Rates & Barrels - Training In Isolation

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

Rundown3:51 What Are Malasadas?5:47 The Big Sim: 30-Team Out of the Park League15:36 Making New Opening Day Plans23:03 Enjoying the KBO Streams (Thanks, Dan Kurtz! - @MyKBO)28:03 The Challenges of Training In Isolation37:21 Increased Depth and Potential Intrasquad Training?Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get 40% off a subscription to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Braids and Barrels, episode number 80. It is March 24th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. The calendar says it's a Tuesday, so I'm just going to go ahead and believe that that's actually true. I don't know if there's any other way to verify that. Time continues to take an unusual, very flat sort of shape. Nothing really stands out anymore. I kind of know what day it is based on which podcast I'm hosting. That's where I'm at right now. I'm trying to keep to my routines of when I run and my dry days and all that stuff. But I have to say, it is actually harder than usual. I am stressed out because I have to be now the kid's teacher as well as everything else.

And the kids are home more everyone's home more like there's more there seems to be more stuff to do that's not work um but on top of that there's just this like who cares if i have a beer on monday right you know like who cares i might not be another monday to feel like like like why should i even run what if we don't go outside anymore it won't matter how fat i am you know um but i guess you know it helps to just get that sort of feeling of normalcy and, you know, get your, get your run in, have your dry days, eat your broccoli. The only, and the thing about it is really is the, the beer you have after your couple of dry

days, after you're running, after your broccoli, the beer you have that Thursday or Friday is going to taste better if you didn't have one every night. This is true. I think it's also the opportunity, though, if you've been cellaring beers, to actually get through some of them. Ordinarily, if you're only partaking on the weekends, it takes a very long time to get through a well-built cellar so if you've been hoarding or cellaring beer in particular uh you've now probably lowered the

bar for what it takes to open something nice yeah but i like to really like i like to do say those for special occasions where i have a friend over or something and we we share it i did uh do something virtually like that this weekend i played dominion online with some friends we did a video chat and i drank well i don't know is it is it time for beer of the week i guess it would be thursday but beer of the month i think i think we do beer a week at this point we're back into beer of the week but i drank um i've talked about this before and it's probably even been a beer of the week uh the maui imperial toasted coconut stout yeah but this one had let me see, it's right here in the trash can. Oh, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Gonna make a mess.

This one had ale brewed with toasted coconut malasadas, coconut sugar and coconut milk powder. Now, I don't even know what malasadas are, but they tasted good. Let's learn. And I toasted to my friends and resisted the urge just to drink out the damn bottle.

So poured it into a glass. Malasadas are a yeast donut of Portuguese origins that are very popular in Hawaii. Well, Hawaii have I not had one? Okay, well, next time I get to Hawaii, next time there's traveling allowed.

Portuguese influence in Hawaii. There's a history lesson that I have to go take. I don't know anything about that. Hawaii's got a kind of a cool collection of cultures that come together there. East Asia and the Western influence come together there in a really fun way. I enjoy the food there especially. Yeah, I enjoy that as well. That was a highlight of my honeymoon almost 11 years ago now,

which 11 years ago feels like 1,000 years. We're just trying to scale everything down to modern life and how things feel. But other topics for this episode, we're going to talk about out of the park a little bit. You've got a 30 team league you've put together. That's getting off the ground very soon. The KBO inter-squad streams are picking up thanks to the sharing efforts of Dan Kurtz.

You can find him on Twitter at my KBO. We have an update potentially on the fantasy league that we talked about potentially putting together around the kbo that's a project that you've got on one of the burners right now and you wrote a piece recently about training in isolation so we'll talk about some of the you know potential impacts of that and some of the the ways that players are going to be challenged depending on their situations to you know be prepared whenever the season is able to start up. We have some ideas from our mailbag about playing with old stats and some questions about street cred in the fantasy industry,

as well as Zach Pleszak's pickoff move, which is a very specific question, but I still appreciate that question. Yeah, it really is. I never thought that would be a question we'd receive, so I'm looking forward to running through these. But let's start with out of the park. I think this kind of stacks up as one of the better options if you are really missing baseball and you want to play something that resembles fantasy and the roster construction process. And the cool thing is I have just started to scratch the surface with it. So I am a noob,

as they say, in the gaming world. They probably don't say that anymore. But I don't really know what I'm doing with Out of the Park. So I opened it up before your league launched. And I started a season with the Brewers. And as the role of GM and manager both now fall on my shoulders, I am David Stearns and Craig Council. The first thing I saw when I opened it up for the new season was a message, an email from Mark Atanasio, who owns the Brewers. And it was a list of three things that he wanted. He wanted to make the playoffs this season. He wanted to make the World Series in the next four years. And he wanted Eric Sogard signed to an extension. And I thought, oh, one of these things is not like the others. But it made me wonder,

