Rates & Barrels - The soaring Blue Jays, dangerous Wild Card teams, and a trip inside the mind of Eno

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss the red-hot Toronto Blue Jays, the most dangerous potential Wild Card teams, the hope of avoiding one-number Hall of Fame cases, Eno’s FanGraphs dashboard preferences, and more.�� Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Get 50% off a subscription to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels presented by Topps. Check out Topps Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards. Derek Van Ryper, Eno Saris here with you on this Friday. On this episode, we'll discuss the recently surging Blue Jays. They are right back into the thick of the wildcard race. 8-0 so far in September. We'll dig into them and discuss which potential wildcard team is the one we'd least want to face if we were a team already in an LDS sort of position. We're going to take a look at what's on Eno's dashboard, something that carried over

from the last episode so we get a sense for how Eno's mind works and what kind of lens he's looking at. It doesn't work. Well, the successes and the failures. Both are important. You can learn more from those failures, so it's important to dig into those.

I had a few follow-up questions about Hall of Famers, and it kind of slides into this team greats versus Hall of Fame thing, and a few extended thoughts there, so we'll get to that a bit later in the show as well. But really, the Blue Jays are where I wanted to start today. I even found my hats, which is great news. If you were listening last week and wondering why I've been wearing the Padres hat so much, well, I've found all my hats. So that's a huge victory for me personally. But a lot of victories for the Jays lately, including a four-game sweep over the Yankees this week. So they're now sitting at a 51.9% chance of making the playoffs.

They were down at 8%, I want to say, two weeks ago. So definitely kind of where the A's and Mariners have been living in the AL for most of that time. This is a good team, though, because the Jays, they're first in the league in home runs, hit 217 home runs this year. They're second in WRC+, and not surprisingly, they're second in K% too. So they have the look of an Astros sort of offense, and they could have a healthier George Springer back in the fold come playoff time as well, which has been the case for only about 60 games so far this season. So I think

the questions people have about the Jays will continue to point back to the pitching. Is the pitching good enough? And I'm leaning, yeah. I mean, you talked about this when we were looking at just stuff in command numbers for staffs, I think a couple weeks ago with bullpens in particular. They're good there, but they're also good in the rotation. We love that Barrios addition back at the trade deadline. Ryu has been solid, and Robbie Ray has pitched like a true frontline guy. Plus, you've got Alec Manoa. Matz has really surprised me the most.

Right. I just didn't even think he was a credible starter. And then to go to the American League, to see his strikeout rate go back down, but somehow corral the homers while pitching in Dunedin and Toronto, all of those things surprised me. And maybe he's pitching over his head a little bit, but I think he's proven that he's a capable fifth starter.

Somebody that can get you there. I don't think he's necessarily somebody that'll pitch other than maybe an inning in a postseason matchup. Right, right. But I think that's a great spot to be in. If Matz is your five, you're more than okay. That means Alec Manoa is a big part of the plan, but doesn't have to be the guy. Manoa is a big part of the plan, but doesn't have to be the guy. I think the arrival of Barrios and the step forward from Robbie Ray took a lot of pressure off the Jays' young starters

because we thought earlier in the year the young starters especially would have to be phenomenal if they were going to make a run like this. They've got a little more buffer because of some other things that we just didn't see coming. But I think one of the questions they would have to sort out if they get into a tiebreaker scenario or if they do end up playing in the wildcard game, do you throw Robbie Ray in that spot?

Is he the starter you trust the most right now on this staff if the season is on the line? I think it does matter a little bit if they're home or away. And most likely, if they make the playoffs, it's the second wildcard, just because they'd have to overcome more teams to get the first wild card um I mean if they get the first wild card maybe you throw Ryu because he's been really good at home um but I mean he's been really good away as a Blue Jay did you throw Ryu on the road like how much do you trust home away splits like that?

I mean, it's only two years, but home for him has meant more homers, and that's what the park has. That's the park factor. Yeah, I think I trust it more with a skill like that than with the broader result, if that makes sense, because I think that link can make some sense. The way a guy pitches, his approach could not fit or fit particularly well in a park.

Well, how about this? Your next series is going to be on the road no matter what. So Ryu can be your game one starter in the next series and still benefit from that home away split. And in general, I trust the guy with the larger strikeout rate that's that's it just the guy with the largest strikeout rate robbie ray striking out nearly a third of the batters he's seeing this year it's a big difference i i think you have to go ray and it's again not not the kind of thing that i would have expected to say

going into the season but i'm on that side where I trust those skills enough where he's the guy that I would want to have on the mound in that elimination scenario, that one and done scenario. A little bit underrated for them as a new thing that's just happened is that Julian Merriweather is back.

He only has four innings so his 50% strikeout rate is not stable but he has really exciting stuff so I think that you know with Romano I think that every once in a while with Romano you're like whoa he put two

guys on you know how's this going to end up having Merriweather as like oh we'll just take Merriweather and put him out there now, is kind of awesome. And it's like, okay, as Tim Miza, I don't know exactly how to say that, and Adam Simber have pitched as the setup guys, have pitched as the, the setup guys, uh, just having Merriweather back makes that more of a foursome at the end instead of like a threesome and,

and hope you've got enough otherwise. Yeah. So, uh, your, I think your postseason bullpen is mostly just Merriweather, Miza, Simba,

