Rates & Barrels - Final Draft Prep Weekend

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Rundown1:18 Issues with 2020 Statcast Data5:57 Latest Pitching Rankings Adjustments15:09 More Unusual Math18:47 Confidence Levels Across Rankings23:52 Buying In On Amed Rosario For Another Step Forward?28:11 How Long Will Multi-Inning Relievers Hold Value?35:24 Pushing Up Closers in Best Ball Drafts?47:37 Deep Points League Pitching53:04 Unexpected Appreciation For Evan Longoria Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get a free 30-day trial to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels episode number 113. It is Friday, July 17th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Serious. Yeah, that's right. It's a Friday, as we talked about earlier this week. One day later because of a schedule change. And it's final draft prep time. Eno updated his rankings this week. Jake Seeley's projections were updated. My rankings are being updated

Friday afternoon. Ads and drops will be up for the first time this season, this afternoon, which catching up on Fab, if you drafted a league back in February or March and Fab hasn't run until this weekend, there is a lot that has changed. So breaking all that down and going through the last steps of getting ready for this season, how's it going for you on this Friday? It's going well.

Last day of vacation didn't end up being quite the vacation that I had thought because of some breaking news that was happening and some team analyst blowing up my phone. No, I love them. I love them to death. But they were all complaining to me about the StatCast data. And so I did a piece today that came out late last night that's up today about problems in the Hawkeye system. And some of it's definitely coronavirus related.

They wanted to do a ground truth test for all of the parks. They wanted to do it again this year, and they haven't been able to get to more than 11. And I'm sure that has something to do with lockdown orders, lack of travel, that sort of deal. But some of it also seems to be that they skimped on some of the hardware. But some of it also seems to be that they skimped on some of the hardware. So that's a little upsetting because I was really excited for observed spin rate and axis. And now it seems like it's going to be mostly machine learning. And they kind of took the low-end cameras. For example, the camera that they're using to track spin is at 100 frames per second, and your iPhone can handle 240.

It seems less than ideal to use technology below an iPhone for something like this. Yeah, like could we just put a bunch of iPhones up instead? a bunch of iPhones up instead. Yeah, I don't know why you would spend this much money and kind of not take it over the last few yard lines. Yeah, frustrating indeed. And you've spoken on this show before just about the difficulty of tracking different stats and season, how that's going to be a bar that's moved

and one more variable to work with right just data that's not quite what we're used to so it's a little bit disheartening to know that it could be captured much better than it will be captured like that is a very frustrating sort of thing i i totally understand why teams are mad about that. Accuracy is important. Yeah, yeah. And I'm even getting some texts today about analysts pushing back on MLB pushing back. There were some details in there that, anyway, some team analysts were like, ah, that's BS. Some of this, though, is to be expected. And not just because the coronavirus, some of this is be expected because we are using a new system. And, you know, the first couple of years that we had pitch effects, the sport vision pitch effects, we didn't really believe in the pitch type, the pitch type classifications.

They didn't, for example, split out the fastballs at all. They just recorded fastball and didn't bother with two seamers or so on. And that got better over time. And it was mostly because of great analysts in MLB AM's office, um, going to, going to work and sometimes just being like, you know, reading and, and, and asking pitchers and finding out what, what pitchers say they were throwing and kind of putting those labels on them and using that to improve the algorithm that that classified pitches and then when we got track man the first the beginning of track man there were problems too they kept missing pop-ups and really low ground balls. And a lot of those got ironed out.

Not all of them, but most of those got ironed out. They added an optical camera that would catch the pop-ups and they found ways to sort of spot the issues and clean them up. And so some of this was inevitable. First year you have a system is always the worst. I just think the very low ground balls, I mean, you can make Eric Hosmer a ghost with the proper adjustments. In fact, the Rob Arthur piece about all the missed ground balls and dropped exit velocities, Eric Hosmer is at the very top of the list. He has the biggest

adjustments because there was missing so many of his wicked low ground balls. I feel bad always making fun of him, but he got a lot of money to play baseball, so I feel a little less bad about it. He's not hurting. Yeah, he's living a good life in San Diego, no less. So let's dive into some topics and some questions. A lot of great mailbag questions have been coming in for the last week or so, and we just want to try to help out as many people as we can.

First question I have for you is you were going through the pitching ranks update for this week. I imagine you were in a similar boat to what I've been in, where it's really just kind of taking out a couple guys who opted out and making a few adjustments based on some injuries, because I think it's still difficult to make significant adjustments based on absences from summer camp. Even in the case where you have a player who's tested positive for the virus, some of those guys are asymptomatic. They're throwing on their own. Some of those guys are going to show up at some point this weekend or early next week, and they're going to be pretty much at the same level physically they would have been at had they been there the entire time.

So I found that the fine adjustments are still pretty limited despite the number of updates and news items that have been bouncing around throughout the last two weeks. Yeah. I think that there is a lesson. It's hard to apply the lesson wholesale and broadly to every player, but I think I've been pleasantly surprised with how stretched out pitchers have been when they've come back. It's not that they're all uniformly fully stretched out.

It runs the gamut. Blake Snell, for instance, is up to about 23 pitches, I think, in his last simulated start. Jeff Samarza said he could make 70. I believe Clayton Kershaw threw five innings. Five innings. You said five pitches. I was like, oh, that took a turn. The weird one that I just saw this morning was Grinke.

Grinke pitched Thursday in an inter-squad game. He threw 54 pitches. And his comments afterward made it seem like he was kind of surprised he didn't throw more, which I don't know if that's Grinke just messing with everybody. Like, I can never put that past him. No, you have to believe him when he says stuff like that. He's pushing back. He's the kind of guy that won't be quiet about something.

