Rates & Barrels - We're All Howard Hughes

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Rundown9:16 March Movers18:47 Re-Thinking the Shape of Production in a Shortened Season24:45 Empty Stadiums & Performance33:47 Increased Interest in Top Closers?40:57 Ranking Organizations for Talent Development51:23 Talent Development Laggards 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 Rates and Barrels, episode number 82. It's March 31st. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we're going to talk about some upcoming adjustments to our rankings as the calendar flips to April. We're going to answer a lot of questions. We had a question about the baseball. We had a question about ranking teams for their ability to develop talent. We'll talk about a few March movers as well. Eno, how's it going for you on this Tuesday? It's interesting. I think it's interesting for people like you and I that work from home and have to watch

the rest of the family get up to speed. And I think it's been particularly hard for my wife, particularly because she said, like, you know, in the office, she used to get annoyed that people would come by and ask her questions all the time when she's trying to work. But now those people have to schedule a Zoom meeting to ask the question. So everything is on a meeting. And so everything's even longer and she just has meetings all day. So I can imagine that. And then now we're scheduling meetings with our friends,

Zoom meetings with our friends just to see them. So things are getting bizarre and we're only two weeks in and it looks like we're going to have another four weeks. So I'm just hopeful that near the end of April, we start getting some better news. And this all hinges on a date. We need something to look forward to. The thing that makes it so difficult, I think, is that we're just hanging out, just waiting. Yeah, we're in a holding pattern that feels indefinite right now, even though eventually it will end. And I think it's particularly challenging if you live in a place that has bad winters. Because if you're like me, you're listening to baseball in early March when spring training games begin.

And it's sort of like Bob Uecker, at least in Wisconsin, when he starts popping up on the radio at the beginning of the month, he moves the snow away and the winter away. He clears it away. Baseball makes winter end. Baseball not starting has made it feel like winter hasn't ended yet. It is a little bit warmer out, so we've been able to get outside just a little and walk the dog and get her over to the park and everything. But that sort of, I don't know, life calendar just being completely erased for a while is disorienting,

and people are all feeling that. And it is strange to schedule meetings with your friends using the same tools you use at work. It blurs the lines between home and work. But yeah, everyone's just kind of figuring things out. work. But yeah, everyone's just kind of figuring things out. I mean, my wife usually works in a lab and she's now working in the same room where I record the podcast. You're one side of a podcast when she's in the room and I'm recording. It's just little things like that. But I still feel like we're lucky in the grand scheme of things, having enough space where we can do this, having opportunities to continue our work. It's been a strange couple of weeks. And April is

going to be probably even more strange than March. I did hear, I was listening to the radio this morning. I had made my weekly supply run and threw NPR on for a little while. And I thought I heard that the current modeling for peaking of the coronavirus is around April 26th or 27th. I think they had a Wisconsin date and a nationwide date, and they were pretty close together. So that kind of gives us an idea of how things are tracking that way and how it could move up depending on how people are handling social distancing and other preventative measures. But it was really the first time I'd heard an actual date put out there for that to take place. And that just made me think, okay, this is the way things are going to be for at least another month. But at least I know we have something that we're looking at as a possible beginning of

the end part. Yeah, I think we'll have some clarity in May. I'm hoping for some clarity in May. It's just clarity that we need. And there are just little glimpses of hopes in the numbers. If you look at them, I mean, what we're looking for is the derivative to change the derivative of the curve. Like it's going to if you look at cumulative numbers, it's going to go up because you're going to keep adding. But we just want to add at a slower rate. And that that'll mean that we that we've accomplished something. to that and when and how much you were willing to risk another spike uh is is a question of you know hospital capacity and um uh i guess the need for a functioning economy and all sorts of different questions that you know people stand on different sides of those of those questions but

when you look at the derivatives of certain curves um new york just had like a day or two of um of the softening basically a flattening as people might as people might know and then um northern california uh we were one of the first to socially distance that's why i'm on day, oh God. You've lost count. No, I almost, no, I'm keeping count. I'm on day 16. And I know from pals like Jason Collette and Paul Spohr in Texas and North Carolina, respectively,

that they're on sort of day two of a specific shelter-in-place order, not necessarily what they've done personally. And so, you know, we have one of the flattest curves in America, in Northern California. So California as a whole doesn't look as good, but Northern California, I think,

was out in front on this. And so it hasn't gotten that bad here. I have noticed a field hospital was built on Stanford campus. On my last run, I noticed that we are trying to do a lot of the same things that New York is doing because we have the same population base, but we don't have necessarily the same type of problem. Right. It's encouraging to hear that things, at least in Northern California especially, have been progressing in a way that seems to be overall much better than expected. But again, you see things that are different in different places. I was out on Sunday just for a little while. I had to drop some boxes off, and I saw Home Depot was packed. I just thought, what are you all doing?

You're all going to get new kitchen backsplashes together? Why are we doing this like it just doesn't it doesn't make sense so i hope i hope the message is still being received where it needs to be heard um but i'm definitely encouraged by what you're saying yeah it's happening around you if you're on a beach in florida please go home please please, please, please, please go home. I saw this thing that was like an animation of cell phones on one Florida beach.