Romano, and Matt's, uh, as a lefty, um, in that group. Yeah. And hopefully,

uh, you, you don't run into trouble where your starters get rocked early because I think the depth in the bullpen is a slight weakness. That's true of plenty of teams, not necessarily an indictment of the Jays as having any sort of problem. But I just think the way that offense is built,

especially, makes them a really dangerous team beyond the wildcard round, right? They're a team you don't want to deal with. If you're the Rays of team beyond the wildcard round right like they're their team you don't want to deal with if you're the rays of all the possible wildcard teams right now i don't think you want to see the jays and they're at the top of your list right now would you agree with that yeah and one thing that i really like about it is that it's actually a fairly diverse lineup in terms of skills and you know bring to the table. You've got kind of more grinded out at-bats with Springer and Simeon, guys who will take pitches, who will have long at-bats,

will take walks. Vlad is in that group, but he's also just a hard hitter, and he can hit it hard. I just wrote this piece about you know players that could push their teams into the postseason and vlad you know his ground ball rate is up in the second half i've talked about this on the podcast he's been you know seeing some some more low four seamers to kind of entice them to hit some more grounders it actually doesn't matter a little bit you know he hits the ball so hard that if you're throwing him high stuff or low stuff in the zone he's going to hit it hard so he brings something to the table that very few other teams have just a guy who can hit it hard all over the zone and take walks and will make a lot of

contact i mean it's it's a great combination and then you've got your kind of wild uh swingers in bo bichette and teoscar hernandez and it's it's kind of weird to to say that as um as a bonus as like a good thing but i actually think it is good to have a couple players like that on your team because let's say you run into a guy that has extreme like great command right and you're and you're grinded out guys are just taking called strike threes too often right and they're trying to grind it out and they're trying you're grinded out guys are just taking called strike threes too often right and they're trying to grind it out and they're trying to grind it out but they're like this other guy has great command and uh they're just not it's not a good matchup um to have a free swinger in there might actually be a good alternate when there is great command

this guy he's just placing a little bit outside the zone well boba shett doesn't care he's not gonna take it you know he's not gonna take it and allow the umpire to maybe call it strike three on a pitcher you're like ah that was a ball no boba shett's gonna swing at it and that actually might um i would love to like kind of suss this out a little bit if like maybe against a great command guy you do want some free swingers. Some people will just get out there and don't really care about is that a ball or a strike as much. I think the lineup is really good up and down. The one thing that bothers me is, is Springer wearing a big old brace? Have you seen this?

I haven't seen the brace yet. I don't know if it was just one game or if it's a temporary thing, but it looked big, old, and clunky. And, you know, if he's not at his best, they can do fine. They can do fine. And they'll just use him more as an AB. They'll probably DH him and use him as a good grinded-out AB, and he'll still bring value to the table but it won't necessarily be the springer that like at times put the astros

on his back yeah i think because they've got so many other ways to beat you they don't necessarily need him to be that guy right now which affords them a little bit of buffer but yeah i mean i would say the thing about the jays' approach as hitters, that varying approach that's interesting to me, is maybe that's one of the ways to unlock beating a bullpen that can mix and match the way the Rays do, right? When the Rays keep throwing the kitchen sink at you, if you've got a lot of hitters with similar approaches,

they can keep zigging and zagging before you can adjust. But if you've got a bunch of hitters in the lineup that go at it differently, that might be one way to break down a bullpen like that or to at least make those bullpen games a lot less effective. Yeah, do the Yankees have a boba set? You know? Most teams don't.

When I think of the Yankees, I think of everyone's like 6'6 and like 250 pounds. And just grind it out at bats that take six pitches per plate appearance. And they strike out a fair amount. I think a line of diversity is something that I've been chasing for a long time that I haven't. You know, I've been asking people who model in sim games to like, could you, there's a season that's very similar.

You can find an Adam Dunn and a Vladimir Guerrero senior season that have the same WOBA, the same production in totally different ways. What I want is someone to sim a season

of a lineup of just Adam Dunn's and just Vlad Guerrero's with that same Woba and then a lineup of mixed Adam Dunn's and Vlad Guerrero's. Right. See how much varying it up actually impacts the outcome.

My hypothesis is that even the simulation would produce that. Just because you think about if you had the very extreme where you had a guy who just walked 100% of the time and you had a guy who hit singles 100% of the time,

I guess the guy who hit singles 100% of the time would score more over the course of a season. Because you could score on a single from second. Yeah. Right. It wouldn't just be station to station. The occasional roped single that somehow scores the runner with two outs. Right.

So that's not a great example, but it is the sort of with two outs. Right. That's not a great example, but it is the sort of what I'm getting at. Maybe it's best if you had a guy who walked 50% of the time and hit a single the other 50% of the time. All right. Well, let's flip the script and look at the NL just for a moment. Same question. Which potential wildcard team do you want to avoid there? I guess that group would really include the Phillies, if we're for being very generous the mets the reds the padres and

the cardinals yeah you're just gonna leave the dodgers out i guess i'm thinking about this in terms of that particular game right so if you're the dodgers of the giants and you end up in the wildcard who should scare the dodgers the most who would scare the dodgers in that one game scenario because i think the dodgers are the clear answer. If they don't win the NL West, they're the wildcard team that the rest of the NL doesn't want to face. That's what I say. But who's that next one? Just leave out the one answer.

No, we have to bypass that because it seems too obvious. You know, I'm really starting pitcher-centric, and so I want the best ace. So you're talking Aaron N nola jake degrom well yeah healthy degrom if the mets find their way in that's a nightmare scenario for you i mean especially if you're the dodgers and degrom's healthy and you can go six look out yeah because you could get lucky and get good diaz and good Familia and just finish that game up um yeah I think the Mets sneaking in would be bad news for the Dodgers uh Reds ace is Luis Castillo or Sonny Gray Luis Castillo it'd be Castillo I think yeah I mean he's an ace he's

a good ace and I'm not trying to denigrate him but as a as a scariness factor i'm not sure the dodgers ace is you darvish or blake snell darvish's recent form impossible injury even though they try to say he's healthy make me think they might want to throw snell there and it does negate some of their left-handed bats right i mean if you think about that uh that i mean it's they do have mookie bats i'm not saying they don't have good uh power righties i mean pollock is there too if he's healthy but um muncie negating like not negating but like you know reducing the impact of muncie and seager uh and getting bellinger to be out of the lineup although one of these days you kind of almost want to win. Maybe you want to win. Anyway, I would say that I kind of think that might be – that's the most realistic one because the Mets have a lot to overcome to get in, right?

