Rates & Barrels - Would you Wander, quantifying injury risk, and preparing for a fresh set of pitching ranks

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Eno and DVR discuss a few Wander Franco fantasy trade scenarios, as well as several difficult dynasty toss-ups before exploring the possibility of a more quantifiable way to measure and account for injury risk when setting expectations for players. Plus, Eno previews his upcoming Starting Pitcher rankings update, before examining the recent performances of Corbin Burnes, including his weekend trip to Coors Field.  Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Subscribe to The Athletic for just $3.99/mo: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels presented by Topps. Check out Topps Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. It is Wednesday, June 23rd. We have seen the Wander Franco debut, and there have been a lot of amazing trades going down in some of your leagues out there. So we're going to kind of dig into an extreme version of would you rather just one day into the Major league career of Wander Franco. Sometimes it's the absolute best time to move a player in short-term leagues and long-term leagues.

Lots of different angles there. We're also going to talk about whether we quantify injury risk appropriately on the heels of some more injuries, of course, from the last couple of days. And we got a spin related question that we're going to get to on today's show as well. You know, happy Wednesday. How's it going for you today? Good, good. Tomorrow's my birthday. And so tomorrow I will be going out to a nice sushi dinner. And this weekend, I'm going to have a party for adults. And that sounds weird because it sounds like some sort of sexy time thing.

It's not. It's not anything like that. I think we might get a fight and stay up past nine. It's just one of those things that once you have children, you kind of understand what I'm saying. Don't bring the kids. And we have enough beds here that, you know,

a lot of them can stay over. So we're going to have a, an adult sleepover, which again, again, sounds bad. That's just, I'm not,

I can't, I can't find the right words for this. At least you're hearing it. I mean, at least you in your own head, you're, you're hearing this, you know, this your own head. You're hearing this. You know this doesn't sound quite right.

I don't know what the name is. I guess somebody's shouting at the radio, it's called a party, dude. Yes, it's just called a party. We used to have them. That's part of it. It's been a while. Also, once you have children,

a party just means you invite people with kids over, and the kids run around, and then everyone goes home at 7. It's just not the same as the pre-kid parties. Exactly. Well, happy you're able to do that. Early happy birthday to you. I'm sure I'll talk to you or Slack with you or email you or Gchat you or text you tomorrow, but happy birthday anyway. And I'm glad you seem like you're in a better place than the last time we talked about your birthday on this podcast, because when you turned 40, you were in kind of this low place. You were fixing things around the house and you just

weren't really sure what you were supposed to do with yourself. And I feel like now you're just being you. Yeah, I'm going to enjoy myself. I do think about this a little bit because I went to a bar last weekend and we're opening up. I think with the kids, I went to Great America recently. We're doing things. But there wasn't as many people, the bar had just opened a cellar maker, which is a great brewery around here. Uh, maybe they just hadn't really announced that they were open and they weren't, it was like a soft open or something.

Uh, but it was like a, it was like a Friday, you know, evening and it was like 50% capacity or something. Um, so I have a feeling that as we open up things will, there won't be as many people that are there. Uh, but, uh, from some conversations I've had with other people, the people that are there might be more utter. It just might be more out there. Might, might be very ready to party. you're gonna get my gather my drift i mean uh there has been this sort of suppression of that instinct so um there will be the people who who still don't leave the house and i'm with that um and then there's gonna be the people that really live but leave the house yeah i didn't really know how to celebrate steph finishing her dissertation last week like i was happy but it wasn't the kind of happy i would have been previously it was just strange like i've

forgotten how to get really excited about something and that was a a huge life milestone for us as a as a family i think part of it was just kind of exhaustion like she was really tired and i think just from kind of helping make that last push to the very end, I was exhausted too. So I'm like, let's just get a pizza and drink a beer and fall asleep at nine o'clock. We don't have kids. We're just,

we're just that tired. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a congratulations to her. It's such a, such a momentous day. And it's,

it is one of those things that it's not months, it's not weeks. It's just years and years and years. And I think that the thing to fight is sometimes the feeling of like, not was it worth it, but just like, God, that was so much work. And why don't I feel more excited? I think there's this always a natural like thing where, like, you know, I kind of worked on that bat piece for, for like, you know, six months or something. And there's always like a moment where you're like, okay, that's it. I did it, you know? Okay. Yeah. And you kind of, uh, on some level you have to dig yourself. You have to remind yourself, be like, I did i did that thing like i and for her it's like

years and years and years of work and just be like yeah baby it might take a couple days to get there but oh you know who's digging wander franco is his dad yeah he was 11 when she started graduate studies that's there's so many amazing dissertation related facts that i think about sometimes that really just make me laugh that's funny too because i bet you that wander franco's dad almost enjoyed that moment more than him and wander has been working on baseball since he's 11 right so in a way this was like his graduation, like his moment of like, I finally did this thing, you know? And I bet from some level, I'm sure he was like, all right, next at bat, you know?

But his dad was out there just, I loved it. He just was so happy and it was just unbridled happiness. And it was really fun to watch. And deserved and absolutely a player we've been excited about for a long time, as we talked about on Monday, but he homered in his debut. And it's always fun when the highly anticipated arrival happens and a good game comes with it. I think if I look back at games that I was looking forward to watching for debuts, this one's kind of in that Steven Strasburg level of what I wanted, and that Strasburg debut was incredible

against the Pirates, geez, almost 12 years ago now ago now yeah did stanton homer in his debut i the the stanton debut i think was like the same day as a strasburg debut or something um i just remember we were at a place with like three or four tvs and we're trying to watch both things but um anyway uh the uh the anyway the thing that stood out for me because you know I'm not being a damper it's just one game I'm not saying that it's no big

I'm not saying that it's no big deal he only hit the ball 105 he did not have the standout exit velocity on that homer that would say oh shut up all you doubters about the power. The power, I think, is still somewhat of a question mark. Yes, he hit a homer, but it was like 105 miles per hour.