It just grouped a bunch of cell phones on a beach in Florida and then showed where they went. Oh, jeez. I was like, ah. I immediately washed my cell phone. it's actually part

of the ritual now and the supply runs when i come back from the store i take the phone out of the case and break it all down and wipe it all out with clorox wipes and try to just just make sure that like i didn't accidentally grab the phone to double check something while i was at the store after i touched something you just you just don't know who's the um who's the uh uh the the famous old billionaire that uh that howard something he was like a uh he was like a germaphobe? Famous, old, billionaire, germaphobe. Let's see what that brings up. Are you asking Google?

Yeah. I'm consulting the internet. Famous germaphobes. There's a story from New Hampshire Public Radio. I may have to listen to that later. Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes. We're all Howard Hughes. Yeah.

Hopefully it continues to work. That reference is going to capture people by the tens. It really will. All right. We'll move away from coronavirus talk. There are plenty of other places to get that, but glad to hear things are still going as well as they can be on your end. Let's talk about some players who have moved a bit in March, and really it's more

like players that we are about to move coming out of March. We can look at NFBC ADP as well. I have opened that up from March 15th to March 31st. Of course, we had some major injuries that happened over the course of the month. Luis Severino, Chris Sale, more recently Noah Syndergaard, all undergoing Tommy John surgery. So that pulls some players down. And I think the prevailing thought has been that the innings limited starting pitchers are getting a bump. And I saw a draft board from our colleague Matt Modica

that was definitely a reflection of how at least the high stakes arena is currently viewing Jesus Lizardo. And in a 15-team draft that was playing out at the end of last week, Lizardo was a fifth-round pick. It's the earliest I've seen him go. His min pick in March, in the second half of March, was 68. So that just kind of gives us a sense of, okay, this is the jump for a guy like that. We've talked about Julio Urias as being slightly more of a discounted option who does a lot of the same things. He went in the eighth round of that same draft. I don't know why there's a gap between those two guys of three rounds right now but i really don't expect that to

last you know i think the more people look at both of those guys like the closer they're going to get in adp i have them right next to each other 38 39 overall um i could see pushing them um ahead of them are some boring vets like kyle hendricks and hunjan ru um eduardo rodriguez denelson lamette matthew boyd mike minor i guess i could i could push them ahead of all those if i was really being aggressive and get them all the way up to sort of zach gallon zach wheeler territory at the back end of the top 30 um but once you get above that you've got like soroka giolito carasco montas i just just people i think um you know that uh i think i think they're a little bit better i don't know montas versus lizardo was a very good question i had on a show where i made an appearance who do you think is

going to get more innings yeah that was a question. That was the live stream we did with Vlad Sedler over at Fantasy Guru last Friday. It's still up, by the way. Check out Vlad on Twitter, at RotoGut. I think Eno and I both shared the link at some point in the last few days as well, but that was a fun stream. I think more innings are still probably still coming from Frankie Montes. Also, I think it's important, I think, more innings per appearance. That's where I think the difference comes in, right?

I think the usage in terms of being a starter from day one or whenever the season begins through the end of the year, that's a level playing field. Lizardo's often going to go five and probably not more than six, whereas Montes won't have restrictions. I don't think he's gone six in his career in the major leagues. I mean, it's a short career, but yeah. He's more of like a high-effort, high-pitch count guy

that they have to watch. I guess Urias is not that to the same extent. However, Urias' injury was more substantial. I guess that's the three rounds. Coming back from a shoulder situation is not good.

Though he's shown himself to be healthy since, it's still there. It's still there. It's still a truth, you know? Yeah, if you go back to early 2019, we did see when he was starting, Urias got six innings in against the Brewers back on April 18th. Nine strikeouts, six scoreless, one hit.

Yeah, he was shoving that day. Had a five-inning start against the Brewers six days before that. Had a five-inning start against the Giants in his first start of last season. And then was pretty much in the bullpen for most of the rest of the season. And the starts he did make later in the year were two, three-inning, just quick outings. So even there, yeah. And wins are harder and harder to get to go by. And I hate to chase wins, but you know,

this is, uh, it's another thing you have to think about on some extent. And I wouldn't necessarily, um, I wouldn't necessarily use that as a big D marker, but like, if you're talking about,

uh, you know, Montas and Carrasco, Carrasco versus Urias and Lizardo, I think a little bit more likely to take the guys who I think might be able to go pitch deeper in the games and get wins. I think the guy that I'm still pretty excited about is James Paxton. I've got him a few places.

I took him in the Tout Wars auction a couple weeks ago. He won't have, at least I don't think within starts, any sort of innings restriction. As long as he's fully recovered from his injury, when things ramp up again, he kind of stands out to me in the 100 to 140 range ADP-wise as a pitcher who doesn't really have any start-by-start concerns. And the skills are really solid.

We love the run support. We love the bullpen. And I still think there's another level for Paxton to reach as a member of the Yankees. I think he can still turn in a season better than what we saw last year, 382 and 128 for the ratios. The 128 whip just doesn't seem right to me. I think he could beat that number in particular.