I'm like, okay, this is a very realistic sim. And we know teams sometimes are in a position to surprise us. And we don't really understand why they do the things they do. And it kind of made me wonder, is this actually some of the realistic pressure that you get in the front office where you have goals that generally make sense for your team? And then one sort of off the wall goal from ownership that you think, wow, I wasn't going to prioritize that at that level, but it's important to ownership, so now I have to do it. I kind of wondered if that was part of the nightmare twist to the dream job of running a baseball team. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely something

that I've heard extremely far off the record when it comes to dealing with ownership and you know which ownership situations are the worst i talked to one gm that refused to interview for the job in i think it was anaheim um before before he got a job with another team. And, uh, you know, that one, that one sticks out. I think Baltimore, uh, there've been sort of, we're not signing that guy because of this thing I saw on his medical report and I'm not a doctor. I am Peter Angelos. That one, that one is the one that stands out the most in my mind when that job was last available. There were people denying interest in it without even really being asked about it. There'd be a good GM candidate being interviewed about a completely different topic.

And they would almost just like, hey, so this is what's going on with Brent Honeywell. Also, I don't want the Orioles job. Please don't call me. Right. Yeah. So, you know, I think the Mets come to mind, obviously. And the Mets one, I think, is maybe one of the more problematic for this reason.

Sometimes they are proactive, like in your Eric Sogard situation, where they say, oh, we really want this. And, you know, I don't I love David Wright as a player. And some of what happened with his back and everything was not predictable. But I also think that that deal wasn't amazing. And I think that it was, you know, there's another situation where they had Jose Reyes late in the season. They weren't contending, but Jose Reyes was in it for the batting title.

And the rumor is that the Wilpons nixed a trade that would have gotten the Mets something when Jose Reyes left after that for nothing because he wanted him to win a batting title for the Mets, which I'm sure does not drive attendance. No, right. And I think the Sogard example, I don't think that's some sort of advanced sim understanding of Marc Atanasio as an owner. I think it was kind of a random thing that owners sometimes will ask for.

So I just thought that was a really funny goal when the other two were just so like lofty and made so much sense i think some of the worst deals that you can think of had a tinge of the of ownership to them well there was that year the padres got really aggressive and i might i might confuse some of the players they were bringing in but you know matt kemp justin upton the guys that were padres for like one minute that was a little bit different i think what happened there was you had aj preller coming in as a new manager and i think you've seen as a new general manager you've seen this with some general managers they'll come in and especially ones that think that they can um like think about what happened with the mets you know come in and trade away young assets that

you did not draft that you have you don't have you know any sentimental ties to that you think you can replace with a good draft of your own players trade those away for present value because you just got the job and you need to make you need to make a splash and so AJ Preller did that it did not work out and then he has a second life you have to kind of think of yourself as having like two or three lives as a GM his second life is telling ownership okay well the first one didn't work but you know I'm a I'm a guy who builds from the from the inside and I'm gonna build with the best prospects and you're gonna see this and so his second life is coming to fruition now. Now, if they don't win in the next two or three years,

he's gone. Right. Yeah, he's in a spot right now. When this season picks up, he's definitely one of those GMs that needs to show ownership results. Like even, what did Jerry DiPoto do? Even in Seattle where it seemed like

maybe they should rebuild, the first attempt that Jerry DiPoto made was to win now. Then he traded away everything for future, and now he's building. And you also have to think about it like this. When you come into a new situation, you really want to make some fundamental changes to how player development is done, how people communicate, how the organization works. And those things won't come to fruition for two or three years. So you need to buy yourself those two or three years.

Otherwise, you're just going to lose, lose, lose, and you won't ever get those fundamental organizational changes through. So it does make sense to kind of try and win now at the beginning and at the same time be changing underlying structures in order to win later. It's fun that I've got the Padres and that 30-team sim that you're setting up. But as far as out of the park goes... You do? I thought I gave it to you in college. No, he's got the White Sox. Oh, wow. Well, there we go.