So, like, you know, it wasn't one of those like 110, 115s that we look for to kind of describe plus power. But the one thing that I was really impressed with was his first ab he went down oh two and um you know he he battled back he got the walk and he fought off a pitch that i think that they wanted him to whiff on and once he did that fought off a pitch inside they kind of stayed outside on him the rest of the way, and he just spit on all of it. I mean, he can spit on loan away. That puts him ahead of half the hitters in baseball already, and then he can make contact on the pitch inside. I mean, I think there's a very special plate coverage batting average package in here. The question is just how many homers. Right, and even if we get home runs eventually, how many are we going to get down the road, right? I can temper expectations in the short term and say,

let's say he's a 15 home run guy for all intents and purposes right now, prorate that over the fact that we've got less than, a little more than half a season left. Okay, see, maybe he hits eight more home runs the rest of the way. Is that who he is next year? Is that who he is the year after that? That's the harder part to project. How much raw power projection is there for Wander going forward? So the would you rather type stuff right now is amazing. I threw it out there on Twitter. I just wanted to know if anyone

had traded him. We got an email from one of our listeners, John, who writes, I've always tried to trade my elite prospects just before they play. The hypo based on accurate data is just a projection and tends to emphasize the ceiling, not the floor, or the most likely outcomes and creates the best possible trade value. So in his case, he flipped Wander for Luis Castillo. Kind of still a relative buy low compared to our previous expectations for Luis Castillo. But if you think about it through this lens, if back on the last weekend in March when we were doing our last round of drafts,

if you had drafted Wander ahead of Luis Castillo in a redraft league, people would have just looked at you like, whoa, you must think Wander's coming up immediately and mashing. So it is the type of trade that you wouldn't have been able to make three months ago. And it certainly could end up making a lot of sense. Well, you know, one thing that I have to point out is you had to nurse that empty roster spot

all the way here. So it's not exactly the same thing. You know, you had to, you had an empty roster spot. The other person could have had Luis Castillo as an ace, right? You know, so even if the strategy works could have had Luis Castillo as an ace, right? So even if the strategy works going forward,

in order to enact it, you have to nurse a roster spot along. You have to give up a place that could be giving you production of some other sort. You have to get a little lucky with injuries, that you didn't have to use that roster spot. It works a little better in places with unlimited IL or a lot of IL spots because then you can sort of protect that bench spot easier. I think that it generally works better with prospects sort of below the top five. I was looking again at the bust rates for my article on Wander this week,

and I was looking at the bust rates, and the bust rates for top 10 prospects were really low. The bust rates were on the order of 15%, if I remember correctly. And so if you get a top five prospect and four out of those five end up not busting they're much more likely to be superior so you could be trading out of a really nice situation but if he's talking redraft another thing that Derek Cardy said that's really interesting is just that we're talking about one year. So in a keeper league, trading away Wander right when he debuts is more risky

because you could be giving up a superior talent. But in a redraft, which I'm sort of getting that's the feeling I'm getting from him, is this is a redraft which i'm sort of getting the that's the feeling i'm getting from him is this is a redraft idea um wanda franco could be amazing and could just struggle in his first year right and so it could be a mike trout situation where you know yeah in the next year you draft mike trout early because he's a great prospect and and you know who cares if he struggled in his first 100 plate appearances but he's you know prospects are likely to struggle in their first plate appearance. Yeah, and I think focusing first on the redraft aspects of this, I think the theory or the concept that is executed by John

and a lot of people out there who decided to trade Wander, that generally makes sense to me. Because you can get excess value. Wander can be good, but the player you can get back can still be better in a lot of cases. Castillo could be a $20 guy the rest of the way. Wander could be a $10 guy the rest of the way, and you made a good trade. If you needed pitching, you used the guy to get it, and you probably had someone playing in the middle infield before Wander came up anyway, it and you probably had someone playing in the middle infield before wander came up anyway so you know it wasn't like you completely missed out you actually did better than what you would

have done had you just stayed put like i i totally get that i think that makes a lot of sense here's a you're just a like a really cool little graphic that that cardi put um you know on twitter that that that is super relevant to what we're talking about here he has top 10 prospects from 2009 to 2019 and he does and he just sorts them basically into struggled did pretty well crushed right and the list of struggled goes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, like 25, 30 deep, right? And it has Javier Baez on it, and it has Byron Buxton on it, and it has JP Crawford on it, and it has Victor Robles on it, sorry. It has Eloy Jimenez on it. It has Vlad Guerrero Jr. on it. It has players that bustedero Jr. on it. You know,

it has players that busted eventually, but also players like Manny Machado that were great eventually. Mike Trout. So there's 30 of those. There's, you know, six that did fine. Stanton, Meadows, Benintendi, Myers. Okay. That's fine. And then there's the ones that crushed. Acuna, Tatis, Torres, Seager, Carlos Correa, Lindor, Bryant, Harper, Hayward, Santana, and Posey. You're risking the 10 because I think the five in the middle, if you trade Austin Meadows in his rookie year for Luis Castillo, then you get about even value. You know what I mean? If that's what Juan DeFranco does, if he just plays his projections, if he just plays, you know, hits like 275 with eight homers and five stolen bases the rest of the way, something that would

fit in his projections, right? Then trading for Luis Castillo was a fine trade. If he's one of the 30, it was a great trade. So you have like a half chance it was a great trade, a quarter chance it was a straight up trade, and a quarter chance you hosed yourself. Yeah. And I put the graphic up. If you're watching us on YouTube, you see it on your screen right now. If you don't subscribe to our YouTube channel, this would be one of the many reasons why you could hit that subscribe button and smash the like button for us. Why do they say smash the like button? Can't you just click it? That's in my nightmares. Follow me, smash that like button. And it's just what you have to say.