So I think the most realistic tough scenario for them is the Padres. The Padres have played them really well. And the only thing that I would say is that familiarity breeds – no, what is it? Familiarity breeds contempt. Is it? Yes.

Well, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's true. Um,

but also, um, does it help them to have seen Blake snow? Um, even on this good run, you know, to, to see what his strategy is like and,

you know, how many wrinkles does Blake snow have left? Uh, is it, to see what his strategy is like. And, you know, how many wrinkles does Blake Snell have left? Is he going to go to the curveball more or throw the fastball even less? Or what is it, you know? Any case, I think Snell and a Padres lineup that is clicking is the scariest for the Dodgers. Yeah, I think that's probably fair. But I do think the long shot scenario, I mean, if the Mets take that spiraling Yankees team this weekend

and sweep them and increase their odds and put some pressure on, that's a scenario you really don't want to see if you're the Dodgers right now because they do match up so well, especially in that one game scenario. And there is some, there is some momentum. I don't know. I don't really want to litigate the whole, was it torn?

Did they lie, you know, about Jacob, Jacob DeGrom's elbow, but there does seem to be some momentum for him to start possibly next week. Mid-September is the thing I've been hearing thrown around. And he could actually make a difference to their postseason chances just to get out there and maybe get them two or three wins. Yeah, it would be huge if they find a way to get him back.

It's a Friday. We're definitely not going to dig into the the tear and the things that have been said about it and the time no sorry not on a friday can't do it although i will say uh the most recent tweet uh by john hayman about um oh well you know sandy was only just to like sort of take care of the mets for a couple years and he never really wanted to run uh baseball ops i have to say um yes we we can we can tell we can we can see that from the outside he's running it like uh he doesn't want to be running it i mean there's this whole thing he said um i wish i i would have checked with any women in leadership positions about Jared Porter if there were any. Well, it was a Jared Porter, Zach Scott. One of them worked for a woman GM in Boston, Raquel Ferreira.

Yeah. I mean, it takes like three seconds of research to find that one out. And I would say in light of what's going on and how much of this stuff is coming out and in light of kind of the new Jonah Carey stuff or the – it's not new, but the kind of Jonah Carey filings, court filings and stuff. I think it behooves us all. And I don't want it to be like – it's not like a narc thing. You're not trying to like out people. you're not trying to be a cop but it behooves us all to ask questions and it doesn't doesn't have to be oh i need to find someone of an equal of his no you would have found jared porter out if you'd ask the writers and don't pretend this is something we don't do because when brett laurie was traded from the a's they they asked writers

what we thought of brett laurie's makeup they asked writers in that case that i don't remember i mean i wasn't a writer and still really not this is the thing i know that's so weird if you're if you're asking writers when you're making a trade you can ask writers when you're signing a GM. Yeah, of course. I mean, writers deal with front office people regularly. And try to ask writers of slightly different backgrounds because you ask a bunch of white dudes,

is Jared Porter good? And Jared Porter's been leaking them information. They'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Jared Porter. That's what happens. Right? That's what happened

when he was hired. It was all praise. That's probably the source of all the written praise, yes. Exactly. So, it's a dirty game, journalism. But I would say that, like, just generally, the idea is ask more people, ask people at different levels, ask people of different backgrounds. Want to do your job. Well, yeah. If you don't want to do your job, you if you don't want to do your job you know maybe let

someone else do it yeah let someone else do it don't like put your your son in an atm position and then just uh hire you know whoever without checking their background never a dull moment with the mets that is for sure still a good good team. Yeah, I mean, like we said, probably the team the Dodgers would least like to see if they find their way into that wildcard scenario with a healthy DeGrom. I don't think anybody wants any part of DeGrom in an elimination game at this point.

Let's talk about a couple things that came in as a result of our conversation about Hall of Famers earlier this week. And I think there's an important distinction to be made. If you say someone's not a Hall of our conversation about Hall of Famers earlier this week. I think there's an important distinction to be made. If you say someone's not a Hall of Famer, it doesn't mean they're not a great player. In that case, you're probably talking about a team great player.

Salvador Perez was tossed out this week. A Hall of Very Good. A Hall of Very Good. That's not an insult. That's not a slight at the player. I think that sort of conversation needs a lot more nuance. It can't just be, he's not a slight at the player i think that sort of that sort of conversation needs a lot more nuance it can't just be he's not a hall of famer like okay we're not saying he's bad like he's he's still very good and maybe we could talk about why a player is not a

hall of famer uh be out of your melina who brit wrote a piece about this week i think might be right at the line of this but i think he also kind of touches on this idea that I want us to avoid it with everything we do and analysis and even how we play fantasy. I never want everything to come back to one number. Like even if we lean heavily on numbers for analysis, no one number should mean everything. And I think that's true of war in the hall of fame too. And I don't know if anybody's like gone that far down to the extreme where it's like, yep, war's got to be here or they're not in.

But it's still the kind of thing that you need to see, like, what moves the needle if the war doesn't stack up to a current group of Hall of Famers? What could get you there? What could be the type of thing in your career that is worthy of making you a Hall of Famer? And I think in the case of someone like Yachty, it's a bunch of different things. We've seen him win World Series. We've seen him win Gold Gloves. He's a 10-time All-Star. I mean, I realize the rosters are bigger, but the list of catchers who are 10-time All-Stars who are not Hall of Famers, only three guys. Elston Howard, Del Crandall, and Bill Freehand. who are not Hall of Famers, only three guys.