I knew I gave him a team with some youth. Yeah, no, I'm excited. I like the Padres. They're a fun team. I think they're on the cusp of making the playoffs. And being A.J. Preller in a sim is a fun opportunity. I've got the Mets, so I've got to try and figure that out. For some reason, the sim really wanted Luis Guillerme to start. Is that an ownership request? I don't know.

It was like the default starter in all the lineups. I'm like, listen, Robinson Cano has fallen off, but I'd rather have his bat in the lineup. So, yes, Guillerme is going to play a fair amount because he's my backup at short, second, third. I snuck in a little J.D. Davis backup at third action. But, yeah, it's fun. And I think it's a fun way for people.

It doesn't cost too much. And it's a fun way to people to kind of simulate out their favorite season. You can pick your team. And you're basically the general manager and the manager. And you can simulate out games you can get your box score fix and um you know right now we've been feeling it because we do fantasy here and we're very forward looking and and and and that's it's very difficult to be forward looking without an actual date to look forward to but uh it's gonna hurt more on Thursday. Yeah, that's going to be a strange day.

I'm planning on listening to the Brewers opening day from a year ago, the replaying. I think I mentioned that on the last episode. But that's going to be one of those reality check days where you're like, this is the day I was going to be at the ballpark. This was the day I was going to smell the brats cooking on the grill. This was the day the crowd was going to roar for a first pitch that was probably just a 92 mile an hour strike down the middle like you know just the things that you expect on opening day aren't going to be there and i'm

like a creature of habit and you know i wouldn't i don't actually read the box scores for spring training but i haven't missed a day i feel like when it comes to to reading the box scores for spring training, but I haven't missed a day. I feel like when it comes to reading baseball box scores in years. So that's a weird one maybe for some people, but just, uh, it's something I look forward to just, and I don't even, I can't even tell you what I look for. I look for plate appearances. I don't really look at results. I look for pitching information because you get so much pitching information from one game. So I usually scroll down to the bottom of the box score and read what happened with the pitchers first. And I focus on strikeouts and walks. But I do that for every game. And, you it's it's uh really comforting in a weird way it's a a thing that i look forward to every day it seems kind of small it takes like

you know 20 minutes or something but it's uh it's meaningful so i have to have some sort of plan for thursday i don't yet i i will i will i think i might break out a historical game. Maybe I'll just watch something on MLB TV and just pick a game that I remember fondly and just watch it. Yeah, I mean, watch your favorite opening day game. Watch your favorite game from any part of the season. I think just watching a game on Thursday will at least make an unusual situation feel better,

even if it doesn't completely fix it maybe I'll watch a Jesus Lizardo start there you go yeah where do you like to look at box scores at this point Yahoo still

I don't know I think everyone's got a habit like a habit like everyone has a thing like the first place or the second place they started look at box scores is the place they still look at box scores. It's true, too, because I've had conversations when I was working at Fangraphs with David Appelman, the founder there, where he was basically asking me about my box score situation and like, where do I get and why? And what would I look at?

And, you know, if you look at the box scores at Fangraphs, you know, like he's he's got this sort of more regular one. Then, you know, you can kind of toggle between, you know, batted balls and advanced. And like, it's actually way more has way more information, you know batted balls and advanced and like it's actually way more uh has way more information you know like you know i could i could look at you know who hit a bunch of ground balls and stuff like that and and i could look at pitch velocities and all that and i don't i go to yahoo like i have forever and I just scroll through. One thing that I would say is that the, the toggle between looking at the scores,

like where all the scores are aggregated and, um, and the box score is important to me. So at Yahoo, you have all the scores along in a, in a, in a column along the side right and so you can just go down and you can hit the first one get the box score then the next one's

right there you hit that you get the box score you know what i mean yeah yeah so most of the places i look at that don't have that you have to like look at a box score then press back to get to the scores and then pick a box score and then press back to get to the scores and then pick a box score and then press back you know what i mean so it's a tiny little thing but you do it every night you kind of gravitate towards the easiest place i started to get hooked on the baseball savant box scores when they updated those which are definitely more modern like the fan graphs ones you were describing and i like those because i I think the fire emojis for hard-hit balls give me the extra information I want without overwhelming me.

