blue Jays miss out. I think the Jays are more likely to go after guys like Merrill Kelly, right? Like guys that are cheaper and easier to acquire. Yeah. Easy to get, but also aren't going to jack up the payroll that much too.

I think that's part of the problem. And if the lineup is that good with Springer in there, that lineup is amazing. So maybe, you know, Kelly, you know, some,

who, who am I missing? Who is that? Springer. Not Springer. The guy from the Dodgers. Who are the pitchers in the Jays rotation? Ryu.

Huh? Ryu. Yeah, I know. Other than Ryu. Ray. Ray. Oh, okay. Does that say like Ray, Kelly, Noah?

Stripling. Stripling. And then you just score six runs a game. It's not impossible. You'd want a slightly better bullpen, I think. My simple take is it's not fluky what they're doing right now. The offense will get better. They need their pitching to stay healthy

because their pitching depth is where, like many teams, it falls apart very quickly. I think the Yankees, to answer Britt's question, are they on the outside looking in? If I had to bet on it today, I would say yes. They'd be my first team not making the playoffs. And that's not to say that they're bad. That's to say that the AL East is harder than it has been in a long time with four legitimately good teams in it. That's not normally the case in that division. Yeah. And playing the Orioles is not enough to up all their win totals because they're all playing the Orioles. You know, just the game.

Yep. They all get those swipes at the Orioles. So, you know. Speaking. But Yankees fans, I'm sure, can just be miserable because that's what they love to do. Yes. You know, we deconstructed Arizona,

but I feel like the Orioles in John Means, Trey Mancini, and then trade rumors had a good one today with Paul Fry could actually be a team that helps another team if they're willing to try. I'm, I don't know. I go back and forth with it. Like, you have to make trades with no emotion in it, but are you going to bring back Trey Mancini a year after he overcame colon

cancer and then you're going to trade them? Yeah, I don't think so. I think they want to feel like they're building towards something. The only guys, it's amazing too, the way the payroll is done. The only guys that are not under contract for next year are Michael Franco,

Matt Harvey, and Freddie Galvees. I could see somebody picking up Galvees for utility and Matt Harvey for the pen, maybe. But you'd have to come to the Orioles with some actual prospects for the rest of them. Yeah. If you're the Orioles, you better give us proof of concept of Matt Harvey as an effective reliever before anyone's going to make that trade, though. That's true.

But here's... Yeah. Maybe Orioles took him to the pen just to show him off as a reliever. The old Pomerantz trick. What kind of bothers me, though, about the Orioles not trading Means and Mancini is they're not going to be good next year. So are Means and Mancini going to be part of the next good Orioles team? Oh, you know, I don't know.

D.L. Hall and people say Grayson Rodriguez is the best pitching prospect in baseball. You know, I don't know. D.L. Hall and people say Grayson Rodriguez is the best pitching prospect in baseball. Like, what if those guys do hit and you've got Means, Hall, Rodriguez in the rotation? It's the rotation that really needs the most help. Well, they pitch at Camden Yards and they've had a really long track record of not developing guys at Camden Yards. And also, 30 seconds ago, we just talked about how stacked the AL East is. None of these teams are built to bust, right? They're not

full of veterans where they're going to go off a cliff next year. These teams are up in... I would say, I would call... The Yankees are looking kind of old. They're teetering. I would say Toronto, up and coming. Boston, up and coming. I would say these teams are not teams... And the Rays

always every year. Even if the Orioles are... Always up and coming. Right would say these teams are not teams, and the Rays always every year. Even if the Orioles are... The Rays always up and coming. If the Orioles are better, again, I repeat my question, are Troy Mancini and John Means part of the next great Orioles team? I would say probably not.

Mancini only got 2022 as well. Means would be 2024, 2025 like he's he's got a means could be there it's possible terrible to trade back player of the year yeah i know and he may not even get that much for mancini i mean he's still kind of a corner infield bat yeah i, I think that's the other problem. You might not get the impact guys, or you might get guys who are really far away,

so you're kind of prolonging that core. You want to do it right if you're the Orioles, because the quality ahead of you is legit. I think that's something we all definitely agree on at this point. All right, we had one other question that came in that I thought was pretty interesting for today's show, and it's about the idea of parks changing based on the time of year. Question came in from Jerry. Jerry writes, on a recent pod, you noted that Baltimore in the summer could be a tough place to pitch when discussing John Means, and I was wondering what other weather or seasonal effects you think about when looking at the matchups for your hitters and pitchers, do certain pitches perform better or worse with increased heat and humidity? Or is it just about stamina of pitchers?

So maybe we take that second part of that question first. You know, are there certain characteristics of pitches that are impacted more than others when the weather starts to get hot, humid, sticky like it is in a lot of parts of the country right now? Yeah, I find this a fascinating question. I think it'll lead to some studies in the future, but I don't know that I've seen them already. One thing I can tell you is the velocity peaks in August, but so does offense, partially, I think, because the ball flies better in heat. So this is me guessing.

I would guess that the later summer favors stuff over command. Why would I guess that? Because if you get an extra tick, something that John Smoltz always said, he said in the postseason, everyone gets, tries to throw harder and gets a little bit extra tick. It's something that John Smoltz always said. He said in the postseason, everyone gets, uh, tries to throw harder and gets a little bit extra gas. And that favors stuff guys,

because, um, they're used to just trying to overpower players and pitchers and they, and they've got good stuff. And so adding an extra tick is great. Uh, but it wasn't always great for Glavin and it wasn't always great for, you know,

Smoltz agreed with me saying that, yes, he was the best option in the postseason on my podcast back in the day. And I think that I agreed in the motion. The thing was that for Maddox and Glavin, getting an extra tick was not necessarily good news that they knew how to shape and place pitches based on what they had. And so, you know, bumping up to 94-95 meant that the pitches ended up in different places than they expected or they just weren't used to trying to overpower people.

