Rates & Barrels - How About New Year's on July 4th?

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

Rundown7:28 The Difficulty of Predicting Anything15:03 Maintaining Health in Restarting MLB21:06 More than Escapism28:05 The Impact of Changing Reliever Usage41:41 A New Project Goat 2.0 Winner!46:31 Long-Term Strikeout Rates (Update)57:58 Beer of the WeekFollow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Raids and Barrels, episode number 93. It is May 7th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris on this episode. We'll take a quick look at some of the latest happenings in the KBO, and we'll talk about something that Major League Baseball has to be thinking a lot about as they try to come up with a plan for resuming play in North America. What happens if a player tests positive? Eno's had a chance to speak to Dan Straley, who's pitching in Korea right now, about what happens in the KBO if something like that unfolds. We'll dive into that.

We're going to touch on a topic that came up a couple of weeks ago on a show, long-term strikeout rates. I haven't done complete research yet, but I've taken a look at some numbers and have seen some interesting trends already as I've dug into that. We'll also talk about reliever usage, and we've got a revision to the Project Goat standings to pass along as well. We'll close things out with some Beer of the Week talk as well. Happy Thursday, Eno. How's it going for you today? I am a little bit chippy, I have to say.

I'm a little angry. I have to say, I'm a little angry. My biological father, who is in the classification of didn't bother, for most of his life has left me alone, and I've been happy with that. I've had a stepdad who I call dad. I've had many male role models. I feel pretty okay about that part of my life. I've even considered, you know, reaching out to him. And I've, I've read some, some stories about people who have reached out and I've just thought, you know what, we don't know each other. Um, you know,

I'd mostly just want to know what his medical history was. Um, and at this point I'm 40. So I'm deep in that medical history. i don't think i need him to tell me about what's happening to my body at this point so i've kind of decided it probably wouldn't be that much he doesn't have that much to do yes uh you know with the nature involved he's not half of me um in any case i've closed that book for most of, for mostly in my life. He went out and wrote a book about me. That is very unexpected.

He went out and wrote a book about me in German, The American Son. And there's some things are so infuriating about this. I don't even know how to order them. So the book is the process of him coming to find me. I think the most infuriating thing is I know he didn't try to find me. The entire premise of the book is a lie. It's a lie.

We have mutual friends in Germany that have my information, and he knows where they... They still live where they lived that many years ago. He could have found those people. He put them in the book, too. But he could have found those people. He could have found my mom. He could have found me. He knows... And then here's how I know he didn't try to find me.

Because he left my name in the book. He left where I live in the book. He left where I live in the book. He left what I do in the book. If you know those three things, if you do a Google search, my email is like the second result. You are very publicly accessible. That's so... The only thing that's given me peace is the book was destroyed by Der Spiegel, the magazine that reviewed it. That's how my mom found this and all this stuff.

But it was destroyed as basically the casual ramblings that amount to nothing more than I have a son. Those are the cramped, casual ramblings, the cramped, casual ramblings of a self-professed preacher that amount to nothing more than I have a son. And there's a great part in it where it says the first rule of writing is show, don't tell, uh, this author should learn that rule. So, uh, you know, people, uh, people reach out to me and, um, it's,, and it's interesting to sort of encounter other people's issues, family issues, and how this relates to theirs.

Interesting is the wrong word. I feel a togetherness with other people that have had issues like this in their family, and I appreciate the reaching out. But the reason that I emoted about this reason, I'm telling it now. And the reason I said anything on Twitter is because I'm angry. I'm angry. Like, it's not because I feel slighted or whatever, like I'm angry that he did this like lazy thing. And then he left my name in the book. It's like, if he'd actually called me, I would have taken the call and tried to be gracious because, you know, we all make mistakes and, you know, maybe he's a good guy. I don't know. And, you know, we could have at least had a phone conversation. I don't think I would have necessarily invited him back into my life

completely, but, you know, I would have talked to him and then he could have written this book more truthfully, you know, and then he could have written this book more truthfully. Then I might not even be that bothered if you put my name in it, but just put my name in it and not actually try. It's just, whew. Anyway, so yeah, I'm a little bit chippy. Understandable, given the circumstances. It'll probably bring us to some other interesting places along the way but

i'm really sorry that that turned out the way it did though because that's very disappointing right i mean to to have what looked like a seedling of effort turn out to be just 230 pages of and thirty pages of rambling and lies basically that's terrible oh my god and if he really did in the book he apparently is like standing in Menlo Park if he really did get that far

and didn't go the rest of the way I guess it's just sad and maybe I should have some pity on him but I don't believe it. It just doesn't seem like at this point, finding you in that circumstance is hard enough to have fallen short. No, not at all.

I was looking at image searches. If you do an image search, the second image that shows up is from an interview I did in uh menlo park with the local um with the local with the local publication it's like come on dude uh but anyway so that's a that's a crazy thing that is an unusual uh twist in our unusual times that, frankly, I wouldn't have predicted that. But I think, if anything, these last two months have really driven home the idea that we really can't predict anything. We can try to predict things, and sometimes we can end up being somewhat close to the right outcome. But a lot of things are impossible to predict.