So I would believe that he thought he should pitch more. Here was the quote. Like, he pretty much says what he thinks. I mean, I hope so, because this is what he said. Today, I really got tired in the last inning, so next time we'll try for 75 pitches or so, but it's possible

it will only be 60. Possible it will be 80. I don't know. I'm hoping for more than 50. End quote. He threw 54 and just kind of petered out after four innings. Well, just the fact that he said he was a little tired, I think that's more saying there might be a little bit of frustration

on his own part that he was like, oh, gosh, I didn't make it past 50. It could just be that. It really could be. I think that it's hard to kind of stay on top of every single pitcher like this. And there's some people who try. Jeff Zimmerman has a velocity tracker up again this year, and I don't know how he has anything, any information on that because I've seen barely any.

You know, I basically almost feel like just kind of throwing up my hands in the air and being like, they're all going to be a little bit less ready than I hope. And that's where I'm sort of, that's where I'm aiming for. Tracking Velo right now is really difficult. I think at some of the inter-squad games, the scoreboards are turned on. The scoreboards have velo readings. So if you have writers in the ballpark watching those,

then they can just write down what they see. Oh, Corbin Burns threw a cutter at 95 miles an hour. That's pretty cool. Like, you know, that's something that we didn't really see from him before but it's so piecemeal yeah but it's like that's one observation of one pitcher throwing in a shorter outing no less i mean like how much do we want to really buy into that so what adjustments did you make on the latest round of updates? Well, you know what I didn't do was,

you might have noticed from what I just said, I didn't react heavily to current news of coronavirus situations. I just saw that Pitcherless said that they took Jesus Lozardo off of their rankings. And I can understand that because, you know, like for example, we had the one player that I talked to that had the four-week version, you know, and then we're going to have other players that have like a 10-day version, you know. I think it goes back to something that Scott Pianowski has said for years.

This crosses over into other fantasy sports as well. Injuries are going to find your team in any season, so especially early. Why draft injured players? Why bring that risk in ahead of time? Now, this year, of course, the virus kind of just gets wrapped up into that same sort of concept. It's like, you're going to find trouble this season. If Jesus Lizardo is a is a fifth sixth seventh round pick in drafts happening this weekend you know why do that to yourself why subject your roster to added risk i i see it from from that perspective i could see dropping him i don't know about removing him completely because you still have benches some leagues are going to have il spots where you can

draft him put him on the il spot fill in that roster spot with an extra guy while he's away if he even misses some time like i still think it's i think there's probably a happy medium between where you and i might be like taking it really carefully and not moving a lot of guys around and then pulling a guy like lizardo off a top 100 completely like i think the true answer is somewhere in the middle, and that's why the problem is so difficult. Yeah, yeah. So, like, my response was to, like, push Hazel Stardard, Lizardo down a few ranks. You know?

Like, I don't know that either of us is correct. And, in fact, one of us is likely to be totally wrong um but uh i'm kind of treating it like other injuries where i'm like and it's not even other injuries like if if he if he's just was out with that shoulder thing or an elbow thing right now i would definitely dock him way more than i did did because I think that he's likely to be throwing and hit the ground running when he gets back, maybe miss a start. And I know that's a big deal out of 12 starts or whatever,

but I can't push him much further down than I did. I pushed him down to 27 right there with Frankie Montas at 29 and Julio Urias at 30. If I push him below those, I feel like I'd have to push the whole trio down, and that doesn't make any sense to me. So I still like those players about the same, even with the asterisk next to Lizardo.

Yeah, I think the problem with Lizardo just comes back to everything we talked about previously where it's almost like the expectations are so high the price is so high his margin for error to not return value where he's going is so slim it doesn't necessarily make sense to chase him at the adp right now even though there's a lot to like about him as a pitcher like a top 30 ranking is a solid ranking of him, and he still might eclipse that in some rooms because expectations and projections are so favorable for Lizardo. All along, I've wondered if Frankie Montes wasn't simply just the better A's pitcher to have for

2020. He goes a couple rounds later. He's looked really good in summer camp. Had that splitter really make a huge difference for him last year before the suspension, we've kind of gone through a lot of that. Um, but again, that comes back to how much risk do you want? Where do you want to take those risks? For me, it just tends to be a lot later. And when I have made adjustments, uh, like Anthony Rizzo has got a back injury or a rib injury, and it's not like I'm going to drop Anthony Rizzo 30 spots overall, but I'm going to bring him down among first basemen who are already very close to him. There was pretty much nothing separating Rizzo from Jose Abreu when they were both healthy. Now the difference is Rizzo's got this nagging injury that

could bother him for the beginning of the season, right? Or if there was very little to separate him from Josh Bell or Paul Goldschmidt, he falls behind those guys because of how closely they were all ranked when everybody was healthy. I think it is just like adjustments within tiers to account for a potential absence to begin the season, whether it's injury or virus related. Yeah, yeah. The thing about some of these players, or a lot of these players, like even Keone Kala, who was put on the 10-day IL with no further information, which is the giveaway, he hasn't been in camp for days and days.

He hasn't gotten to camp yet. So this is very possibly an intake test where he got positive, you know, which means that he's fairly close to coming back. I think it's much more worrisome when they test positive now. So last week, there were six more new positives. I just saw this report come by. MLB released its latest round of COVID-19 testing results while we started recording. Five players last week.

Five players, six of 10,548 samples, which is 0.05%. Listen, listen. Shut up. Okay. Shut up. The children learning math are taught right away. You don't divide people by test. You divide people by people because then your answer is a percentage of people.

It's the only way it makes logical sense. So look. Six players, five players is not 0.05% of the player population. Right, there are not 10,548 people being tested. There aren't that many people involved in the situation. So they can stop with this any time. Like clearly the longer players are around each other we're seeing fewer positive tests players are doing what they need to do for now as we've said before yes it's generally

positive they don't have to massage the numbers no they don't have to do this we we don't need to do this song and dance we don't have to lie to people it's they're doing this anyway it's not it's not at a level where people are going to say, this is too dangerous. We're not there clearly. We don't know where that line is, but we're not even close to it. And here they are still massaging these numbers, trying to put ridiculously low

percentages out there. How stupid do they think everybody is? I guess a lot of people don't read through the report though. If some other news outlet picks that up and just gets the 0.05%, then that's the headline that gets relayed. And then people who watch, I don't know, CBS Evening News see that. Yeah, there's a fair amount of in reporting sort of grabbing the press release and, and like retweeting it basically. I mean like that's what I'm looking at right now is a retweeting of there.