Yeah, you know, we've been drafting for so long because the baseball season was supposed to start early this year, and it was crazy, but spring training started like february 24th or something so i had drafts in february and i remember the the the roller coaster that we bid on like paxton sort of represents that thing because there was like there were drafts where i took him when he was healthy and i was like nice paxton and then and then he got hurt and i was like god damn paxton you know and then there was like a little bit of news before uh everything went to to crap that he was throwing again already and i was like yeah paxton you know and now i'm like, hey, Paxton, sweet.

So I have a fair amount of shares because I believe in Paxton. And I also think that, I think I've talked about this a lot, I just generally think that quality per inning is something I'd rather focus on than a ton of innings because there are so few people doing a ton of innings that I think the bar has been lowered in terms of what is an acceptable number of innings to get from your top pitchers. So if I get one guy who hits 200 and then a couple guys who have 150, I feel like I have a pretty good basis for my squad.

And if you ask me, do I think that Paxton in a typical year can get to 150? Yeah, I think so. I'm now going to check his paragraphs page. He's got to 150 in two-thirds last year, 160 in a third in 2018. Those are the only two seasons of his career where he's got that many innings he was at 136 back in 2017 and 121 back in 2016 right he's been injured so often but what's still two straight years 150 i think he i think he can do 150 but not not necessarily this year god we have to change all our all right well we don't even know we don't even know how many there are so i can't even tell you what i have to if you hear me say something like 150, 200,

I'm obviously talking about full season pace, and we're going to have to adjust all those things by however many games we do get. It's still easier, I think, in general for people listening and for us analyzing players to put the numbers on at full season knowing that we're going to reduce them. If we started shortening up

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shipping. Is there something about the shape of production though, that will favor certain players in terms of, if you're talking about like an auction value or just fantasy value, like if you think about it, like if this season was 10 games long, you would want to own maybe one of 20 starters and, you would want to own maybe one of 20 starters, and

then you would want to have all the closers. Hmm. Right? Not sure. Why would you want that? Let's say season's 7 games long. You get one start. So you get one start out of your guy. Most likely. Maybe two.

I'm saying ten. In ten games, you get two starts out of your guy and out of your starter. You might get three to five saves from your best closer. In a Roto League, theoretically, everybody else would have the same or a similar balance, right?

So they'd have the same opportunity. Well, I just generally think that there's something about volume that accrues. Yeah, yeah. No, no. There's something here. So think about strikeouts as a category, right? Strikeouts as a category favors starting pitchers, right? But if you're talking about two starts versus three to five appearances, let's say, let's give them four appearances, two per week, or let's give it five. So five appearances from the, from the, from the, from the, your closer,

your closer in five appearances might get eight strikeouts, right? And your starter in two appearances might get 10 to 12. You get a typical starter. Yeah. The-end guys maybe get a little more but yeah right so the difference there is smaller than if you take that 10 game stretch and multiply it over and over and over again you know what i'm saying right so if you had a graph of fantasy value and you did it for 10 game like started at game 10 and then went over the the graph of starter and reliever fantasy value they'd have different slopes they'd they'd start close to each other and then they'd gradually drift away from each other

wouldn't the main issue here be that even in a 10 game schedule the reliever opportunities to get the saves don't necessarily pop up evenly but you know the starting pitchers are going to take the ball and at least have those chances so that that workload is just still even in that smaller cluster that workload from the starters making two starts is more reliable than getting save chances specifically. Those relievers might get used

but they may not get used in save chances simply because of how those 10 games can play out. I still think that there's something to the fact that a part of a starter's value is bulk. And the shorter your season is, the less bulk he has to wield over the reliever, basically. And I think there's something there. And if that's true, and then you throw in the asterisk of the fact that there might be more injuries this year to starting pitchers who have a more precarious preparation schedule right now for the season.

schedule right now for the season. Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing that I'm really kind of wondering about right now is if we had an in-season auction calculator from previous seasons that could give us snapshots of one month at a time, two months at a time, three months at a time, what would those numbers look like i mean would there be meaningful conclusions you could draw from the shape of the numbers as you said or would it just be mostly random you know like that's there's going to be more variance in a short season that's the fundamental thing we've talked about from like a team standpoint where the mid-pack teams have an even greater chance of reaching the playoffs. You put the numbers out there for the Jays and White Sox and a bunch of those teams, right?