That's the simple thing. Like, oh, who scorched a few balls? Which pitcher got blasted? And you can see pretty quickly in that column, like, okay, everyone pitched pretty well. Oh, that reliever had four hard hit balls against him so that you know that was pretty bad who was that like i don't know like it's it's a simple way to convey a kind of a new bit of important information all right i'm

gonna look at one real quick box score on savant for the yankees beating the tigers six to four on september 12th i think oh yeah look at those hard hit aaron judge two hard hit dd like that you got your traditional stuff for fantasy hard hits allowed pitch to i don't know that pitch types things is i mean come on i don't know what any of those things are it just makes me want to play trivial pursuit yeah right oh man true pursuit we'll play that tonight moops a little bit a little bit over the head of the kids there's a kid's version right i mean i think there is it's a kid's version of spencer turnbull allowed a lot of hard-hit balls. Wow. Yeah, I was looking at the opening day Brewers box score

I was just talking about from last season, and Myles Michaelis allowed 10 hard-hit balls in five innings on opening day. He was getting hammered last year. And Turnbull's not too far from Myles in that neither has standoutout velocity and they're trying to mix and match and make it work yeah so anyway that's where i've been going for box scores lately but if i wasn't going there i was going to espn for a long time for box scores and i don't

i'd never reason like someone was asking me about it and like it's just where i go i don't know my my browsing habit for box scores starts there for some reason and i can't really tell you why i might i might switch to savant you know one of the things i was saying is that you need to have a scroll bar and savant has the day's scores all across the top they do and the thing that i think is also helpful at a glance if you do like the advanced stats sprinkled in, the win probability added leaders, the pitch velocity leaders,

the exit velocity leaders, and the batted ball distance leaders are all there kind of in their own part of the screen on the left. So you can sort of like opt into that if you're into it, or you can just look at the traditional stuff on the right.

And we know that eggs velocity over 108 is meaningful. So in this game alone, Luke Voigt, 111. Didi Gregorius, 110. Even Mike Ford at 108.1. Yeah, I like this. At the bottom, you got every batted ball that you could

do a quick sort by EV. Yeah. So, it's a good thing. You see where the balls were for when they hit it. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. I wish, I guess the one thing as a pitching geek... Ah, it's...

There you go. Game pitch velocity. Boom. Oh, yeah. When you scroll down, there's a ton more information, too. So, yeah, yeah when you scroll down there's a ton more information too so yeah you can you can keep drilling down even more if you just scroll below the fold so now i can see what stents for sensor turnbull sat he sat he threw some 96 mile an hour sinkers but he sat 94 plus i think maybe the reason i like it though, is because if something stood out to me that I wanted to look into more closely,

Savant's on the short list of places I'd be going anyway to follow through. Yeah, and Yahoo doesn't. But I do play on Yahoo, so it allows me to set lineups and check box scores on the same place. Yeah, I don't even play in leagues on ESPN. What am I doing?

I don't know. in leagues on ESPN. What am I doing? I don't know. It's where I go. I think the reason I like there for like four or five years ago, I started using their daily hitting and pitching leaders. They just have the game scores, I think, on there. And I'd start there. Who had a big game? Who had a bad game among pitchers?

Who had a big night hitting? That, to me, was the fastest way pitchers, who had a big night hitting. That to me was the fastest way to catch up on what happened the night before. I think that's probably why I would then stay there and start clicking through the box scores off of that page. So that was my summary page that I'd start with. That's probably why I was looking at so many box scores on ESPN for so long. One other question for you, thinking about, again, distractions mostly and things people are getting excited about. I mentioned at the top the KBO inter-squad streams.

They're happening at night, like 11, 12 o'clock at night, pretty late on the East Coast, but not so late where you are. You know, the games in Korea, the inter-squad games are available to watch on YouTube for the most part. And if you follow my KBO on Twitter, it's Dan Kurtz. He's sharing all those links.

You mentioned before a possible fantasy league around the KBO. So we had a request via email from Forrest who just wanted to know where things stood with that. Is that something we might be able to get off the ground? Yeah, we're having a little bit of trouble with the data. You know, they are not as friendly disseminating their data as a league as some other leagues. And so you basically have to scrape it. And if you're scraping it, then you run into some translation issues sometimes even with the names. Okay.