So it's, if they put it out there like this, like, you know, they're not lying about anything, but they are definitely massaging the numbers. I think it's generally positive if you just look at it in the worst possible way,

which is we had about 50 positives i would say 50 to 60 positives between intake um and earlier camp testing right so that was the the worst big number that was when when everyone came to camp plus the people that had already tested positive before and since they've been in camp um only 18 uh players have tested positive and in the last week only uh five like i think that's decent you know it's not great you know but it's decent enough and it might be enough to have a season yeah it seems like everything is trending to the point where when we speak for our thursday episode week, opening day will happen as planned. It's great.

Like we have games. They are going to at least get this season off the ground. Hopefully they can keep it up in the air for all 60 games. I think that's at least a possibility at this point. I feel like that's the most likely outcome at this point. So things are all generally positive. I'm just furious that we can't be honest with basic math. Like just stop insulting everybody this way.

It's just inappropriate. Oh, well, I'm sure baseball will come out with a presentation about how awesome Hawkeye is next week. Probably. Yeah, but they're going to have to. They have to respond to your piece. Nothing to see here. nothing to see here so okay so i have a rankings related question that came in from isaac and he wanted to know is there a demarcating line in our ranking sets that separates more confident and less confident tiers as in is there a player in your rankings who after that player you get more uncertain based on the likely volatility of the sprint season?

I think that line kind of exists all the time. I think the further down a list of rankings I go, the more volatility there is, the less there really is to separate each player from the next. each player from the next. And I kind of think the confidence level for me starts to fall off around top 200 players overall. So I guess by position, that's probably after the first dozen catchers. It's probably after the first 40 or so pitchers.

The difference between my SP41 and my SP80, that's a pretty small difference. I don't know if that's perfectly answering Isaac's question or if he's looking for specific players to fill in, but do you kind of have that too, where the further you go down the ranks process, the less precise you feel you can be? Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And there also is, I don't want to be too cynical, this isn't, I'm not claiming names by putting them higher in the rankings, but I do know how people use rankings and how people draft, and so there's pockets of uncertainty too. There's pockets of uncertainty too. For example, I've talked about this. Around 70, I always have basically a list of my sleepers starts around 70, right? And the reason that happens in this case, it's Sandy Alcantara, Griffin Canning, Dylan C, Spencer Turnbull, John Means, Nate Pearson, Adrian Hauser, Austin Voth, Luis Patino. They're all in that group. I just basically gave you 70 through 79.

I'm not trying to claim those guys as sleepers, but I do know that most 12 to 15 team leagues are looking for their last pitcher around 70. Do you know what I mean? That's where your SP6 would be or your SP5 at least in a 15 team league. It's where you're going to start taking more chances. Right. And so that's a line that exists, right? That's a line.

It's a fake line that I've put in there, but it has something to do with how people draft and where people want to take chances. And so, um, I do think there's a line for me, um, somewhere around 40 is, uh, where I stopped feeling, uh, super confident about the pitchers. So then there's, um, you know, some high sleepers, uh, you know, Garrett Richards, some high sleepers, Garrett Richards, Rich Hill, Josh James, guys that I'm willing to spend a little bit more to get into. There's a line there.

So I would say there's a line around 40, another line around 70, and then another line around about 100, 105, where I expect last pitchers to be taken in a lot of leagues. Yeah, I would say that does hold up with how I look at it. I think there's something about the way we build teams that doesn't necessarily translate perfectly to listing the players and then just following that list to the letter. Rankings have inherent problems. Yeah. And even when you run them off of projections, there's still going to be times you kind of fight against your own list. There's going to be certain instances where you're looking for a certain category or you're looking for a certain skill set and you're going to make

that adjustment. Or you took safe and boring earlier, so now you need to take the exciting. Or you took exciting earlier, so now you kind of need jake or to reetzy instead of lance mccullers yeah i i think that's that's the gray area that's the nuance that's the that's where it's like we can give lists that are as close to what we would do as possible but you still have to think about what you're doing as you're doing it and absolutely i'm not accusing anyone listening of just going on autopilot while they draft. They're like, well, you know, said take 75 over 76. Like, no, there's still thought that goes into it. And we've said it before.

Like, you'll notice if you're in a situation to actually have to make a pick, you might go against your own rankings, too, when the clock's ticking. And it's based on those variables we talked about. Or it's even just based on being forced to choose whereas like with rankings a little softer near the bottom of the list you don't have to have any skin in the game any stakes to actually you know put one player over the other but when there is something at stake you know you're going to give a more honest sort of response so it's it's just the nature of the ranks. So hopefully that helps answer Isaac's question about where those lines are. They really do exist.

Thanks for the question, Isaac. We got a question from Luke about Ahmed Rosario. He writes, why do you think Ahmed Rosario isn't getting much love? I've seen tons of hype for getting late steals from Robles, Mercado, and Buxton, but Rosario's projections are very similar to those guys. So this is kind of in the high-end, like 75 overall range where Robles goes down to probably about 150 or so where Buxton typically goes. And yeah,

Amad Rosario is kind of in that 100 to 125 range of most of the drafts I'm in, you know. I see him kind of stuck to Tim Anderson. Maybe it's because they're both young shortstops with suboptimal plate discipline, but tools. So what do you think it is that keeps Rosario from getting as much love as the other players that Luke mentioned? Well, it's interesting. Here on NFBC, Rosario has 137 as his average draft position, and Tim Anderson's at 95. So if you give me the 40 points, the 40 spots on Tim Anderson, you can get me at the table, I think, for Ahmed Rosario. So, yeah, I would say that I think that there is some similarity between those. And, you know, the price doesn't really necessarily reflect it.