Elston Howard, Del Crandall, Bill Freehand. I think with the postseason success that Yachty has had especially, that's not part of war. That needs to count. It kind of devolves into the typical pro football Hall of Fame arguments. Well, Eli Manning in Super Bowls, he's a Hall of Famer. It's like, well,

it's not just winning the World Series. It's what did you do on those stages? I think that really needs to be part of our calculus as well. So I'm curious what you think of Yachty first and, and just this, this broader idea of like, what else would be enough to take someone's resume that might not jump off the page with war and other metrics we look at,

but what would be enough to actually put them over the top and make them Hall of Fame worthy players? That's interesting. He has an extra 394 plate appearances in the postseason and an extra 36 RBI that would get him over a thousand. He'll probably get over a thousand anyway with the extra season, the last season he's got. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was sort of talking about with there's two things going on here for me. One is that, yeah, I agree with you that one-numberism is faulty because

we're always improving on the numbers. Like I said, Yadier Molina was not a Hall of Famer until we put framing in. Now he's a Hall of Famer on fan graphs you know um so to kind of be absolutist and be like well he's not a little now he is yeah it's like okay what what's the next thing that we'll find uh the other thing is um that i'm thinking of when you're when you're talking about this one team is the thing um we we have found that players that the players that are retained by their original team and free agency outperform players that move from team to team.

And there's been different postulations about this, but the general idea is that the team that retains a free agent knows the most about him. And to me, there is probably something we can't see from the outside when a team makes it a priority to retain a player all the way through their career. It's increasingly rare in this era, and I think that's definitely something that carries some extra weight with Molina because if you think about the Cardinals today, if you've watched the Cardinals over the last 15, 20 years,

the first player I think of when you say name a Cardinal is Yachty. It's him. It's not Pujols, even though Pujols was a more impactful player by a lot just because of the longevity. That does do something in our minds i think what what surprised me and this is this is kind of where i entered this point was i was looking at the the jaws leaderboard for catchers at baseball reference that we were talking about those leaderboards the other day and jason kendall pops as a guy that actually had

a much better career than i would have remembered. Very comparable to Yachty based on their metrics. Those don't include framing, though. I do think framing and even game calling, right? Being a great game caller is something that also would factor in if we're talking about a catcher. And I would say Molina is a great game caller, too. Kendall bounced around a lot. And I wonder how much differently we'd look at Jason Kendall's career

if he had been a pirate from day one to day 1500, right? If every single day of his big league career was with one franchise, maybe we'd identify him more consistently as one of the better catchers we've seen really in the last 20 years. I don't know if that makes him a Hall of Famer, but I do think moving around a lot at some point does start to work against the player, especially guys on the margins. What also would the difference be if those Pittsburgh teams had been good? That too. If you're a good player on a bad team, that can work against you. He has 12 postseason games. 51 postseason games. You know, 51 postseason plate appearances and 11 postseason hits.

You know, he just doesn't have that same visibility. But, yeah, in terms of a hitter, he's a 99 WRC+. Yachty is as well. No, he's a 98, whatever. Yeah, comparable hitters. When you start looking at fan graphs, Kendall, yeah, he doesn't have that framing in there, so he doesn't show up in the same place with framing in it. But, see, that's another thing, too too is we don't have the ability to do framing for carlton fisk we can kind of do some with or without you some guesses some you know

there was there was some interesting work at baseball prospectus that went back and tried to like pretend like try to kind of approximate framing value so some of that might be in there but it's not the same as telling you we know how good Buster Posey and Yadier Molina and Russell Martin were as framers and so people might get mad that Russell Martin is the 11th best catcher of all time by by Fangraphs War you know they might remember the end of his career. They might remember the fact that he moved around, just like Kendall, right? He doesn't have that same postseason aura to him.

He doesn't have that same anointed one-team aura to him. I think he's maybe even a better example than Kendall as maybe one of these players that should be in the conversation that just won't be compared to Yadier Molina. I don't have an easy answer for that because, to me, Russell Martin should be in the conversation, and I just don't think he will be in the same way as Yadier Molina. And I guess I'm not trying to dodge the question. I don't think about it in terms of who I would vote for

because I will not have a ballot. But if I did have a ballot, I would vote for Yachty. I don't know if he'd be one of the first guys that would get in for me based on how crowded things are right now. Hazel agrees. She's a big Brewers fan, but she respects what Yachty or Molina has done. But I would vote for Yachty. I think he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. There's enough on the resume that goes beyond

whatever first metrics you're looking at that would push him in. Yeah, yeah. I would vote for Yachty. I'd vote for Buster Posey, even if his career ended now. And I think Russell Martin would be the one that would be very difficult for me. And he doesn't... Yeah, he just doesn't have that same um je ne sais quoi you know it's it's it's hard to put your finger on it um and so that's why i think you know that's why a lot of

people do say hey do it by the numbers because your je ne sais quoi is not the same as someone else's and so you're then you're just falling for it falling back on the same kind of what we used to call bs of the old writers just being like well i didn't think he was a hall of famer when he played you know uh like like uh i think there is there are just there's some sort of band of confidence there's some sort of limits of confidence there's some sort of limits to to how much you want to trust your gut and how much you want

to trust the numbers because I think trusting your gut too much gets you Harold Baines and I just when I look at Harold Baines' career

I even watch some of it I was like there for it it's not like I'm talking about some old folk I remember Harold Baines he just never struck me then and my gut as a Hall of Famer.