They're all more likely to make the playoffs in a shorter season than they were in a 162-game season. How does that really change the individual valuations of players who, because of their ability to hit that higher workload ceiling, have a higher baseline value? Does it completely change them? Does it somewhat change them? I don't know how much to correct for it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't, you know, for the life of me,

I can't figure out anything meaningful when it comes to hitters. I mean, the closest I've come is like someone like Michael Conforto, who's coming back from an oblique strain, which is fairly simple,

just a question of, does it hurt? Don't do anything. As soon as it stops hurting, you can start doing stuff, right? Um, it doesn't, didn't require surgery. Hopefully, uh, the one thing that would suck is if he did require surgery and he didn't know it because he's not, you know, going to a hospital right now. Um, but I can't otherwise, uh, put my finger on something. They're like, one thing that's interesting that we had a question a while back. I don't think it's on the docket today was this idea that like, and apologies for,

for not shouting out your name, but thank you for sending this idea. And I'm thinking about it, which is that we may play in front of no fans. And so I wonder if there's a class of player that will like that and a class of player that won't like that yeah yeah it was a question from splash gordo i remember that coming in yeah he had he had kind of speculated there could be some some groups right yeah certain players who like the noise and certain guys who uh don't like the noise because they lose focus or it's it's one of those things like you you really i don't think you know

until you see it but maybe there is a way if you know a player well and you know how they handle different circumstances maybe you can try and at least predict how it might impact them we don't have anything to fall back on to say oh this is what happened last time you know like we can at least look at 1995 and say okay when we're probably going to have like a 19 to 21 day spring training because that's what we did in 1995 but there's been one game played without fans that i can think of in like the history of baseball baltimore yeah and i don't think that going into that one game is going to tell us much no no that's yeah well think of it this way though i. I mean, players coming up, they played in front of crowds that are huge. They've played in front of crowds that are non-existent. And in a lot of those games, early in their career, especially when they were being heavily scouted prior to being drafted, those were important games. The stakes were high on the individual level for a lot of those players, right? So I guess my snap reaction is to not think too much about it, even though I thought it was a really interesting question. Because I think when you

play rookie ball and you play at low A, I mean, I've been to a game in Beloit in April before. There's like 20 people there. You're just playing the game. And maybe it's different in a giant stadium that's empty because you're used to that place being full and you quickly adapted to the smaller, low-level minor league park not having anybody in it. But I think the players can adapt to this pretty well. Yeah. And I don't know how we would identify the players that couldn't.

I mean, I'm looking at clutch and I'm like, okay, maybe clutch players could be players that need the noise, right? Number one in clutch last year was Matt Olsen, who is just a doll, dude. He's just, like, the nicest dude ever. He is not about, like, needing to play in tons of fans, in front of tons of fans. Like, just, I know this,

we're getting anecdotal here, but like we're, of course we're going to, because there's no roadmap for this. And I just don't see Matt Olsen. Now, when I go down a little bit, I see Bryce Harper is the ninth clutches,

you know, and it's possible to me that he needs the roar of the crowds just because, or that he desires it because of his personality of my interactions with him of you can just see it you can see that he's been surrounded by crowds his whole life basically he's a he's like the lebron james of baseball basically in that we knew about him since he was like he won a home run derby at 14. You know? Yeah, oh yeah. That LeBron comp, it's not about what he's achieved,

but it is about how he's been treated since he was a teenager. I think that holds up. But he was clutch last year. He was not clutch the year before. He was average clutch the year before. He was really clutch in 2016. He was one of the worst clutch

players in 2015 clutch is just i'm sorry man i i'm sorry if people believe in it i think that uh there are people that have a slow heartbeat uh i think that most of baseball has a slow heartbeat because i think if you are really jelly-legged at facing Justin Verlander, you're not going to last very long. Yeah, I guess what I was trying to maybe hint at with the idea of playing in empty stadiums, playing with high stakes when only a few important people are watching. people are watching i think the the path that brings you to become a major league baseball player puts you through a series of tests where you're kind of weedled out if you have problems with or without a crowd that's yeah that's kind of my hypothesis here yeah yeah yeah and and clutch just mathematically clutch does not have a great relationship year to year. No, it's noisy as F, as the scientists would say.

So I don't think that there's going to be a lot of learned going up and down this clutch list. I mean, does Charlie Blackman, 13th in clutch, does he need the fans? Kevin Newman? I mean, Kevin Newman is like a 26-year-old nobody, you know? Newman. I mean, Kevin Newman is like a 26-year-old nobody, you know? He probably enjoyed having a lot of fans for the first time as a big league player last year. Yeah, but is that the same thing

as if he starts slumping and they're yelling at him? I don't know. No. Yeah. A lot of Pirates were clutch last year. That's weird. Another knock on clutch, probably. Also, a knock on knock on the pirates if that's how they looked when they were clutch yeah that that's true sorry sorry pirates fine sorry um any case i i think uh

it's harder to figure stuff out and on the hitting side like uh back to my conforto idea uh they're still asterisk with conforto and then like if it's any worse than conforto like mitch handiger like you know i talked with mitch handiger recently and he was talking about you know hey i'd love to have my my masseuse my masseuse and my my massage therapist and my you know my rehabilitation therapist and all that stuff um you stuff coming to my house right now. Is he okay, by the way? He's been through some stuff. Yeah.

He said this last thing fixed it, that he finally feels better, and he feels like he finally got at whatever it was that was bugging him. But the whatever it was that was bugging him has been pretty raucous, dude. I mean, I think he has fractured his testicles. Ruptured? He ruptured one. At least one.