Unspeakable. Yeah. It's unspeakable. Right. So I do think this is the right way to think about what you're doing here. I just thought the other fun exercise is to just look at some of the deals that people are actually making right now, aside from that Luis Castillo trade. The Twitter thread responses I thought were generally pretty good. There were some pretty fair deals. There were a couple of really strange ones. The one that struck me as the most bizarre, there was somebody in a league who dealt Wander plus Kyle Hendricks for Whit Merrifield. And Whit Merrifield is more valuable than we probably give him credit for because of the steals, right? I mean, 20 steals at the time that the trade happened. That alone, do we think Wander is going to provide more 5x5 value than Witt the rest of the way? That is hard to do because of that unique categorical contribution. I mean, maybe there's some positional aspects, but Witt has some second base eligibility.

So you'd have to really have a huge need for power at shortstop. And you might not even get that much of it immediately from Wander, too. So I actually like that trade quite a bit on the Witt side in a redraft league, just because steals are so hard to get. If Wander was your way to get those steals, I think you did something pretty good in most cases. By the bat, X rest of season projection, Witt Merrifield is a top 20 bat or just a back end top 20. About the same as Nelson Cruz and Pete Alonzo. Basically a $12 player.

A lot of these trades are keeper ones. Here's one more redraft one from Christian. Christian was offered to Chris Bryant, Mitch Hanager, Julio Rodriguez, and Josh Young for Wander and Matt Chapman. And that's a 12-team. This was actually a dynasty, so this was also not a redraft league. Wander, what did he do? He did Wander and Matt Chapman for what? He was offered Bryant, Mitch Hanager, Julio Rodriguez, and Josh Young for Wander and Matt Chapman in a 12-team dynasty.

No, I don't think so. I keep Wander. You know, Julio makes it the hardest. But if you take Julio out of it, it's like an easy, easy no. You want to give me Hanager and you know what I mean? Yeah. So with Julio in it, if you just believe in Julio and you think that Julio is basically the second best prospect in baseball which some people uh believe then you then you

might do it but you'd still be giving up the first best prospect in baseball so are there any of those dynasty leagues uh trades or keeper league trades that you would do because i i i'm kind of on the opposite end where i'd be like it'd be pretty hard to pry Wander from me in the Keeper League. This one is a Dynasty League. Someone in this Dynasty League swapped Wander and Cedric Mullins for Mookie and Kenta Maeda and a pick. It's tempting because Mookie should age really, really well. When you get to the perennial first rounder,

even guys that are older, I find it really difficult to turn those players down because you're hoping that Wander and any player like this gets into that level. And I realize that getting fixated on the difference in years remaining is a big part of it because the back half of the career won't be as good as the first half of the career. So you have to build in a lot of decline, even when you have a really good player to start with. That's the kind of offer that I think is really hard to turn away, though. I think that's why those trades actually happen. I rue the day that I traded Mookie Betts for Miguel Cabrera and... But that's already right in the...

It's the same kind of deal. It's the same kind of deal because it was back... That was when Mookie was in the Wander spot. It was back when Mookie was a hot prospect and Miguel Cabrera was coming. It was like a year or two off of the Triple Crown. And so I said, I did it and I said, I'm getting

a really good bat and I just got the very beginning of his decline phase. And he got injured that year and then he got injured again the next year. And I was just the very beginning of his decline phase. And he just, he got injured that year. And then he got injured again the next year. And I was just like, what the hell did I do? So, I think a lot of this flips if you're not talking about a top 10 prospect.

I would agree with that. I mean, I think there's some point at which it really flips. And maybe it could be done sort of just by math. Because if you look at top 50 hitters right the bus rate is 33 which is lower than i thought uh but if the top 10 is more like 10 that means that it kind of goes past 30 in the you know, in sort of 30 through 50. So I think if, I think that a general Rubik for me is top 25 hitter prospect.

Real hard to give up. We have, we have somebody on devil's rejects, Hedberg Perez. God, we talk about the brewers a lot. That one's on you. I didn't bring him up. It's my fault. But Hedberg Perez, we, we talk about the Brewers a lot. That one's on you. I didn't bring him up. It's my fault. Hedbert Perez, we think that he's basically already a top 25 prospect.

It hasn't really been borne out yet in lists overall, but we just don't talk about him in trades. We're a buy now team. We'll talk about anybody in trades. And we're a buy-now team. We'll talk about anybody else on our roster that's young. That's interesting that he's reached that level. But he's that close for us. Maybe he's right now at 40, but we're just like, end of season list, 25, top 20.

Yeah, I think that could definitely happen with him over these next couple of months. Michael Waterloo does some writing for The Athletic, at Michael Waterloo on Twitter. Give him a follow. He did a thread of Wander 1v1 dynasty polls. Here's where these stand right now. He had Wander versus Trout.

Which side of that one would you be on? Just straight up. Isn't it fun that you're even thinking about this? I might take Wander, dude. You would be on the smaller side, that one right now. You can vote in these polls, by the way. Trout's not hitting anymore. I mean, he's not hitting.

He's not stealing anymore. No. And he just had a leg injury, and I think we might be hitting the injury phase of his career. I'm not saying that he's going to be oft injured and forever injured. I'm just saying he's going to be injured every year, a little bit or a lot. I think that the projection for him next year

will be to steal five bases in the full season. How many more seasons do you think Trout has where he has a top 15 ADP going into the final weekend of drafts? Fangraph says he can come back and still finish this season with a 300 average and 25 homers and 5 steals. That's basically if you just combine

what he did with what he's projected to do. If he does that, he'll go back into the first round still. And if he maintains it with better health, he probably stays in the first round for at least another year after that,

if not two or three. Maybe not that much. All right, so we're kind of saying maybe... It happens kind of fast, dude. Let me find that Miguel Cabrera year that I got him. I just want to point this out. Miguel Cabrera, when I got him, it was the first year he missed significant time,

so I can probably spot it pretty quickly. 2017. In 2016, Miguel Cabrera hit.316 with 38 homers and 108 RBI. Okay? In 2016, he was 33 years old. No, 30,

33? You think he made this trade in 2016? So that was right as Mookie Betts was reaching the top end Mookie Betts levels for the first time. Yeah, and he gave, it was the first time,

I wasn't sure he was going to maintain that power, and he gave me Miguel Cabrera and like a bunch of other players you know so i was like oh this will make my whole team better uh how old but i can why can't i do this math he was 33 miguel cabrera's 33 mike trot's 29 so not not apples to apples but mig Miguel Rivera was never good again. Yeah, I mean, injuries, big injuries may have been part of what sped up that decline. Because at the time, I don't think it was unreasonable to look at Miggy and say, this guy's going to hit until the contract is over.