Or now when I'm looking at number, I think he's probably maybe the worst Hall of Famer in the Hall of Fame. Yachty might become the worst hitter in the Hall of Fame. But the game is more than that, right? I mean, if you can be a DH and mash your way in and not even play defense, then you should be able to be an elite catcher and be a solid offensive player and maybe have that work because Yadier Molina was an above average offensive player earlier in his career. It's not like he never was, not like he's always been, you know, mediocre with the bat or anything. It's just kind of a, kind of the broader picture of who he is. Russell Martin, I'm glad you brought him up.

He was just too early, almost in some ways, because if he was on the current Dodgers teams, we'd see him in the postseason all the time, and we'd remember him as a great player. I think he also loses the team great path, too, because he played for four different teams. I guess the Dodger Russell Martin is the one you remember the most, even though you saw the Blue Jays Russell Martin more recently at the end of his career.

I know he played one more year with the Dodgers at the end, but it's so weird how where players go kind of shapes our perception of them. And contracts. I mean, I think there's a fair amount of Blue Jays fans that thought that that contract that they gave Russell Martin was a bad one. And that it hamstrung them and that he was a bad player for them. And I kind of disagree on all fronts. But that may shade your perception of him as a Hall of Famer.

By the way, I have to retract my previous statement. I forgot that Ozzie Smith was in the Hall of Fame. Yachty Molina cannot be the worst hitter in the Hall of Fame because Ozzie Smith is in the Hall of Fame. But I think that's a good example, too, where there's a guy who excelled defensively in ways that the metrics may not capture that well. You know, if current defensive metrics are not that great,

how great are defensive metrics for when Ozzie Smith played? Plus, he was a face of a franchise in a similar way and had some of those similar leadership qualities that we were talking about with Yadier Molina. I think the Yadier Molina argument is the Ozzie Smith argument in some ways. There were a couple other names that we didn't talk about as players, maybe putting together the base of a Hall of Fame career. Nolan Arenado caught my eye as one of the tweets we received.

I think he's very similar to Manny Machado in terms of what they've accomplished so far. It is possible, but I think a lot has to happen in the back half of the career to go from very good, you know, franchise great type level into the Hall of Fame. So I would say not outlandish whatsoever. I mean, the defense is elite. The bat's been really good. I just wonder how much he's going to pay a penalty for.

Is it a little bit like Roland-esque? A little bit. And he's also got to deal with the Coors situation too. I almost wonder if there's an overcorrection for guys that get the hit in Colorado. Like, if that works against you. I think Todd Helton may have gotten a raw job. Yeah, and then I guess we didn't really talk a lot about Goldschmidt and Freeman as first basemen who could make it.

You did say something about you think Goldschmidt falls short. Goldschmidt is very, very close, but just short. Right now, if his career ended today, he's basically marked to share by Jaws and by a certain amount of metrics. I think he's

going to end up right in that Todd Helton range. That's where I think Goldschmidt's going to land. He would be a below average Hall of Famer for a first baseman, but within range, there would be worse. Keith Hernandez is not in, but would be right there. George

Sizzler is in. Hank Greenberg is in. Mark McGuire's not in, but that's a little bit complicated. Eddie Murray is in. He'll probably finish among a group of people who are in the Hall of Fame. I think Goldschmidt could be in. Freeman is going to take some work. In terms of just a baseball reference war,

he might need another 10 to 15 war. Right now he's at 42. If you gave him 15 more and got him to 57 then he'd be in that uh joe joe tory bill terry george sizzler below average hall of fame first baseman but among hall of famers uh gulchman doesn't have as far to go but gulchman is further along in his career i think he's older right a? A little older, yeah. So I don't know. They both have chances. But I also think that, like, I wonder if the Hall of Fame

is going to follow some of what's happening in baseball where first basemen are a little bit more undervalued. You know, when you look at who's in the Hall of Fame, we haven't put a lot of third basemen in. Maybe there will be sort of a movement to, like, put of third basemen in. Maybe there'll be sort of a movement to put more third basemen in, that sort of deal. We didn't have any relievers in for a long time,

and then we started putting a bunch in. So maybe they'll decide there's a bunch of first basemen in, and Goldschmidt looks a lot like Helton, Helton's not in, so I'm not going to vote for him. Who knows? But I don't think that either Goldschmidt or Freeman looks a lot like Helton. Helton's not in, so I'm not going to vote for him. Who knows?

I don't think that either Goldschmidt or Freeman are going to make it a no-doubt case. This is part of why I guess I'm not digging the one-number solution to the Hall of War for first baseman because you accrue so much negative value for your war by playing first base.

It's so hard to be a positive war defender at that position it's part of why goldschmidt is so high is that he was a good defender early on yeah and i'm looking at so i'm looking at just a different number this actually occurs to me a little bit you uh the the one failing in this uh let's give players credit for staying with their with their organization is is that that might cost them money. They might make more money going somewhere else, and let's not hold that against them because they wanted to make money during their career.

Yeah. I was trying to look at first baseman almost more like the way I would look at a DH. Okay, so yeah, I'd rather have a good or great defensive first baseman than not. But just look at the offense. Yeah, how do you stack up offensively? I mean, Paul Goldschmidt's got a career 140 WRC+. That's 14th all-time among first basemen.

Most of the guys ahead of him are pretty clear Hall of Famers. Not all of them. I mean, there's a few guys in there like Lance Berkman. Not going to be a Hall of Famer. Votto, we think, is in. So, I mean, for the most part, that's another way you could look at it and say, okay, let's just focus more on the offensive metrics and figure out what's good enough there. But Goldschmidt, I think he's still got more work to do.

I really do. I think he's a very good player, but I think he'd be an all-time great D-back who spent time with the Cardinals when it's all said and done, if I had to guess how we're going to look at him five-plus years from now. Yeah, sorting by WRC Plus, man. Mark McGuire, look at that. Kind of sad, actually. Fourth-best first-base WRC Plus of all time.

