Rates & Barrels - Ideal Hitter Profiles & Using Statcast to Find Undervalued Players

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Eno and DVR discuss what they're looking for in hitter profiles, Statcast-driven Buy Low targets, differences in changeups, and more! Rundown6:13 What Are We Looking For in Hitter Profiles?10:55 Examining Z-Contact% Leaders17:50 Z-Contact% Laggards23:50 Why O-Swing% is More Useful than O-Contact%31:37 Hitters Who Avoid Chasing (Low O-Swing%)34:50 Brendan Rodgers as a Buy Low Candidate43:51 Using Max Exit Velo to Find Undervalued Players56:30 Why Didn't Teams Move Top Prospects at the Deadline?66:02 Differences in Changeups Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get 40% off a subscription to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Interested in picking up a Dugout Mug? Go to dugoutmugs.com/TheAthletic and use promo code “MLB30" for 30% off your first purchase!   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The economy is getting back underway, and with it, the world of pro sports. Stay ahead of the curve with the unparalleled tools of two world-class news desks covering developments across finance, economics, technology, and sports. Subscribe to Bloomberg.com, and if you're not already a subscriber to The Athletic, for a limited time, receive a complimentary subscription to The Athletic. Go to Bloomberg.com slash subscribe to sign up today. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 133. It is Thursday, September 3rd. We are in the final month of the 2020 regular season.

On this episode, we are going to answer a lot of great mailbag questions or discuss some topics that were at least inspired by great mailbag questions. What are we looking for in hitters, especially in this shortened season? We'll go in detail on that. We'll try to use StatCast for some buy lows. I had a great question to come in about change-ups and different types of change-ups and what makes them effective, so we'll dig into that. And a follow-up question following the trade deadline about the prospects that were not traded by Major League teams and questions about why that might have been the case. Eno, how's it going for you on this Thursday?

It's weird. It's really weird. We have these puppies and a puppy ate some chocolate last night. And so we were on high alert. And then the fires here have gotten to the point where I woke up with a

nasty headache because we'd left the windows open because it wasn't that bad. And then over the night, it got worse and had to'd left the windows open because it wasn't that bad and then over the night it got worse and had to close all the windows in the middle of the night last night because of the chocolate i had to the puppies would be better sleeping through the night but like last night because of chocolate i think they had to take a little you know midnight poo and um it was so funny so i take the them out and it's, it's one 30 in the morning and I'm just so in that weird space. I just, I don't know where I am or what time it is.

And I'm just used to being so tired all the time that I thought it was morning. Tits black outside, but you thought it was morning. Tits black outside, but you thought it was morning. Yeah. Well, I mean, with the fires too, like, and I think there's a decent moon. I just thought, you know, it's like five 30, you know? So I thought, all right, like, come on dogs, let's go get breakfast. My wife had to kind of pop up out of bed and be like, yo, it's one 30, put them back to bed. up out of bed and be like, yo, it's 1.30, put him back to bed. So, but the good news is the puppy's okay. Buster is okay. Just a little bit of chocolate and the family is healthy and happy.

They're at school doing distance learning at their school, which makes no sense at all. That's strange. But that's 2020 for you. That's 2020 for you. It's kind of like the that's baseball season. That's kind of the tagline for this entire season. I am finding lately that the littlest things just put me on edge. I'm more or less Charlie Day in the Pepe Silva episode of It's Always Sunny.

I'm Charlie in the mailroom. I think I've unlocked a conspiracy, and I am on edge. I'm not doing well drinking coffee. I feel like it's making me even more intense, so I probably have to switch to some sort of decaffeinated tea or hot water with lemon. We'll see what the next couple of weeks bring. I think I'm feeling the weight of football season starting baseball season

happening and the life not being normal for anybody. Right. I mean, like a tomato plant tipped over this morning and I just lost it. Like I was out of my mind and it's like, it's a plant. We didn't tip it over, put it back up,

move it over a little bit. Get on with your anger or sorrow. What was it? Was it? Why did more anger or sorrow? What was it? Was it, why did this plant fall down? Or was it, goddamn wind? It was more of that. It was more the ladder, more the rage. But then there was a little bit of sorrow.

Like, we're all just tomato plants in the wind. Why did I get so angry? You're right. And then like, why did that bother me so much? That was really not a big deal. It took me 30 seconds to pick it back up. But I was weaving... Well, imagine you have kids.