And they will always be impossible to predict despite our greatest efforts. You know, and I think that's actually a really interesting way to bring that back to what we do because I think there's pressure on people in the fantasy sports industry and in baseball and in sports industries in general to make predictions i mean there's always the pre-season predictions and um you know there's sometimes a like a a calling uh what is it called like when you like call the task so like like i said during the astros and Yankees series last year that I thought that that was probably the World Series.

And I was wrong. I mean, the World Series was really good and the Nationals won. So I was wrong. I'm not saying, I'm not trying to weasel out of being wrong, but it does point to how hard it is to predict these things, how there's pressure on us to do these things, and how, I don't know, is it useful?

Obviously, we help people make better decisions, I think. But to make very specific predictions, I think that what we try to do here is point to the best research point to the best sort of strategies and the best ways to think about things and not necessarily give you a list of names you know um because it is it's so impossible and that's why one of my favorite things to do every year is bold predictions because it's like i'm to try and do galaxy brain stuff here. I'm going to just like, since predictions are all useless anyway, let me just do something weird and predict that the Reds win the Central. You know, or that this random pitcher wins the Cy Young.

You know what I mean? It's like, why not? It'll be an exercise in trying to predict the stuff we can't predict. You can't predict ball, you know? And you can't predict life. It would be boring if we could, though, in both cases. If you knew exactly how your life was going to go, it would be boring. And if you knew exactly how any season would go, it would be boring.

It wouldn't be fun to play fantasy baseball. It wouldn't be fun to be a fan of baseball if you knew the outcomes that could accurately predict them time after time, right? The book from Back to the Future, The Almanac, if you had that, that would take so much joy out of experiencing the game. Oh, and here's a way that you can actually really physically feel this. When we're showing these replays of old games, it just doesn't have the same juice, right? You're like, oh, yeah, Johan Santana throws a no-hitter. It's awesome. It's still fun to re-watch it but it's not anything

like i remember i was actually at i was covering the the fresno state bulldogs against the uh stanford cardinal and i was at a game where aaron judge hit two massive taters off of marco pel and i stopped watching that game because johan santana was about to throw the first no-hitter in Mets history. And I was glued to my computer in the press box at Stanford watching that game, just like, you know, holding on every at-bat. And, you know, I remember that single that should have been from Holiday, right? I think Matt Holiday hit a single down the line that should have been a single, but they called it foul. I remember all that stuff, but watching it again, I was like,

oh yeah, dude, Johan looks tired. They should have taken him out. Yeah, I mean, re-watching that probably brings back a 4 or a 5, but when it happened in the moment, you reached an 11. I mean,

like you broke the scale because you'd never seen anything like that before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even the, um, 20 K games,

you're, you're like, wow, it's a lot of strikeouts. Yeah. The carry, the carry would 20 strikeouts, right?

Like that game. I remember when that happened, it was like, Whoa, that nothing that we're never going to see that again. And we've seen some kind of similar stuff since then. But even when you rewatch it, you're almost sad because you know the ending. When you don't know the ending, you can enjoy the middle. You can enjoy some of the peaks a little more. And with Carrie Wood in particular, they're interviewing somebody.

They're interviewing an actor during one of the breaks. He says, oh, I think the Cubs are really going to put it together this year. We've got some veterans. We've got some young guys. Kerry Wood looks like the real deal. And you're like, oh. You know what I mean? Like what could have been.

But when you're in that moment, you're like, oh, what could be? And that was 20 years ago yesterday. Not 20 years ago yesterday. 22 years ago yesterday. I could do math. I still know what year it is, Eno. I might not know what day it is. I don't know.

But I do know that it's 2020. I know this is the worst actual year that I have been on the planet. I know that. I'm certain of that. I'm not sure how much worse it can get. We should have a year draft. We're drafting everything. Let's just have a year draft.

2020, last pick. If it wasn't already locked in, the murder hornets thing was just like proof. Like, hey, there are more ways this can keep taking hard turns so but i did learn on one of our our calls earlier this week that the the murder hornets if you haven't heard about these these hornets that they shred bees and if you know anything about plants and flowers and whatnot that bees are actually very important to everything. So bees being shredded by hornets is actually bad for us for a lot of reasons. But in Japan, I guess there are some bees that figured out how to stop the murder hornets. They swarm the murder hornet and it burns to death.

It overheats and dies, which is... Yeah, they have to band together and overcome. Yeah, that's a really drastic counteraction, but necessary. A metaphor. A metaphor for us. I guess it is. A metaphor for our lives.

Together we can overcome 2020. If we just all swarm around 2020, we can just... We can declare it over. We can declare it 2021. It will become 2021 in no time. Hey, we're in May. That year is dead.

We're getting there. We're getting there. How about New Year's on July 4th? If there's any way we could just hit the fast-forward button to 2021, I think 9 out of 10 people, if not 10 out of 10, would say, yep, hit the button. Let's start over. Let's try again.

Let's do it. Blow on the cartridge. Put it back in. Yep. Let's make it happen. But, okay, so in all of this, again, we're laughing about it, but things are always unpredictable. We realize the weight of that in times like these.

