Rates & Barrels - Young Hitters to Target & Why the Stabilization Point for Barrel Rate Feels Slippery

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Eno and DVR discuss why Esteury Ruiz might have a difficult time becoming Jon Berti 2.0 despite blazing speed and a growing path to playing time with the Padres, before examining several young hitters whose underlying skills point to future success, and why the stabilization point of a hitter's barrel rate still messes with our minds.  Rundown -- It Starts (Intro Music) -- Esteury Ruiz: Stolen Bases Galore on the Waiver Wire? -- Spencer Torkelson: Second-Half Turnaround On Tap? -- More Likely to Improve Barrel Rate: Andrew Vaughn or Ke'Bryan Hayes? -- Andrés Giménez: Is This His Ceiling? -- Where is Gavin Lux's Power Amidst a Breakout? -- More Power Coming From Nico Hoerner -- DVR is Still In on Brandon Marsh -- Raw Power Search: Below Average Barrel Rates, Top 20 Max EV -- When to Trust a Dramatic Shift in Barrel Rate for a Veteran Player? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Wednesday, July 13th, one day early. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris on this episode. We discussed the possibility that our speed wish from our episode on Monday has actually been granted. May there always be another John Birdie on your waiver wire. Maybe, just maybe there's a player that could scratch that itch. We're going to talk a lot about long-term hitting targets. As you're probably detecting, there's usually a pattern with our show. If there's a pitching topic that comes up on one day, a related hitting topic usually comes up on the next one.

Sorry to break the fourth wall, but that's going to be the main topic we get to. Maybe we'll squeeze in a few mailbag questions, time permitting, today. Otherwise, we'll get to a lot of them next week. Now, we begin, Eno, with Esturi Ruiz. He is getting an opportunity with the Padres. We have seen great slash lines from him at AA and AAA this season. We have seen a ton of stolen bases at both of those levels. stolen bases at both of those levels.

So with Asturi Ruiz in particular, could he be the type of player who is a clear difference maker in the second half? Is there enough playing time or the skills good enough for him to be a John Birdie type pickup where if you land him, you end up maybe solving your stolen base problems in one move. I, uh, He has the speed. And he probably has the opportunity because he's better than Azokar, I would guess.

And we don't know, as of this moment, how long Jerickson Profar is out. So there's an opportunity there that I think is real. He plays all three outfield positions. Trent Grisham has been scuffling offensively and then recently has been starting to add some defensive scuffling. So there's a chance that he could just take a job. So that is all the good news. The bad news came from Sam Dykstra pointing out on Twitter the other day that he has an 18% hard hit rate at AAA,

that very few of his balls go harder than 95 miles an hour, let alone the sort of 100 plus you want for power. So maybe more Miles Straw than John Birdie? Okay, fair. I think the related question that has to be asked here, though, is if you are looking at speedsters, especially for a short period of time, half season or less, can you start to throw out some of the things

you would ordinarily want for a full-on 26 week sort of player right i think it's different playing for the whole season back in february and march i was not the kind of person who wanted to have mile straw on my teams then however if i'm in a situation now where mile straw becomes available i'm more likely to pick him up now as a bandaid than I was to pay full freight, which I thought was probably too expensive back during draft season. Some of this is about costs. Some of this is about needs and things changing along the way. So I can totally accept that flaw.

It makes me immediately understand that history is if he runs into more than a home run or two, it's probably extremely lucky. But maybe the quality of hitter we're looking for doesn't have to be as high when we're talking about an in- if you want to burn that waiver wire priority, how much you need the steals. And then how fleeting of an opportunity do you think this is for Ruiz? Is he going to be the headliner for the package that gets the power bat that they need in the corner in San Diego? He does not seem like the type of player that will solve their offensive woes and come up and be kind of the power source that they need. So, you know, I guess I would say there's something like, what are we going to say?

There's a 10 to 20% chance that he becomes a regular in that outfielder. And that's what they do. Then there's probably a 10 to 20% chance that he is the headliner for their, their trades at the trade deadline. So I would cap the chance that Ruiz is a regular from here on out under 50%. Seems fair. And I think this is an important thing for me to emphasize because I underestimated John Birdie in a big way, in part because he does hit the ball harder than a lot of the very low end speed only players. Even though John Birdie is not a good barreler, he's under 5% every year of his career, even

though he's flirting with 5% this year, he's consistently had hard hit rates in the mid 30% range, even above that 37.7% for his career. That is acceptable. But the guys that are at the bottom of that list the laggard board for hard hit percentage just looking at it from this season i'm going to speed read these names jose herrera backup catcher andleton simmons can't hit tony kemp i mean very small guy that doesn't hit the ball hard tyler heinemann chris owings tyler wade victor robles hey there you are vic to compete a marcano d strange gordon jake

hager uh this is these are players you want nothing to do with steven kwan's down here billy mckinney's weirdly down here that's probably just a small sample size fluke nikki lopez is in this range adam frazier miles straw these are all under 25 oh there's there's Dylan Carlson down here. 24.2%. That's unnerving. So, these are not good players. If you said you can categorically dismiss a group of players, I would pretty much give up on

hard hit rates under 25%. And if I miss on a few speedsters here and there, eh, that's okay. I'm probably not going to miss out on that many good players. Quan has elite contact ability. Straw has that speed. I think hard and fast rules are not super useful. You don't have to play this way.