He's that type of player. I mean, he just hit 316 with 38 homers. At 33, you just think he can keep doing it. Yeah. That decline should have been more graceful than that. If you delete 2017, if 2018 had followed 2016, if he'd gone from 316, 393, 5263 to 299, 395, 448, that's a big power drop. But at least those first two numbers you'd look at and go, all right, 5263 to 299, 395, 448. That's a big power drop,

but at least those first two numbers you'd look at and go, all right, this is the beginning of the end, but it's still pretty good. But the power outage, the power just vanished for Miggy. That shouldn't happen. Usually elite power hitters like that don't fall off that quickly

when the hit tool is as good as Miggy's hit tool was. The only thing I can come up with is that he's an all-fields guy and oppo hits, you know, if you take a little bit away from an oppo hit, it's not a homer pretty quickly. But I don't know. I think probably the injury is a big deal. Anyway, that was 33. So I would say in one more year,

I would 100% take Wanda Franco for Mike Trout. How about Wanda versus Otani? That one's really hard. Daily one lineup spot Otani is pretty frigging useful. I mean, you will miss some homers on the days he pitches, I mean, you will miss some homers on the days he pitches, but you could get from one player, you know, 280, 25 homers, and 10 steals,

and 7 wins, and 8 wins, and 150 strikeouts, or 140 strikeouts. But, I will say this, His command is reliever level. His injury history is not great. His oscillations on his fastball velo are just weirder than we've ever seen from anyone. Today, in his start, he went from

92 to 95 in the first inning. I say no, man. Wander Franco. Wander versus Vlad Jr. Well, see, now you're getting a guy in his peak who's going to give you the batting average and has already shown you he's giving you the power. So I think I'd take Vlad. Yep.

That's where the masses are too. I think I'm slight edge Vlad. I don't think it's as much of a landslide. Were you on the other two? You didn't give me your opinion. You take Trout and you take Otani? I think I would take Trout. I think I'd take Trout over Wander, but I think I would take Wander over Otani. There is a risk that, like we were saying, there's almost that risk of twice the injury risk for Otani. It's just twice the ways to get hurt.

And to be completely clear, I do not feel strongly about most of these. Some of the other ones that he put out there, Wander versus Bieber, I think that's a landslide for me to Wander. Wander versus Corbin Burns. Pitching is just in general. Any pitcher, I'll take Wander. Wander versus DeGrom? Wander versus DeGrom

was out there for a dynasty. That one's almost split evenly. DeGrom has already had TJ. He's got something traveling around his arm right now, like his whole body. He's had shoulder, lat, all that stuff. He does. Sometimes, context maps a little bit

like, if I'm going to win this year, DeGrom is the number one pitcher and I want to win this year and I don't necessarily need, like I probably have a good shortstop too. But rebuilding, that would be something I would like seek out. I'd be like, here, give me Wander Franco. I'm going to give you DeGrom. I would prefer Wander.

I love Jacob DeGrom as a talent, but he's 33. Even though he started pitching late, he might not be a very old 33. He could be a young 33, given what we know about him, but that lingering concern right now only bumps me even further onto the Wander side.

If DeGrom were totally healthy right now, I would still be on the Wander side in a dynasty league because we're talking about a really long period of time where it is much more likely that DeGrom falls off than Wander is just a complete bust,

just based on what we know about those players. Time catches up with most pitchers. Sure, maybe he's more like a Scherzer or a Verlander. Those guys are generally considered outliers, though. It's very, very difficult to rely on that and win with that long-term, even though I don't think we have any debates about how valuable a healthy DeGrom really is.

I do have a naysayer scout that I stay in contact with. I love him because the takes are so spicy sometimes. And one thing he sent me was Ben

Grieve. What? Come on. I just don't. Ben Grieve struck out more than the league did when he hit the league, and he didn't have the defensive value or the base running acumen, I don't think. And Ben Grieve was really good for a while.

So really, the question is, do we think that there's something about Wander when he does that, that it doesn't have any longevity? The other name that he said was Profar. And there are actually some other links that, you know, I think they're friends and they're from the same town. I think they're friends and they're from the same town. But I think the thing, the problem with Profar is that there's an injury. Massive injury. The shoulder injury that Jerickson Profar had earlier in his career completely changed it.

A ton of power potential. I think we were talking about Profar as having the kind of potential that Wander has. And so, yeah, okay. If you want to say that Wander could have a shoulder injury but i mean i feel like tatis could like we were just talking about did tatis just have that injury yeah and we were like did he did he and then he didn't or

maybe you know maybe we'll he will see ramifications of this i think that injuries we're going to talk about this a little bit but uh it's very... I think, to me, my general stance on injury is like, unless you're talking about the very fringes, it's impossible to model. I kind of just throw my hands up at him. So that's why I would say, Wander, if not injured. At the very least, I see him as like a 280-2010 guy.

That's short. So it's just a really high floor. And then if he is a 335-40 guy, then you just got Tatis, you know? He's not Ben Grieve, okay? An injury could make him into Profar, but he also doesn't look like Profar body-wise. He's jacked.