And different translations for the same name and different sources there. And then just the format that the data is coming over right now is coming over in CSV files. And we're just a little worried that it'll break a lot and would require a lot of maintenance so um i'm not going to give up on that i'm trying to to spur some innovation with a with a group a group of people but um i'm also going to poke around and see if there's any existing fantasy Japanese games. Japan, that league has just been around longer, and they're doing spring training type stuff, where they're having spring training games with nobody in the audience.

So, and I'll have to admit that i'm a little bit more comfortable talking about certain players in that in that league i i know a few more i feel like over there so um i'll keep poking around i mean we're looking we're looking for something to do and and korea and japan are closer to playing actual games so um i'll try to get something to you for sure. Maybe we can simplify it to you if we had to. If we can't run a traditional 5x5 league because of issues that come with the stats, maybe there's a way to do home run derby style leagues or strikeout totals or something that at least resembles fantasy. But even watching Adrian Sampson and dan straley you know pitch against their teammates

yesterday that was comforting it just made me feel like there's a chance we'd get back to normal like there's there's some hope out there of beating the pandemic and getting life back to the way it was or something at least that resembles the way that it was yeah yeah yeah i was happy for for dan to get out of there on that he was in australia for spring break when a lot of this hit and i wasn't sure he was going to even go to korea but korea kind of got handled on things things pretty well, and Japan too. Both of those countries, people listened to the shelter in place, and they had an effective testing program, I think,

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So you wrote a piece about pitcher injuries and concerns about how training might cause that. The lack of training might ultimately cause more injuries while we're in this shutdown period. And you also had some interesting conversations for that piece about ways teams might be able to work around that. What really stood out to you as you put that piece together as far as ways that pitchers might be able to still prepare themselves for the upcoming season while in isolation? It's funny. And it's funny, we're in a weird place right now with technology and data and training that three or four years from now, I think we'd be much better prepared for what's happening right now. Or five or six years ago, we would have been much better prepared.

And we're stuck in the middle. And the reason I say that is this. Five or six years ago, we were grasping around in the dark more or less we weren't wearing modus sleeves and tracking stress on every throw we didn't have the same sort of data rich approach and so you know i feel like pitchers could have more or less done some push-ups and done some jogging like people pitchers could have more or less done some pushups and done some jogging. Like people, pitchers used to jog, which is the weirdest thing. It's like, why are you jogging?

Like when, when is that important for you in the game with how far you can jog? But, um, you know, and so I think we were less refined and so people would have gone home and been able to do these less refined approaches and and been fine and then you know five or six years from now i think we would be prepared to send a modus home with every pitcher and every pitcher would know

that to wear the sleeve when they were throwing and how to how to you know upload the data how to track it put it into a tracking system Every team would have a tracking system where that MODIS data would come right online, and the pitching coach or pitching coordinator could see and be like, oh, you know what, why don't you take a day off tomorrow? Your numbers are a little bit high or low or something here. And you could do a lot of sort of offline or or at least non-in-person virtual training and so we're kind of stuck in this weird place where some teams have a software you know kyle bode talked about his track software that includes elements of you know acute to chronic which is

just a part of the way that people think about building up stamina and getting ready for these acute moments where you're going to throw 120 pitches or you're going to, you know, you're going to go into game day mode. And so he has a tracking software and each pitcher has been modeled to some extent based on stuff that's been directly measured in the past. And so even though you can't directly measure right now, you can use their previous models and their current workload and kind of say, you know, okay, here's your personalized throwing program based on what you're doing and where we want you to get. So I'd say probably, you know, three to five teams have something like that.

You know, at least when it comes to, if you open it up to, like, a really good plan coming from the pitching coordinator saying. You know, at least when it comes to, if you open it up to like a really good plan coming from the pitching coordinator saying, you know, you know, this is what we want you to do. I'd say maybe we go into like five to 10 teams, but I'd say there are at least 10 to 15 teams where the pitchers were just told, you know, try to play catch if you can. And I think that's going to be problematic because catch is like October, November. And they built up to, you know, a week away, two weeks away from opening day. And then you're going to go back to October and November. The longer they stay at October, November, the more they are in October, November. And then you're going to say, hey, two weeks from now, we're going to go back to October and November. The longer they stay at October and November, the more they are in October and November.