I'm just saying this is a pretty big red flag, though. I have a bias away from these players, yes. Right. These are players that I'm going to be extra skeptical of. And if you're doing that at AAA, if that's your hard hit at triple hard hit rate at triple a it's only gonna get harder i think it's probably coming down a little bit tougher not harder yeah you're not going you're not going the good way you're going you're probably going the wrong way just like if you've got a k rate problem at triple a you're probably going to strike out a little more in the big leagues well

if you don't hit the ball hard in triple a you're probably going to hit it hard less often once you get to the big leagues. So there's your ice cold bucket of water on Asturi Ruiz. And I do think I want to talk about longer term hitting targets, like players you'd be going after right now in multi-year leagues. And some of these guys could make sense in the second half of this season as well as trade targets, maybe in a few shallow leagues. They're available as waiver wire pickups too, depending on the size of your league. We were talking about Spencer Torkelson this morning on Under the Radar. He's more of a keeper in Dynasty League buy, but he's been dropped in some, even some deeper redraft mixed leagues.

And the Tigers, to their credit, have actually been very patient with him this season. And I think they're right. I don't think there's a lot he would solve at AAA. And I guess the question comes back to when you're looking at someone like Torkelson getting his first 300 plate appearances in the big leagues, are you seeing enough in the underlying numbers to still believe that this is a very good profile or a good profile to buy into for either the second half or the long-term future? What's your approach with Torkelson right now? Well, the first pass that I did was to create a leaderboard with the stats that will surprise no one. I have reach rate, barrel rate, and max EV on there, but I also put pull percentage in there.

barrel rate and max ev on there but i also put pull percentage in there um and then i limited it to uh to everybody under 26 years old uh to get a bit of youth in there and then i sorted uh by chase rate so that juan soto is number one he's number one in all of our hearts and if you can go get him right now because you're in a 10 team and his owner thinks that a 243 batting average means he's no good, then do it. But that's probably not useful to 99% of the people listening to this show. So instead, I think what I like to do is find players that have a good eye, that can hit the ball hard as demonstrated by their max EV. And I think what I like to find is they're just not pulling it enough yet. Because as a player ages over time, they generally do two things. They generally swing less and have a better eye at the plate and pull the ball more.

Those are two things that are old batter skills. So if I get somebody who is doing fairly well, but not pulling the ball, I find that interesting. And so, for example, somebody who's on the cusp of a little mini breakout right now is Nico Horner, and one thing that he's doing is he's pulling the ball in the air more. Now, his overall bail rate is 3%. That still puts a limit on what he can be.

But do I think he can maybe hit 280 plus going forward and maybe have some seasons where he hits 20 homers? I do. I think that now because he's shown a little bit of that. But that's the sort of general method. You can put that together pretty easily by using the custom leaderboards on fan graphs. Yeah, I think this is a good combination of things to be looking at.

I mean, our usual suspects, barrel percentage, hard hit percentage, O-swing percentage, not a surprise they're there. The pulling the ball situation and then how frequently the ball's hit in the air, I think, is another thing that I would consider if you're trying to put more pieces together. And I think the interesting flaw for Torkelson so far is he's hitting the ball on the ground a lot, much more than he did at any point during his stops in the minor leagues. To me, that seems very correctable. I think we've had mentions of hitting instructors pointing that out, saying, give me the guy that hits the ball hard.

We'll teach him how to hit the ball in the air. That part is more correctable. I'd rather have the guy that does that than the opposite problem, someone that hits the ball in the air but can't hit it hard, which might be the Asturias-Ruiz type problem. He can loft the ball, but there's no power there, so you can't really make good on something like that. Sometimes it's as simple as kind of what they were doing with Isak Paredes,

which is in Tampa, which is um oh you you hit the ball hard uh you have good plate discipline you hit the ball on the ground um but we think that you have a flat swing uh you're only hitting the ball on the ground because you're you're swinging at pitches low in the zone so you you kind of take them and you say let's just not do anything other than differently other than sort of target pitches high in the zone because you've shown that you have a flat swing you have the ability to to make contact here uh let's put you higher in the zone so you know torkelson's a little bit more of a three two outcome player where he doesn't have the base running ability

doesn't have the defensive ability and so the on off switch there is the the barrier to entry what's the word i'm looking for like the the he has to he has to be a really good hitter to make it work uh so there's a little bit more pressure on him than say somebody like gavin lux uh who's on my leaderboard here, or not to zoom ahead too far in the rundown, but guys like Andrew Vaughn and Cabrian Hayes, who do have a little bit more defensive value, I think, and are doing a little bit better right now,