And that's where getting back to baseball, the KBO and the light at the end of the tunnel that we referred to, we're not quite as far along. We're not even close to as far along, but we're getting close to the point where Major League Baseball is supposed to provide a proposal to the players for how things are going to resume and i think the the lingering question or at least a secondary question but primary concern has been health and safety of everybody involved along and what happens if a player or someone on the field a manager would probably be included in this group too what happens if one of those people tests positive and in the kbo they do have a plan for this and you've spoken to dan straley who's pitching in korea this season what did the kbo put in place for a scenario in which a player tests positive for covid19 yeah i can't speak with full authority on this because dan straley himself said that uh he was kind of putting his head in the sand and just trying to put one foot

in front of the other and not worry about that. He said literally because, you know, worrying about stuff reduces your immune system. I'd rather, uh, be healthy and happy, but he did talk about what he's heard and he kind of put that together with some speculation and was kind of talking about,

uh, what was possible. And, um, I think that it's, I've talked about how we're going to, we're all going to sort of figure this out together. But the general idea is that if someone tests positive, there's kind of a pause on all of baseball for a day or two, as they figure out who, they basically administer tests to anybody who'd been near the person that test positive.

And then they quarantine that group. So the question then is, and Strayley pointed out, like, if it was an outfielder, like, I may not have come anywhere near him. Or after an F7, the outfielder threw the ball back to the pitcher, and the pitcher rubbed his face, not thinking about it. Spat on it, yeah. Again, I'm not trying to be an alarmist. Even in that circumstance,

there's at least a very low-risk situation in play there. Yeah, but you can do the testing then, basically. I think that basically the whole team would get tested you'd find out how many there have to be i think the biggest part of the plan is actually how how many constitutes uh there's gonna be a threshold and the threshold like let's say five people test positive on a team is that dl worthy or uh does the does all the baseball stop for two weeks until those those people are healthy again you know what i mean uh that's the question so the question is where's the

threshold and that's going to be something that's going to be argued about between the players association and the teams because each one will have a different sort of perspective on it most people will want to play i think uh but a team like an owner may say well dude i don't want to play if I'm missing my, you know, six of my players. That's like too many injuries at one time. That'll, that'll cost us and wins, you know? So there's going to be some argument on what that number is, but there's going to be some

number that's like, okay, if it's two people that we're going to DL them and play on, if it's six people, whatever. So we'll have to stop all baseball for two weeks. So that's I think the feeling out process that is still left to be. But I think some people are acting like no one in baseball has thought about this or that's impossible to do. And I don't think those two things are true. I think it's possible to figure out something that makes everyone, I mean, nobody's going to be totally happy. It's 2020.

Nobody's going to be totally happy. Also true. But if we can all accept a certain amount of sadness, maybe that can work. The other thing is, how do we procure enough testing for baseball? You know, this is a sort of regional thing but i know that um anybody here in santa clara who wants a test can get one um and i think the testing has been really ramped up and i've mentioned before that like uh syria in in um in italy uh is attempting to overcome this by basically buying five tests for the general

public for every test they want for themselves. And baseball has the resources to do something like that. It doesn't have to be five. I mean, I think even two or three means that they're a net positive, basically, in terms of testing for everybody. And if they buy enough tests to test all the people that work in baseball, and then also buy enough tests to basically two or three tests for people that are just in the surrounding communities, then they're being, I think, a net positive in that regard, even if they're taking tests out of the stream of available tests. So I've seen a lot of sort of like focusing on those two aspects and as if they were hurdles we couldn't overcome. And I don't agree. I think those hurdles are overcomable. Yeah, I get the sense that there have been a lot of conversations about what happens in this scenario and what happens in that scenario.

happens in that scenario because we've said this before there's so much at stake financially that a full shutdown again after restarting is something that major league baseball will try to take as many precautions as possible to avoid and even the scenario you described where if a handful of players on one team tested positive i guess i'm still enough, even though I think there is a legitimate component where teams in the league want everyone to be safe, that they would still play missing key players because having the games on TV and the importance of that revenue is so great that they would just try to forge ahead with whatever players they can pull together to keep the schedule moving. Yeah, that's another last thing I wanted to sort of talk about was I've seen a lot of people say that the only reason to start baseball is escapism or some sort of national psyche thing.

And I don't think that's true. When I think of restarting baseball, I think of the wonderful lady that I say hi to every day who checks me in at Oracle Park when I go through security there, or the dudes out front at the A's game, or different vendors that I've come into contact with, or Mikey Thalboom, who's like the clubhouse attendant for Oakland. These are not rich people. These are people who are not getting paid, and they're hurting. And maybe if we had a more robust social safety network in this country, um, it'd be easier to continue, uh, these lockdowns indefinitely. Um, but, um, you know, one in five kids right now is going hungry in this, in this country. Um, and, uh, and schools are a part of that. So, you know, given what we have, there are difficult

choices to be made. And I will not hector or admonish anybody on either side of this. And I hope to sort of find my way through the middle on the data that's out there and on the best choices we can make. And so I doubt that... I just wanted to push back a little bit. This is not just about the psyche. This is about the economy as well. This is about people who are suffering. Yeah, there's definitely a major financial component to this. And both are true. There's a nice escapism outlet for not just people like you and I who depend upon the leagues existing and running in order to remain employed, but for people who need something to do in the evening, something to help pass the time. You can't keep re-watching Tiger King. Yeah, right. And a collective thing. The thing about Tiger King, that's interesting. We can all make jokes about it, but there's no impetus in today's modern world for us to all watch at the same time.