And, you know, it's also possible there's a recency bias going on because Tim Anderson had his breakout last year and Ahmed Rosario's breakout was much more mellow. And so maybe Ahmed Rosario has his best season in front of him and tim anderson has his best season behind him um i think that's those are fairly possible statements given their age and given their histories so um i'm with you man i think ahmed rosario is a good pick he has a decent hard hit angle i believe, despite hitting too many ground balls. Let me get his hard hit angle up here real quick.

His biggest comps. He's not like an all blue ink guy on a StatCast page either. My first thought when I saw the question was, you know, maybe StatCast doesn't like Ahmed Rosario, but it's not all bad. There's an 88 percentile XBA. He runs well. He doesn't strike out a ton. There's actually quite a bit to like. Here's his power comp, Alex Verdugo.

They have almost the same max exit velocity and almost the same hard hit angle. Now, Alex Verdugo right now seems to be changing his swing to possibly hit more fly balls, and I think he probably has more power upside than rosario but uh to put rosario in the same camp as verdugo i think uh actually describes him fairly well it describes his upside well like good batting average 15 homers and a full season type guy and the steals probably are the thing that really kind of separates those two guys price-wise for us in fantasy.

But I do like Rosario where he goes. I think he's a good way to make up some ground in the stolen base category. The batting average floor is probably higher than people think. They see that 248 from his first season. They see that 256 from his 2018 season. I don't think that's necessarily who he is as a player. I think 287 last year is a sign of what's likely to come so uh how much power he gets to this year will maybe make or break him i

think the other thing here is where he's going to hit in the order but we've talked about victor robles a lot on this show robles probably begins the year in the bottom third of the order mercato could end up being lower in the order than we thought i saw a report out of cleveland that cesar hernandez is the favorite to lead off. And they're going to hit Frankie Lindor out of three spots. So where Oscar Mercado fits into those plans, that is to be determined still. But yeah, I think Rosario is fun because he could still get a lot better. And he's already pretty good.

That's a nice floor to have for a guy with growth potential. Still just 24 years old. Yeah, yeah. And I think we've seen enough growth out of his batted ball profile and his strikeout rate and his swinging strike rate that I don't want to extrapolate that growth more, but it speaks well to his ability to adjust. I think that he's made adjustments,

and that speaks well that there might be a couple more adjustments left. Yeah, I'm right there with you. Thanks a lot for the question, Luke. Let's go to our next question. This one comes from Albie. He wants to know, is starting pitchers likely to pitch fewer than five innings at the beginning of the season?

Are there relief pitchers you think could be a good source of early season and possibly all season long wins? Pitchers who are in the position to follow starters who don't go five and then pitch a few innings. So we talked about it a lot with maybe the Rays. In the question, Albie looks at Ross Stripling. I think that was before David Price opted out. This email is from about 10 days ago. So Stripling kind of moves into the rotation and maybe someone like gonsolin kind of takes that role for the dodgers now but yeah i think our patron saint of this of this concept

is trevor richards uh but uh tony gonsolin i've got i've got them all if you if you've got your rankings in front of me look around 100 uh that's where i put in the six starters that i thought could vulture a bunch of wins and i have have a bold prediction coming out for Monday that Jonathan Loizaga will lead the Yankees in wins. It's a bold prediction. It's probably not going to happen. But if it does happen, it's because J.A. Happ and Jordan Montgomery never see the third time through the order all season.

And Loizaga is the guy who comes in at least half the time to pitch the fourth and fifth or the fifth and sixth. That is my prediction for him. And he's, I think, the best in terms of quality stuff and command. But I thought Alec Mills was headed for that, and he might still be once Quintana comes back. You know, Sean Newcomb's role is up in the air. I think he might actually be making it as a starter,

but the Braves in general are piggybacking their starters. So, you know, it'll be hard to tell. Maybe it'll be Kyle Wright that'll be their sixth guy. Tony Gonsolin, I think, is actually one of the safest ones because I think he's just going to be in that middle of the game, wins a vulturing role all year. But then Trevor Richards, I think, is also up there. At what point do I have to hang a Trevor Richards jersey behind me?

I think he's one of our most mentioned players this year. Watch him just be terrible. If we had a word cloud of the players we talked about the most, like Victor Robles and huge letters across the top, and then in a slightly smaller font, there's Trevor Richard's name. That's just how it goes. Spencer Turnbull's up there.

John Means gets up on the word cloud as well. Someday we're going to have that technology. It's just how it goes. Spencer Turnbull's up there. John Means gets up on the word cloud as well. Someday we're going to have that technology. It's going to be amazing. I think this is why, like, earlier this week on the Under the Radar episode of the Athletic Fantasy Baseball podcast, Nando was talking about his relief pitcher rankings and kind of going through, like, outside the guys who get saves. It was kind of tricky because it was like, here's a guy guy who gets holds and here's a guy that could be a starter and here's a guy who's a multi-inning reliever and then here's Emilio Pagan and it's like these guys all do different things and you're solving a different problem late in your draft

by taking any one of those guys for any reason it kind of made me wish that instead of just doing straight list rankings for anything we do that we did groups that were tiered based on player type, at least at a certain point on the list. Maybe after that confidence line of demarcation we talked about earlier, once that's crossed, it's like, okay, here are the upside pitchers who are breaking in this year, who are first-year starters or second-year year starters you want to get one of these guys here's the order in which we like them now here's the old boring veteran that actually makes sense because he's on a good team and he's going to get wins or whatever those labels are i just think giving a signal of what you're actually trying to accomplish by taking those guys

that might actually be more helpful than just having them at 77 78 79 80 i that's that is how i try to fashion my rankings that's exactly what i was talking about with the lines yeah like i i have groups of pitchers it's also just easier in your head to compare like pitchers and be like okay among the you know volatile young guys with tons of stuff where we don't know the innings, do I like Lizardo better or McCullers? Okay, I like Lizardo better. So that Lizardo's ahead of McCullers.