but have some similarities in that they all kind of have a good sense of the zone and have shown the ability to hit the ball hard at times. So are you in on Torkelson? Is there enough good in that profile where you see a path for him to figure it out? My instinct is that you'd still be interested, not you specifically, but we should collectively still be interested in what he's going to do as a hitter because there's actually plenty to like despite the poor results. If he was at like 32% strikeout rate and a higher chase rate than he's at right now,

he's got the ninth best chase rate among qualified hitters that are 26 or younger. That's really good. That's pretty good, yeah. And so if the contact was worse or the eye was worse, I'd be out because I do think there's a bit of a razor-thin edge here that he's on. But 7% barrel rate, 112 max EV. That max EV is actually good. He is pulling the ball a little bit more than average, but there's still more that he could pull it.

Yeah, I think he'd be a good dynasty by-law. There's an interesting toss-up I put in the rundown. If you had to choose between Andrew Vaughn and Kebrian Hayes, two guys who are lagging a bit in barrel rate. Vaughn at 6% this season, Hayes at 5.2%. Not a new problem for Cabrian Hayes, something we've wondered about for a while. Whose future barrel rate is more likely to be higher between those two players? Is there anything you can see comparing those two hitters so far that would give you more confidence in one versus the other, barreling balls more often going forward. It's a great question, man.

They're different players. Andrew Vaughn hits the ball in the air. He just really likes going the opposite way. He probably shouldn't. Hayes, I would say that, yeah, I think so too. They both have two problems, okay? So Hayes' eye, the plate, is significantly better than Vaughn's. Hayes is in the top 10, Vaughn is 20th, so that's a fair amount of difference there in terms of knowledge of where the zone is. Hayes has two problems, which are he

hits the ball on the ground and the opposite way. Vaughn has two problems, which is he reaches a little bit and he hits the ball the opposite way. But in terms of batted ball quality, at least Vaughn's hitting in the air some. So I think I'm going to go with Vaughn in terms of barrel rate. As much as I've professed my love for Hayes on this show. And you can like both players. There's obviously nothing that prevents you from liking both of them. But that's why I thought it was kind of interesting. It's like they both have these characteristics that are good.

They both have a couple of things that are missing, which thing can move quicker, which thing is easier to fix. I think for me, the other angle here is that we did see last season andrew vaughn had a 10.9 percent barrel rate and that was over a pretty decent number of batted ball events that was 321 batted ball events we saw that little blip from hayes when he debuted in 2020 that was only 65 batted ball events. Tantalizing. We have that longer previous run from Vaughn of doing the thing that we want him to do consistently, so that gives me more confidence in him getting there, at least sooner, but just maybe getting there, period.

And Brian Hayes could be the kind of guy that still is a good player even without massive improvements to his barrel rate. He's just going to be a different kind of player than we're accustomed to seeing as an everyday third baseman. Yeah, yeah. I think that the floor there, given the positional value in the steals, is... If I could choose between acquiring one of the two players for my Dynasty League, I think I'd still rather do Cabrian Hayes. Because he's got the steals.

He's got more positional value. But those are very important things. In Dynasty Leagues, it's very hard to put steals together with an old roster. The San Francisco Giants are not stealing you a lot of bases. They are not. You can put together a San Francisco Giants-type roster as a dynasty team, and you can win with that a little bit, but steals will be a problem. You know, there's another profile here, Andres Jimenez, who I just, for some reason, I kind of feel like he's kind of maxed out a little bit.

You know, I don't know how much more is left. Now, maybe you can buy Andres Jimenez and say, I believe in what he's doing. I just don't know that there's another level. And the reason I say this is he's already pulling the ball more than league average. uh his max ev at 109.9 is decent but it could line up especially given his ground ball rate with a seven percent barrel rate going forward so i don't and and then his his chase rate is bad uh 28th out of 37 qualifiers under 26 so i see a guy who doesn't have tremendous command of the strike zone, who doesn't have tremendous raw power, who's already pulling the ball. Like, I kind of think that this might be one of the best versions that we see out of Andres Jimenez. Pulling this back just for a second, thinking about Jimenez and Cleveland's decision to trade Francisco Lindor rather than to make him a franchise player,

right? I mean, any team could have given him a contract like the one the Mets gave him. We talked about it at the time that it happened. How do you feel about the return that they ended up getting now that you've seen a bit more from Jimenez? I think as it stands right now, this is tracking toward Cleveland being right. I don't think you can put a stamp on it just yet. It's still too early. But this is the type of step forward that you needed to believe Andres Jimenez could have to take the Jimenez-Rosario return and feel good about it if you were Cleveland. I know. It's so validating for an infuriating tendency in front offices to take like three or four guys instead of take a chance on one because what you did was you said either rosario or jimenez is going to step