He looks a lot stronger than Profar did, especially at that age. I think that's a huge, huge difference for me between those two players. Fun exercise, though. Be sure to check out Michael Waterloo on Twitter and cast your votes. We'll see if any of those swing from where they're currently at here

on Wednesday afternoon. That's one of the hardest for me. Absolutely. Let's get to some other matters, since we spent a lot of time on Wander and for good reason. I started thinking a lot about this question again. It's one we've definitely hit in the past, thinking about rankings and especially pitcher evaluations, but I keep wondering if we just don't quantify injury risk very well because Byron Buxton,

quantify injury risk very well because Byron Buxton back on the aisle, this time with a very fluky injury, got hit by a pitch, broke a bone in his hand. So he's going to miss another month. His injury history is extensive and not all of his injuries are the kind that you could say are fluky. That's very clear, right? There are some kinetic chain related issues that are in his legs. He's had hip trouble. He's had concussions. He's had all sorts of stuff. I think the hit by pitch and concussions, I can put into the fluky accident group and everything else I can put into the more long-term concern from a recurrent standpoint. Obviously, a head injury, as we learned in the office, is a bigger issue than a foot injury, for example. You might recall the injury that Michael Scott suffered cooking bacon on his foreman grill and stepping on his grill getting out of bed.

That's the episode where the doctor explains to him that a head injury is more severe than a foot injury. All that being said, I think emotions actually dictate how fantasy players approach injured players. I don't think it's a data-driven sort of approach. I don't think we're always listening to people like our friends at Inside Injuries or my friend Jeff Stotts over at Roto-Wire. I don't think we're always taking what they say and necessarily fitting it as well as we can into a tool that properly assesses the risk and values players correctly. I think this is one of those areas where there's actually often a buying opportunity. There could be a situation where because of how unique they are as players, guys like Buxton and Mondesi remain overpriced because we're just chasing steals so much. But then we get guys who end up getting buried in ADP because of their injury history.

They stay healthy for a year and they're league winning players because their skills got completely overlooked at the expense of those injuries. Yeah, you know, there's a really interesting piece called What Makes a Position Player Injury Prone by Robert Arthur, Rob Arthur, over at Baseball After Respectus. And he does one graph where he just shows mean days lost to injury and age. And there's a general upslope as you get older, not something that's too surprising. But at the beginning of the graph, there's a downslope. Just the first three or four years, there's a downslope from 20 to 25. And I think that there's some aspect of

sort of getting to know how to play 162 game season that may cause some fatigue injuries or, you know, even you're still growing a little bit. I mean, one of the injuries that Tatis had to his back was a injury that happens when you're growing and playing a repeated stress sport. The lower back, like sort of stress fracture they had was something that happens when your back is growing and being used in like a sort of professional sport environment. So I could see there being sort of growing pains for some players. And then they, then they, then they show that they weren't injury prone, right? I think that fits, that fits other players. And then there's just the general, as you get older, your, your body parts need more oil and

just, you know, wear out. And so, you know, that part is interesting, but then the other part is interesting. He tried to make a model where he used, you know, how many times you were injured last year, the year before, the year before that, and age, and put them all together. And by far, by far, the most important aspect of whether or not you're going to be injured next year was how often you were injured last year. However, the translation is five to one. So let's say a player missed 50 games last year due to injury. They'd be expected to miss 10 more games this year. And that's pretty extreme. I mean, that's like saying, you know,

Byron Buxton only gets docked 10 games next year in his projection. But that makes more sense in my head from just like a math standpoint. I think this is similar to the conversation we had about Wander's projection where I can't just take that and say, okay, you know, Buxton is only going to miss 10 games. I think you give him a little more than that, or you at least plan for the possibility that he misses more because of the unique combination of injuries and how interconnected they might be. I think the exact concept of what you're describing is what we need to do really well, but it's not going to do all the work for us either. Instead of being 90% emotion,

which I also think includes people looking at the most recent injury and trying to piece these things together and like 10% data and logic, it just needs to be more balanced. That's all I'm looking for. Yeah, and there is a lot of this work because Rob himself in the piece says there's a big difference between a hamstring injury, a torn hamstring, or, you know, being hit in the face. And it was really interesting because some of the more injury-prone guys have seen both. Buxton, Lowry, Stanton. Early on, there was both. Stanton got hit in the face. Stanton had the gruesome hamstring injury. Lowry had a problem in the field and also got hit on his hand. Buxton has now gotten hit and had collisions in the outfield and had soft tissue injuries. And you would think that the soft tissue

injuries would be the one that's more predictive. So you can maybe tease that effect out. You could take some of the emotion out and be like, okay, the fact that Buxton got hit on the hand is probably not that predictive, but the fact that he, you know, had a hamstring injury, that's more predictive. And so we can actually run little prediction models on each of these things. Until we do that, there is a place for you as a human being to enter into the conversation. You know what I mean? Because you are going to be able to look at those and be like, I'm not as concerned about this player who got hit on the hand.

He's going to wear more body armor going forward and blah, blah, blah. You know, maybe he'll move, you know, six inches off the plate or whatever it is, you know, he'll, it's not like someone who just tore his hamstring off the bone. What about the White Sox outfielders so like eloy yeah what was eloy's was a torn peck on a contact play yeah i mean that was like that was almost like getting hit you know uh louis sorbert was uh was running yeah his was running down to first base i think and just like tore his hip off i would say that i think i would be a little bit more worried about luis than eloy going forward yeah i mean we're looking for power from eloy and in your pack and your upper body is where a lot of that

strength comes from but certainly not all of it you need your whole body to swing the bat at that at that level. There seems to be more contact involved, right? That's sort of what we're talking about. Who are some other players that have had gruesome injuries? Byron Buxton has had both, so it's kind of hard to tease those out. I think to some extent he's injury prone. Add it up to him on to see what his injury

has been this year. All soft tissue. All oblique. Oblique and hamstring, right? Yeah, and I think it was both sides now on the oblique. So that's just, to me, that's bad. But it's, at a certain point, this is the point I was trying to get to. At a certain point, the risk-reward makes sense to still draft those players. It's not a, they were hurt all year last year, stay away.

It's, how early are people willing to take them? If they're jumping too early because Modesty could still steal 50 bags next year, all right, if he's a third rounder next year, an early third round pick, that might still be too early based on what we know about his health history paired with the skills. If Buxton is, I mean, based on the per-game numbers, Byron Buxton's played like a possible top 10 fantasy player between last season and this season combined when he's been on the field.