The other name that I thought was really i mean we got other feedback too but jose el tuve i thought was kind of interesting because i just hadn't thought about him in that light so looking at how he stacks up to other second basemen you know just at a glance still work to be done but i think it brings us to a pretty interesting question of how we think he's going to age it's generally a position where players do not age all that well. El Tuve, kind of a clear physical outlier in terms of his stature, the bounce back that he's had in 2021 gives you some hope that these next few years,

at least in the early part of his thirties could still be very productive. So I'd put him in the, it's possible, but probably unlikely category, you know, maybe a guy that stays with the Astros forever, and that kind of adds to it a little bit, but I would guess he's more like a Goldschmidt type at second base.

I mean, 10 war would make a big difference. Right now he's at 40, and he's hanging out with, I just wanted to say this, Eddie Stanky. Oh, my goodness. He's hanging out with Eddie Stanky and Cupid Childs. Love it. Cupid Childs. Buddy Meyer.

Love it. The worst second base Hall of Famer by war. I guess there's Bill Mazeroski down there with 36. But you don't really want to just be better than the worst one. That's not a great case to be made. But if he got up to 50, he'd be hanging out with Kinsler, Pedroia, Joe Gordon, ahead of Nellie Fox and Bobby Doerr. That's where you start getting into the BGO Alomar territory too.

But 10 war. I mean, how many seasons do we think he has left? At least four. I mean, he signed through 2024, so his contract runs for three more. Okay. And he's about to put up four this year. A normal sort of half a win aging curve uh would say he puts up four three and two uh so that's nine all right i think i think he's got a really good chance

you know if he puts up nine he has he's at 49 and he's got that'll make him ahead of zobrist and right there uh nip it on Pedroia and Kindler's heels. And then maybe he gets a two-year contract and finishes as a league average player for a couple years. It is a type of skill set. He's already got five post-seasons. Oh, and there's post-season to go for. But then there's also the mar of the cheating scandal.

I think the further away we get from that the less people are going to care it's it's not going to have anything close to the staying power of the pd or it's not it's not anywhere not even the same conversation it's also not because there's no like sort of a player uh there's no punitive action against the player. Right. And I also think as more time passes, if the Astros win again, which is very possible, that changes a lot about how people think about some of the core

players from that team too. I do think he has the skill set to age pretty well. And the thing that I point out is the contact rate. I think a lot of times people flame out from baseball because they have like a 35% strikeout rate. I mean, that number's going up these days. But the power goes down to a point

where the strikeout rate doesn't play. I think he could have... He's already shown us seasons like 2018 and 2020 where he didn't have the power, but he still was making contact. And if you shove those two seasons together, you still get an above-average Major League player. So I think just based on his contact ability,

he'll be kind of like a Michael Brantley. You know, even if he has to play DH. That's a way to keep piling it up. Wouldn't he be kind of the funnest DH to have? Here's our DH, Jose Altuve. Makes me think I've got to dig through some Jason Stark columns to find out who the smallest DH in the history is. I would put that out there right now.

He'd be the smallest player to do it more than once in a while. If he did that for a whole season or part of a season later in his career, I'd say he would probably, of players under 5'8", or whatever you want to make the cutoff, he would end up leading baseball at all time in plate appearances as a DH. That would be almost a lock at this point. I'm calling it now, dude. I'm calling the start column and

the actual thing happening. So we had a question come in about your Fangraphs dashboards and what you're looking at as you evaluate players. What do you like to have on your screen? One of the best things about Fangraphs, you can really customize it as

much as you'd like to get those leaderboards and those player pages to pop just the way you want to. We should start on the hitting side. We talk so much about pitching on this show. We know a lot of the different things you're looking at for pitching purposes. But what do you focus on with hitters? What's the combination of metrics that you like to look through first? I don't have too many of the counting stats. I do have the triple slash line out there,

average OBP slugging. I have isolated slugging on there. I think that's actually much better than slugging at capturing just a person's power from a results standpoint. Then I have walks that strike out, swinging strikes. I like swinging strikes. They,

I think, stabilize faster than strikeout rates, so you can get a good sense of change early on in the season if someone has changed something at the plate. For example, Altuve, I think, is healthier this season than he was last season. Last season, he had a 9.8% swinging strike rate, which is the worst of his career, and now he's back to 7.2%, which is back in line with the rest of his career. You could have seen that early on in the season and realized that Altuve was going to have a pretty good season this year. Then I have ground ball, fly ball, and pull percentage. I like pull percentage. You'll see that over time, Altuve has become more of a pull hitter.

That's been the source of his power. Then I have reach rate or O-swing percentage, which stabilizes super quickly. And so you'll have, the example here, I believe, is Juan Soto. And so you'll have this tiny O-swing percentage here on YouTube, if you're watching. The O-swing percentage here for him was tiny to begin with because the average is something like 25% on this metric.

And now he's at 11.8%. He's a league leader, number one in baseball. That just stabilizes really quickly, becomes meaningful really quickly. It gives me an idea of what their plate approach is that year. It's not always amazing. Like, for example, Randall Gritchuk, I think is the third best improver in O-swing

from the beginning of the season to the second half of the season, and his splits suggest that maybe that isn't working for him. But we know that contact rate on pitches outside the zone ages really terribly, so it's a really valuable piece of information to know who's swinging pitches outside the zone and who's not. And the last ones are barrel and max EV barrel percentage, because it stabilizes quickly and it tells you a ton about the power and max EV because it's the one thing that like a rookie can do that will make me look their way right away.