forward and be 80 of lindor uh for many years and then the other guy will stay where he is and be 30 of lindor and between the two of those we get get more than Lindor, right? I mean, and also cheaper and under team control for longer. I mean, that's what teams are doing. They have a certain thing that they like. It's like me with the barrel rate and the chase rate. They're like, you know, this guy has a good sense of the zone and he, you know, he hits the ball hard. He just hasn't been barreling them. You know, that's what the rays do right the rays get guys with a good sense of the zone good bat to ball good max evs and they hope that they will learn to barrel the ball while they're in tampa yeah and it's obviously working for them it it pushes back against the

pay the players and keep your franchise stars like It fights back against that, especially when teams are successful at doing it. But I was pretty critical of the return they got at the time. I didn't think Andres Jimenez was going to hit for this much power. And you might be right. Maybe this is where the ceiling actually is, but maybe a 20 homer, 15 to 20 steel type player like this for a long time, that's a really solid player to have. And it's, as you said, not far away from what Lindor was doing, maybe a little less power, but when you're talking about a league minimum salary guy and then arbitration years in the future, that's the unfortunate big win for Cleveland on that front. Some other names though, that are really interesting as we're

looking for some young bats and trying to figure out what to make of them. Gavin Lux is taking a step forward this year. His offensive value is up. He is figuring it out in a lot of ways, but is there still power coming down the road? Because coming into this season, I thought speed was actually going to be a sneaky good category for him. I thought there would be more power than we've seen so far. I'm not wrong about Lux in terms of him not returning value for me, but I'm kind of wrong about how exactly it's happened so far. He's sitting with only three homers and five steals now through 78 games this season, but it's a big batting average profile. It's average in runs. It's a 302 average, a 375 OBP, 43 runs scored so far from Gavin Lux. I mean, if he was doing what he was doing and struggling, then I would say maybe there's a chance he retools and does something.

But he's right now almost 30% better than league average with the bat. His team is probably super happy with what he's doing. He is probably super happy with what he's doing. So what is he going to change? And then the underlying numbers do not suggest that there's more power he and you know he he did incrementally improve it's a little bit like the dylan carlson profile where like oh one of the better barrel rate improvers he improved all the way to six percent um ten percent is where you want a guy

with real power. I'm looking at him right next to... He just shows up because I got sorted by Chase Wright right next to Pavin Smith. It's Pavin Smith. Max EV is almost two miles an hour harder. His barrel rate is twice as much. Pavin Smith is going to hit for more power going forward than Gavin Lux.

I'm not saying that Pavan Smith is better. No, no, no, no. But if you're talking about power, I think, you know, I think Gavin Lux is going to peak somewhere around 15 homers. I guess the thing that's weird is, yeah, he could pull the ball a little more, but it's not like Gavin Lux. It's league average already, yeah. He's not going the opposite way too much.

You can't look at that and say that's going to change. Hard hit rate is fine, 38.7% this year. Yeah, where is it coming from? If there's more power in the profile, I don't see a lot of evidence of it hidden in the underlying numbers so far. This does look more like a what you see is what you get. lying numbers so far. This does look more like a, what you see is what you get. Maybe just, maybe there's some, some funny stuff with the baseball going on that explains some of the missing power, but you're talking about a handful of home runs. You're not talking about a 25 home

run guy with this profile who's been cheated. Like you're talking about a 12 home run guy who's on pace to hit eight instead. Like that's the difference at most if there's even anything like that in play here. You know, one thing that I do also like to throw in as a modifier is strikeout rate. And that's one of the big differences between Patton Smith and Gavin Longs. We're talking about 26% strikeout versus 18.

But it is interesting when you're talking about, you know, potential buying situations in Dynasty, there's Trevor Larnak and Jack Sawinski, who both appear in the first 25. I've softened my minimum plate appearances to get more names in. And now Sawinski and Larnak appear as guys who do have a good sense of where the zone is, do have good max EV, do have good barrel rates, and have that contact problem. 31% strikeout rate for both of them, 32% actually for Larnak. So in that situation, I struggle a little bit because there are some players who strike out 27 to 30% of the time.

There is the kind of Giancarlo Stanton pathway to excellence, which is you come into the league striking out 30% of the time and spanking the ball. And then you cut that to like 27, 26, 25 and have MVP type seasons. Right? So there, there is a buying opportunity there. Same time, So there is a buying opportunity there. At the same time, I have a bias towards wanting guys who make contact. But then if you look at the guys who do make contact, a lot of times they just don't have that power aspect. So Bryson Stott is somebody that I like. And I think he has a chance for a little bit more power than Gavin Lux.

But he has a very similar max EV. He has a worse bail rate right now. He's obviously younger. And in fact, he profiles very similar to the Gavin Lux in terms of having a good sense of the plate and making a lot of contact and not having a lot of power. But would you tell, if I could tell you that you could buy Bryson Stott and he could be next year's Gavin Lux lux you would you would take it right in because the price is probably pretty low trade-wise and in a deep enough league yes in a 10 team keeper league no like that's a really league dependent sort of player you're interested in leagues where depth is really important you're less interested where you kind of need that that high level output

to keep pace with the rest of the league but when when things all align uh and yet the results are kind of boring that's when i get most excited someone like luis arias i think still qualifies like that for me because we're talking about a 110 max EV, 8% barrel rate, good chase rate, good walk rate, and a 23% strikeout rate. It all lines up. Right now, it's a little bit just a Babbitt problem for him. So, you know, Luis Urias is, I think, putting it all together. And, you know, if it's not this year, it's going to be next year. not this year or next it's going to be next year um and there's some some things and some aspects i'd like to to uh to him that i think could be undervalued i think there's a lot of things you

could look for in in previous versions of a hitter that can make you more optimistic about their ability to make some adjustments i mean urias's minor league career had a pretty unusual shape it was all hit tool initially and then it was adjustments to get the power and then it's trying to blend all of that together maybe at the big league level in some ways i think that's a really smart thing to say because i was looking at lars newmar too and lars newbar never had a problem with strikeout rate um in the minor leagues he had a problem with with power so now he's showing a 111 max EV, 5% bail rate. So that's better, I think, in ways than he was doing in the minor leagues, but a 29% strikeout rate all of a sudden. This is, I think, related to the training he was doing in terms of, you know, he's maximizing for hip shoulder

separation, but not necessarily maximizing for contact. So he has that great bat-to-ball in him, and there might be another iteration that kind of combines those two. And he's practically pick-up-off-the-wire type situation. Do you see enough growth in Nico Horner to believe that he's actually getting to more consistent power i mean the barrel rate's up to three percent which is a big improvement compared to parts of the last three seasons we've seen him in the big leagues k rates down he just seems like an all-hit-tool

sort of player that maybe similar to lux is 10 to 12 home runs and he has to run. He has to steal bases to be a sneaky, valuable player, but he's a good runner. He's in the 91st percentile in sprint speed. So maybe that's a skill set that the Cubs are very comfortable with. And maybe it's just a little bit of everything. And those kinds of players can be a little undervalued. Yeah. And here I'm leaping off into uh personal sort of eye-based scouting which uh is not my strength but um for for me so for some reason i think nico horner has that uh what they call in the local broadcast here the magic wandu uh he has a really good hit tool i think uh i would i think it it may be like only a half grade or a quarter

grade better than gav lux who also has a pretty good hit tool but like Horner has a nose for hits as they say in old school so I like him as a possible 330 hitter some season 350 even if he doesn't hit for more than 12 homers. So I like Nico Horner. I'm trying to find ways to get him onto rosters.

The problem is in the deeper leagues, someone's happy to have him and already holding onto him. In the shallower leagues, I have three short stops, and I'm trying to get a fourth one on the roster. I think Horner kind of fits more into the Bryson Stott mold we were just describing, where if you're in a 10 or a 12-team league with even 10 keepers,

he's nowhere near productive enough for that. But in your super deep leagues where you just need players that play a lot and that can do everything, I think that's where he could be slightly undervalued with a little bit more room for improvement. We talked about Brandon Marsh on the show, I don't know, maybe two weeks ago now.

And I think you said sort of in passing that you were less excited about him now than you were when the season began. And I think that's like calling something overrated. If I say something is overrated, if I say, I think U2 is a little overrated, people get really defensive. Like U2 fans are like, how dare you? Bono is a god.

How dare you, sir? And I'm like, listen, I'm not saying they're bad. I'm just saying that I don't think they're on the same level that most people put them on. If they're an A plus to most people, they're like an A minus or a B plus to me. And people just think that's the worst possible thing. I kind of felt like that's what you were saying about Marsh. Not that you don't like him anymore, but the ceiling you saw previously is down because I'm still intrigued enough by this profile. I would actually want to target him in long-term leagues.

I think the relative expectation for him is low enough to where you can still profit. You can go get him right now. He could still get better. He could still do a lot of the things we care about and end up being a player that you're very happy that you traded for in the second half of this season because of what he either does down the stretch

or what he's able to do in these next couple of seasons. in half of this season because of what he either does down the stretch or what he's able to do in these next couple of seasons. Yeah, I think that his defense is important because it's good enough that it's going to keep him on the field through some struggles. And that's what we've seen this year. I mean, we're talking about a 73 WRC plus. I think if he wasn't good defensively he could he could be back in the minors so uh that's important in in dynasty because that's that's going to keep his speed on your team um we've seen i think uh more patience from him and a little bit more contact from him in the minor league so you could see some improvement there six percent walk rate 35 strikeout rate is no good and then uh you know an eight percent barrel rate despite uh you know pulling 18 less than league

average so there's i think they're right i think there's still that chance to maybe get that contact point out in front go get the ball a little bit get that barrel rate to 10%, pair that with steals, and give you maybe a 250-2020 type season. He's not that far off from that this year. Right. Right now, it's more like 225-1215. But we're still talking about a player in his first full big league season's worth of plate appearances

because he came up second half last year. And he's made some adjustments, I think, in front of us already. And last year when we saw him debut, he was coming off shoulder surgery. So I just don't want to put too much stock into what we've seen so far from him given the major injury he was returning from. I know this year is not the step forward that we were hoping for but i still see a decent barrel rate you know i see i've seen

worse oh swing rates from young guys that are hurting us in terms of the slash line and of course having multiple ways to make value with some speed and some power that bodes well to some questions as to what this roster looks like as you kind of look ahead to next season and in 2024 of course but if they were to keep this core together and marsh finds his way into a prominent spot in the lineup you're probably going to get some really nice counting stats to go along with that power speed combo as well so be patient in long-term leagues if you have them and you're playing for the future and consider making the move for brandon marsh if uh if you're looking for some long-term help that might be a tick on the undervalued side jesus sanchez came up about a month ago on this show and i think for

me he's going a little bit the other direction i'm a little less interested in jesus sanchez than i was before and maybe plate skills are not great and maybe maybe i'm wondering am i am i getting hurt by the classic have him on too many teams like am i too biased am i too close watching his numbers be bad yeah am i just too close to the problem whereas you know i have marsh i think in one league i've got jesus sanchez i think in four and when you have a problem player in multiple spots it seems to hit a little bit harder. He's still barreling the ball. Higher O-swing percentage than Marsh, just by comparison.

Doesn't steal bases. So a lot is riding on Jesus Sanchez hitting for power. You know, it is a tough profile to sort of thread the needle with. And so far, it's just not working out. Yeah, I think he's interesting interesting comparable to jack sawinski both have good max evs both have good barrel rates they both hit in pitchers parks but sawinski chases 27 of the balls he sees outside the zone and sanchez chases 36 and that's a little bit of difference between their respective walk rates and I think it says something to their ceilings in terms of what they are as players

Swinsky and him have very similar profiles and Swinsky is a better than average hitter by WRC plus and Jesus Sanchez is 15 percent worse than league average. But I still like the fact that Jesus Sanchez is 7th in max EV among players under 26 with a minimum of 90 plate appearances. So he's still on that list. I just wanted to throw this in as a raw power. Could they get to their raw power list? Here are players with below average barrel rates that are in the top 20 when it comes to max EV among young players. Ahmed Rosario?

We've given him so many chances. Luis Oroberto? I mean, yes. If you can get him, buy him low, then do it. But I think everyone can see all the tools. Probably doesn't exist, but could. Yeah. Then you have some contact problems. Jared Kelnick is still actually on this list right next to Jake Berger, but Jake Berger has a better barrel rate and a better contact rate.

So I'm not necessarily saying that I believe in Kelnick as a buy low because he hasn't even closed the hole that he showed at the major league level at the minor league level uh he's just uh the play the pitchers down there are just not able to exploit it as much uh Bobby Witt Jr. uh is temporarily on this list because he has nine percent barrel rate I'm calling 10 percent as uh below average for a power hitter Witt changing that as we watch luis garcia is interesting he is 16th in max ev has an eight percent barrel rate he has a 20 contact rate he has a one percent walk rate so he he hits a lot of the things except he has zero idea where the plate is well or he's just

super aggressive yeah i mean i think it could be it could be either one of those things i need to watch him more but i i do think with luis garcia one of the things that we were pretty unsure about was whether the power he was showing at triple a was just like bad pitching or if he'd actually got stronger and i think the underlying numbers totally back it up right the barrels and the hard hit rate i think what would make me concerned that he does struggle with pitch recognition is he's got a 47.2 percent oh swing percentage it's not always that sometimes just being really aggressive but that's that's not pointing to someone who's going to walk more

even though he was walking 8.3% of the time at AAA. And I also wonder, seeing how much he's fluctuated walking at AAA, how much were they just pitching around him there at that level? He's been 6% or lower at every other minor league stop, and then he gets to AAA and he's above 8% each of his two years that he spent there. That sort of leads me to believe that you got kind of older veteran pitchers that are just working around him because he he's on a bad triple a team why would you pitch to him yeah

yeah and then the majors they just uh see the 47 percent chase rate and just fill up fill up the chase zone um so i think he's an adjustment away but um other uh oscar gonzalez is an interesting name too uh 19th in max ev in this group five percent barrel rate also like luis garcia some question about what the power is going to look like um and on a team cleveland that we've just talked about loves to get players that can make contact uh have that nice max ev have that raw power and and hope to help them barrel more just off the list uh but interesting christopher morel uh 22nd uh but he's actually uh he's he's making do on that he's uh morel is more in the uh sort of kelnick group of what's going to happen with that 31 strikeout rate but michael harris the second right there and then

wander franco is 25th and max ev has the same max ev as josh nailer if you can get wander franco i still say get him i think you you have a chance to get him i'm not sure you're getting him at that much of a discount but i I think you, whereas before you just couldn't get whoever had Wander to trade him to you, now they're at least listening, right? Now there's at least, if you could come with... Especially in 10 and 12 team leagues. Yeah, if you can come with a

godfather type offer in a keeper or dynasty league, you might not get the snap rejection on that. So it's worth thinking about. I mean, it's going to be, I think, five to eight weeks before he's playing again. So we'll see him again this year. I'm not even sure what he does down the stretch changes my opinion either way.

Handmade injuries do not actually affect, they specifically do not affect long-term power issues. And they're not actually that bad in the short term. It is a question of pain. But mechanically, it's not something that should affect his power. Right. So still buying into Wander long term makes a lot of sense to me. And again, the injury might just leave that opportunity for you in a long term league.

We got one question here that I think is related. It doesn't necessarily apply only to young players this came in via email from peter and it was prompted by the barrel rate risers piece that you wrote a couple of weeks back peter wants to know how many batted balls before you believe in a dramatic shift from a veteran the example here is jock peterson who was up to nearly an 18 percent barrel rate this year this is at the time of the email, 168 batted balls. After being about a 10% guy for seven seasons, when do you believe something like that is real enough

to meaningfully adjust your expectations going forward? I mean, the answer is supposed to be 50 balls in play, but I just philosophically don't understand. Honestly, I don't understand honestly i just i it's it's i don't know right like it's supposed to stabilize the 50 50 balls in play so it's supposed to tell you stabilizing means it's supposed to tell you more about their future than league average would so if a guy through 50 balls in play has a 10 percent bail rate you're supposed to hew closer to the 10% barrel rate than the

5% official average across baseball, right? What happens if the last 50% the last 50 balls in play are at a 15% barrel rate? I think you have to adjust to it. I don't know that you say 15% is the right number. But if he was 8% before and he's 15 in the last 50 i would say his true talent is above 10 probably you know like you it's hard to think probabilistically it's like when we're talking about estuary ruiz right my numbers were totally out of my butt you know in terms of like 10 20 he%, he's going to stay, whatever. But that's the kind of thing we have to do as fancy players is if you look at his barrel rate for the full season and you look at it for the last month, you have to say, you know, X percent

of who he is, is the last month. And another X percent is who he has been for the whole year. Right. Well, I threw the birdie thing at you i just tweeted at you yesterday when ruiz came up and i was kind of tongue-in-cheek and i think that was hopefully that was clear in the segment today but someone responded he's probably vidal brujan and that's actually the most likely outcome that it's true ruiz is an up and down guy who, even though he tore up double a and triple a doesn't actually hit big league pitching enough to play every day. And he's an extra guy on the roster. Like that is, that is the, if you're trying to make a bell curve, I mean, you ran, you ran, you ran through that list. It's not a good, not a good list at all.

It's a group of players that you generally don't believe in. There are outliers. This is why probabilistic thinking is so hard, especially I think in fantasy baseball. This is a game of outliers. The guys that don't fall into what we expect are the guys that largely win and lose our leagues. You need the guys that hit their projection and do their thing. But when you look back at your season,

you probably won because you had waiver wire pickups and late rounders and $5 and $10 players who returned $20 and $30 worth of value. They were outliers. They did something we didn't expect them to do. That's why it's hard because you think you can know when someone's going to be an outlier and when you start to predict that with some accuracy or if you start guessing right you become really confident in your ability to do it again and then you're quickly humbled in most cases and you go whoa actually nope that was just why why wasn't this like that it's like well there's more to the part of the reason why i think you have a hard time believing the barrel rate as you described it that at 50 batted ball events that it's enough

is because i think you know there's enough in the game there's enough that can change with a player to where while it's statistically more valid after 50 batted ball events you know something else might be completely different. The player might not be the same player he was before those 50 batted ball events and that the baseline might be completely different

because of that, because of a swing change, because of a new bat, because of a new strategy on pitches they're hunting. Yes. Or strategy from the pitcher's side. Yes.

They're picking out a hole he's got. So it breaks the statistical expectations of what should happen, expectations of what should happen even though what should happen still happens more often than we want it to because we're trying to figure out when it won't happen the way it's supposed to that's the goal and that's so much harder to predict why is this outlier an outlier that's the question that we're wrestling with in some form every single time we're looking at Estre Ruiz

and whether or not he's going to steal enough bases or Jock Peterson and whether or not he's going to hit 40 home runs this year and be this surprising, amazing offensive player that actually helps the Giants hang around in the playoff race. That's the essence of everything we're talking about most of the time. Yeah, and I can remember when, when barrel rate has led me astray. Uh, you know, I think Harrison Bader is an example that comes to mind for me, uh, in 2019 in 400 plate appearances, 8% barrel rate, not great hard hit,

but, uh, and not great power, but I was like, okay, the barrel rate is good. I'm going to believe in the barrel rate next year, 12% barrel rate, real improvement in power, but it's 2020, just a tiny little season. Strikeout rate is up. So I say, okay, next year he's going to put together the better strikeout rate with this great power rate. And then the next season he hits 21% strikeout rate. And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, 7% barrel rate.

I'm like, well, I still remember the 8 and the 12, yes yes yes yes 7% barrel rate I'm like well I still remember the 8 and the 12 you know and and 7 is still okay and he's got the 112 max EV it's still good and then this year 4% barrel rate 110 max EV below average power and honestly I don't know what's coming next you know like he's 28 maybe we missed the peak power and maybe he's just going to be an okay player i mean here's another example it's a perfect example of where we've been maybe led astray christian yelich we've been expecting christian yelich multiple times we've talked about yelich specifically or on the 3o show we've talked about the brewers and one of us and other people have said this too hey if mvp MVP Christian Jelic comes walking back through the door, that'd be huge for the Brewers.

Increasingly, the evidence is piling up that he's just not that guy anymore. It was really fun when it lasted. It was a bit of a fast peak. Part of the reason it's probably not coming back, the back is a problem for him again. Just missed the game on Tuesday with that. Followed that ball up his leg. Ground balls are back to where they were back in his Miami days, right?

I mean, if you look at the ground ball rates of Yelich last year and this year, this is what he was doing right before he became a brewer. So I can't tell you with precision why it was so different for him for those two amazing first seasons in Milwaukee. But also it actually fits right into our conversation

because he had a good barrel rate in the beginning of the season. And in fact, since then, his barrel rate is more around 5%. So his barrel rate has been falling off since the beginning of the season. Could also be that health that you're talking about. Maybe he started the season fairly healthy, and he had that nice 12% barrel rate and it was going well. And as the Nixon cuts have come back in, he's back down to a 6% barrel rate.

He was one of the biggest barrel rate losers from the first month to the last month. Yeah, and now most of his underlying numbers, his walk rate, his K rate, his O swing percentage, his barrel rate, his hard hit rate, they all look a lot like they did last year. His ground ball rate, almost all of those numbers are the same as as they were last year and what's been different about yelich one thing he has done to help return value to provide value to the brewers but to also return value for

us as fantasy players not doing it for us he's 13 for 13 as a base stealer it's a pace to steal 25 bases this year so it's worked out not in the way that you necessarily expected if anything everyone said well they're following that ball off his knee and starting to have back injuries he wasn't going to run anymore and here's the thing that he's doing at age 30 he's like again i say it all the time this is why the game is fun it's maddening but it's fun and i don't know why mvp yellich won't come back to the door exactly, but I'm going to try and figure it out for a long time. And I may never have the answer to that question because it's just one of the great mysteries of recent seasons.

One last thing before we go, just wanted to say, got an update from a listener, Max Freeze, did look at high fly ball rates and batting average on balls in play, something we've talked about with the 50% threshold. And he found some evidence, actually, of that 50% threshold. He said from 2015 to 2022, 200 plate appearance minimum with a fly ball rate over 50%. The average BABIP was 252.

And the only real outlier is Trout, who is the perennial outlier. And then when he relaxed that to 45%, the average BABIP was 265. And 7% of the sample got a BABIP over 320. So at 45%, you're still kind of hitting a lot of pop-ups and affecting your BABIP, but there is something kind of interesting about 50%. There's a threshold there. And I even was talking to Christian Walker in the clubhouse last night

about how there can be too many fly balls, and when he does reach that sort of 50% fly ball rate, he kind of tries to mitigate that and hit some more line drives. And there is a balance that you have to match up. So thanks to Max Fries for reaching out on that. And I told you I'm always right. Is that how it is? You're always right?

No, no, no. I've never. I celebrate my wrongness on this show. I mean, if we didn't, we'd be total a-holes because I don't have all the answers. If people are looking at me like, yeah, he knows what's going on. I'm like, no, I'm trying to figure it out like everybody else. Do my best, just like you. I find life hacks and feel like I've evolved.

Oh, you should actually rinse the strawberries in a solution that's three parts water and one part vinegar and they don't go bad as fast like that's amazing whoa i didn't know about that berries won't go moldy as fast so but they taste like vinegar after no you rinse them with a little more water after the after the vinegar this is like a preservation in between it's a natural preservative of sorts that keeps the mold and sterilizes the berries. Berries are part of what? The dirty dozen? The things that grow on the ground that hold a lot of dirt and bacteria

and things. You don't want to eat that. So if nothing else I said was useful, I at least made your berries last longer in the fridge and less likely to make you sick which seems like a win. If you've got a question for a future episode, you can email us ratesandbarrels at theathletic.com.

Drop us a comment on this video on YouTube. Be sure to hit the like button on YouTube. Be sure to leave us a nice rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you are listening on those platforms. Bit of a weird schedule next week with the All-Star festivities, so we should be back with you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.