Yeah, I don't know if it was both, but I mean. He said that was the worst thing that I ever have known. I have a hard time imagining worse injury you can suffer playing sports. Like that's like not extreme sports anyway. You do extreme sports. Maybe you can add another whole category. But yeah, when that news came by and other players have had this like catchers get hit a lot right a foul tip bounces off the ground just catches them the right way and

yeah normally they wait for some protection yeah well i mean you get you hit just right though it might not it might it might save you from more damage but you're you're still you're still in trouble yeah that's true. It's just hard to, like, I think every group that we identify, we're like, oh, these people should be valued higher. We still have questions. Like, oh, Jesus Lazardo should be valued higher. And that one seems like the easiest.

Lazardo, Puck, Gore, maybe Paddock. But, you know, young pitchers that you're not sure they had 200 innings in them, they don't have to have the 200 innings in them, that's great. But you still might find them coming out of games early and losing wins that way. Injured players, yeah, great. They have more time to get ready. Does Justin Verlander actually have everybody he needs to get ready? Is he getting the best care that he can be getting right now um i like james passan because he's throwing before like he seems like he was past

the whole like i need a bunch of specialists working on me and now he's throwing already so he seems like he's ready to go um so maybe maybe there's certain cases where you're like this seems like an unquestionable good like like Conforto and Paxton. But it's hard to, and there may be something to this. Maybe you should invest in the very best relievers. But, you know, just looking at the reliever pool, I'm not super excited about the best relievers. I mean, I think Chapman is fine,

at least for another year or two. But at some point, he's going to lose a tick and have a fair amount of drop-off. I don't know. Did you see that picture of Chapman? No. There was a picture of Chapman going around? Oh, my God. Dude, his arms look like Mark McGuire's.

Is he just lifting weights every day at home? I don't know, dude. He looks bigger than I've ever – I don't know if it was the way the picture was taken, but there's this picture of him out there where he looks like his bicep is bigger than my head. All right. I'll be checking this out momentarily. I think maybe Will Carroll, the injury expert, tweeted out.

But anyway, Chapman, I think, is safe. Osuna has very low strikeout rates for a closer. And I feel like that could be meaningful at some point. Liam Hendricks is a total pop-up. Brad Hand lost velocity already. I think we're already out of the sure things. Yeah, that group is still only like seven or eight and I'm seeing this picture of Chapman. Yeah, he looks like an NFL player. Yeah, it's true. He has linebacker arms now. Yeah, yeah. I mean the funny thing though about

something like Instagram and this is this is something that comes up when workout videos pop up also it's that you don't see other things to compare it to from the same player like i don't recall seeing aroldis chapman sitting around in the tank top prior to right now so in my head i'm like wow he's jacked and it's like well maybe he's always looked like this and he's always wearing sleeves and you can't tell. I think he looks a little bigger than normal. It certainly seems like he has added muscle at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But, yeah, I think there's fewer sure things. If it was like a nicer collection of reliever arms at the top, I might say hey uh like maybe it's a good year to get two elite arms uh two elite relief arms and avoid some of the injury and then just get a bunch of quantity on the pitching side but uh unless you get chapman and osuna like you know i don't know yeah the other wrinkle here uh i brought this up on on show on Monday that I did with Matt Medica. It was just that with Corey Knable being near the end of his recovery from Tommy John, I'm kind of curious to see how the Brewers handle him and how that impacts Josh Hader with regard to save opportunities. We talked about Hader on the reliever episode. He could still be a very valuable fantasy pitcher, even with a significantly reduced number of saves.

But that one, when it comes to a snake draft, especially choosing Josh Hader in the fourth round, where his ADP has been, is something that I'm having a really difficult time doing. I'm much more likely to do it in an auction where I've got a lot more control over the combination of players that I put together. It still kind of baffles me that there are players like that who are not format dependent in terms of daily versus weekly,

but who are format dependent in terms of draft versus auction and your willingness to get them. It's the Fernando Tatis, Javi Baez problem just applied, I guess, to another player. Hayter, Hayter, good example, yes. I should have thought of Hayter. I do think that there is some risk there in terms of what you're talking about but um maybe it's the year to kind of be interesting to to go you know bueller hater chat like bueller chapman hater yeah just go a little more aggressive with the early closers i can see that being the way to go maybe i'm just i not going to push up the back end closers, man. Well, it doesn't have to be Hayter in particular either.

I think it has to be. I mean, it has to be. The only three that I... Who am I missing? The only three that I really think are kind of bulletproof in a way are Chapman, Hayter, and maybe Osuna. But Yates isn't in that group for you? I put Yates and Hendrix in a group which is like,

hey, everything looks great, but where were they like two years ago? You know what I mean? Right. How quickly could it fade on them? Can it fade as quickly as the elite skills kind of popped up? Yeah. And as much as I pretend to know these things, you know,

for a living, in, in reliever situations, you're, you have to admit it's, it's harder to project them year to year. And something like, I think something like two thirds. or 40% or 50% of them lost their jobs. I think Jeff Zimmerman had some number for last year.