You know, you gotta have, to be a major leaguer, you have to have a max EV pretty much over 100, a major leaguer, you have to have a max EV pretty much over 100, 105 in there. To be a powerful major leaguer, it's got to be over 108. And if you do something in the 111 to 113, 115 range early on in your career, you can see Juan Soto hit a ball 113.7 in his rookie season, then you've got my attention. Yeah, as like a 10 year old which makes it more impressive i should put age on there you're right let's look at the pitching one real quick if you're watching on youtube it'll cover our faces which is probably an improvement it will throw uh screenshots over our faces more often on this show this is corbin burns i believe yes corbin burns oh yeah that's corbin burns of the 882 era in 2019 yeah that's him yeah um i this is in flux

a little bit i see k9 is still on there i i i kind of leave that on there because um people are more familiar with it but k percentage and bb percentage are superior i've got those on there um uh swinging strike rate does stabilize quicker than strikeout rate and does stabilize quicker than called strike rate so uh for a pitcher if they start putting up really dominant swing strike rates early on um like uh you could even look at that first year for corbin Burns, where he has an 8K9 and a 15% swing strike rate. I was already interested. It was only 38 innings pitched. I should have games started on there to get a sense of if he's a starter or not, but there was already something going on for Corbin Burns in 2018, and that was still going on in 2019. He still retained my attention

because even though the ERA was terrible, you got this really high K-9, really high swing strike rate. Those things really appealed to me. I'll leave ground ball rate on there because anything over sort of, I think it's

like 60% is plus plus and can be really meaningful. I'll even pay attention if it's over 55%. Home run per fly ball rate is there because it's noise. And there's a really good example there. In 2019, 49 innings of Corbin Burns with a 39% home run fly ball rate just tells you something's off. And look at that home run per nine rate of the other three

seasons. And look at that home run for fly ball rate. That is just a straight noise. Tells you that that home run rate is just not really worth looking at. Sierra, I think, is one of the best one number things out there. And that's what some of our validation work on stuff plus showed us that sierra was the best one um you know it beat dra it beat uh fip it beat a lot of these other ones um it's complicated though it's kind of black boxy you know it's it's just a i don't it's not gospel for me but it's's there. Velocity stabilizes super quickly.

And so really early on in the season, you can say, oh, wow, look, Corbin Burns is throwing his fastball almost two ticks harder this year. A giddy app. And then called and swing strike percentage. I think average is like 31. Is that right? For called strikes and whips?

Yeah, the CSW. That seems a little, 31 seems pretty high. Maybe 30%, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I like that one. But like I said, swinging strikes stabilize quicker than called strikes. So early on the season, I'd rather know a person's swinging strike percentage than his called strike percentage.

Yeah, hopefully some good insight into Eno's mind there. Maybe a few tweaks you can make. And if you didn't realize you could customize those leaderboards, you will forever see fan graphs differently it will bring you much even more joy than it was bringing you already if you and learn from me man don't don't uh don't let it stagnate i mean i even or even for this i had to clean them up a little bit and now you know sort of speaking them into existence here on the show like i kind of want to go back and tweak them a little bit i mean uh it's going to change the way that you look at players and so you want to kind of manage your own

existence right you kind of want to like manage your own biases by like removing stats that'll make that you think are like if you leave fip on your dashboard you'll think it's important uh but uh it's mostly not yeah it's pretty wild i know you had sierra on yours and if you look at corbin burns's sierra in that 882 era season it was 355 i mean that gives you a much better idea of where he might be headed it's like way in line like right now it's like 3.0 or something you know 3.1 or something so it's like way in line. Like right now, it's like 3.0 or something, 3.1 or something. So it's like, yeah. Yeah, he's better now than he was that season, but it's not on the order of from like an 8 ERA to a 2 ERA.

Right. He beat his Sierra by more than a run last year in the shortened season, 2.11 ERA, 3.18 Sierra. That was a bit of a surprise for me. That's part of why I thought the price jumped enough. I wish I had carbon burns more places but i thought the market over corrected clearly i was wrong isn't it fun to be wrong about a player that you watch all the time so humbling uh i submit to you most of the giants this year

well you're not alone on that one i've got some shares of lamont wade but other than that i think i'm uh pretty devoid of giants on my teams oh buster posy buster posy i was in on i just thought the year off would be good for him yeah just tons of playing time too high spot in the lineup there was i'm always like buying cheap catchers and you know he he fell so far i was like yeah sure yeah i i got him a couple places too and that's turned out just great so far this year well thanks for sharing that dashboard with everybody hopefully people found that to be helpful uh we had one more question that came in and uh i i think this is the all you from that's not all b from from

frequent email or oj he writes uh like you have been on board with robles for a long time so he was the better prospect than soda which i think i'm gonna stop right there for a second i think a lot of that was just age right people hadn't seen soda yet he hadn't had a chance to make his case like the one soda prospect arc is uniquely weird. Yeah, he kind of just did all of his good work between prospect list updates, I think. You know what I mean? Where it's like nobody had seen him, so they didn't know how to rank him.

Then they ranked him, and then he went bonkers. And then by the time updates were out, he was already in a new level. You know what I mean? It was like in mid-season updates, yeah, he was already in a new level. You know what I mean? In mid-season updates, yeah, he was already a top 20 prospect. But in the year-long updates, just weird things happened. I agree with you. I think it's just the shape of his prospecthood

that somehow slipped between the cracks a little bit. And it was so fast. He was such an extreme fast-track player that the prospect community didn't have a fair chance to tell everybody how amazing he was going to be. But I understand where OJ is coming from. I'm not picking at OJ. I'm more just saying this can happen sometimes. The Juan Soto, one in 100, one in 1,000.