That's a huge clause. When he's been on the field, he's played 66 games across the two seasons combined, but 23 homers and seven steals, and he's hitting something like 290 or 300 during that span? I'm just doing the math on the fly. I mean, that's an elite player for fantasy purposes with the F health grade.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a full-on F health grade. I tried to do this in the pitching ranks and from season to season, you can do more math and you can have a little bit more of a regimented process in season. It becomes even harder because like when you're doing the pitchers like, you know, you now you're looking at Carlos Carrasco versus Spencer Turnbull. And you're like, Spencer Turnbull hasn't had a real long history of these.

It doesn't seem like as big a deal, but I have no updates on Spencer Turnbull. And in the update from Carlos carasco says he's doing long toss where does that put him in the thing you know so it's like uh it's like i am i still am closer to throwing my hands out because it's like how are you so sure that you understand these things like like there have been a lot of people who said that uh jake de brom is injury prone right and had more injury risk which is playing out but at the same time might not i mean he might might have like 150 innings of a 0.6 era this year and break records so um yeah it's really really tough to do i guess is the answer and I think that in your first three rounds, I think maybe something that Christian Yelich is teaching us and Cody Bellinger is that maybe in your first three rounds, you want no questions. Yeah, no known ailments.

Maybe you can limit that to the last three seasons or something. If you strained your hamstring in 2016 or 2017 and nothing's happened since even in martha's model it's it doesn't mean as much yeah really last year because i think last year means it could still be there you know you could still be dealing with it if you had a full season last year and two years ago you hurt your hamstring you know maybe you you solved it you know um so but but it does make me think a little bit about who i want to put a first round pick on and the second round pick on because cody's been hurt this year you know and yellich might still be hurt definitely feeling it in a few leagues with both of those guys missing as much

time as they have missed and just the fact they haven't really been themselves when they have been out there either that's been the other frustrating part of all of this you do have some new rankings dropping tomorrow thursday on your birthday your birthday rankings going yeah new poop i can't say that shouldn't say the other word doing that you're trying to do the dj khalid new poop that didn't work don't have kids man it just turns you into like the worst version of yourself. Anyway. Yeah, I got new rankings out. And the cool thing is new sort of inner workings for Stuff Plus.

A little bit of work we've done on that. That does a couple of interesting things. One thing it does is it splits all of the different outcomes that we're trying to predict. It splits them apart. We used to kind of try to predict strikes and try to predict balls in play as sort of two big groups. Now we've split those into like singles, doubles, triples, and called strikes, and not singles, doubles, triples and and uh called strikes and and and and not singles doubles triples uh fly balls ground balls that sort of deal so like uh what type of batted ball and called strikes versus swing strikes and i think that's going to get at a little bit of maybe weak contact which is something

that everyone's always chasing and no one's been able to really nail down but i think that we do know that different parts of the strike zone different movements um you know produce different exit velocities launch angles so there's there is there's got to be some stuff that like you know sinkers do have a lower slugging percentage than four seamers you know there is there is some you know suppression to be to be had out there so uh sean man for one, has stuff that just sinks everywhere. And in the first model, it said it stinks. And the new model says, no, it sinks. And it's really interesting because I've been poo-pooing Sean Mania

and this one kind of stings a little bit. and this one kind of stings a little bit. But I had to push him up because the bat has him ranked as the 17th best starting pitcher going forward, and now he has a 103 stuff and a 101 command, and he has a great home park with enough patsies on the schedule that it probably is right to have him at least top 30, top 35. I'm sorry if you missed out on Sean Mania because of my idiocy, but you always work on the model. You always try to make it better. I'll have a list of biggest movers out there. Oh,

what's another thing we did? We defined fastballs differently. It's your top 90th percentile and higher in velocity. So it can be a cutter or a sink or whatever. So we don't have to play that game of how to define your stuff. And then what else did we do? Oh, we added gyro spin. We added spin efficiency. So low and high spin efficiency could be a boon because we know that some sliders with gyro spin do well. Um, those kind of zero, zero rifle sliders, gyro sliders. Um, and so that helped some people. So, um, I'll have biggest movers out there. Uh, I'll have them all in the ranks and you can do the new stuff. Plus everyone to see um should be fun the hardest though as i said was that injury component um i kind of end up doing stuff where i have little injury tears uh chris sale i think uh this is this might be an interesting conversation here to have

is chris sale i think has separated himself from the pack. The one reason I did not have Sale, Severino, and Thor very high in the first rankings was things can go wrong in rehab. You know, people aren't amazing. We know, for example, it's been shown, it's been shown to me in a clinical study that command is not as good in your first year back from TJ. So we know that they might not be as great when they get on the field and we know things might go wrong. I think Chris Sale is separating himself from the pack. And I wonder if you feel the same way where Thor's had a setback, Severino's had a setback, Carrasco's had a setback. Those guys are down more in the 60s and 70s for me, but Sale is creeping up. I had him like 29 or something right now. Yeah, it seems like he is making the most progress, which is strange

because back during draft season, he looked like he was going to be the slowest of the group to return. Yeah, there was bad news about him, I thought, all the time. And Thor was the one that was pushing the rehab, but maybe Sayle just going slowly worked for him, you know? Yeah, it's definitely one of those things where they all seemed like they were pretty clearly on their respective paths and every path changed in a pretty significant way in the last few months. By the way, if you don't have a subscription to The Athletic, $3.99 a month gets you in the door at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. A pretty awesome interview that Britt Giroli has with Commissioner rob manfred that went up on wednesday as well so oh that was another thing about trying to do rankings in the middle of spin rates dropping everywhere uh that'll be reflected in some of the stuff numbers because spin rate actually ended up in this new uh one being uh one of the top three features um and so

uh i find that pretty interesting as spin rates are dropping oh and another thing we did was we now define fastballs on a game by game basis so your stuff is defined off of your fastball in that game and so that will allow us to be more reactive to spin rate changes as they're happening but i will say my method of trying to find two standard deviation guys that have changed has produced something like 30 starters that have dropped the hard goo, 30 pitchers that have dropped the hard goo, which is really about five to seven starters. I hesitate to name them because I don't want to scapegoat them. I think it's a little unfair for a rule that just began being enforced in the middle of the season. And I don't want to scapegoat them. I think it's a little unfair for a rule that just

began being enforced in the middle of the season. And I don't like the piling on, especially in a thing that has been done for a long time that we're trying to get through. I'm sort of trying to be like, let's all do this together and bumble our way through it. But I understand that somebody in fantasy wants to know, he wants to know what's going on. So all I can say is, ask me for the stuff card, I'll give you the stuff card, and spin rate is in there. You can see some of the biggest movers will have some of these names that we're all talking about.