But then trying to take McCullers and comparing to Madison Bumgarner, it's like, what? It's impossible. It's a totally different situation, especially over a longer season. I think the bulk innings that someone like Bumgarner can provide are sneaky valuable. You're not worried about him missing time because of management. Obviously, that problem was adjusted for because of the pandemic.

I think we tend to underrate those accumulators especially guys who used to be great but are just kind of like okay or in some people's eyes below average in the case of bum garner i think uh i think derrick cardi's been pretty vocal about how he feels about bum garner at this stage of his career but anyway i just think the players do very different things even when they play the same position, even when they have the same role. And I think grouping them in clearer ways might actually be a more beneficial way to

provide ranks. But I think you're right. Putting those guys down in that 100 range makes sense because they're very droppable. These are mostly streaming pitchers, unless the usage is so predictable that you can basically use those guys like a starter or at least let's get to the point where you know that you're going to get two multi-inning

appearances per week you know two two plus inning appearances and that's about as much as having a good streaming pitcher because in the case of someone like richards optimal usage lowers the ratios so you get that that better era and whip ceiling and you get plenty of k's yeah you're trying to get four innings uh one run four k's zero walks and a hopefully of altered win yeah you know that's that's what you that's what you would play them for uh if you had a weekly much better situation in dailies where you can monitor their use a little bit. Or often what you can do with dailies is stack your lineup with relievers and just bring in starters when they're starting. Because starters, you have that day, you have that predictable stuff.

That's how I do my dailies in Yahoo, for example. you have that day you have that predictable stuff that's how i do my dailies in yahoo for example basically i have sprps um and relievers like all the way up and down and then i just slot in the starters on their days uh so richards would make so much sense for me um on on a couple of those teams uh for that reason but yeah and weekly it gets a little bit harder because you have to kind of almost want a two start week a two start i say in quotations you want a two appearance week at least um and you would hate to roster richards for a whole week and just get two innings two k's even if it wasn't even if he didn't give up or an earned run like if he didn't get a win it's not that valuable i noticed i was um part of this best ball draft that just started,

and it's the NFBC best ball, best ball 10 format. And looking at the way saves are valued, it's actually conceivable to take closers a little earlier in the best ball format because you can get three saves in a week. You're not getting three wins in a week, like ever, unless you're a middle reliever and things fall perfectly, right? But a starting pitcher is not going to get more than two wins in a week. So from a best ball perspective, you could take an elite reliever who does other things well and gets you three saves any given week. That's gold. That can actually be extremely valuable. It made me wonder if Josh Hader is sneaky valuable in that particular format. I know it's a very unique set of circumstances,

but I think this is one of those cases where you want to be very careful about making sure your league is designed to take advantage of some of these players. I think in the right circumstances, in most rotisserie leagues, Richards and Loaiziga and the types of guys that LB was asking about are going to be very valuable, not only when the season begins, but throughout the season. There's going to be some teams that just don't have a fit starter. They just don't have someone who's going to go out there and pitch five innings really ever. And these relievers are going to be the guys that catch the most value because of it. relievers are going to be the guys that catch the most value because of it. This is the most unknown thing for me,

is how much will it be a two- or four-week strategy and how much will they just continue to do it all season. The teams that have a fair amount of high minors' ready arms, like the Padres, they could theoretically be in a much better place to do it all year. It looks like Austin Meadows tested positive for coronavirus. Yeah. That's another. My tracker is going to get updated again. Does that mean it's a new one?

It must be a new one? He was already away. He was just being placed on the injured list. He was already away, though. He was gone for... He hasn't shown up yet? Well, I don't know if he was gone entirely. I think he was there for a little while and then gone. He was a really strange situation.

But the Rays had a bunch of guys who were absent that it just wasn't clear for a while for some of the things we've talked about. I don't know if they were breaking up workouts and then the media only saw Group A and then a bunch of guys were in Group B. Those types of things have happened. They've had a lot of players like Brendan McKay has been away. Yanni Chirinos has been away. So they look like they've...

Jose Martinez. Yeah, Jose Martinez. They've had quite a few players who've been absent from camp thus far. That would be bad. So the Padres have the arms. I think the Rays have the depth to withstand this, and hopefully it's an early flurry and they don't have to deal with it all year.

But you could continue the strategy even with the shorter roster just by kind of cycling people in and out and there there is a job now in today's front office that's basically a person who manages the options and the dl in order to keep arms fresh there is a there's a person in in a lot of front offices that's basically just like, okay, we can't bring this guy up yet until this date. We can't send this guy down until this date. We're going to put this guy in a phantom DL here and bring this guy up, and then this guy will replace him.

It's like a full-time job just to know all the rules for who can replace who and how to manage the roster and massage the roster and basically create extra roster spots out of thin air by just having these guys shoveling back and forth. We know this is the truth because the Dodgers do this, and there are other teams that do this. So we could see the Padres. They're trying to decide between

count quantrell and joey lucchese like i say pick both you know uh make them both your fifth starter and um there is a question in padres camp about which one of them it could be more likely to be able to pitch two innings twice a week. So this is exactly the kind of stuff we're talking about. Then you have Adrian Morihan, who was a starter until, I think, last year. He was the first year he was a full-time reliever. And he could piggyback with one of them. He's a lefty, I believe.

So pairing him with Cal quantrill would be really interesting and making joey lucchese a two inning guy where you you're not as uh worried about his command problems and the fact that he only has two pitches so uh i i'm watching the padres for this sort of stuff and i think a team like the padres could continue to play the shenanigans all the way into the end of September. I keep looking for a surprise indicator from a team like the Padres that, you know, Mackenzie Gore or Luis Patino or one of those guys are going to make the leap earlier than expected. And mostly that group still looks like it's going to be Spencer Howard in Philadelphia, Nate Pearson in Toronto. And after a week, it's not even going to be right away. It's yeah. And it's looks like it's going to be Spencer Howard in Philadelphia, Nate Pearson in Toronto, and after a week.

It's not even going to be right away. Yeah, but it's because five days, because of the prorated situation and what's been negotiated between the owners and the players is five days. Five days gets you another full year of team control, five days. Five days gets you another full year of team control. Or five days keeps your player from getting a full season of, what's it called? Service.

Service time. So we're going to see, especially for pitchers, you could take Peterson and Howard and just have them be your fifth starter, basically, or your sixth starter, and have them start six days into the season and say you're going down to my leagues to keep you on schedule yeah i mean it's it's a week and it's really not that big of a deal because there are some off days built in to some of the schedules early anyway so you're talking about missing one turn in the rotation which really isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things with

the first week being a partial week. Most leagues are Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Make your lineup changes on Monday, and you'll have those guys already available. You wouldn't have had them for the partial week anyway because there aren't five games in the first partial week, and they're going to be good to go by the end of the first full week. It makes it a little bit tough on leagues where you're not allowed to draft the player if he's not in the big leagues. Yeah, wrinkles like that. This has been a horrible year to be a commissioner, and I'm sure it's probably a worse year.

Shout out to all the commissioners. I have a keeper league with salaries, and it's like, so if this happens, the salaries move forward. If this doesn't happen, then we're going to freeze everything. It's brutal, and I think the people who are absolutely dealing with the worst are the programmers who are having to adjust different things. All the little designation changes,

requests for things to be handled differently. I can't imagine being a programmer right now, working in the fantasy baseball space. Because right now, normally you're finalizing football stuff. Football probably even launched for a lot of the major sites out there so you're fixing things that are breaking that you probably added to your football uh product in the downtime so uh yeah i went to uh i went on niv shah uh niv shah's podcast niv shah

started i don't know and he has a podcast with chad young and justin vibber um maybe called autobot i believe and i went on that uh podcast with them and at the end when we were off air niv was like i think i i got to get back to coding because he's got to make sure that the head-to-head leagues uh can have four concurrent matchups that was the thing that he was working working on. Head-to-head's big. A lot of work for people. In auto-new, too. Yeah, I just can't imagine. Yeah, people seem to like it.

We're, I think, going without playoffs. We're going to do multiple matchups and no playoffs. So I just think that playoffs is kind of ridiculous to think that you would just play for three weeks and then start having playoffs. Yeah, and the possibility of players, if their team is not in the mix, maybe saying, yeah, I'm good. I'm going home.

I think there could be a few players. I don't know if there are going to be a lot of players, but I think there are some players who could say, I'm going to bow out. My hamstring is bothering me, and there's three weeks left in the season. We're talking about it. I'm going to leave because of the hamstring injury, but I'm not going to come back because I'm already out bow out. My hamstring is bothering me, and there's three weeks left in the season, and we're bad. I'm going to leave because of the hamstring injury, but I'm not going to come back

because I'm already out for two weeks anyway. Yeah, I'm thinking about Chris Davis and Miguel Cabrera just being like, why am I here? Why am I doing this? I've made plenty of money already. We're just traveling around. Just putting myself at risk. This team sucks.

There aren't a lot of – the one thing that I would say is there aren't a lot of established people who made a lot of money who are on really bad teams. Can you think of more examples like that off the top of your head? No, because Pujols is on a good, because Pujols is on a good team. Pujols is on a good team. Jonathan Villar is on a bad team, but he's about to be a free agent, so I think he'll want to play. Yeah, it's only one year.

Anthony Scopani said basically, I have to play because I'm a pending free agent, which is just one of the sadder things you'll hear. But yeah, those bad teams are bad, and they've been cutting salary for a while, and so there aren't actually the established opt-outs. There's like 13 opt-outs, and 10 of them are established people who've made a ton of money. Yeah, bad contracts, bad team. Ian Kennedy, I guess, is kind of a bad contract, but that one's at least getting closer to being done and as a reliever he was effective so it's not you know it's not like

he's also hurting the team as they uh try to figure things out either like i think chris i feel bad for chris davis in baltimore man like that's just like not bad because he's super rich and everything but i just it's such a terrible situation like i can't imagine he actually wants to play but i wonder if he would rather have signed a smaller contract not like a tiny contract but just like i wonder if he'd rather if he would give up like 20 million just to not have that number be as big and not be as sort of taken. You know what I mean? Like put in such a bucket. It's going to come up forever.

You know, he's going to come up all the time. It's like one of the worst signings ever. And like, you know, he's going to be on lists, on Bleacher Report. And you know what I mean? It's like, I don't know. I wonder about that sometimes. And it's not his fault that he was offered the money. You know, like you would all, every one of us would sign that sometimes. And it's not his fault that he was offered the money. Every one of us would sign that deal.

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Hothorn.co. Smell good. It's important. All right, let's talk about points leagues, which actually kind of rolls into the auto-new stuff that you were just talking about. This question comes from Jason. He just wants us to discuss deep league points pitching his league is similar to auto new and focuses on the best innings pitched no matter how they show up so definitely not a far cry from things we've been talking about on this show it sounds like a best ball a little bit

like a best ball sort of thing you've played auto new i've wanted to play it and just haven't found my way into it somehow. It's kind of surprising that I haven't played it yet. So with a points league like that, what kinds of adjustments are you making? What other pitchers are bumping up your ranks or moving up into your queue of guys that you actually want to have in that format?

It occurs to me that my mistake, I'll have to put Tanner Roark on the ranks somehow. He slipped off. I don't know how. I would expect to put Tanner Roark in maybe around J-Hap, around 115, maybe below that, ahead of Zach Plesak at 125 in there somewhere. So not a very highly ranked pitcher, but a pitcher that in that setting could be pretty good

because you figure he's going to be out there every five days, and some days it'll be good. You know what I mean? Like he's one of those pitchers that has good stretches. So I think kind of I'd rather have Tanner Roark, for example, even at those rankings that I was mentioning, than someone like Cal Quantrill where you don't know what his role is, and you don't know if he's going to be out there every five days.

And maybe even ahead of these six-starter guys because in any given start, they won't be that valuable you know the six starter guys are more of a weekly play than they are like um because i'm not fully sure of how this how these settings work but it's possible that they'd be that rock would be a better play than these six starters depending on how best is defined and what the sample is but anybody that could have a good week i mean that's all i did with best ball was um basically just line the coffers with pitchers at the end like as much as once i had made sure that i had redundancy at all my positions um i started just filling in starting pitchers at the end just guys that could have great weeks

because that's what major league pitchers do. Yeah, it's almost like you're chasing innings on good teams and hoping for the best in some points leagues. In some cases, the scoring system rewards every out so much that just chewing up

innings ends up being more valuable than it probably should be. So I'd be really careful to make sure that you're not overlooking that group of pitchers. Jay Happ in a straight Roto League, I could see him bouncing back a little bit and actually being pretty good. There's a world in which Jay Happ somehow wins five games this year, pitches to a 370 ERA, and gets almost a strikeout per inning. That could happen.

And if that happens, he's basically free. You come away really happy. But I'm definitely, no pun intended, I come away looking for guys like that in points leagues even more than I look to them in rotisserie leagues. So really it's the bulk starters who look pretty safe in their respective rotations. Yeah, I think that's what I would agree as well.

Sometimes not super exciting, but fairly safe. Or at least cycle those guys on and off the roster at the bottom a bit more. Johnny Cueto looked fairly good in his last outing. A couple more news items rolling through. Frankie Montas is throwing hundreds on the board um and apparently has has improved his extension like he made his arms longer better stride i don't know i kind of want real data and hopefully data i can trust extension was actually one of the things that there was a fair amount of error in but But his pitching coach is saying that he's throwing it seven feet from the rubber,

and that's like six people threw the ball seven feet from the rubber last year. And one of them was Tyler Glassnow, who's the king of perceived velocity. And he's a giant. He's a giant, too. So I'm not sure how much I trust that bit, but the hundreds are good. So I'm not sure how much I trust that bit, but the hundreds are good. Evan Longoria is out with an oblique, and that's a terrible one to have in this season.

That's my main source of fear for all hitters is oblique because they didn't have their timing. They're trying to get their timing now off of major league pitching really quickly, and obliques can be nagging, and they can be a three- to four-week variety, which at this point is half the season. Anyway, for the Giants, I don't think that creates much of a job for most leagues that we're super excited about, except Wilmer Flores is maybe inching his way towards mixed league status at this point. This kind of sucks though because actually I wrote up Longoria.

His belt is hurt too. I wrote up Longoria for ads and drops this week. I'll have to either strike through it or just add a little Wilmer Flores tidbit. But Evan Longoria is actually still useful. The park scares people away. It's a bad team. But he was better than league average last year in exit velocity, 89.7 miles per hour there, 74th percentile in ex-WOBA, 78th percentile in ex-SLUG.

He doesn't strike out a ton. He's kind of like NL Kyle Seeger. No one's going to be excited about that pick, but I think he's discounted more than he should be. And he was available in a decent number of TGFBI leagues. He was available, I think, in more than 40% of those leagues. Yeah, he's oatmeal for sure. But for a 15-team league, especially, he's

rosterable. And I think because of where he would hit in the order when healthy, I think you could justify him at a 12. I think you could actually do a lot worse with your corner infield spot. First base drops off like crazy. We've talked about that before. So I'm bummed. I think you could actually do a lot worse with your corner infield spot. First base drops off like crazy. We've talked about that before. So I'm bummed because I think the oblique injury would probably make him almost unrosterable in Knicks leagues at this point.

If he's going to miss any time, you can't wait for him. There's no way you're waiting. There's no way you're waiting four weeks for Evan LaGuardia. I'll put that blurb into a draft somewhere, and then in three weeks when he's healthy, I'll just paste it right in there, save myself a few minutes. That's how the sausage is made over here

if anybody was wondering. It's a heel for Brandon Belt and he's not 100% for opening day. I wonder if there's any uh sort of deeply donovan solano love i noticed donovan solano had the uh second or third best expected batting average in baseball last year so you know you look at the 409 babbitt and you kind of say oh he didn't deserve that 330 but is there a possibility that maybe maybe he's a better hitter than the 260 projections and he could be a batting average asset? But as a right-handed infielder that is normally used just against lefties, it's a little bit hard to roster him in most leagues.

So I guess I'll stop talking about him. I mean, Mauricio Dubon's probably already owned in a lot of 15-team mixed leagues. His playing time was pretty safe anyway, but a few injuries have happened. His playing time floor is about as high as it can be at this point. I would expect it kind of to go... Flores' arm? He's been playing second for a while and first. I don't know if they want to play him at third.

Maybe Solano at third? Maybe Solano Dubano? Dub? Maybe Solano Dubano? Dubano. Solano Dubano. Solano Dubon at third. Flores at second. And with Belt out, Flores

at first, Dubon at second, and Solano at third. All of a sudden, Solano's looking like he's playing. Here's a name. I'm just looking at the depth chart over at Rotowire. This is a name of... Pablo S's looking like he's playing. Here's a name. I'm just looking at the depth chart over at Roto-Wire. This is a name of... Oh, Pablo Sandoval's there, too. He's still there, but there's a different player. I don't know much about this guy.

Zach Green is an option on the depth chart at third base. A lot of swing and miss last year at AAA, but 25 home runs in 72 games. I know that's super happy fun ball. I know it's PCL, but that's actually a lot of power and not a lot of playing time. It's a 140 WRC plus last year for him.

Big number at AA back in 2018, 162 WRC plus. He's been a little old for the level, but this is a team that will just give someone like that playing time. It makes more sense to see what Zach Green does with that playing time than to play Pablo Sandoval too much.

So at least for NL only. And even Solano, I think. Solano, at this point, even though he's a fine for them, he's 32. He's just a guy you have around. So yeah, I could see green getting a shot. I did.

I, you know, I think every team will pretend to want to win for a week. So, um, I think early on, we might see, uh,

Solano and Flores, uh, playing over green, but, um, definitely a possibility that green is playing in week two because all of our decisions will be, uh, put on hyperdrive this year. Yep, that goes for MLB teams as well.

We're all going to have to act a lot more quickly than we are accustomed to. Thanks a lot for that auto-new question, that points league question, by the way, Jason. A couple more to get to real quick. Jesse wants to know, he's switching from a daily head-to-head to a daily roto league. He just wants to avoid massive starting pitcher streaming, such as total overhauls every day. ESPN suggested a 370 innings cap.

Yahoo 500, he tried putting in a transaction cap. It only allowed him to do season long. Can't do a weekly transaction cap. So what should Jesse do to try and avoid SP streaming in his league? Where should that number be if you're going to cap innings at a certain ceiling? This is an innings cap, not an innings limit? Yeah, this is a cap to keep people from going overboard

with streaming for a daily league. I do like that for daily leagues as a way to just sort of say, hey, look, the person who just grinds this the most doesn't just win because they they spent the most time on it yeah i think i also want to allow for a certain amount like i'd rather cap the innings than the transactions because the transactions because of what we've been talking about in terms of uncertain roles bullpen days that sort of stuff you know if somebody about in terms of uncertain roles, bullpen days,

that sort of stuff. You know, if somebody wanted to kind of try and cycle through these six starters, it would be very difficult and I would actually appreciate their work. You know what I mean? And so I think I'd rather cap the, the innings than the, than the transactions. And, you know, I think a three 70 is fine. We were talking about 330 as an innings minimum, just to keep people from just doing relievers. So I think 370 makes sense as an innings maximum. Yeah, because I'm trying to think about it per week. If you have nine pitcher spots, and let's say you're going to go five or six of them are starters, you're probably looking at about five innings per start, maybe a tick more eventually. So let's just say 30 innings for those six spots, and then maybe six to 10 more from your relievers

any given week. That's like 40 innings per week. We're talking about a nine-week season, 40 times nine, 360, maybe bump it up a little more like 400. I think 400 is probably the, if you want to keep it pretty reasonable 400 is probably a good way to really level that playing field in a season like this so that's the range I think that 370 suggestion is really good if you want to go higher I wouldn't go to 500 I'd only go to 400

and like Eno said you have to have plenty of flexibility with actual moves because players are going to be disappearing left and right yeah you wouldn't want to be run out of moves with coronavirus. Yeah, exactly. I'm also a proponent of unlimited DLs for this year, if not always. Not always a fan of it, but definitely more into it for this year.

Last question. This one comes from Daniel, probably the fifth biggest name in our player word cloud. Our friend Jeff Zimmerman over at Fangraphs is reporting that Mitch Keller has been working on his fastball direction and spin as well as his change-ups effectiveness. Have you heard anything about Keller in summer camp or seen anything that would lead you to believe he can correct some of the problems he's had, especially with that fastball? Well, those are the two things he should be working on. I mean, we've talked about how we think his fastball is bad and uh the one

problem is he doesn't necessarily have so much command of the slider uh that he can go to kind of a 40 slider plan but uh if he improves the movement on the fastball he has the velocity and then maybe he can just basically out-movement his command problems. His command problems are not as bad as, say, Dylan Cease or even Josh James. So, you know, there is some chance for him to just slightly alter the fastball movement and out-stuff his problems, basically. Yeah. I mean, I think Keller versus Musgrove is still kind of the debate at the top of that rotation. Like, who do I like better? Prices are pretty similar. I think I'm more likely to take the chance on Keller, even though I think Musgrove has the safer floor of the two,

which is, again, where the rankings... You might draft against your own rankings, or you might pass the guy you have higher to take the guy you have lower, just based on what you're trying to accomplish at that portion of a draft. I'm excited. We're moving into this last draft weekend, our Tuesday show. I think we're going to probably do a lot of predictions for the upcoming season, some bold.

My bold predictions will come out. I've got two lukewarm, not very bold predictions that didn't make the cutting room floor, so I'll make those on Tuesday. Yeah, look forward to the lukewarm predictions from Eno. The ones that weren't good enough for his article will make the those on Tuesday. Yeah, look forward to the lukewarm predictions from Eno. The ones that weren't good enough for his article, we'll make the pod on Tuesday. I didn't mean it to come out that way.

It's all right. We'll have some fun with it. If you're enjoying our show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it, we'd really appreciate it if you took the time to do that. Thanks to the many of you who've done that. If you have a friend who would like the show, tell your friend.

I mean, people are getting back into baseball again, not just the diehards. So we appreciate everybody who's been listening to us, especially in the really slow times in April and May and most of June. If you're not already a subscriber to The Athletic, you can get that subscription for free for 30 days at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. If you sign up for a subscription do that through one of eno's pieces or through the link on the podcast page we really appreciate

that if you want to reach us for a future email rates and barrels at theathletic.com is the best way to do that on twitter he's at you know saris i am at derrick van riper looking forward to doing a sunday waiver pod with michael beller this, so be sure to check that out on the Athletic Fantasy Baseball podcast as well. Eno, enjoy your weekend. Yeah, thank you. And honestly, to everybody, especially the ones that stuck with us during the bad times, I say very heartily, thanks for listening.