No, no, there's not. Like, we just don't have schedules for that. We can all stream it. We can all get it here. We can do that. Sports is the only thing where, you know, we have our collective eyes turned to one thing at the same time. And that sort of feeling, I don't know, I'd hate to denigrate it too much because it's like, you know, that's when you go on Twitter and you're like, oh, crap. And there's like someone shares a gif of the home run or screw that guy. You know what I mean? Like it's a real release and we're all kind of feeling pent up. And I think the KBO starting up has helped that a little bit. But it's in the middle of the night.

The timing makes it very difficult for all of us to have that shared experience. If it was a coverage assignment for me, it'd be very different. It's not. It's just an extra thing to try and get to when I can. It's just an extra thing to try and get to when I can. I end up watching replays, basically, and recorded ones, which is more like watching Tiger King. Yeah, unfortunately, it is a little bit more like watching Tiger King. But we're glad to have it back.

Nonetheless, I saw Preston Tucker got on the board with a big night, had a home run this week. Aaron Altair hit one. It is fun to see those box scores and to see highlights and to see a few bat flips sprinkled in to the mix as well. Changmo Koo. Not only is Changmo, like, I love that name. It's a really good name. I'm all in on Changmo. It's a really good name.

I'm all in on Changmo. He had an interesting history because he's always had the good strikeout rate, but his homer rate has fluctuated. And with the deader ball, I thought he would have a great year. And his first start was eight strikeouts against two walks in, I think, seven or eight scoreless. So He had a great night last night. Yeah, it's been fun to play along. Future big leaguer, Changmo Koo?

Maybe. He has the slider. Right now, the emphasis on the slider in the big leagues is such that having a good slider, having decent velocity, um, you know, that, that puts you ahead of a lot of people. So, uh, I think maybe, um, I was talking to a journalist who covers, um, I think it was the bears. And, uh, he did tell me that the average velocity over there is 88 or 89. So the, the thing that you're looking for, velocity over there is 88 or 89.

So the thing that you're looking for if you're watching is you want to see those 155s. You want to see those 154s and 155s. That means the person's throwing 93, 94. And that's kind of a median barrier for entry for getting to the big leagues these days. Yeah, that has become the threshold in recent years. So keep an eye out for that. And even still, replays are better than nothing.

I'm happy we have that. And for people who have been getting up in the middle of the night, I'm stoked for you that you're able to do that. I don't have the – it's not drive. I just – yeah. The rest of my day doesn't work in a way where I can push myself to do it, which maybe it's a discipline problem, but nevertheless, it's a small problem. You lack the discipline to stay up till four in the morning.

Yeah. It's a weird way to say it, right? Teenage you is shaking his finger at you. He's always disappointed in me, but that punk should get off my lawn. He's a jerk anyway. Get a haircut. If you're bored in the house,

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So go to manscaped.com today and use the code THEATHLETIC. Alright, you know, mailbag questions have been great lately, and they continue to provide different paths for us to talk about players and topics. This one from this week that we want to feature came from George. He writes, Bill James wrote an excellent essay on the optimal

use of relief pitchers in his historical baseball abstract. Haven't read in a while, but I do remember the creation of the save stat dramatically changed how relief pitchers in its historical baseball abstract. Haven't read in a while, but I do remember the creation of the save stat dramatically changed how relief pitchers were used. If you go back to before saves were a thing, a few pitchers had 20 win, 20 save seasons. Think about how a pitcher would be used to make that result possible. It seems like the Rays have fully implemented the approach he talked about.

What are the implications to fantasy baseball if other teams adopt this approach? Yeah. There's a couple of resources I just wanted to point to. Alex Fast at Pitcher List has done a couple pieces in a row called, Were Drafting Saves. And it's sort of a fascinating look into how, and we've talked about this on the show, about how fewer and fewer relievers are getting 90% of the team saves or fewer and fewer relievers are getting the bulk of their team saves and more and more relievers are getting 5 to 10 saves a year.

saves and more and more relievers are getting five to 10 saves a year. Um, and that's part of my Diego Castillo infatuation. Um, you know, I've got tons of shares of that dude because, you know, he throws a hundred miles an hour, uh, with, with great movement, uh, hits like a 94 mile an hour slider. Like, yeah, I'm on board, dude. Um, and I think of a, uh, also, um, this table that I made on fan graphs, a very simple table where I looked at, uh, by team, um, starters innings pitched. Um, and since we're looking backwards and we're looking at 162 games, um, you know, just looking at the bulk, you can see who is emphasizing the bullpen more than others. At the top are the Angels, and then you've got the Rays, Blue Jays, Mariners,

Yankees, Brewers, teams that you kind of expected, peppered in with a couple others. But if you then slide over and look at the quality of the starting rotation, and you can kind of take the Angels and Blue Jays out. The Angels, Blue Jays, and Mariners, they didn't have their starters go very far because their starters weren't very good. They had bad starting pitching.

But the Rays got 17, 18 wins out of their starting rotation and still used them the second least. The Yankees had a good starting rotation and used them the fifth least and the Brewers are up there. So, you know, the Red Sox, the Rangers, the Padres, like there are a bunch of teams now that are focusing on that type of usage. And what does it mean? It means, um, you know, two or three people can get saves. Uh, it means more wins are available, uh, to, to the bullpen. Um, you know, for example, the Brewers had a good starting rotation, but only got 44 wins, uh, from their, uh, from their starting pitching. Um, whereas,

you know, the, uh, Nationals got 66 wins from their starters, and the Astros got 79 wins from their starters. So there's definitely some wins to be vultured, and that's going to happen more this season. And what it means for fantasy, I think, is just don't invest heavily in saves. I mean, it's kind of an old school conclusion to come to. It's something that I've done for a long time. Another piece

that I want to recommend is Al Melchior, our own Al Melchior on Fangraphs, writing that two out of every five saves in the NFBC last year came from the waiver wire. So, get a top guy and then just get guys, get good relievers, maybe on these teams that spread the saves around.

And so I think that it speaks to Rafael Montero on the Rangers and Diego Castillo on the Rays. Maybe even someone like Austin Adams on the Mariners. And then Knievel on the Brewers. Well, and I think the Brewer situation is one where they've shown us a willingness to do it kind of the Rays way, just to borrow something conceptually from George's question. You have some teams who are willing to use their best reliever in the most important spot and not worry about the save. And that's the right way to manage a bullpen. I mean,

this is something that has been written about on fan graphs and other places for 10 years now, at least. And yes, it makes fantasy more difficult but we would all agree if we were managing teams and trying to win baseball games that's how we'd want to run the team yeah it does also have implications for starting pitching i'm working on a piece about what what is an ace And I was talking to Adam Adovino, and he was like, you know,

pitching on the Yankees, think about Ian Happ. He could go five innings of one-run ball, and the expected numbers, like the sort of expected strength of the next pitcher, of a reliever, would outpace what you would

expect from Ian Happ in that sixth inning every time. Right. And that sort of calculation is being made more mathematically, um, and more aggressively by almost every team. Um, you know, the Braves have Alex Anthopoulos as the manager, as the general manager now. In the last four years, they don't have a single closer that has gotten over 90% of the team saves, over 80% of the team saves, over 70% of the team saves. They have one reliever in the last four years that has gotten over 60% of the team saves. And so remember that when you're looking at Will Smith or Mark Melanson. Sure, buy one, but don't spend. That's what's made Will Smith signing there so frustrating is the concern that based on what they've said with Melanson beginning the season

as the closer that even if they use a traditional closer, Smith's not the guy right away. And it could take a couple of weeks, it could take a couple of months, and it may never happen where it switches, or they could just be one of those teams that's falling in line with the new way of handling the bullpen, where Smith's probably going to work the 7th and 8th a lot of days when he pitches, because that's when the most difficult situation comes up late in the game.

But there will be some times where he pitches the 9th because that's when the 2-3-4 hitters are coming up. Yeah. And Shane Green has some pretty silly splits. Let me see if I can find this easily. But, you know, if he's just facing a righty, let's see what his numbers were last year.

Last year he had a 210 Woba against righties and a 324 against lefties. How does that translate into other kinds of stats? Let's see here. Against righties, he gave up.9 homers per nine. Against lefties, 1.5 homers per nine. He

had a 3-5-2 ERA FIP against righties, a 4-2-1 against lefties. So he's really good against righties. So he could get a save where they've already used somebody earlier, and there's a bunch of righties coming up in the ninth inning. And Melanson is hurt, or they want Shane Green's velocity. And then think of Luke Jackson. Luke Jackson is a really good pitcher. And I think in Atlanta, some fans were upset about some of the dinks and dunks that led to some blown saves. But if he's pitching in the middle innings,

he's going to have a fair amount of wins. I think him and Chris Martin and Darren O'Day are going to have five, six, seven wins, I think. So I think the thing that's a little bit different, though, about this era with the Rays using the opener, the 20 win, 20 save seasons, those probably don't happen because if you're an opener, you're not going to get a win.

You're not eligible. You're not going to get a win. You're not eligible. You're not going to get it. But what I think you are going to see is teams that do that are going to have saves split up like the Rays do. The way using an opener, I think, makes it the biggest fantasy impact

is it turns Ryan Yarbrough into like a top 30 fantasy pitcher. That's not a thing that happens if you use Ryan Yarbrough like a traditional starter. If he begins the game and you try to force him through the lineup a third time and he gets that massive third time to the order penalty, the ratios fall apart.

He's in a position where he's not winning as many games. Whereas if you give him four innings as a follower, put the opener in front of him, he can get those wins he can give you elite ratios and his stuff will play up to the point where he's also going to give you an above average or at least an average strikeout rate so because the usage is optimal you get unexpected better results from otherwise difficult to roster players or guys that you would use a lot less if they were handled in a more traditional sort of way.

Yeah. Yeah, and last year, Lou Jackson had nine wins and 18 saves. Roll that back to five saves, but what kind of a value would a reliever have with a 3-2 ERA, 13 strikeouts per nine, eight wins and 5 saves. There's value there. Yes, that's optimal staff filler if you know it's going to happen that way, but I think it's so

hard to predict it. In retro drafts like the 82 and the 90 draft that I've done, when you can see it after the fact, it's really valuable and you build around it. When you're trying to project it for the future because of the way those stats work, it's not quite as viable as you'd like it to be. Sometimes a reliever with an iffy year will get a bunch of wins

because a closer that blew a game will get a win after he lets the team tie it up. So that's why Luke Jackson had nine wins last year, is because he let other teams tie it up some. That's part of it. But the other part of it is, if you want to try and predict these things, is that the wins come from good teams with good bullpens. Here, I just have the list of reliever wins last year. John Gant led them on the Cardinals with 11 wins.

He could do something similar again this year because he's kind of like the fifth reliever on a good team that will put him in a tie game, and he's a decent pitcher, keeps the game close, and he wants the rest of the bullpen to be good to actually finish that game out and win, right? So you've got Gant on the Cardinals, Workman on the Red Sox because he was kind of in and out of different roles, but he had a really good season.

Luke Jackson, I think, decent bullpen, decent team. Marcus Walden, decent bullpen, decent team. Marcus Walden, decent bullpen, decent team. Daniel Hudson, Junior Guerra, Ryan Yarbrough, follower. Craig Stammen, decent bullpen, decent team. Matt Albers, another brewer. Seth Lugo. Lugo. So I would be looking for, you know, if I was looking for the kind of five, you know, six win, five save guy, I would be looking at like Seth Lugo types and Diego Castillo and Luke Jackson and kind of like guys who are behind the guys who get drafted. And I think there would be

almost any league, maybe not 12, but in a a 15 team league those are fine final relievers uh final players uh to to pick you you put that kind of guy on your on your team and that's the kind of guy that you accrue some stuff early on and then you drop them for a full-time closer when the waiver wire produces one yeah and sometimes those guys become full-time closers like taylor Rodgers last year probably would have fit that description pretty well, and he just became the guy in Minnesota. So it's often a split between a few wins and a few saves, good ratios and Ks, but then occasionally you get lucky and you get 20 or 25 saves because things shift.

That's just how it goes. George sent us another email. Pretty simple one. Subject, lips that touch Coors Light. Body will never touch mine. Well, I can't kiss George. Same.

I can't either. A lot of Coors Light in... The kid that I just yelled at to get off my lawn was drinking a Coors Light. Playing some flippy cup. He had a 30-pack in his left hand, then he had this crushed can in the other. And he was looking for a Beirut table because that's all he cared about. I do have a mea culpa to another piece of mail that we've gotten.

And I did run GOAT2 incorrectly. I don't know how it happened. Four scores just kind of ported over from ERA to WIP for some reason. I don't know how it happened. I apologize. We do have a new winner. Sean T. is second. Sean T. and Kevin H. are second with Monroe's Reform Doctrine. When I re-ran it, they lost by seven points to Scott E. and his Eggs and Woe Bacon version two.

in Woe Bacon version 2. So I just wanted to apologize and highlight Scott E.'s excellent work. I didn't give him enough points in whip. I gave him 30 or 20 points too few in whip. And that's just my fault. One of the things that Scott E. did better than Sean T. was a focus on batting average. He had 225 points to Shanti's 172.

Let's see here. I've got his open here. So he had Joe Maurer as a catcher helping him with batting average. Albert Pujols with a.359. Miguel Cabrera at CI with.348. He also had Robin Yowt, but he used Brett Boone from the Mariners. That was a big season. Oh, you remember that season?

.331 and 37 homers. Brett Boone. He also used Jose Canseco, Larry Walker, Barry Bonds. Albert Bell from the White Sox in 96. Hit.328 with 48 homers and 11 stolen bases and 148 RBI. And he also used that Sammy Sosa 1998 season, which has been common across some of the top ones. He also did the Icon Gambit.

And a lot of the winning teams used Blake Snell in 2018. Yeah. You know what? The White Sox were pretty underutilized. I don't even know if underutilized is the appropriate word. I think they were the least used team. Yeah. They were frequently ignored.

Padres or White Sox, one of the two. I just had a flashback to I had an Albert Bell White Sox jersey in eighth grade. I think it was after I lived in Illinois for one year, and I really wish I still had that jersey. It might be the reason why I was carrying cases of Coors Light around, shotgunning beers as I got older. It was fun. Is it fair to call him irascible? I remember him being kind of like argumentative a little bit. I just remember the cork bat thing.

Trucking Fernando Vina. Yeah. That was when he was with Cleveland. There's a funny back story on that that I never knew. But I think Davey Nelson, who for years was on the Brewers broadcast, he passed away a year or two ago now, but he was a coach at the time, and earlier in the game, Davey, who by every account is one of the nicest people in baseball,

he actually got on Albert for not running out of ground ball like prior to this and then it is next at bat that happened um so that was kind of an odd twist like wow like that's a i never would have expected davy nelson to have a tie to that story with albert bell basically just running over fernando vina which a lot of people probably remember that play. It was pretty well highlighted at the time. I can picture Albert Bell's swing in my head, too. A way better player than he gets credit for because of a lot of the things that we're talking about right now that kind of overshadowed some of the production.

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back at the prospect strikeout rates for Chris Bryant compared to what he's done over the course of his big league career that would stand out as a surprise George Springer is a prominent example of this to a guy that when he was coming through the Astros system it was always well he's probably going to strike out 28 or or 30% of the time. And you're going to get a low batting average. But he'll walk and he'll steal bases. I missed on him. I think everybody kind of did, though, right?

I think there's two things that I'm starting to hone in on as I build this out. I want to find the outliers like that and figure out how they broke the mold how they got away from the trends and i also want to find specific results and say okay normally usually what we can expect is if you struck out 22 of the time at triple a you're going to strike out 27 of the time in the big leagues whatever that number actually is right i want I want to know that, but I also want to drill into the outliers and figure out, are there certain types of hitters who are more likely to improve over time in the big leagues or more likely to even stagnate in the big leagues? Because you're going to see every possible combination. But guys like Bryant and Springer have really kind of jumped off the page as some of our bigger outliers over the years in this regard. And let me see.

Bryant had big strikeout rates in the minors? Bigger in the minors than what he's been doing now in the big leagues. Initially in the big leagues, he was kind of following that same pattern. But both him and Springer struck out 30% of the time the first year. Right. Came in high and then brought it down and had been even better than they were in the minors, which, again, isn't something I would have necessarily expected at the time when they were in the minors. Yeah, it is weird.

Have you found any sort of patterns? I'm just in the initial phases of it. So mostly just bringing it up to remind people that it's something that I care about, that I'm digging into. And if anyone out there is listening and has done some research like this already, please direct my attention to it. Just because I would like to read it and look at the methods and see if there's anything I can do to possibly improve upon them. And advance things if it's already been started somewhere else. But yeah, even like Uli Gurriel, he wasn't in the minors very long. I'm looking at what he had, 18% high A, 25% double A, 21% triple A. Are those rehab assignments though for him?

I don't think he was really in the minors at all. 10.6% in the big leagues. That's a massive drop. 10.6% in the big leagues. That's a massive drop. Yeah. And what I can think of, I immediately thought of this piece by Chris St. John on Beyond the Box Score called Success Rates for Prospects based on walkout strikeout rates. But you're not quite asking the same question because for all intents and purposes, all the guys we mentioned are successes, right? But there's a difference in fantasy. We almost want the fantasy success rate, which is a higher threshold. So there's a difference between what if George Springer had continued to strike out 30% of the time and had been a guy who kind of oscillated between two 30 and two 50 every year and was just not quite the guy he is now.

Right. And you know, that those two things are different for fantasy and it's, it's really important to kind of figure out like, will Keston heroes strike our way to go down this year because he's more like George Springer or will that continue to stay high? this year because he's more like George Springer or will that continue to stay high? Um, so the one thing that I would say that is interesting about this research is that he put people in bins. And so, um, he looked at, um, you know, how productive were people that had a low walk rate,

how productive were people that had a low strikeout rate how you know and that sort of deal um and um you know he put them into like low walk rate low strikeout rate how 67% were busts. High walk rate, high strikeout rate, 70% were busts, which is, I think, surprising. There's plenty of people where you'd say, oh, look, he has plate discipline. That's good. But some of the truisms are true. he has played different. That's good. Um, uh, but what, some of the truisms are true,

low walk rate, high strikeout rate, 86% bust. Right. That makes sense that that'd be a very high bust rate category. That's your, uh, like I'm trying to think of, is it Josh bitters?

Who was the, um, the Cubs prospect, uh, that hit the ball real hard and ran real well, but just had a high strikeout rate and a low walk rate? It wasn't Vitters. It's around the same time. Vitters is strange, though, because he does fit the pattern of guy that didn't strike out at all,

really, in the minors relative to then getting to the big leagues, striking a ton and he didn't get many chances in the big leagues either like there was a a lot of hey what could he have done if he actually got the chance and i look back at some glove first players over the years brandon crawford probably a good example of this when you provide above average or excellent defense at a position where it's hard to find that, you get the benefit of more reps. And more reps in some cases maybe bring you to a better floor. It might take a longer time to get there, but I don't know if Brandon Crawford, for most people as a prospect, was ever going to get to the level we saw in 2015. That was the peak offensive season, a 21-homer season, especially in that park. He was really just an all-glove, no-bat shortstop for the first two and a half seasons in the big leagues.

And then things started to click a little for him in 2014 before that 2015 season. Yeah. Yeah. And some of the – I figured out who I was thinking about. It was Brett Jackson. But he actually had decent walk rates. But he never made it as big a leader. And his AAA was, you know, 10% walk rate, 34%, 33% strikeout rate.

So, like, I wonder – I just had a thought. 34-33% strikeout rate. I wonder if some of this stuff won't be obvious in the numbers because I'm thinking about the difference between the minor leagues and the major leagues, and one of the things is velocity. And I just wonder if some of these guys do well against velocity,

but do have some trouble against slop. And in AAA, you might see a fair amount of starters like Jason Vargas types that are kind of trying to hold on and come back that don't throw great velocity, but throw a lot of slop. So you may have a high strikeout rate there. Then you come to the big leagues, and your first year,

you just have a high strikeout rate because you're just adjusting to the big league. And then in your second league, you're like, you know what? I can hit the high velocity, and you zone in on the fastball, and you hit the snot out of the ball. So it may be interesting to look at, like to bin major leaguers who came up with a high strikeout rate and bin them into ones that continued with a high strikeout rate

and ones that didn't, that improved, right? Yeah, see why and how, yeah. You have your two cases and look at what characteristics the ones that improved a lot had. So it's a little bit like this Chris St. John piece, but more emphasis on who improved in the big leagues beyond. And then you might be able to take, you might be able to look at, say, oh, look, the guys who improved their strikeout rate in the big leagues

all could hit velocity really well. Yeah, they came into the league, crushed fastballs, struggled with breaking stuff, learned how to lay off bad breaking pitches. There's some path to how this happens. And my goal is to ultimately find it. So that's where the early stages right now, but still drilling into it. If that was something that we brought up a couple weeks ago that sounded interesting, it's not going away. It's just going to take a little time to figure out the best way to map it all out and put it all together i do want to point out the best bust rate uh bracket just because this is fascinating research for people who are in dynasty leagues uh the best bust rate bracket the best production uh came from high BB average K and high BB low K. I mean, duh-ish, but high BB low K being the best is kind of duh-ish. 49% bust rate, 38% productivity, both high numbers. However, high BB average K had the highest productivity percentage, 39% productive, and the lowest bus percentage. So the actual best bin

was high BB average K. Which is a bit of a twist. You're looking for like 10, 12% walk rates and 20% strikeout rates. 18% strikeout rates. Those are the players that I would say probably show the ability to have a good hit tool and add some ability to discern pitches.