Look, I have felt very bad for people with children during the pandemic from day one. And I think not having the relief of being able to send them back to school in many cases is only compounding stress in a lot of households. And that's the thing I look around at. I'm like, I don't even have children. What stress am I missing out on right now? Because I feel like I have all of it. One of the worst things has been, and I've had to do this a few times, just apologizing to my children like like like you should probably apologize to your plant but yep file the plant an apology or the wind or whichever but yeah I've definitely had to be like yo Calvin I'm

I'm sorry you know you're right you were right about that and you know i'm just on edge a little bit yeah the good news is um if you say something like that to a child i think they kind of understand and they feel a little better because they don't feel so attacked you know yeah i think they like when parents acknowledge that they you know need to do something better they were wrong right i think it maybe makes children better at apologizing. Again, this comes from a man who does not have any children. And my children are not great at apologizing. They're still learning.

They're still learning that. Well, anyway, we're on the road to normalcy, I hope. I hope. I really hope. I hope so. I need it. But the switch to decaf begins tomorrow in earnest. Sure.

Yeah, probably not. Probably going to have like two French presses of coffee to get through the day. But here we are. The question that came in that inspired our first talk today came from Chandler. And he writes, hey, guys, loving the show. I may have missed you talking about it before, but what signs should we look for in hitters? My offense has been struggling this year.

I have three guys, Vlad Jr., Austin Meadows, and Keston Hira that I thought would have at least 800 OPS. And guys I thought would have done better like Tyler O'Neal, who he cites has some improvements, including striking out less and hitting the ball hard. Keep up the great work, Chandler. Chandler. So I think this is interesting because what we're looking for in hitters in a short season isn't necessarily that different in terms of how we'd look at these things in a longer season. And it may say, hey, what should our rubric be? What is important now? We have new information now compared to even five or six years ago. What stands out to us? We've talked about max exit velo on the show before, something that in a very small sample on a micro level, that can be important. But I kind of

outlined it like this, the combination of skills I'm looking for in a hitter, how often is the hitter putting the ball in play? So K percentage, an oldie, but a goodie. How hard is the hitter hitting the ball? Something like hard hit rate. And if you want to look at launch angle, of course, you can look at barrel rate as well. How often is the hitter chasing pitches outside the zone? So O swing percentage. And how often is the hitter missing pitches inside the zone, to me, that's a big problem, a possible red flag at the extreme ends. All these things are interesting for different reasons. If you excel in any one of these categories, it doesn't mean you're a great hitter. I think if you excel in multiple categories, that probably means you're going to be a great hitter. But I'm curious, just off the top, is there anything that I'm missing from this rubric that you'd want to look at as you're kind of putting a hitter profile together right now? You know, I haven't thought so much about zone contact, but I do think of strikeout rate.

And I think those things are highly related because you swing at way more of pitches inside the zone. So if you think about your strikeout rate, it's going to be built up more of the things you swing more at, right? So if you looked at zone contact rate and reach rate, you would kind of be looking at the building blocks, I think, of strikeout rate. Basically, you don't want to swing with pitches outside the zone and you know depending on how much you make contact on pitches inside the zone you should probably be able to predict uh expected strikeout rate pretty well i think mike um podhorzer has done things like that at fangraphs before um so i i like looking at the component stats uh the only thing that makes me nervous is like sort of splitting that into swing is

better than anything at the very beginning. But I think a month into the season, we can start looking at reach rate. We can start looking at zone contact. And honestly, we can start looking at barrel rate a little bit. Exit velocity is really good for

a call-up. I think on your list, you've got Brandon Rodgers, right? Yeah, he was one of the players that came in. He came in as a separate question, but I think it kind of fits into this idea of how we could use StatCast for a buy low, right? Right. It's max exit velocity.

I don't need to take the steam out of the next question, but my point is this. If you've got a guy who's come up and you don't have a take the steam out of the next question. But my point is this, like if you've got a guy who's come up and you don't have a big, big track record, but he's hit the ball 150 miles an hour, that's meaningful. And that means a lot about what he can do with balls and play does not mean that he can make contact enough.

Cause there are guys that just, you know, Franchi Cordero, you know, people like that, that have like 40% strikeout rates that just, it doesn't matter how much they hit the ball um so that's why zone contact rate matters so it's kind of like command and stuff with pitchers right command is reach rate and zone contact rate and stuff is max exit

velocity and barrel rate bam i mean what else you what else do you want to know you want to know how well they command the zone and what they do when they put the ball in play and those are like the best process stats out there so yeah i agree with that sort of uh magic sauce good magic sauce glad we've got uh a good foundation but it's important to just say hey wait like this is what we should be using uh so you could look at each of these leaderboards individually you could try and make a a combined leaderboard, then filter off certain levels and say, okay, hey, this guy actually does all these things very well. And people don't think he's that good, or maybe he's getting unlucky. And you start digging into what's going wrong or what's going right. And I think the