And then you're going to say, Hey, two weeks from now, we're going to have opening day. You're going to ramp up too fast. That's just not going to work. Yeah. It was Casey Mulholland from kinetic pro who you talked to for the story.

And I think it's, it's not even just the 2020 season. If you know, if we have one, that is the concern. It's is damage going to be done ramping up for this season that causes elbows and shoulders to break down in future seasons as well? I mean, there's short-term and long-term ramifications of how this is handled. And I think that's a major issue that baseball needs to think about and be very careful with as things progress.

And hopefully they do outline a timetable to get things running again. And also, when they think about what the season is going to look like, I'm hearing why... I'm hearing, like, why... I think I understand why baseball cares about, you know, having as close to a full season. I think it has something to do with money. I think it has something to do with TV contracts. I think it has to do with, you know, normalcy, maybe, to some extent. You know, trying to get a 162 in. I say throw that out the window, man.

Do not get so obsessed with 162 or 144 whatever it is that you're doing they were talking about double headers with seven innings it's insane like that's insane think about the way teams are kind of dealing with double and the double headers when they have to play them now, but even just extra innings games. When a game runs 13, 14 innings and they don't have a day off for a few weeks. It's a trickle-down effect that just messes things up for a while. I just think it is about money. It's always about money. If you think about it from a very logical perspective,

you're probably cutting the season in half. This is probably an 81-game season at best. If you're very realistic about where things are tracking currently, and everything's changing almost by the day, even still. We're still in the earlier stages of all this. But if you think that there's going to be a 150-plus game season, you're out of your mind. Just completely out of your mind. I couldn't believe it. Bill James said May 15, and I was like, what are you smoking?

There's no chance. There is absolutely no chance. They just canceled the Cooperstown thing for kids, the 12-year-old thing. That was supposed to start in June. They canceled it. We're behind, at the very least, we're a week or so behind Korea, who's thinking about starting in, what was it, early May. But they know dealt with things a lot better yeah yeah and the the path is totally different there right and and they and they started way earlier i don't know may 15 seems wildly optimistic i i'm still i'm sticking with june june 1 is like the optimist

date and uh you know the all-star break basically being more realistic. But partially it is because I want them to have a three-week spring training. Right. And I think what spring training is going to look like is if you have watched Neil's live streams, it's going to look just like what we're seeing coming from the KBO. It's going to be teams working out at their big league facility together, and it's going to be empty stadiums, and it's going to be intra-squad games. It's not going to be teams working out at their big league facility together and it's going to be empty

stadiums and it's going to be intra-squad games it's not going to be travel there are not going to be fans there it's going to be very different but if you can do it that way i think you're at least giving yourself an opportunity to make make the situation as good as it can be for the physical health of the players in the short term and the long term. But if you have this idea as Major League Baseball that you can flip the switch and be ready in two weeks on a dime, that's just not going to happen. I think it takes a month to get ready. And you can do things in an empty stadium for a month. That's doable.

But add that to your timetable of when you're going to begin the season. You can't really start doing that until May. So that's where I think your June 1st earliest date, yeah, that's as good as it could possibly be with everything going as well as it can. And the optimist in me wants that to happen. The realist in me knows it probably won't. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess June 1 is a possibility. You know, it's an interesting thing to think about these intra-squad games

and how they're going to work. You know, one thing that stands out is that organizational quality, top to bottom suddenly becomes paramount. I feel like you're going to be having, like you're having your young hitters hit against your major league pitchers. And if they're not good enough, it's bad for both, right? The, the major league hitter will feel like, God, the prospect hitter will feel like, oh my God, I'm out of my league. And the major league pitcher will not get in

enough, will not get in enough work, you know, will not get, will not get tested enough in order to, in order to, to be ready for the season. So I think it's an interesting problem where I think certain teams are going to be at an advantage, and those teams would be ones that have good hitting. So what I did was I just took a real quick pivot report of the teams that have... So I took all top 40 value and better hitters. So that's basically the top 250, 200 type prospects, right? Actually, probably top 300 prospects. And I just counted up who has

them. And number one is Minnesota. Number one is Tampa Bay with 22, tied with the Yankees at 22. Then you've got Minnesota at 20 and Arizona at 18, which I think is interesting. And the L.A. Dodgers with two. Hmm. So I think that's interesting because the Dodgers obviously just made a reverse, like a star play where they gave up their depth for some, for a star, right? And that's going to be fine when Mookie Betts is facing, you know, Clayton Kershaw, they're going to get a good workout in, right? But then when you, you know, kind of go down to the next, like, matchup, right? The next group of batters facing them.