Right. Yeah. Different things, different skills drive those numbers and maybe isolating. In different directions. Because you could be overly patient and not have a great hit tool, and that would be high BB, high K. And that's kind of Cavan Biggio. So can Cavan Biggio go from high BB, high K? And it seems like this kind of research would be super important right now

because we have a fair amount of young players that just hit the league, and some of them had some high strikeout rates. And like for me, my bet looking at this for prospects, my bet is that Keston Hura's strikeout rate goes down and Kevin Biggio stays the same. Right. Because well, Biggio dropped at AAA a ton, got down to 16.1%, and then spiked back up to 28.6%. And that was after 26.3% at AA, 25.2% at high A. You're right. And he's so extremely patient.

He's the most patient player in baseball to the point where he's letting strikes go by. Which could be correctable, and maybe that's part of what was happening at AAA. He wasn't letting strikes go by, and it's just harder to not let strikes go by in the big leagues, and you're not going to necessarily pick that up right away against top-level pitching. But I'm enjoying it, and I'm only about 5% of the way into it so far. We'll close things out with Beer of the Week.

It sounds like beer mail has been something in your life recently. What's been showing up at your door? Yeah, I wanted to thank Greg and Andrew. Andrew is the owner of the Wildwood Taphouse in Hillsboro,

where the Hillsboro Hops play. Once you are allowed to, I suggest going there and having a beer. He helped a group of his fantasy league, his fantasy league sort of got together and put together like a big beer trade. And so I have a bunch of Oregon beer in my fridge.

And I can't say I haven't, I have drank it all. It just arrived. But I'm super excited to start drinking it all. I just wanted to highlight three things. And one of the things that's cool about this, that's a little bit different from my beer trades in the past, beer trades, I've usually identified beers I wanted and kind of had a conversation and given them what they wanted.

They gave me what I wanted. In this case, you know, they kind of put together this package without asking me anything. And I love it because it has beers in it that I wouldn't normally have. And there's a white ale from Holy Mountain that I'm super excited. But there's also a beer from Monkless called Curtain Closer that's a quintuple. It's a Belgian quintuple. It's going to be very sweet. It's going to be very sweet. And it's like a 14% or something something so it's going to be a good night beer um i'm also excited for an allegory wheelbarrow of swords um just i've heard good things about allegory as a brew as a brew house um and i'm excited to try that one and then block 15 sticky hands block 15

has been long a favorite of listener danny dann Danny has given us great beers at first pitch, and we've enjoyed toasting him and hope to toast him again in the future. And a toast to Andrew and Greg for putting together this massive beer trade that will allow me to try styles I don't normally try and from breweries that I don't even recognize. So I'm super excited to learn a little bit more about Portland beer and Oregon beer, because one of the things that's crazy about Oregon beer is,

yes, there are the brewers, you know, maybe you recognize Block 15, but there is such an ubiquity of brewing in Portland that there are so many, like any restaurant you go to in Portland, brews. Yeah, they all do both. Every coffee house brews beer too. And so there's this second level of beer in Portland that I know nothing about. I know about Cascade and I I know about Great Notion, and I know about all these top-level beers, but I don't know about Allegory, and I don't know about Monkless, and I don't know about the second percolating level in Portland. So I'm super excited to dive into this one this weekend. Yeah, I've got a big beer run coming up. I'm going to make a trip around a few local breweries, buy a whole bunch of different styles,

and then make new six-packs and 12-packs and then drop them off on doorsteps of some friends. So try to do the support beer thing with an epic sort of beer run. Yeah, Ralph Lipschitz, Prospect Jesus on Twitter, did a little bit of that. And it was fun to see that someone returned favor and dropped some beer off for him. So this is a fun thing. I've sent some beer to some of my friends in New York. I've got a single friend in New York who lives by himself in an apartment on the Upper East Side. And in some of our Zooms, he seemed sad, so I sent him beer.

Nice. Very nice gesture. Well, if you're enjoying this show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it, please take a moment to do that. Thank you to all of you who've done that. We really appreciate it. It helps people find our show. If you don't have a subscription to The Athletic, you can get a free 90-day trial at theathletic.com

slash free 90 days. If you can support the site with a paid subscription, to the athletic.com slash rates and barrels and you'll get 40 off a subscription as always you can email us rates and barrels at the athletic.com thanks to george and everybody else who wrote in this week for great questions be sure to spell the word and if you go the email route you can find eno on twitter at eno saris you can find me at derrick van riper that is going to wrap things up for this episode of rates and barrels we are back with you If you go the email route, you can find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. You can find me at Derek Van Ryper. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Raids and Barrels. We are back with you on Tuesday.

Thanks for listening.