So if you look at it, the postseason numbers favored Smoltz over Glavin and Maddox, and I would assume that August is a little bit, September, a little bit like the postseason if they get an extra sort of half tick there. Interesting. I feel like a lot of this bumps into the Al Melchior VMI and air density spaces too. I need to kind of pick his brain

and look a little more at how those things are changing in different parks, probably to greater degrees over the course of the year too because i think that's the absolute like most scientific way to break this all down yeah isn't this part of the reason why teams are having the humidors too like because of the conditions um i'm right like i've talked to guys who always pitched in humidity like baltimore for example and then they go somewhere like ari Arizona where there's no humidity and all of a sudden they can't grip the ball.

So that's where the Roslyn sunscreen comes in because it mimics the sweat, you know, that mimics kind of the Roslyn sweat that guys use. So I think it's time of the year. I think it's ballpark. Certainly like we mentioned with the humidity factor for pitchers um for gripping the ball but this year you know guys are doing whatever until it gets enforced it's hard to say this is what they're doing because they're in arizona right but i do think and i have heard before that there are certainly coarse field i mean there are huge adjustments you have to make um when you go to places like that that are just not at all similar to anywhere else.

So it's an interesting question. I would love for somebody to dive deep into this. It wouldn't surprise me if teams are diving deep into this, especially ones who I always wondered with the Rockies, why not create a team around your team, right? Like why not use those advantages? Like in Tropicana Field, the Rays build – everyone's always like, why do the Rays build these great pitching staffs?

Well, they build great pitching staffs, one. But two, they pitch in the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball. They pitch in climate control. The trough is always shut. It's always 72 degrees. They have ample foul territory for them to be able to get more outs. Buck Showalter used to always talk about this, which is also fascinating. Park to park, the more foul ground you have,

the better it is for pitchers because those balls that are five, six rows out in other stadiums all of a sudden are in play. So yeah, so Tampa Bay does a great job of they never play home double headers. They're able to stack, they're able to create their team around pitching because of their ballpark.

And I think smart teams should follow that lead. Yeah, and it would be really important for teams that are going to acquire pitching, right? Like, you know, I don't think you'd want to do something like look at Merrill Kelly's August splits over his career. He's been very different pitchers. He's gone to different countries and pitched. You know, like I wouldn't just look at his August and September splits and be like, we shouldn't acquire Kelly. He fades in August, you know, like which Kelly are you talking about? But if you could say pitchers with sinkers, they sink more in August and September. He has a good

say. He doesn't, but you know, if you could say something about his arsenal playing up in August and September, then you could say, you know, you could maybe line those up. Be like, he has been good in August and September, and he has the type of pitches that play well in August and September. So, you know, but the reason that it is going to be hard to study is, you know, and Britt touched on some of these. Like, I think there's a lot of things moving parts in different directions. So, like, I think pitches move more more in humidity and they go faster in humidity.

So that's good for the pitchers. Another thing that's good for the pitchers is bats actually soak up the humidity. You know, Mitch Hanegar was in my bat piece saying that he weighs his bats and as they soak up humidity and they get too heavy, he orders a new round of bats. So I would expect more bat humidors going forward too. And so that favors the pitchers, but the ball, once it's in the air, flies better

in heat, so that favors the hitters. There are a lot of moving parts, but I'm not going to say that it doesn't matter because first of all, we know that velocity peaks in August. So there's already something that's just very honking out there that tells us something is different when it's super hot. July and August act differently. Oh, and the last thing that's kind of interesting is that batters don't swing as much in March and April, and they swing

a lot more in August and September. So that might be meaningful for a certain type of pitcher that requires them to be swinging. More aggressive hitters, yeah. Stuff. I think that favors stuff if they're swinging. Command. A command artist, I think, doesn't want you to always swing, right? A command artist throws like a front door two seamer, doesn't want you to swing.

It comes across the plate, right? A command artist throws like a front door two seamer. It doesn't want you to swing. It comes across the plate. Yeah. Right? That's not something that like Thor... Thor actually has some command, but that's not something... What's a high stuff guy? That's not something Glassnow does. Mm-mm. Glassnow just wants to blow it by you. And so if you're swinging a lot, I think that favors Glassnow. I think that's a fair take, but yeah.

A lot of other variables in play because the parks themselves change from year to year and from season to season, sometimes by design of the team that we talked about before, but sometimes by cityscapes changing. Like that's always a weird variable. Nationals Park might be in the middle of changing. Didn't they? Last time I was at Nationals Park, they had like eight buildings that were going up in the outfield. Am I right, Britt? Yeah, they've built up the Navy Yard, I think, over the last, I want to say 10, 15 years a lot.

So yeah, I would agree with that. I wouldn't be surprised if Nationals Park plays differently now than it used to. It's a great question, though. So thank you for taking the time to write, Jerry. If you want to send us a question, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com is the email address on Twitter. She's at Britt underscore Giroli. He is at Eno Saris. I'm at Derek Van Ryper. Before we go, get a subscription to The Athletic. We'd really appreciate it. $3.99 a month gets you the door at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. Also, if you are listening to this show and haven't had a chance to leave us a nice rating and review on Apple Podcasts, we'd really

appreciate that if you dropped in there and gave us a five-star review. Don't let the haters win ever. Just drop in the five stars. It's a good way to support the show if you haven't done that already. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Monday. Thanks for listening.