I'm trying to get the L.A. Dodgers. Okay, so you got Lux, right? You got Ruiz, and that's it. And the rest are going to be guys that aren't necessarily ready yet. I like Edwin Rios a little bit, you know, but he's going to be the best of the B lineup. And that's going to be meaningful because that's when Tony Gonsolin comes in. And so Tony Gonsolin is going to face a lineup with one or two good batters in it. So I wonder if there is a little bit of an advantage to these places like Minnesota and Arizona and Tampa where they'll be playing major league quality games almost when it comes to their split squad games, their interest squad games. Their organizational depth, the teams with organizational depth are going to have more ways to create unique matchups.

I think for more top-heavy teams, you're just going to see a lot of the same pitchers over and over again. I think it's, hey, don't throw Clayton Kershaw at your AA guys. Just let them face your regulars a lot. Because it doesn't, I don't think it hurts your regular hitters to face Kershaw and Buehler and Price a lot. The way throwing your right yeah like and it's like they actually haven't faced them for the most part because they've all been his teammate for so long so it's at least a unique sort of challenge for them that prepares them so I just think each team's gonna have to be kind of creative with how they

how they put it together like how they decide to get where they want to go reps wise in intro squad settings. But I would agree that a team with a lot of depth can be more, I don't know, I guess just, yeah, they can, they can mix and match more graded,

like be able to do more. Yeah. Yeah. Be able to, to simulate real game action more where people are being taken out and they have different lineups and, you know, um,

so it's not, you know, just always Mookie Betts against Clayton Kershaw, right? And also you need to have other pitchers. You need to have some pitching depth in order to be able to counter the fact that, let's say they do have a two-week spring training. From what we're looking at in kbo where they've had some you know some shortening of their pre-season too you said dan straley threw about three innings i think it was about three maybe four uh before i saw relievers getting into that game last night on monday night so i mean that's that's the functional problem other than injury the functional

problem is that they were maybe ready for about four innings before you know the rug got pulled out from under them so if they go back at all the most they'll be ready for is about three innings at the beginning so now you're talking about are you going to add a roster spot and then we're going to have just like a completely different game for one year because you needed to get the game back online so quickly that you said, okay, fine, everybody can have one or two more pitchers. Now we're basically piggybacking every start or we're basically, you know, they're pitching three innings before the bullpen comes in.

Now we're taxing the bullpen. We're going to have a bunch of bullpen injuries later or next year. So I think keep this as much as normal as possible. So I think keep this as much normal as possible, and hopefully they can stay. Hopefully they, with the help of their teams, can stay at that level where they're at three or four innings. We have like a three-week, two-week spring training where they can bump that up to five innings and we can get going. But I think generally there's like there's some there's like a sort of accepted knowledge bumbling to the top of fantasy as we as we twiddle our thumbs which is that injured players are now a better currently injured pairs on our better bet um young young players that would have had innings limits are a better bet

um and to some extent i I believe in all of these. But I want to throw that asterisk on there that the young pitchers that were going to be on innings limit, you know, would have been better tracked right now. You know, like, who knows what Jesus Lizardo is doing? And who knows what Mackenzie Gore is doing right now? And maybe it would have been way better i would assume it would be better for them if they were in camp right now being you know having every throat tracked um think about uh uh justin verlander coming back from injury i don't know where he is physically but if he was in the wrong place he wouldn't want to go into the hospital in fact most of these people don't want to go into the hospital. In fact,

most of these people don't want to go into the hospital. So when it comes to most, everybody doesn't want to go to the hospital right now. So like, if it comes to just like, oh, he needs an MRI or he needs a scan or he needs to check and make sure everything, you know, from the surgery went well, does he have a place where he can do that if he does uh does he contract the virus while he's there um you know uh does he have the the the full rehab program set out or does you know is he going to miss some gaps there on his rehab because you know he's not in front of his his his coach or his rehab coach or his training staff is he going to be able to do all the exercises he has to do for his rehab?