I don't know how rare this is. But that fast track to future Hall of Famer sort of prospect, that's part of the reason why when I'm building keeper league teams and I get a crack at prospects, I'm taking chances on very young players that haven't had a lot of exposure or any exposure in some cases to a full season level yet. OJ always thought that Robles' speed gave him upside, that he'd grow into some power. I thought the same thing. Power's been non-existent, speed is dwindling, and the hit tool hasn't really been evident either. And on the AL side, OJ has also had Leote Tavares sent a ball and has thought of him similarly. A couple years younger, much faster, a little bigger, and this year he's grown to the power at AAA. How do these players compare and then how much does the robles experience maybe shape the way that you would look at a player like taveras and i think it's a good question just because with

with taveras there was always speed always in the profile like that was never ever in doubt he was gonna play center field he's gonna run well but there were more questions about his hit tool than there were about robles is based on the scouting reports like if you saw the old numbers on on tveris you'd say oh okay there's there's like more risk more varying it's still a profile we're taking a chance on 40 slash 50 hit tool uh grades on fangrafts right so you could look at him and say okay i understand there's there's a lot of risk here and you'd still probably take that chance hoping to get long term speed. I did a few years ago, too. So there's there's enough there to gamble on with Robles. I think I got duped into thinking he was safer than he's turned out to be because of the way the hit tool was advertised. if that's a mistake that people actually made in their evaluations,

or if it's just going to happen a lot later than we expected, or what exactly the explanation is. But I'm not sure in this case that what's happened to Robles is necessarily the same thing that's happening to Leone Tavares, just because our expectations for Tavares should have been lower all along, and I think they got inflated based on what happened last year. The Rangers, by necessity, brought him up, played him in center field. And he sort of held his own in a way that made us think, hey, he's really young for the level.

This is going to work out great. He's going to keep getting better. The K rate should come down a little bit over time. At the very least, I'm getting 25 bags because he's going to play every day. I think a lot of that was just based on the aggressive promotions rather than things that he had shown and had kind of pushed into his own scouting report over time. He does speak to our ongoing question of

why do some players have a sub-20% strikeout rate and get to the majors and strike out 30% of the time and other guys continue having excellent strikeout rates? Because he did used to make a lot of contact and that's kind of out the window at the higher levels. And I don't know if it's because he's, he's taking more of a patient approach. His walk rates have gone up.

If he's waiting for his, his pitch for power, uh, if it's some sort of lack of two strike approach, cause he's just trying to hit for power. Um, I don't know what the source of that is, or if it's a hole in his game that major leaguers are better at,

uh, at exposing my current position. He looks like he's going to strike out more than than victor robles and that's a problem for me yeah even though the the other tools might be just as interesting at least the speed looks like it's going to be just as and the power may be more interesting and that and that might be why victor robles flames out completely in the end as he never gets back over a 90 iso you know yeah Just dangerously low in that area. So I think the thing you hit on that for me is the main reason why this happens

is the quality of big league pitching being so much better than everything else that you can have a flaw that minor leaguers just can't expose, right? Maybe you face a few top prospects along the way, and if you get eyes on the player in those matchups, you see how they go at them, and you kind of maybe get a bit of a warning sign. But I think it speaks to the gap between the higher minor league levels

and the big leagues right now. It's as wide as it's ever been, and that's part of why we're seeing good K rate, good K rate, problem K rate. And what I'm wondering is if we're giving hitters enough time to actually make adjustments before either shuttling them back to AAA,

which has come up in the Keston Hira conversation. I just don't know how you're supposed to fix a problem that big league pitchers have exploited when you go back to the minor leagues and they can't necessarily do it there. And maybe it's the kind of thing where if it's a scouting report and orgs pick that up from what happens in the big leagues, there are more eyes on you then. Then it gets back down to AAA and AAA pitchers do try to attack you that way. Maybe it does give you a chance to get better. But I worry that you just can't fix all of your flaws

against that lower level of competition. I do have a thing on the back burner I'm working on to maybe show that some of the difficulty debuts are having, debutantes are having, is that TrackMan has given us a better book on everybody from the minute they get to the major leagues. We now have hot zones and cold zones that are sort of defined by the machines rather than scouts.

And so we can say this is how to get the least, this is where he can't hit the ball hard, this is where he whiffs, these are the pitch types and shapes he has problems with. We've always had books, but I do think that the machines help you have a more precise book that may, and also a book that gets to you quicker in a way. Let's say you just didn't have eyes on it where you had a scout out there but they you only saw them once or twice that's very different than just having the entire track man for that season you know on that guy you know

so much more volume in the information it's it's naturally better not denigrating what scouts can do but like you know you'd have to in order to equate what you might get from like a track man book on someone you'd have to have someone who followed him around for weeks but you definitely want both of those things working together if at all possible i don't think you want to lean only on the data i think we've made that pretty clear especially if like you know he's made a recent adjustment you just don't know where where to kind of cut the trackman data and look for it. You could have a scout that said, oh yeah, he really changed where he put his hands on August 1st.

So maybe look at what happened after that on the trackman. So if you want to read that piece in the future or you want to read stuff that's available right now, including Britt's piece about Yadier Molina. And my piece about how awesome Brewers pitching is. I can't believe you didn't mention it. Hey, you know what? I'm not hyping him. I'm wearing other teams' hats. That's right.

I'm letting everybody else ask questions. If someone asks a question about Aaron Ashby, we'll answer it. But I'm not bringing up Brewer stuff. A.K.A. why Jake Cous cousin slider uh tells you a lot about how good the brewers are at developing and acquiring talent there you go so check that out from eno also brit's got a piece with maria torres as max scherzer approaches 3 000 strikeouts some that was such a good one great quotes in there one of the best quotes of all time in there yeah 50 off at the athletic.com slash rates and barrels as always you can email us rates

and barrels at the athletic.com on twitter he's at you know saris i am at derrick van riper that's going to wrap things up for this episode of rates and barrels we are back with you on monday thanks for listening.