But I also will say that Max Bay is trying to do a really stringent kind of statistical approach to finding spin rate droppers, and his number of spin rate droppers is way lower than mine. And we haven't caught a single person, so maybe it was less pervasive than we thought. So that's sort of where I'm thinking about this whole thing right now.

It's a poop show, first of all. The whole Max Scherzer gang is super mad. Oh, man. So we weren't going to bring that up in detail today, in part because I think we're going to see some more things happen between now and Friday, and we're two days in to the enforcement. But yes, the – Pitchers taking their pants off.

The two images that are frozen everybody's mind max scherzer uh you know very angry as he's coming off the mound yelling at joe gerardi and then sergio romo just like rapid fire taking his belt and stuff off and those things are stuck in our minds but you had plenty of other checks that went fine. Pitchers just saying, okay, sure, whatever, no big deal. Joe Kelly offered to let the umpires check out his glasses. They didn't even ask. All sorts of stuff like that, too. One thing that occurs to me, though, while we're seeing this is they're being very regimented. They're looking at three things. It doesn't seem that hard to think of

a fourth place. Am I wrong? looking at three things it doesn't seem that hard to think of a fourth place am i wrong no you're not you're not wrong i mean have they looked at a single back of the neck i haven't seen that myself yet i i think a lot of guys have that hair the longer hair coming out of the back and i think that's a spot where you could, you know, you could pick up the hat, get in there and just fix the hair a little bit. And that's, your hair's covering it. It's mixed in. And what's amazing about that too, is once you take your hat off, if you have long hair, it spreads further and covers it even more. So I don't know. I've been, that part, it seems like a theater to me. It almost seems like, you know, we have different kinds of theater in our life, safety theater and so on.

This kind of almost seems like theater to me. Yeah, trying to make it look like the enforcement is happening and will crack down. I mean, that would actually be a satisfactory explanation for the difference between the number of people that you suspected to be using

tacky substances versus the ones that are showing those drops in spin rate might be crossing in my more liberal uh look at it we might be crossing 10 percent uh de-gooping fully two standard deviations we definitely thought it was more than 10 way more than 10 well my first reporting was 75 percent are using something plus uh but that wouldn't necessarily give you the 300 uh you know rpm that would require that would give you this two standard deviation drop so when in the last in a recent report with brit we we asked you know who's doing the harder stuff who's doing the spider tag and stuff and that was more like 30 but even at 30 we're not there and are we going to get there?

We're in the middle of it, so it's kind of hard to tell. Are we going to get there? There are people quitting every night. Every night there's somebody quitting. If you want to, go to Savant. You can go to the little graph, the first graph on the player page. And you can either go to their player page during the game, and it shows their up and down spin rates very easily.

Or if you want to look at a player over time you go to their player page there's a graph you can get average spin rate per game make it within 2021 because you won't be able to see it if you make it over their career make it within 2021 and by game and it'll pop you'll see you'll see it put some names in that you think are there, and you'll get a couple of them. Like I joked with Max Rizzo, I was like, Joe, you could have just gone to his savant page.

You would have known he's not doing anything today. Yeah, he could have just calmly not gotten ejected from that game. Yeah. On Wednesday, though, the Nats were accusing Bryce Harper while running the bases of having some stuff in his hair. Yeah, that one seemed good-natured, so I'll just pretend it is. Yeah, former teammate for a lot of those guys. I kind of took it that way.

Maybe I'm the dummy and shouldn't have taken it that way, but so it goes. There seems to be an edge on everything right now, though. I mean, people are on edge. The CBA is coming down. seems to be an edge on everything right now though i mean people are on edge the cba is coming down you know uh this thing seems to be like a big deal it goes beyond baseball everybody's just mad in general right now it is yeah but there's also this is one of those jokes that has is reaching pop culture you know like you you'll hear about on npr when you hear about something on npr about your sport you know that something's going on you know what i mean like within it you could we are

always all yelling and we're on twitter and we like we like especially our audience like us you know we're we're 100 into it so we're like all over this right so every once in a while you have to be like is this a big deal and then you turn turn on NPR and they're talking about it. And you're like, yes, yes, it's a big deal. Yeah, when all things considered is talking about the sticky stuff in baseball. Yeah, I think they made a spider tag joke on all things considered this week. That kind of actually makes me laugh in a lot of different ways. But yeah, you know you've got a problem when it reaches uh the npr level all right you know speaking of spin the question that came in over the weekend for us was about corbin burns and his

start at coors field and the question came from ck by the way i said thank you ck for bringing this up i find it really difficult it's not bringing this up. I find it really difficult. It's not what the email says. I find it really difficult to get meaning from anything that happens at Coors Field for a pitcher with the exception of velocity loss, like massive velocity loss. Okay. That worries me the same there as it does anywhere else. But spin rates changing at Coors Field, I just want to see the next start because we just know the ball doesn't do the same thing in Colorado that it does everywhere else. Oh, man, I have not. I have not seen a an analysis of spin rate changes there.