Yeah, the rate is usually between 40% and 50%. I think that's been pretty consistent for a while. I think that's something Ron Chandler used to put in the forecaster years ago. It's probably still in the beginning of the abstract. I'm sure they update that every year. I got to get back into the forecaster. I got more time to dig in, so I should probably take advantage of that. But I think this is a question we're going to put out to our listeners. I'll put it out as a poll from the Athletic Fantasy account. Are you going to draft closers earlier this season, top end closers earlier? I'll put that out probably later today after the episode goes up on iTunes and everywhere else. Top

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The formula is vegan, and you can choose between three different flavors or a variety pack. Hydrant starts at just a buck a packet for a 30-day supply. You could save even more with a monthly subscription. For 25% off your first order, go to drinkhydrant.com and enter the promo code RATES at checkout. That's drinkhydrant.com. Enter the promo code RATES for 25% off your first order. drinkhydrant.com and enter promo code RATES. All right. We had a few questions come in this week. The first one comes from Isaac. It's about ranking teams for talent development. He writes, you dudes have mentioned the circle of trust with respect to some organizations and how they handle pitchers.

Also, I believe the new hitting coach in Miami is the guy who was recently the Bomba Whisperer in Minnesota. It's James Rousen, who I think our friend Nando Dufino has really latched on to. He's all in on the Marlins. Certainly interesting to have a new hitting coach there, and the fences have come in. In terms of prospects, the Dodgers always seem to get it right, while, say, the Phillies don't. Have you ever endeavored to rank the teams in terms of how coaching impacts

hitting and pitching and or how much you trust organizations to develop their prospects? Thanks. Isaac, have you ever tried to do that? I have in my head. I don't know the value of doing it on paper because it would just be so subjective. I'm not in those organizations.

And when I get a look in, it's always a highly curated look in that's designed to make them look good and i have to be aware that like now that this is my beat that player development is one of my beats that that people know that they want to look good in my eyes um so that's uh something you know I even discovered recently that someone that I'd quoted probably hadn't told me the truth in that quote so

you know so now I'm even getting that second level stuff where people are telling me that other people are lying to me awesome right to not get the truth that's fun don't worry my reporting is still good It's a minor quote in a recent piece. One thing I would say is that some of it bubbles to the top and some of it gets corroborated even kind of grudgingly from other places. So the gold standard are the Dodgers and the Yankees, despite the sunny gray piece and despite maybe some small failings when it comes to

their pitching, coaching, and some communication between certain departments at the Yankees. at the Yankees, I would say that at least in terms of resources, manpower, dedicated researchers, findings that they've had, being in front of the curve on certain things. I mean, a lot of the things that we see in today's game have been created by the Yankees and Dodgers. If you think about the Super Bowl pen, the Yankees and Dodgers. If you think about the Super Bowl pen, the Yankees were there first. If you think about using high-spin fastballs and using them less often and using them more often as a whiff pitch, that was the Yankees. If you think about the combination of high-spin high fastballs and high-spin low-breaking balls, That's the Astros and the Dodgers.

Let me put the Astros in there too. So Astros, Dodgers, and Yankees, they're the ones that are out in front in terms of finding things, researching things, changing things in their organization, making wholesale changes, and implementing these best practices with their minor leaguers to get the most out of them. So I would say that's the gold standard. That's the gold level, the five-star tier. It gets a little bit harder after that. The Twins seem to be very good at pitching. They were very good at hitting.

I trust the Twins pitching coaches and some of the people they have there. Josh Kalk is there. They had Jeremy Hefner, they've made some really good strides with, uh, older with, uh, veteran pitchers and they developed Jose Barrios. So like they, I think the twins on the pitching side are good. And then with Ralston on the hitting side, um, I think that, I think you have to, they lead the league in launch angle since we started tracking launch angle. So I think that's a meaningful thing. So let's put the Twins in the next tier, if not the top tier.

I liked what I saw in Mariners camp, the things that they talk about. I like what I hear out of the Reds, in terms of pitching at least. They've done some great things with Derek Johnson alone, and then they added to that by basically hiring all of driveline to be their minor league guys. So that has to be good. On the hitting side, I don't know as much, but I do know that Donnie, maybe is it Donnie? Let me see here.

The guy who got hired away from the Reds to be a hitting coach on the Giants. I've heard good things about him. Donnie Ecker. Yeah, that's who I thought it was. So I heard Donnie Ecker was a, was a really sort thought it was. So I heard Donnie Ecker was a really sort of forward-thinking hitting coach for the Reds. So it's possible they're good on the hitting side too. I would say the Phillies are really good on the hitting side. They've got great coaches up and down. Jason Ochard is a great hitting coordinator. I would say that they're behind on the pitching side,

and I think that flows from what you've seen from their major league pitching coaching and their minor league pitching coaching. So they're behind there. They get an uneven grade. You know, I don't, you know, yes, Rosen going to the Marlins is fascinating, but I don't know. I just don't know if it works like that. I mean, yes, Derek Johnson went to the Reds and they had one of the biggest turnarounds ever in that starting rotation. But do you think you just hire a hitting coach and the same thing happens one year over the next? The research that's

out there that says that hitting coaches mostly benefit the way that hitting coaches mostly affect their team is that they're either mostly patient or mostly aggressive. That's a piece that Russell Carlton did at bit baseball perspectives a while back. And that seems to be the way that you can mostly affect your team is by either being more patient or being more aggressive. But maybe it's less binary in the day of launch angle. Maybe there's something there. What what the Brewers, the Brewwers are teched and data teched up and data up uh in the minor leagues and they used to have derrick johnson they seem to have a really good eye for for coaches i'm