So we're going to bet on Justin Berliner coming back. We're going to bet on James Paxton. That makes sense. I understand it, but maybe they're not going to come back. Maybe they wouldn't come back as well in this situation as they would have in a healthy, in a,

in everyone as healthy and they can go to the, you know, they can go to the gym or they can go to the doctor as they like. I think time certainly increases their chances of being on a similar level to the rest of the playing field, but it's important to consider everything you're pointing out here. It's not as simple as, oh, I'm recovering the exact same way I would have been is if things were normal. That's just not what's happening right now. Yeah.

And even the young ones, like, like, so there's variants now and, and the variants in a shorter season will be great for teams like the Padres and the white socks. I think I've mentioned this before. And so they will want to put their young players on the field

from the get-go probably because the Blue Jays, White Sox, and Padres went from having about 3% chance of the postseason to having about 10% to 15% of the chance of making the postseason in like a 100-game season. Yeah. So even if there are playing time stuff, and even if the union and the Major League Baseball

come to agreement about that, and even if it might cost them a year of ownership, a year of player ownership down the road, they may say, hey, man, in 100 games, what if we could win 60? You know, just go on a great tear. Let's put the minor leaguers in there. Great.

So Mackenzie Gore, first-round pick, got a bunch of money. Casey Mize, first-round pick, got a bunch of money. Guys like Lizardo and Puck were in the major leagues, at least got major league money, right? So they have enough money where they probably secured some sort of workout situation that works for them, you know? But I think about guys like Luis Patino, who, you know, he got $160,000. Yes, he got that like three years ago. How much is left and what did he spend it on? I think about Tariq Scooball, you know, for the Detroit Tigers, who was a really, you know, was not paid that much.

I think he was a major league signing. No, I think he was a low draft pick. Let me see here. Tariq Scooball. I think he's like a. He's a ninth rounder. Ninth rounder. So what kind of he's a ninth rounder ninth rounder so what kind of money does a ninth rounder 100k probably and and and he got it uh he got it in

2018 so maybe maybe he set something up or maybe he just you know bought a house or maybe he squirreled all the way maybe didn't do anything what what kind of workout situation he's in is he in and he's probably one of the pitching prospects with the most helium right now so this would be the worst time for something to go wrong for him um and then i think about davy garcia who who got two hundred thousand dollars um but uh you know it was 15 years old right right and like for an international agent like that like how much money went to his handlers? Like there's all sorts of things that have to be factored in.

He bought his parents a house probably, you know, so I hope he put a gym in it. And so, you know, there's these different prospects that are right

on the cusp that are right here, right now. And I think I'm always going to gravitate towards pitching because I feel like a hitter, you know,

yes, he might lose a little bit of development time in terms of seeing major league pitching, but, you know, intra squad, he can get there. a hitter, you know, yes, he might lose a little bit of development time in terms of seeing major league pitching, but, you know, intra squad, he can get there. Hitter can, you know, we're talking about in terms of equipment, I think a hitter could probably find a place to work out or at least replace a lot of that with just body work. You know, using your own body as weight pitching uh, pitching. I've seen some innovative things with

J bands and like using these, these bands almost like, um, Pilates style where you're like trying to, uh, get a workout out of, uh, out of a rubber band basically. Um, but, uh, you know, I really hope that, uh, we don't see a rash in this sort of teresa gubal davy garcia luis patino group that um you know or even i mean even ones i haven't come up with that just uh didn't get anything you know and are scratching their way to the top and are right there uh and right now we're trying to figure out how to stay start to stay healthy and stay trained basically yeah there are plenty of players who are in bad financial situations right now who don't have a home gym

or the resources around them to train the way they normally would right now. I think that's the big takeaway here. And there will be an impact on those players as this plays out. There's no doubt about that. We are going to push back the questions I mentioned earlier.

Street cred, Zach, please X pick off move, which is part of a broader question, by the way, and another way to think about playing historical fantasy. We'll get to those on our Thursday episode. I think beer of the week is going to make its triumphant comeback as a weekly

segment for at least a little while. And, you know, we'll get back to beer the month, probably when things get more normal, by the way, as many of you know, everything has been stopped. We're still writing stories. We're still doing pods.

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Deadline is next week, Wednesday, April 1st, noon Eastern. You can find Eno on Twitter, at Eno Saris. You can find me, at Derek Van Ryper. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Thursday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.