cool thing about each of these metrics is that you're going to find different types of players on all of these leaderboards, right? So if you go to the zone contact leaderboard, you're going to find that David Fletcher among qualified hitters makes more contact in the zone than anybody. And that leaderboard has Fletcher at the top, Mookie Betts is second, Isaiah Kiner-Falefa, a player who I really just don't like as much as everybody else. He's third. Anthony Rizzo, Kevin Newman, Tommy LaStella, Max Kepler. That's kind of a surprise. Nolan Arenado, Adam Eaton, Gio Urshela, and Cesar Hernandez among the top 10, 11 players there. So it's not all stars. It's not all guys that have been first round fantasy players. It's not all even guys that

we think of as having power, right? Like there's different things you can do when you make contact in the zone. And I think it's perfect. It's perfect as part of the sauce. It's not good on its own. It would be, it'd be like the vinegar in a barbecue sauce. Like you don't want just the vinegar. Like you do want vinegar in the barbecue sauce. Or like a pitcher that has a ton of command in an 88 mile an hour

fastball right yeah yeah i the funny thing is david fletcher is kyle hendricks right yeah i think that's kind of a fair like pitcher hitter comparison and mookie betts is jacob de graham because mookie betts has the 96 percent zone contact rate and a 317 ISO. You know what I mean? I think it is kind of instructive to think about pitchers as hitters because there's a lot of the movements are the same. When they break it down to what baseball is, it's a rotational game. You need to be able to rotate your trunk fast. That's why

we had, once we started having a lot of weightlifting, we started having a lot of oblique injuries because it's all about turning really fast. And if you look at bat speed and pitch speed, so basically it's arm speed for both. Bat speed and pitch speed are both arm speed, and arm speed is highly correlated to how well you can turn your trunk and how well you block with your lead leg. You slam that lead leg down like a, like a pole vaulter or javelin thrower, and you kind of just throw your body around it. And, um, so if hitting is like pitching, I think it's, it's interesting to have these corollaries. So Anthony Rizzo, uh, is a, is a, Anthony Rizzo is a finesse pitcher that has power.

Max Kepler is a really interesting situation, I think, because Kepler, I think, is closer to Fletcher than people realize. Yeah, I mean, a lot of that power comes to the pole side. He's still hitting for power this year. His overall numbers actually haven't been that good, a 220, 322, 431 line for Kepler. I would not sign Max Kepler to a different park. So a little bit of what we saw from like peak Brian Dozier, too, where he was just yanking the ball down the line there in Minnesota.

But the thing about Kepler, if you kind of pull back and look at some of the other metrics, I mean, the K percentage is still low. He's been pretty good in that category throughout his big league career. He's patient. He does draw walks. He's been double digits in walk rate three consecutive seasons. There are a lot of things he's done right, and I think he is a hitter

who's changed a bit in recent years especially. When he came into the league, I think you had a presentation at first pitch like three or four years ago, when he came into the league i think you had a presentation at first pitch like three or four years ago and he was a guy that was refusing advanced stats he just wanted nothing to do with data and it's not very good all about data right those are those are things he was struggling with he changed though like he yeah he adapted like he did maybe maybe kicking and screaming along the way but he adapted and he became a better player for it i think he's a really interesting case study

because uh like i said i think he has a little bit more in common with fletcher than um betts orizzo because i don't you know if you look at his uh his stack cast stats are not very good like he doesn't hit the ball very hard uh but instead of fletcher's sort of line drive spray it um you know have a level swing uh get on base with it kind of approach uh kepler went from having a uh% fly ball rate in his first year to having a 46.4% fly ball rate this year. So he's bought into the twins approach of lifting it, elevate and celebrate. And he's slowly hit the ball harder in those angles and it's worked out for him.

And the last two years are the first two years that he was an above average hitter. But I think with a different ball, he would be someone that would suffer tremendously. And I think maybe we're seeing just a little brought this up a while back, is going to be that even for guys that play nearly every day, we're still getting less than half a season to look at everything and to then draw some conclusions going forward. exit velocity barrel rate a lot of those underlying numbers they all look more like they did before that 2019 breakout right before he hit that that highest possible level a year ago i think increasingly you could say with some confidence that what we saw from max kepler in 2019 was not a new baseline but it was his career long peak right you could have said that coming into the season but i think we are getting far enough into this shortened season where you can begin to come up with that with more confidence.

At least with these process stats, we're getting somewhere, yes. And that was one thing that I was happy about, that if it was like a 30-game season, there would be almost nothing here. It's something that's come up with regards to how should we wait your production in the great fancy baseball invitational. And there's some of the proponents out there that say, you know, we should not wait it at all because of how crazy the season is and stuff.