I don't even know if... I would assume that spin rates stay the same and just the conversion of spin into movement is different. Because spin rate to me is something about how the ball comes off the hand. So I would also point out... Let me see if I've got this here. Oh, you have to go to this second, which graph is it? The first graph, first graph that gives you more, but if you do average spin rate in 2021 by game for burns, you see a pretty massive drop that did not start in course. Let's see, his cutter

on May 19th had a 29.48 and had been steady at 2900, and over the next two stops, starts dropped 650 so there's a 300 rpm drop that he sort of stayed steady on since so my answer is uh there's absolutely was but i guess the question is also how do we translate these spin rate drops into production changes going forward too right because that's what's tough about this course thing is like yeah he could have the spin so that's the answer that's what's tough about this Coors thing is like yeah he could have the spin so that's the answer that's the answer actually the answer is his spin rate's been down for five starts well in the yeah so in this case if so if he's struggling probably Coors right if it were the first of five I'd want to see more being able to look back and go okay well actually this was already happening before he got there.

The first part of what you said, going back to not knowing how much the actual spin rates change in Colorado, or if they even change at all, or if just the movement from spin is just different, that's really important to parse out at some point. But with Burns, you know, when did the memos start going around? Like how many starts ago was that, right? Because there was some warning before the crackdown started earlier this week, before the actual new protocol was put into place. Like is this, in your eyes, is this sort of lining up with when we started to get the idea that things were going to change? Yeah, it's a little bit early, but the problem is that there were many ways into this. So in 2020, baseball says they told managers to tell their pitchers to stop doing it, right?

And that was before the 2020 season. And then ahead of this season, before it ever began, there was another memo. And then there was a June 3rd memo. Was it? Yeah. June 3rd. Because there was another one June 14th that said things were going to start June 21st. Enforcement was going to start June 21st.

So really ramped up around June 3rd. But Corbin Burns' drop came before June 3rd. His drop came from May 19th to May 25th to May 31st. However, if I was a smart player and i saw this coming and i didn't want to show up on anybody's you know savant before and after list good way to do that is to wean and to do it earlier than other people because what we're all doing now is okay i'm going to do savant up... This is the weakness in my own method that I'm doing to try and catch people. I'm going to do it up to June 3rd, and I'm going to do it after June 3rd.

Well, what if you were quitting right before June 3rd? When I compare back to June 3rd, I'm going to compare back to an average that's already dropped because you've already dropped it on purpose. And if you don't ever have a 300 drop in one game, and you kind of do it over time, then nobody ever gets you on the, oh, last game, this is 300 less than last game. So I think that's why I also report the one standard deviation droppers, because there could be some wieners in there.

And I'm not trying to be accusatory about Corbin Burns. I just think that the evidence looks like he probably stopped using something. But he stopped using something before he struck out 13 diamondbacks against zero walks

in zero, like four hitter in seven innings. Yeah, I mean he still pitched exceptionally well and what was a good matchup pitched really well in a matchup before that with six innings of one run ball against the tigers with seven k's right i mean even that padres game 525 when i look on here 525 he had his cutter did not have the 2900 it had It had 2,800 and then it dropped to 2,600, 2,700 after that. I have put someone on blast now. I didn't really mean to. Maybe Corbin Burns, maybe it's natural variation, but by making it two standard deviations and looking at only two standard

deviations, what we're saying is within two standard deviations change should be 90. That's the bell curve, right? There should be 94% of everything should happen within two standard deviations change should be 90. That's the bell curve, right? There should be 94% of everything should happen within two standard deviations, right? So if someone is out beyond that, that means they're in the sort of three to 4% likelihood range, right? And like,

let's put it another way. No one's up to standard deviations in the last month. It'd be so weird to see that right now. Yeah. So it would, and it would be terribly timed if it was just somebody that was like, I just got healthy, man. I don't know. I changed some mechanics.

I don't know. Constantly, constantly getting checked. I don't think you were going at Burns. We were asked about him specifically because of Colorado. And this is why there's so many accusations and people just throwing different things out there and trying to monitor things on a granular level. I think mostly with good intentions, just trying to figure out

what the heck is happening in front of us. And there's all different paths you could get to these reduced spin rates and Burns' path versus someone that took a harder stance potentially and just said, oh, okay, it's all gone. We're going to see little bits of everything. And I think Burns raises more suspicion for people than the typical pitcher

because he went from the 882 ERA and 184 whip in 2019 to the 211 and the 102 last year and the 262 and.93 this year. That's such a huge discrepancy from who he was and who he's become. But he didn't get that out of spin rate change. I just want to point that out. He's had really high spin rates for a really long time. Yeah. So that was a pitch mix change, I think.

That was mostly a pitch mix change. So I would say that generally, i think the best players will remain really good yeah the very very good players will just be good or very good if they aren't still very very good they'll make adjustments they'll find some other ways to to be effective he's got a deep enough arsenal if something's not working he can go to something else so i am a little worried about the injury aspect like there is some proof that like if you increase your grip strength you're increasing your fatigue so and and i also got a little bit of a whiff with the in the max game of like this dude is throwing as hard as he can right now and he's pissed just to kind of

yeah just to show everybody like now here watch this and he had a good Just to show everybody, like, no, here, watch this. And he had a good game, but you wonder, what's the cost? Is that sustainable? What's the cost of that effort that he put through? And was there fatigue cost

that he's not used to? Coming off of injury already? I tell you, these rankings are impossible. They're just my best effort, man. It's like trying to map in a maelstrom.

It's like trying to... It's a great movie. The Master and Commander or something? I haven't seen it. The one where he's on a ship? That would be a ship movie. It's like in the middle of a maelstrom,

trying to nail the map down and trying to figure out where you're going. The ship is rocking right now. That's a fair way to describe the state of the game at this point, and I'm sure we'll have a lot more exciting stuff to dig into once we get to Friday's show. But thanks again to CK for dropping us that question. If you want to send us a question,

rates and barrels at the athletic.com is the email address on Twitter. He's at, you know, Sarah's I'm at Derek van Riper. And I mentioned it before the athletic.com slash rates and barrels gets you a subscription for just three 99 a month. If you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?

It's the best deal around that is going to wrap things up for this episodeates and Barrels. We are back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening.