Rates & Barrels - 2021 Fantasy Baseball draft prep begins!

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Eno and DVR begin their 2021 fantasy baseball draft prep episodes and discuss how they plan to work with the shortened 2020 season when putting together rankings for the new year.  Rundown 3:59 How Are We Accounting for the 2020 Season? 11:51 Prioritizing Steals in First-Round Picks 17:57 Is the Industry Wrong to Pass on Trout at 1.1? 21:07 Re-Thinking Tim Anderson 25:47 The Adalberto Mondesi 'Problem' Isn't Going Away 28:49 The Challenge of Early Hitters Without a pre-2020 Track Record 38:05 Beware the Swinging-Strike Leaders 41:05 Where Did Ketel Marte's Power Go? 49:11 Gavin Lux and Sample Size Theatre 55:50 Is Wil Myers Fool's Gold? Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic for just $1/week at theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So let's be clear. When it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents electronically? Mm-hmm. The answer is FedEx. Okay. But what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments? How do I find all the... Also FedEx. Impressive. Is there a regulatory specialist I can ask about? FedEx. Oh. But let's say that... FedEx.

What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It is Wednesday, November 4th, 2020. Derek Van Ryper here with Edo Saris. Episode 1 of 2021 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep Season.

I think that's fair to call it that. We're back after a week of temporary relaxation. And now we've just dumped a whole bucket of anxiety all over ourselves in the last 48 hours or so. It doesn't look like that's going to clear up anytime soon, but you know what? This is a welcome distraction. I think this is a much-needed episode for me,

for my own sanity and well-being, given where we're at right now don't want to look at the needle anymore do not want to look at the needle anymore it is weird though i think to kind of just finish off the world series and like maybe procedurally we could change things in baseball where options aren't due like the day after the world series ends or something it's like we will write into you know are they going to pick up his option or what are we going to do like hot stove let's get into it maybe baseball wants that you know i guess there is a part of the baseball machine that wants to have like mlb network needs to have content you know they can't just spend a month,

you know, just putting nothing up or putting old games up. So like, I guess that's the whole idea. Make it year round, you know, make it the Sunday after the world series, the options are due.

So then we get to yell about Brad hand and yell about all these option decisions. So, I mean, if the, if the commissioner is going to take an interview, an exclusive interview the night of game six or the night before game six and talk about how many losses, financial losses baseball is having,

there is a certain element of baseball that just is always on and will always be on. It just feels like those decisions could be a little more strategic. And if you're really struggling for off-season content and viewership, maybe this is just a suggestion, a very friendly suggestion. Maybe you don't run the two-hour gold glove award show during election night. Now, I realize election night in the States is once every four years, so it's not always on the calendar, but you should every four years just

steer your content away from that night in particular if you're trying to find the path to the most viewers. Just a friendly suggestion, but I'm moving on. Like everybody else, I do want to look ahead to 2021. I do start thinking about next season, pretty much the day after fantasy baseball season ends. Even if I did well, I start thinking about the future. Like, okay, what are we going to do next year? What kinds of changes are we going to make? What movers do we have? What kinds of adjustments are we making to our strategies? Those questions do start to pop up on me pretty quickly. So I'm not going to hold it against baseball if they want to sort of get on to the next one as quickly as they do. I think they could make a few tweaks, maybe not have options due on a Sunday when a lot of the sports world is thinking about the NFL, for example.

Maybe have that a week after the World Series ends, but on the first weekday. So maybe a Tuesday night. Don't run up against Monday night football. Don't run up against Sunday night football. Kind of have your own little space so baseball can be on sport fans' mind for these few hours and be the distraction for those few hours. That's the way I would do it. But hey, look, they don't ask what I think. They just kind of do their own thing. So I want to sort of pull back and talk about the process of what goes through our minds as we're starting to look at players for the 2021 season. It's weirder than ever because of the shortened 60-game 2020 season. Trying to find some balance in how we put those rankings together.

They've come along much more slowly than anticipated. People who listen to the show might recall that at the end of the regular season, I was trying to get them out in the first week of October. A month has passed, and they're still not quite done. So my apologies for that. There are some kind of interesting reasons for that, though. It's kind of like looking at a season in a funhouse mirror is the way I'm looking at 2020. Nothing is what it appears to be.

Everything is distorted, right? One person steps in front of the mirror, and they're short and wide. And the next person steps in front of the same mirror, and they're tall and skinny. I feel like I'm just visualizing Sleeper in the Bust, our friends Justin Mason and Paul Sporer in my head. I don't know why. It's because of their t-shirt, though. Their t-shirt is the graphs, and Mason's the short, wide graph, and Collette's the middle graph, and Sporer's the tall, skinny graph. Yeah, it's their own design. It's not me being mean. It's like you put Collette in front of the mirror, and he looks like Sporer or Mason now. That's what 2020 is. It's so much of a distortion of what we're used to. And you're

trying not to introduce too much recency bias into new rankings anyway. And I think that's doubly important when you're dealing with a 60-game season. From some players, it was even less than that, of course, because of injuries, because of call-ups, all the different factors this year. So I'm just trying to find a balance between, for hitters especially, growth in things like plate skills and 2019 and 2020 sort of mushed together. I don't know if this is the best way to go about it, but I feel like that's my tactic for trying to remove some of that recency bias from the shortened season that we just experienced. Yeah, it's really tough because we're going to have so much recency bias, and it's recency bias around such a small sample that it's going to pollute what we think about some really key bounce back players. You know, players like Cody Bellinger, Kristen Yellich,

like these guys are all going to come up and we're going to debate them to death. What I like about you combining 2019 and 2020 is now those players look a little better. You know, for example, Cody Bellinger, instead of hitting 239, hits 287. is now those players look a little better. For example, Cody Bellinger, instead of hitting 239, hits 287. It starts to kind of even out some of the missing spots. I don't know if this is going to be helpful or make the discussion harder to track, but I do think this is interesting either way. Tom Tangoo who is

the main architect over at MLB I am data architect and will be am has a blog called tango tiger blog and he did he just wanted to look at what 2020 stats meant and so you know like you like we all had this like this number 2.6 right that like everything every game was number 2.6, right? That like everything, every game was worth 2.6 because that was the relationship between one game in 2020 versus the, that's the relationship between 60 and 162, 2.6. But what Tom Tango found was that actually, if you just double someone's war in the first 60 games of a season, he kind of looked back over past seasons, if you just double their war in the first 60 games, you get their full season war. So that's about wins by replacement, which is a unique stat because it looks like a counting stat, but you can have negative war. Like you can play, you can play two weeks

to below replacement. So even though it's a counting stat, it's not one that just only goes forward. You know, you can go backward. And so that's probably why you can double it, right? You, there's going to be regression, there's going to be some bad weeks and all in all, it comes out to about doubling. So, you know, even if you look at some of the 2020 stats, that actually kind of starts to make some sense. You know, Fernando Tatis hit 17 homers, had 11 stolen bases. I feel a little bit uncomfortable 2.6-ing a lot of that. But doubling it, now you're talking about 30, 34 homers, the 20 stolen bases, that feels pretty good. And so that can help you kind of just glance at 2020 and come up with something. The reason I'm worried that this is unhelpful is the other way that

projections are done is you look at five times, like Marcel is just the most basic projection system. You look at five times the last year, three times the year before that, and two times the year before that, and you divide it all by 10. That's a very simple projection system that actually can hang with the boys when it comes to the other projection systems. I didn't mean to make that gendered. I'm just saying it can hang with all the other projection systems. And so that's why, you know, Marcel's is a good way to kind of look at things. However, what if you're taking five

times, two times, are you going to double like everybody's 2020 stats and then do five, three, two, because then you're waiting that small sample really hard. So, um, I know there's steamer projections out. I haven't yet talked to, uh, them about how they're doing. It seems like an interesting, um, thing to, to talk to the different projection people and see how they're dealing with the small sample. And we do know that like steamer and zips and all them, they're well aware of the things that become stable quicker. So they're not going to look at how many singles you had in 2020 and put a lot of weight on that. They're going to put a lot more weight on your strikeout weight, your walk rate, your fly ball rate, you know, things that become more meaningful in smaller

samples. And that's, that's, I think what we should end up doing is a lot of sort of process, look at strikeout walk rates, look at ground ball, fly ball, like launch angle type stuff, look at exit velocity, and try not to look too hard at something like batting average, which is super, super noisy in a full season. The other thing I would point out too, if you're using earned auction values or earned dollar values from the shortened season, with batting average being really noisy, that's not accounted for in the earned formulas, right? So you might be getting a lot of lift from a batting average that's really unstable. So I have earned values in my big spreadsheet that I use as I'm putting the rankings together, but I know that some of those numbers are artificially inflated

by factors that simply don't matter going forward. Yeah, like we love Juan S soto but a 351 average right i mean the juan soto's partial 2020 season is incredible a 200 wrc plus that's ridiculous 196 plate appearances of that he might not be a great example because he's so good that like you knoway who's 364 probably overrates him yeah right he's not going to hit 364 marcelo is not going to hit 338 again and and that's where i find it like really helpful to kind of pull back and go what does this look like with a larger sample what does this look like for the last year and change and that's where with dj lemay I mean, still, over the last 871 plate appearances, 19 and 20 combined, a 336 average. That gives you at least a little better idea

of what the high-end sort of outcome might be. And even that feels higher than any projection system's going to go, of course. But all this kind of being the foundation for our conversation, we got a lot of great questions that came in over the last month or so. We'll kind of weave those in and out as well. And I find that you're going to kind of end up with this difficult choice early in your draft. If you have a first half of the first round sort of pick, or if you're in an auction,

you're going to throw 40, 45, 50 bucks at a couple of players. How important is speed to you at the very top of the board? Because if it's really important to you, Mike Trout's not your number one overall player. He wasn't my number one overall player going into 2020. He's third for me yet again, still in the big three, even though it's not really a big three anymore. If speed is important to you because you can't trade for it, because you have a hard time finding it later on in your draft or in your auction, Tatis and Acuna sort of jump up in that early group. And I think the question with Tatis is, do you have enough there between last year and this year to trust him?

Because the concern I had with Tatis coming into 2020, which is so funny because he was the first player I ended up getting in labor back in the spring. The concern I had was that he struck out a lot. And the back injury that he dealt with a season ago was something that I thought could be a problem going forward. He proved that really wasn't an issue. Cut the strikeout right down. Showed that the power he displayed in year one wasn't a fluke, and still ran. He ticked all of the boxes and the underlying numbers are good. Is it enough for you, if you have that first pick, to say, yeah, Tatis is my guy. I think he's the best player in fantasy baseball at this point.

You know, you had this really helpful sheet here that kind of is color-coded. And you kind of look at Mike Trout. The thing that stands out for him is he's got the lowest combined 2019-2020 stolen base count in your top 10, top 11 even. But it's not quite red. You know, it's, you know, full season, you might still get a representative number out of there, you know, like an average,

you might still get your five, whatever you need per slot, you know, so you wouldn't be dragging you backwards. Like, maybe somebody like rindone or or somebody that might just end up with one or zero stolen bases next year um you know jd martinez nolan arenado those types uh so that's one thing the only red i see uh in the top 10 anywhere is the strikeout rates for Tatis and Acuna at 27%. And they still exist. Holding a 27% strikeout rate and a 301 average as Tatis has done for 2019 and 2020 is not usually a combo that goes together. Just look at Acuna. 27% strikeout rate, 274 average. Acuna hits the ball hard.

His max EV is harder than Tatis' so I think I might be a bets guy. That's sort of a have your cake and eat it too sort of approach. There's no bad. There's nothing bad. It's no bad. There's nothing bad.

It's all green. There's nothing to worry about. Power, speed, runs, RBI, batting average. It's all there. And usually what you're doing with the first pick is buying floor. That's why we bought Mike Trout with the first pick for so long. So Betts to me is the new Trout because he steals bases. Yeah. And you could even argue that Soto is right there as the new Trout as well. I mean, the plate skills are elite. He runs a little bit more than Trout does. You're getting, the thing that jumps out the page to me,

when you look at the 19 and 20 combined numbers, look at the OBPs, Both Trout and Soto in the 420 range. Trout at 424, Soto at 421. That gives you so much more floor with your runs scored. Or it should. It should. Actually, Trout did pretty good. Even though his team was terrible, he had

41 runs and 46 RBI. That was pretty good. It's kind of crazy when you look at it. Tatis, Acuna, Betts, Turner, they all scored more runs this year. They did. Soto played less than those guys. That's another reason to take

Betts, though. You don't know which directions the lineup is going to go in Washington. The Angels lineup struggles sometimes despite the big names in it. And we don't know if they'll ever jettison Pujols like they should. So there is something constructive about the runs and RBI totals for Tatis Nakunia versus Trout and Soto. So Betts, though, doesn't have that problem. He's more like the runs and RBI totals from Tatis and Acuna, the floor of Trout and Soto.

So I think it's a fascinating thing to kind of sort those first five. But to me, it starts with Betts. And then, man, maybe the patience of Acuna puts him a little bit ahead of Tatis. But I think both those guys make me a little bit nervous just in terms of just having a year. Like Acuna hit 250 this year. I'm not saying that's a collapse, but that's a possibility for both of them is to hit 250, 240 even for a season. And with the power and speed, it'll probably be fine. But that's something I'd rather do at the sort of 3-4-5.

I think I might even go like Betts, Soto, Tris Acuna or Acuna to Tis. But I know there's definitely some people yelling at their radio. Yeah. I'm sure we've struck a nerve because people are on edge and everything about other stuff. And we had a question from Wes. What other stuff? Wes wrote us a while back and just wrote, any chance the industry movement to moving Trout from one overall to that three to five range is an overreaction to the 60-game season? I don't think it's that.

I think it is a question of floor versus ceiling and the value of steals. And it's a roster construction question, too. Depending on the value of steals and what's a roster construction question too depending on the type of league you play in where are you going to get the bags from if you don't get some steals or a lot of steals right away i think that's a a real question but as you look through and you start moving further down the board there there are steals there are guys that run just as much as those top five players i mean mean, even a dozen bags, like we said, it's not nothing. A dozen bags in two years is still fine. If you get a handful of guys that do that early on, you're not in terrible shape. And in the mid-round, you can still find more guys that run a little bit there too. So maybe you're spreading the risk

around in that category and getting so much more floor in average and run production and power that you are better off that way. I think it's more of a debate than there's an obvious answer one way or the other. I think the projections are going to tell you it's Trout or Betts or Soto, and the more kind of loose gut feel sort of approach and thinking about it more from just a pure roster construction exercise, that's going to steer you more towards Tatis and Acuna. Yeah, the stolen bases are big. And I almost want to push back a little bit on the existence of mid-round steals. Like, they kind of are drying up.

I think someone with the plate skills of an Alberto Mondesi, to me, should be that mid-round steals guy. He's going to go in the second round despite having a.294 OBP last year and a.256 batting average. There are projections out there that Steamer has him with 50 steals next year, 52 steals in a full year, which would make him a better pick than Trey Turner, which just seems weird to me. Seems like some evidence that fantasy is broken if we're trying to reward good players. But Alberto Mondesi, Merrifield stole 12 this year, which was pretty surprising. I think he'll steal fewer next year.

Trent Grisham stole 10. I'm looking for double-digit steals in the middle rounds, and I just stopped naming them. Tommy Pham? Yeah, I mean, Luis Robert, Tommy Pham. I think a half dozen in the shortened season kind of gets you there. If you look at the combined totals, like 15 to 20. The mid-round steals guys are mixed risky players.

Jonathan Villar. The problem he presents is the gap between his real-life value and his fantasy value. It's always been true. And I think we've hit the point now where he's old enough and teams have recognized, like, even rebuilding teams. He's just not part of the future. We're not doing that anymore. He's a part-time player next

year, I think. I think he's somebody's utility player. Yeah, and maybe he can do enough damage if the price comes down to still be viable for us, but days of him being an early rounder appear to be over. Is Tim Anderson risky? Because he's one of those guys. I've got him inside my top

50 among hitters. He's at 331 over the last two seasons combined. 28 homers, 22 steals. The lineup around him is getting better. It's a 134 WRC plus over that span. He doesn't strike out that much. What's so much of a steals asset if he steals 10?

More, I mean like 10's kind of a big deal. You have to get to 100 steals in most leagues. I mean it used to be like one that's not the guy we're like oh i took five and took three and took four and then i took tim anderson and i'm good no now you have 50 steals right you gotta keep you gotta keep finding it i mean i'm not saying it's draft tim anderson in the fourth or fifth round i mean like all right it's good on steals but i i think you have to kind of decide on some of these mid-tier players who are going to get you 8, 10, 12, maybe 15.

Do you trust them to keep their job? In Anderson's case, 100% yes. And are the other skills stable enough for him to be good in several other categories? I mean, I think when you look at Tim Anderson, there are some concerns maybe with stat cast numbers. The average exit velocity is not great. The max exit velocity is not great the max exit velocity is not great i still think he is not a a sabermetrically pleasing player because of the low walk rate and people get really bent about that i think i used to get more bothered by that than i do now so i don't fault people who look at it that way and just say yeah i just can't really

go early mid-round with a player that walks less than 5% of the time. I can understand where that line of thinking comes from. But we have more good Tim Anderson than bad Tim Anderson in the range of time that we should care about. I think that's the broader point that I'm trying to make with him specifically. No, I like him. But I think I might project him for like a 275 average just to reflect some of the risk. You know, I mean, some of his bad bits have been pretty inflated. But I will tell you, man, I'm looking up and down this sheet,

and I'm freaking out. I am freaking out about steals. I am freaking out. I have now changed my top five just because of what happened when I scrolled down and looked for steals. So I'm still going Betts first, which I think he has the highest four in baseball. Then I'm going Tatis Acuna in some order. Then Trout and Soto.

And maybe that means Trout is five. Because I am freaking out, dude. Look, like, I'm just looking for green. And I think you have green if it's like over five steals, right? And I'm looking for late green because that's another thing. Even if you take Tim Anderson and some five guys, then you need somebody at the end who's going to be bulkier. Over 100 in your rankings, green.

Let's see. Jackie Bradley could be part-time-ish. Always way up and down with the batting average 283 in the short season but 241 over the full season uh jerickson profar not really going to be a bulk guy but maybe he'll get you 15 late these these that's the best names until uh 200 until 150 where you get nick solak who doesn't have a job yet dylan moore who was a total pop-up guy and like there's some risk about you know his age he has a 224 average to combine 2019 2020 so not like somebody i'm like i like him but i'm not jumping at him um i think solak is the best name

i've said so far that i like in terms of like as a batter. Liotta Tavares, 32% strikeout rate. Like definitely defense first guy. I still haven't, like Solak is not going to rescue me. And he's the only guy that I've liked so far. I don't like John Birdie. I don't like Colton Wong from an offensive standpoint. I don't like Robbie Grossman next year. I don't like Manny Margot next year. I don't like Garrett Hampson next year.

I don't like Shogo Akayama next year. So Austin Slater, maybe I like him. And now I've got Austin Slater and Nick Solak on my team. Congratulations, you know, you have 20 steals. Yep. I've, uh, I've made you paranoid. Yeah. I feel like I don't like I don't like Kevin Kiermaier. I don't, I don't even know if Mike Taugman has a job. Rommel Tapia. I don't like Kevin Kiermaier. I don't even know if Mike Tauchman has a job. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the

beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton bike or bike plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access membership separate. Terms apply. So I will come back to another sort of line of roster construction process related stuff that could impact rankings. How does that change if you get away from that top five, if you're in the middle of the round? of roster construction process-related stuff that could impact rankings. How does that change if you get away from that top five, if you're in the middle of the round,

or again, if you're in an auction scenario, how much does that make you interested in someone like Trey Turner or Trevor Story or Jose Ramirez? All those guys run a decent amount too. I don't really see a cliff coming stolen base-wise with any of them at this point. It seems like you really have to prioritize bags early, even if you don't want to.

Edelbert Omondesi is a player you've got to make a decision on. Do you think what you're seeing late in the season is a sign of things to come? Can you get past the 30% K rate and sub-5% K rate there? I mean, that's who he's been over a larger range of time. There is some pop there. Not a lot. It's red ink compared to the other players in the first couple of rounds,

but at least it's not nothing. Do you figure out a way to build around a player like that knowing his flaws because you believe you can get power and run production and average and the other things you need to counterweight that with relative ease throughout the later rounds? The league batting average is like 250 so average is not that super

easy to get you know it's shooting yourself in the foot with average however i think it becomes more of a strategy in something like uh al only uh because i was looking again through the the at this sheet through the eyes of someone who plays in AL labor, an AL-only league, and so many of these speed options are in the NL. What if Lindor leaves Cleveland this offseason and goes to the NL? Totally possible. Everyone's talking about the Mets. So now you've got in the top 15 here, or the top 20,

and you're talking about you want speed from a top 20 overall guy in your AL only league, the only choices you'll have are Jose Ramirez, Xander Bogarts, and Alberto Amandese. Maybe Bo Bichette. Maybe Bo Bichette will steal more bags. But Alberto Amandese is the only guy who's going to really move the needle. Those other guys are just guys who will get you a little bit more

than normal, you know? Still won't get you to that 100. Adalberto Montesi might get you to that 100 and half. Like, halfway there in one guy. I hate chasing steals, but you got to think about them. You definitely have to think about them. And those targets,

they might be lower than ever, but you still want to do well in the category. I don't know. Maybe punting steals become something that sometimes you have to do depending on how a draft falls. There's only a few players in each pocket of the draft that you can go after. Someone else might be positioned to take them. They reach a couple picks, a couple rounds even in some cases.

They get the guys you were targeting and you kind of have to zig away. Or maybe it's just being respectable in steals. It's not punting entirely, but it's not overpaying because the market is overcorrecting and running through stop signs in the form of these skills flaws to get these players who

do this one thing, but they don't really have enough of anything else to put with it. I mean, it's an open conversation at this point. I think there's going to be a lot of conversation and debate about that in the weeks and months ahead. Let's talk about some tough rankings in particular. And I feel like there's kind of two groups that have tripped me up so far. This first applies to the hitters. We'll get to some pitcher stuff probably a little bit later on in this show.

Or if not on this show, next time we record. But guys who don't have a full 2019 to fall back on are extremely difficult to figure out. That'd be Randy Rosarena, who comes with the extra recency bias of a great postseason. That would apply to, I think, Trent Grisham, who was a late call-up for the Brewers in 2019, and then took this massive step forward with San Diego this year. And it would apply to Luis Robert, who was a rookie playing in the big leagues for the first time. We saw him get off to a great start, and the league figured him out. Now it's a question of, all right, how quickly does he adjust? And can you trust that combination of power and speed, even if it might be accompanied by a low average, low OBP sort of skill set for

a while that buries him in the bottom third of the White Sox lineup? I mean, I think that's a fair concern and a fair question to think about as you try and put a projection together for Luis Roberts. So would you agree that that's a, not those three players specifically, but that's a group of problematic players, players who just don't have that track record at all to fall back on in terms of how a projection would work and how a ranking could work. Yeah,

you've definitely got that. You've also got three players that were very remarkable at different parts of the season and had some up and down nature to their season that may lead you, depending on when you were paying attention to baseball and when you were not, to think that they were amazing and flawless. I'm just thinking about, I'm going to call him Robert. I found some pieces where he said that's what he prefers so i'm gonna i'm gonna go with that it makes more sense to me in my head because he's cuban and that's how you would say it there um so uh anyway robert like

came out real hot right and then was gone in the second half but maybe your team wasn't any good and you stopped paying attention. And then you saw him in that wild card game obliterate a ball. He hit the ball further than any other person in this postseason when he almost hit it out of Oakland Stadium. You might think he's amazing.

If you watched Grisham at certain points, he looked amazing. He also regressed some. And then Orezarena, like, you know, if you watch the whole playoffs, you saw some regression near the end. There was definitely more strikeouts near the end of the postseason. And he definitely cooled down a little bit.

There did seem to be more of a book on him by the end of the postseason. So, you know, I do like to fall back on the stack cast stats. Unfortunately, again, here they're really good for all of them. And there's no real reason to fault any of them when it comes to the quality of their batted balls. And in

fact, the thing that you might fault them on is their plate discipline, their plate skills um and you don't always have enough sample for not only like their true talent like how much contact can they make and and stuff like that but how much the book is going to change and how much they were able to to you know respond to that book and how much how much uh ability to change had they shown so i think robert in that case is almost the most um worrisome for me uh just because if you look at his splits um the strikeout rate was uh you know it was um more manageable uh at the beginning and uh you know he started out with a 32 percent strikeout rate in the first two months 30 31 percent um and then he was at 34 percent in

september so um there's some risk there that it's that we haven't seen the bottom of his strikeout rate yeah i think that's possible i think one thing i look at when i see a high k rate for a young player i look at savant and i look at the different pitch type breakdowns and i want to see is there a clear flaw with a pitch type is it an inability to do damage against anything but a fastball and that doesn't apply to robert i prefer the robert pronunciation too so i'm glad that that's what we think he prefers because that's where it started. And I started at Robert. Everyone said it's Robert. And I said, no, it can't be. And that's how they pronounced it for a year. And I really hope we're getting it right. I hope it is Robert. There is a video where he describes his name as something muddled

that sounds a little bit like Robert. That's the video of the pronunciation video. That's why I think everyone's using Robert. But in a piece, he says that's how basically he thinks Americans would say it. And he's fine with that. But like, you know, that's not how it's been said his whole life. Right. He doesn't need to adapt it for the english language we can pronounce it the correct way we can handle it you would like it to be pronounced that it's totally fine so

a lot of damage on breaking balls seven homers against breaking balls only three against fast balls i mean the actually the numbers against fast balls might be a little bit concerning so you could dig in there see what the heat maps show you, if there's anything with high fastballs or something along those lines. I don't know. I see a reasonable balance in where he was doing damage. So that doesn't jump off the page to me as this uncorrectable sort of problem, but it takes time.

Hitters don't just get better overnight and suddenly cut their k rate by 10 so i do think the thing you can look at with a guy like him is robert hits the ball hard enough where he could strike out a lot and still not be a batting average liability but within his range of outcomes he is still a batting average liability despite his ability to hit the ball hard if that makes sense like that's that's part of the concern. It's a fairly unique sort of setup that he's good at hitting breaking balls and bendy stuff. We'll see about fastball, but he also has

incredible bat speed. It's not about not catching up to fastballs. It's something about his approach. That's probably just experience. If he had a full year to even adapt to how big league pitchers were attacking him, he may have made that adjustment. He might have started feasting on fastballs.

I feel like we just didn't get enough of a look to know what the adjustment is or was going to be. I think we'll get a sense of that probably in the first two to three months of 2021. Steamer says 260 batting average with a 27% strikeout rate. That's really good if that's what he becomes. I assume 25 and 25-ish for the homers and steals. 30 homers, 24 steals.

30, 24, 260. That's really good. There's your middle round. It's not going to be middle round. I mean, he's going to be what? He's going to be probably a top 50 player based on ADP, I would think. Oh, top 30.

I was saying top 30 batter. Yeah, yeah. I've got just hitters ranked against hitters. Well, two early mocks are always a good starting point, too. And in those, ADP 34.9. An early pick of 16. That's definitely kind of an outlier mostly 27 31 we got a 45 45 41 39 in there so a reasonably wide range it's earlier than I expected that's inside the top 40 with ease though I mean I understand it I totally understand it and

another way to look at this, even though Alberto Mondesi runs a lot more than Robert does, there's more balance potentially in what you're going to get. It's reflected in the projection. I think someone who didn't like Mondesi a couple years ago, I think could

like Luis Robert a lot more because of the different ways he can make value at that inflated price. Plus power where as Montessi is probably league average or less some inklings of

patience the ability to walk when people aren't giving him anything with Robert that I don't necessarily think you see with Modesty. I think those things are important. Modesty, however, you know, both plus

defenders, and we keep them on the field. And I think that's really important to keep in mind with any player. You mentioned Jackie Bradley Jr. a little earlier as an option for late speed. He had a better year in 2020 than I think people realize. Again, small sample,

and he's been a very streaky player. But he should play a lot, and playing time volume gets a little overlooked sometimes. It's going to be there. Some teams are going to bring him in if he doesn't stay in Boston to be their regular center fielder,

and he's going to play basically every day with a power-speed combo that I think has always been pretty interesting. 2010. He's a fairly good bet for 2010 most years. It's shaped a little differently from year to year. The biggest question is the batting average. If you're in a punt batting average team, a Mondesi-Jackie Bradley combo is pretty powerful. Absolutely. Now, it's interesting.

Both of these guys are on the swinging strike leaderboard from 2020. Yeah. Luis Robert is first at 22.1%. Oh, yay. He was swinging the bat even more than Keston Hira, who was at 20.4%, also a tough rank. And Mondesi right there at number three among qualified hitters at 20.1%. I mean, other people on this list,

Javi Baez is fourth, Miguel Sano is fifth, Avi Garcia had a weird year. He's sixth. Willie Adame struck out a ton this year. He's seventh. Castellanos is eighth. Friendmil Reyes is ninth. Rafael Devers is tenth. He struck out a lot more than we expected this year as well.

This is, this points to a higher than projected K percentage without some significant improvement. Interesting thing that fits into this, and I'm not sure that it fits like a glove because a lot of these guys are young, but there is evidence that in a given season, hitters start out the year swinging less.

And I think it's like they're trying to see what everyone's got. And then they become more aggressive as the season goes on. But we didn't have that as the season goes on this year. And so we might, from some hitters, just have the portion of the season where they were not swinging as much. And not swinging as much is correlated to strikeouts and walks in power. So some of this might be they spent a month trying to see what the league had and the season was half over. So that's kind of a fascinating thing

that we didn't have last year. It's not just the opportunity to regress and improve. It's that there is a certain shape to every season that last season didn't have that's a really good point too and look i don't think there's any one metric that would automatically lead me to just say i'm not drafting this player i mean i think price in the draft or auction is a major factor that would change whether or not i'm comfortable having a player on my team. But Baez kind of falls into the other bucket of players that I think are tough ranks. It's the massive 2020 collapses. Despite his flaws, I think we all felt like we had a pretty good sense of what Javier Baez was going to do in any particular season at this point in his career.