gonna have to put the brewers there with the twins um do you think of somebody that i'm missing that no i think that's a really strong list that's that's how i would generally have them sorted out too i think the the other end of the question or the end of the spectrum is just like, which teams are still lagging the furthest behind? Just because we didn't mention them here doesn't mean they're necessarily way behind. But the extreme laggards and the Orioles, I think, used to be one. I think they've started to change in the last year plus now where they're probably at least heading in the right direction, whereas maybe previously they weren't really moving in any direction. I think the same would be said for the Pirates. the Joe Musgrove and some of the approaches they have with their pitching now are very different post-Ray Searidge and post-Neil Huntington's front office now with Ben Charrington at the

helm of the organization. It can change fast too is another thing. Yeah. So think about the Pirates before they were data darlings. And then all of a sudden they lost it. And now they've got a whole new team in. What if they get back into the top 10 just by hiring the right people? Yeah, I think you still need talent, though. You kind of alluded to this with the Marlins. Bringing in James Rousen is good, but if your hitters to their core just don't have enough talent, you're going to make bad hitters a little better

than brinson can't make enough contact right yeah at a certain point now they they do have some really interesting tooled up players like lewis brinson when he does make contact actually hit the ball pretty hard when he's healthy so yeah it's harder to talk crap on on an organization because then somebody will say oh but what about this coach and you'll be like well i have respect for that coach but are they being listened to like i i i and also like the white socks are really interesting because i would say that they are not at the forefront of anything and they have a lot of talent they have a lot of talent and they've developed a lot of hitters so they must be doing something right on the hitting side but But like, you know, it's not it's not being done the way that, you know, the sort of most forward thinking people think it should be done or, you know, with the with the with the benefit of the most, you know, best researchers out there. the benefit of the most best research that's out there.

It's being done in a more old school manner. It can still work in an old school manner, so the White Sox are showing us that. I wonder about the White Sox. The Royals have made a lot of news in terms of

who they've hired and what they're doing. I've yet to see changes on the major league level and they also went and drafted Daniel Lynch who just has an old school arsenal as a sinker slider guy. Where we're kind of moving more towards four-seamers.

So I think there might be some disconnect in Kansas City. Let me look at some... I like what the Rangers have been doing with veteran pitching the last couple of off-seasons. We've mentioned that before. I mean, the success of Mike Miner and Lance Lynn in particular makes me start to trust them a bit more as they take shots, right? So the fact that they added Kyle Gibson and Jordan Lyles to me makes me a little

more interested in those two guys than I might have been had they gone to an organization without similar success stories in the last couple of seasons. I got one for you the rockies as far as just not having anything figured out they a they should be way more innovative than they are like they should be the rays of the nl oh yeah we did a pod about them like if we were running the rockies they should just be completely different they should be a laboratory organization they've got more to crap to deal with than anyone um and then and then they do weird things like um they they they highlight ground balls because you know they think that they you got they got to worry about fly balls in that outfield and and babips and home runs and all that stuff yeah okay good but one of

the ways to like really screw yourself up is to throw four seamers low in the zone and they throw more four seamers low in the zone than anybody yeah they gotta stop that they gotta stop that um and they shouldn't be forcing sinkers on people and, uh, you know, just signing Chi Chi Gonzalez was just kind of hilarious to me. Uh, that was a kind of a Rockies moment. Um, who else, uh, the, the Tigers, uh, don't seem to be doing much innovative in terms of an organization, uh, in terms of gameplay on the field and stuff like that. But, you know, I've talked to Matt Boyd a lot. When I talk to Matt Boyd about the coaches he works with and the things they talk about, he says, no, he's right at home at driveline,

and he's right at home in Detroit. So maybe the Tigers is more just a question of talent than it is coaching. Yeah, I think that's kind of a reflection of how they've gone about their rebuild and they have a lot riding on the health of that group of young pitchers if if that group stays healthy then their outcome is positive sooner rather than later but if that group doesn't stay healthy we've talked about their their lack of upper level position player depth in the minors and that is a huge issue for them like they

they seem like they got one foot going in the right direction but the other foot is just kind of bebopping around not really moving in a direction and the last one might be surprising but the A's I think the A's are brilliant at acquiring talent I think the A's are brilliant at knowing which prospects to fade which prospects to trade away I think they have a really good strategy in terms of building a high variance

kind of 84 win team have a really good strategy in terms of building a high-variance, kind of 84-win team. And in the years when they win 78, they trade everyone away. And in the years when they win 95, they add. Right. So they're elite in the front office in terms of managing the roster, but they're very poor when it comes to using tech to maximize they just don't do it and like chapman has figured out chapman and olsen have figured out a way to to get good uh simeon was kind of a player acquisition uh a win that just happened to be you know the most um

like he has probably the best makeup in the game. And so he just got the most out of his skillset. Uh, but you know, uh, in terms of like develop it, drafting and developing a guy all the way to the top in terms of just what I know of, you know, what, what their process is like. Um, and, uh, they're're just they just don't invest they don't use money to invest in tech and data in the same way that other teams do they do seem to have good coaching though at the big league level so it's it's just a strange they've cycled through their pitching and hitting coaches pretty fast i don't i don't think they've they've found a guy that that is amazing i also know they've found a guy that is amazing.

I also know... They've had Walsh as their bench coach for a while. Yeah. And a lot of stability with Bob Melvin. Yeah, Melvin is great, but I think what Melvin is so great at is he's like a steady ship guy who the players love and who communicates well. And so nobody feels slighted when they lose a role or when

they turn into a halftime player or something. I feel like he's somehow, he's the guy who's willing to interact with them. Whereas the front office, like Billy Bean doesn't want to be down there telling them they got cut or whatever. Melvin is a guy who can tell you some bad news and make you feel good about it. So, you know, I think Melvin is great, but I don't think he's necessarily telling people to tweak their swings or do this or do that. Um, and so, you know, in terms of coaching, they've cycled through coaches, um, you know, and I, and I like, uh, their current pitching coach, Scott Emerson, but he's, um, you know, our conversations have been about why the sinker shouldn't be

dropped as much as it has been which is a funny thing to say because most of the advanced front offices are thinking that the sinker that only one or two guys on your team should really be thrown a sinker anyway I just think it's interesting when it comes to the a's that they've still had

success with the players they've gotten oh here's a an anecdote uh that fits into a piece that i've been researching for a while uh a lot of the a's use an outside source uh for their game day analytics that's interesting it's really interesting actually like how many teams have players doing that i only know through this outside source that like i'm profiling um you know kind of i have a sense of who his uh who his players are but they mostly have to do with the a's i mean he, he's based out here, so that could be it, but they're mostly A's. So I don't know.

I've seen the A's game day analytics package, and it seems fine, but they even had some interesting stuff about the umpires that I hadn't seen on other ones, where it had the umpires that i hadn't seen on other ones where like had like the umpires pets names so they could just like make conversation with the umpires and get the umpires on their side yeah it taps into a psychological element there yeah yeah but um i it seems fine but um i wouldn't also wouldn't be surprised if like i haven't i don't think i

have i've seen an ipad for every ace player that's not the kind of uh that's not the kind of outlay they make you know that's not the kind of expense they make yeah you go to the giants clubhouse and every single player has their own ipad and it's got a charging station in their oversized locker that swivels to the left and has a nice you know that's a real nice like plush office chair sitting in front of it yeah that's that's what it's like in in san francisco but in oakland it's a crappy chair and a tiny the folding chair with a little bit of cushion on it yes exactly in front of like a just a real old school locker no nobody gets there's like one ipad they all share kind of deal so um i don't you know the a still have a lot of great teams so i'm not i can't poo-poo them generally and that's another thing that's another

lesson for us trying to uh chase after this and be like oh you know uh the brewers are bulletproof because they do amazing things with their tech and their data and their minor league system. They built a lab and they've outdone their projections for three straight years. And maybe this isn't the year for the brewers, you know? Yeah. Well, if they have one down year, are people still going to uphold them in the same high regard? I think that's the other side of this too. Are they just running really hot right now with a good process that maybe

isn't necessarily a great one? This is just an open question, not me speculating to the quality, just kind of saying, hey. I was a little surprised they signed Christian Jelic to that deal. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money for a team that keeps their payroll a little bit low. It's their same blueprint they followed with braun

though like it yeah it really is so that's funny because it's a totally new front office yeah but ownership overlapped that deal oh so they they think they've found a face of the franchise i think so i i think yellow has a good relationship with mark Atanasio's son, Mike. I think he's got a couple sons. But I think Mike Atanasio is the one who works with the California Strong Charity that Jelic and Ron and Mike Moustakis all do. And I think Jared Goff is the other famous athlete who's a part of it. But anyway, I think there was mutual interest on both sides. And everything I've heard and read about it, Jelic likes playing in Milwaukee,

and ownership really wanted him to be the face of the franchise since Braun's probably retiring at the end of the season. The highest paid position player... I actually mentioned Ryan Braun on the radio the other day as a secret tragedy if we don't have a season. It would be kind of sad that this face of the franchise had played his last game as a brewer and didn't know it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it would be one of those things that you didn't think about at all at the time, but then you realize later like, oh, that was it. It was a year earlier than we expected. Thanks a lot for the question, Isaac. A lot of interesting stuff for us to explore with that.

We're going to save a few of the other questions for Thursday's episode. Please keep sending questions in, ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com. If you want to email us, just spell out the word and if you send us an email. You can find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. You can find me at Derek Van Ryper. We've got a 90-day trial going on at The Athletic right now. So if you're not sure about a subscription, be sure to check that out. You can find me at Derek Van Ryper. We've got a 90-day trial going on at The Athletic right now. So if you're not sure about a subscription, be sure to check that out. If you want to get 40% off a subscription, go to theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels.

That is going to wrap things up for this episode. We are back with you on Thursday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.