And he was awful. And I know he went on the record and talked about not having in-game video and his frustrations with that and that was part of why he underperformed at least that's part of our our narrative as far as why he fell apart but the 2020 collapses Austin Meadows who you know was sick at one point and had an oblique injury to the season he's part of that Cattell Marte's power vanishing like those guys are all really tough in any given year. When you just get a result that's so far away from the normal range of outcomes, you're just left to say, okay, what do we not know about this player? In the case of Baez, he's talked about the video. In the case of Meadows, we've got some stuff that we found out about on the health front

that makes sense sense kind of explains it with cattell marty i'm not quite sure what it is i think he had a wrist injury late in the year but man like i i thought the underlying numbers supported his breakout in 2019 i didn't see red flags in how he put it all together a year ago so he's definitely a a player that i'm looking at and as an evaluator i'm sort of chasing my own tail with cattell marte in particular because it just doesn't add up yeah i think yeah i think the others that might be a little bit easier to parse austin meadows is 25 years old and i think the injuries were huge i mean i talked to him a little bit in the off season in the postseason on Zooms and stuff about it.

And he said that, you know, all he can do is try to swing more and get back in it. But you know that coming from COVID, trying to get back on and then having an oblique injury, this is just a terrible way to shape a season. You know, it's just like, oh, you barely got going and now you're hurt in a way that's really difficult for hitters, you know?

And I don't think he looked right, even as he hit a homer in the postseason i thought you know that was barely the beginning of him getting back on track but given his age i'm giving him a bounce back you know i'm giving him a healthy year bounce back i'm giving him most of his power back i'm giving him most of his strikeout rate back. And I think he'll be an actually a good, a good investment. Baez, I don't like as much, because I think that there, there are concerns for me in terms of the strikeout rate has risen now three straight seasons. The success rate on stolen bases, or just the, you know, the attempts that he's the amount of times he's taken taken off on stolen bases has gone gone down so I don't know that I would project him for much more than 10 stolen bases next year and even in your combined two-year thing or a year and a half

thing for him you know he's hitting 258 so that's about where I'd expect him to come in at sort of.250,.25 homers,.10 steals. I think he'll be cost more than that. That's something for me to figure out. But if I can buy him at that price, maybe I'm back in. Well, I think he's kind of similar to Marcus Simeon if you look at the last two years. And Simeon strikes out a lot less. I think just putting a lot more balls in play, you leave yourself in a position where more good things can happen. You can pick up a few more RBIs. You can find extra

hits along the way. I think most drafts you're going to see, Baez probably goes quite a bit earlier. They both had disappointing seasons. Baez, I think, had an ADP of 81 in the two early mocks, and Simeon was at 137. There's

not 50 picks difference between those two guys value-wise for me. That's too much. I would take the discount on Simeon every single time. And with Baez, maybe that price is closer to right. So at breakeven, it's like, well, what could I get instead? And more likely than not, given the depth at shortstop that we've talked about for a long time, given the fact that Baez actually doesn't run that much, so you're not getting the speed you need either, I can probably talk myself into a lot of other players around that pick 80 range. If you look at the board from the two early mocks and say, what other hitters were going around Baez? J.D. Martinez? Yeah, I'm buying into a J.D. bounce back before I buy into Javi Baez being an early round guy again.

Charlie Blackman kind of interesting for a lot of reasons. I think I would trust him a little more than Baez at this point. I think there's some flaws there. Castellanos, you know, doesn't run, but I like him more than Baez. Jordan Alvarez starting to run already on an anti-gravity treadmill. It's all happening, you know. He's coming back. to run already on an anti-gravity treadmill.

It's all happening. He's coming back. Jordan's going to be the 24-year-old that had two knee surgeries and is going to be totally healthy. It's all going to be fun. I look at all those hitters around Baez and I think I have a better case to take all of them over him at the price. He becomes a player

I miss out on simply because everybody around him has a better path to exceeding value at that price. Yeah. But, you know, I think then, you know, one of the hardest then becomes, I think you're right, Marte. And for Marte, what's so interesting is that he retained his growth when it comes to max exit velocity and so he theoretically still has that same power potential i mean he went from 116.3 to 115.9 i don't think that's very much of a functional difference uh his his average launch angle went from 11.6 to 10 so that seems pretty normal but his barrel rate went from 9% in his 2019 breakout season to

3.7. And his career barrel rate is 4.2. So that's really big difference. You know, normally you'd expect someone who grew from 4.5 to 9.1 to maybe regress a little bit, but to keep half of his gains. So you would expect him to settle in at seven or 8% barrel rate, you know, 7% barrel rate. So you would expect him to settle in at 7% or 8% barrel rate, you know, 7% barrel rate. And instead he did half that, and he kind of went all the way back. And I don't know that we're necessarily going to find a solution here for what happened. But even if you look at other uh advanced metrics like connor corcoran has a um

a dynamic hard hit percentage um and uh cattell marty halved his um so it's uh and it's weird because even conor admits that his dynamic hard hit percentage fully supported the 2019 breakout, and then it went away. So maybe it's selectivity because there is definitely, there was a change in his swing rates and his walk rates. Also, he only stole one base. also he only stole one base so like i'm a little bit like i think maybe some of the power will come back and i like his contact skills so i think he can hit 290 next year and hit you know 20 to 25 homers but i think he might only steal three to five bags and and I don't know. What's his cost like?

78 was the ADP, range of 65 to 97. So comparable to Baez. I mean, Marte versus Baez. I like Marte's approach a lot more. I'll take a strikeout rate that might be a third of Baez's, and so therefore a much better batting average. Yeah, so at cost, I would definitely go Cattell Marte as well, and I just wonder how much of this was injury. I mean, the interesting thing about something like max exit

velocity, right? If you're healthy at the beginning of the season, and you scald the ball because you're fine, you're yourself, and a week or two into the season, you get hurt. You had a chance to reach that max, but then your average starts to lag because you're playing with a wrist injury, a shoulder injury, whatever it might be. So I wonder if that could be maybe a little bit of an indicator for us that, yeah, he just wasn't quite healthy for most of the season. That's why the power went away.

He was healthy early, showed that ceiling again, so it's not a complete fluke, and you can look at it. Max EV is really hard. Alex Chamberlain had a good piece on Fangurass recently about Max EV and it is super useful to know early on. It is super useful the minute you see it. However, not seeing it is harder to analyze, especially from someone who's established it in the past. Because somebody like Jose Abreu last year showed his best max ex-exavilo of his career in like the third week of September.

It's just like, I wasn't waiting for it because I thought I knew what jose rey who is but if that was a young player uh and he just didn't hit that ball would i come out of this season being like oh that guy can't hit the ball like gavin lux gavin lux i think is is really really difficult uh player to to to figure out because we're talking about not only like yeah he's 151 plate appearances but it's two half seat like 270 plate appearance seasons right and so even if you want to like say like oh um you know he's had 95 batted ball events it's not a lot you know and yeah his max ev in 2019 was 109.8 in 2020 it was 105.6 Does that mean that we now think

that he's just a guy who can only hit the ball, quote unquote, 105 miles an hour? If that's true and his barrel rates are true, then he's not actually that good of a prospect. I mean, these are the max EVs

and barrel rates for Gavin Lux for a guy that might hit 20 homers, but probably hit more like 15. Yeah, that one's tough because for the reason you mentioned, hit 20 homers, but probably hit more like 15. Yeah, that's tough because, for the reason you mentioned, the samples in both instances are so small. Maybe if you'd given him 100

tries, he could have hit the ball 115. If we knew minor league numbers, that'd be great to know. That would be the best missing piece of the puzzle. Alternate site numbers, like how hard was the guy hitting the ball at the alternate site?

That would actually mean something to me. There's not a lot of stuff that would matter from there, but just an indicator of raw power or like a raw power ceiling, that would be very helpful. That would be some missing information that would help round out the profile. I mean, I think the way my mind works,

I just see a lot of similarities to what happened to Kyle Tucker in Houston, where he's on a good team. They didn't have an overwhelming need to play him. He also, I believe, was impacted by COVID earlier in the startup phase again. Ended up getting demoted to the alternate site, spent more time there than I

and many people expected. And there never really was the overwhelming need for middle infield help. Corey Seager stayed healthy and was really productive. They got a lot of mileage out of Taylor and Kike. It's just one of those things where they probably will have a greater need for him in 2021 because Justin Turner is a free agent. They're going to shuffle things around in the infield. They don't bring him back. And suddenly Lux will have a place to call his own. And you kind of choose your own adventure. Do you believe in the 2019 numbers as a better indicator of his potential?

Or do you really want to buy into 2020 as being an indication that he doesn't have as much ceiling as we once hoped like i i fall into the former group i think what we saw in 2019 gives us a better idea of lux's ceiling than what we saw in 2020 yeah yeah and sometimes when you have incomplete information like that it's useful to use a projection system that just dives in uses those minor league results based stuff and and produces a projection like steamer has 259 14 homers to seven stolen bases that's okay i guess you know it's it's second base can be a tough position so i could see a fair amount of teams where i decide i'm going to go late on second base and then Lux is on my bench.

I still think Lux, and this happened with Tucker too, this is where the similarities in my mind come from. I think there's a certain type of player with a limited track record in the big leagues that projection systems just don't do well with. I love projections. I use them all the time. I just think there are certain players that they don't quite fit and you kind of have to decide for yourself. You have to trust your eyes. You have to trust your own judgment more than what the system spits out. And I think that applies to Lux. Yeah. Because that's, I mean, that's exactly what we saw with Tucker. Tucker came up, had a terrible slash line and a really small amount of playing

time. And that got folded into the projections a bit. And some of the AAA equivalent numbers probably weren't very good because the overall results were so skewed at AAA from 2019. And Kyle Tucker's 2020 projection was pretty underwhelming. I'm trying to remember what it was off the top of my head. I remember looking at it and just going, this doesn't seem right. And I can understand why it wouldn't be right, but I don't want to trust what I'm seeing. I want to trust myself more than I want to trust this number that I'm pretty sure is flawed. Yeah.

And with so many guys gone, there's definitely sometimes you can overthink it. If you think about Drix and Profar or something, there's a lot of things that he doesn't do well uh but if he ends up in the right place he has and has an opportunity to play then you know he's got the number one thing that we're always looking for is the opportunity to play because to a certain extent the deeper you pick the guy and the deeper your league is the more it just matters how much he plays so depending on where profile ends up i might like him even though i don't like his batted ball stance um and lux is actually in a good position when it comes to opportunity right now uh just because uh kike is gone i'm trying to

confirm this kike is gone right yeah yeah he's he's a free agent he doesn't have a team designation on on fan graphs anymore yeah and turner's gone um and you know right now i would say that like muncie is the first baseman i'd rather play him at first defensively lux is the second baseman and turner comes back on the free agent deal and chris taylor is uh the kike replacement yeah you could run it like that so i mean that means they could spend some money maybe on an outfielder or just backfill in the outfield with um rios edwin rios and matt baity types they really don't have to do anything they could just get some depth guys and and just let it ride with the roster they've got.

They've got enough depth to get away with it. And with Chris Taylor, he's a nice player. Eight homers, three steals, 270, 366, 476 in 2020. It's not that far off the 262, 333, 462 that we saw in 2019. He's living in that above average overall offensive player range every year. Even without full-time opportunities, just a really

nice glue guy for them. A really great NL only player, I would say. It's not going to cost you much because people say what's his role, but then you look up 2019, 12 homers, 8 steals. If you were an NL only, you'd be super happy to have that. And we could plug them all over the place.

For $7 or $8, yeah. It definitely works. One more player-specific question that I want to get to. It was from Mike G. He wants to know, is Will Myers fool's gold? Because Myers was a guy I didn't have anywhere this year. I didn't see it. I thought he was kind of done.

He couldn't hit sliders. And actually, if you look at the splits, he fixed that flaw. And I don't know how much we can trust that in a 60-game season. He's always had raw power. He's always had speed. And he didn't steal as many bases this year, but when you hit a bunch of home runs, you steal fewer bases. So I don't know if that's necessarily indicative of actual lost skill or if it's just reshaped production.

You hit 15 home runs in 55 games. Some of your green lights went away because you hit home runs instead. So what do you make of what you saw from Will Myers in 2020? And how sticky do you think it is to be bad against breaking balls for basically your whole career and to, in a 60-game season, start doing a lot of damage against them? Yeah, I just think that screams like there would have been a different way of pitching him. The pitchers would have changed it up

if there had been more season, and he would have struggled. I mean, if you just add in what he did in the postseason, you start to see, oh, okay, like 26 more plate appearances. If you just add 26 more plate appearances to his line last year, you would be adding a.227 average in those extra plate appearances. And, yeah, he stole one base. So I think my projection for him would be like something like a 235 average uh 25 homers and like six to eight steals i think he is very

much a candidate for speed dropping off the table because he was kind of like a 15 guy and then he had two this year with one caught stealing and he's 29 this is exactly when i think a lot of players stop stealing bases so i just don't know how exciting he's going to be even if he hits 240 with 25 homers and six deals um that seems more i would see i'd lean more towards Fool's Gold with that sort of projection, right? Yeah, I mean, I think Fool's Gold in the sense that 35 to 40 home runs kind of based on what was happening in 2020 are out of the question. He's not sustaining all these gains into 2021.

I think that's pretty fair to say. But I think it's interesting because you're right about the age. Will Myers' speed was always underrated, probably because he was a catching prospect originally with the Royals. That automatically kind of shoves us to push these guys into these buckets of, doesn't run real well, he's a catcher. It was like, well, no, no, he was a catcher who moved to center field

and then eventually moved out of center field. Even tried third base at one point. He's clearly a good athlete. There's no doubt about that now. I wonder if he's still more of a 10-steal guy. If you start taking some of the home runs away. If he gets back to maybe being a cheap 10-steal guy. Like another 2010 guy.

Kind of like Jackie Bradley, actually. Low average. Decent OBP. Myers has always been pretty good at drawing walks, 8% to 10% year over year. K rates in the mid to upper 20% range most years. That 2019 34.2 looks like the outlier. I think he's a better core skills guy than he's been given credit for, at least for me. And exit VLO numbers look good every year too. He's hit the ball hard throughout the StatCast era.

It just, when I look at his player page, I just see the bad years. And I think there's a fair amount of kind of oscillation year to year. And that just speaks to me, to someone that makes adjustments eventually, but sometimes struggles with them in any given year. 2018, he hit 11 homers in a little bit over half a season.

In 2019, he struck out 34% of the time. He'd never struck out more than 27% before that. There's kind of like this yo-yoing effect. You see this batting average that at times has been really really bad and then last year was 288 I think that's the thing that makes me most nervous is the batting average but if you

either have settings where that doesn't matter and it's more about OBP or you're punting batting average or you're just paying a cost that reflects a 230 projected batting average, or you're just paying a cost that reflects a 230 projected batting average, then I'm in. I think every player has a place

where it makes sense to get them. Yeah, and Myers from the two early mocks, 111 is the ADP. It's helpful to look at the other players going in that range, though. It's like 111 right now doesn't mean much. So would you rathers, just in the outfield alone, I'll run through the names real quick,

and then you can kind of say which of these guys actually goes above because we're getting short on time. Randy Rosarena is actually in that range. We just know he's not going to be there, though, in the spring. He's shooting up. Mike Ustremsky is in the same range, and Kyle Lewis is in the same range. Lewis is a little earlier.

And two bounce-back candidates, one outside of the outfield, Jose Altuve and Chris Bryant. Those are the kinds of names going around Will Myers right now. Man, I might take most of them. I don't know about Altuve. I'm a little bit worried about big injury. Mike Yaz, though?

That one's a pretty interesting toss-up because he put together another great season, and I think he gets underrated because he's with the Giants, especially as a left-handed hitter in that ballpark. Understandably, a lot of concerns about how viable the power is, but clearly has a job.

I mean, if you're talking about like a two, you know, he had a.245 ISO in 2019, and then they changed the fences in a way that could help him you know that's this pull power alley that's just triple alley and they and they brought those fences in and then he had a 271 average uh 271 iso so he just doesn't have this this the speed but i do think he'll have a better batting average than will myers so i'm taking i'm taking yes i think all right so the the extra 30 or so points in batting average than Will Myers. So I'm taking Yaz, I think. All right. So the extra 30 or so points in batting average worth more than eight,

maybe 10 steals difference between the two players. I mean, that's fair. And you might make a decision based on whether or not you need that little speed boost or not too. What you've done earlier could be a factor. So it's appropriate based on Yaz being there, but some of the bounce back candidates in that range. Chris Bryant, I mean, I hope it's just health. I really do. I hope he's

going to bounce back in 2021 and kind of be an early mid rounder again, not a top 20, top 30 type guy, but I think he can get back to being in that 40 to 60 range. I think that's still possible for Chris Bryant based on the core skills. I think the concerning thing for him, we talked about him a ton, it's not just one year where things have kind of fallen apart. It seems like it's more like a long-term damage kind of injury that he's been dealing with with his shoulder. Yeah, and now it's like we talked about before, now it's dovetailing with age.

And so it's kind of hard to kind of piece out the two different parts of it um but you know 2019 is not that long ago 280 homers uh 280 and the 31 homers um it's kind of hard even though that some of the stack cast numbers weren't amazing that season it's still kind of hard to poo poo that i think he's um a little bit safer than myers strikeout rates not never got as as crazy as as myers's did um and it's not like myers's power hasn't yo-yoed right but they might be more similar than people really ever would have thought i mean yeah you told me going into this season that myers versus chris bryant might be a fair toss-up i would have said hey that's true pass some of that over here because that's crazy talk.

I would like whatever double IPAs you've been drinking all day if you saw that. But hey, look, I mean, Will Myers, again, a nice player overall, not complete fool's gold, not 30-20 anymore, but I also wouldn't look at what he unlocked in 2020 and start projecting that over a full season either. I think you could end up pretty disappointed if you go that route. Time flies when you're talking baseball and diverting your mind away from other things in the world. If you're not already a subscriber to The Athletic, we're running a $1 a week offer right now at theathletic.com slash rates and barrels. That'll get you everything we do on the site, including those rankings when they finally go up. It's looking like Monday is the actual day that these will be ready for public consumption. We have another episode coming up on Friday with Brit. We're going to do that on a regular basis throughout

the offseason, talking regular baseball on Fridays, having our fantasy episodes on Mondays and Wednesdays on Twitter. He's at Inoc Saris. I am at Derek Van Ryper. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Friday. Thanks for listening.