And yet 60 games is not nothing. There's still some skill that bubbles to the top. There's still some evaluation needs to be done. There's still enough of a sample that people that were crazy hot at times are, you know, regressing to the norm. And somebody like Cody Bellinger, who was as cold as possible to begin the season is starting to get hot. So 60 games is not nothing.

We got a whole nother month left. We're going to get some information out of this um and uh if you focus on these types of stats i think you'll get the most information out of it now zone contact laggards we've had a conversation recently about keston hera and his struggles with high fastballs he has the worst zone contact percentage in the league by a lot like worse than joey gallo which is a concern we talked about it as something that maybe could be fixed in the offseason but it's hard to make that kind of adjustment on the fly some other names on the top of that laggard board here at gallo brian anderson wouldn't expect to see him there for some reason i just thought he'd be like

more of a middle of the road in everything. Somewhat new for him because he has a 31% strikeout rate this year after two years around 20%. Even in terms of his swing rates, he's not reaching more. He's swinging less.

He's swinging at more pitches in the zone and fewer pitches out of the zone. Yet, his zone contact has just totally tanked and you just have to wonder where this is coming from i mean to some extent it could be uh fewer fastballs he's he's seeing 10 percentage points fewer sinkers this year and fewer uh four seamers as well a lot more change-ups and a ton more sliders so sliders are something you can pitch in the zone that you have to swing at, and he's missing them. So you can look at that, but that's like a book thing, and books change, right?

So Brian Anderson is struggling with sliders in the zone right now, and he looks really terrible, but you still kind of want to put that up against his rest of the body of work and give him the next month in terms of, you know, can he burn them on the sliders and return back to normal, basically. Yeah. And I think for his sake, I mean, the OBP and slugging numbers are not way off where they were previously. So he's not in danger of losing playing time. The real life value hasn't fallen that much, but definitely some weird things going on with him in terms of how he's being pitched and how he's responded to this point.

Javi Baez being on this laggard board, not really a surprise, right? I mean, he's a free swinger, of course. Miguel Sano being sixth on there, not surprising. I'm a little surprised to see Johan Camargo, Josh Bell, and Shinsu Chu, which maybe in Chu's case, is this just a sign of him finally showing his age a little bit? Is this the beginning of the end at age 38 now for Chu? What a career, dude. What a great dude.

What an undervalued dude he's been. Bell, I don't get. He's reaching more and swinging more than ever um i could see bell as being as sort of pressing you know it's a terrible lineup he probably wants out of there and he probably thinks that if he can you know hit his way out of pittsburgh um he should do it by hitting home runs and uh maybe that has something to do with him not hitting home runs and him striking out a lot. I bought,

I bought low on bell just with just straight on projections. I bought a couple of shares just in like auto new and a couple of places just because he was highly available, easy to get. And something like the bat X still projects them to hit 261 with a wrc plus it's 15 better than the average uh and a good obp so like i still think there's a good player in there i'm not willing to write them off at 28 chew i do think that age maybe age should go on our sauce uh because we found jeff zman found, of course, that projections are less reliable once you get over 32, 33.

So you could say, oh, well, Chu is projected to be, by the bad X, projected to be a 95 WRC guy. He's at 60 right now. He's supposed to be basically a league average guy. He's going to get better at power, and he's going to have a 238 average, and he's going to have a 350 OB and he's gonna have a 350 obp i don't know man i don't know he's 38 like this is probably his last year so uh i'm not betting on

on a return from that yeah tip of the cap on that career if this ends up being it for chudo because he was a great player and a very good player even late into his career with bell i think the interesting thing is that he had that strong first half and weak second half last year, and you wonder how much of that was teams adjusting to him and bringing that power down in the second half. That was the main thing that I think scared people away, right? He slugged 429 in the second half, but the plate skills didn't completely fall apart. It wasn't like the elevated strikeout rate that we've seen this season was part of the profile for Josh Bell in the second half of last year. And I think that gives me a little more hope that this is correctable.

If we had seen the strikeout rate start to jump last year, if he was a 25% K rate guy in the second half last year and then made the move to 30 in the first part of this season, that would be a bigger red flag to me. But it is strange. The power has been missing now for the last 85 to 90 games or so if you combine the second half of last season with the first half of this one. Yeah, I don't necessarily buy him as even a 30% – 30 homer guy again in the future. But I do think he can return back to sort of 19 20 strikeout right and if he does that uh he should have a good batting average and i think i could buy him as sort of like a 270

hitter with 20 to 25 homers um and a good good ovp so like i still think that's a pretty useful player and he's so available that you could get him for like a Rich Hill, you know, where like, you know, you just trade someone something they need now and they think he's done. But at 28, I don't think he's quite done yet. I'd throw age into our special sauce for sure. Yeah, it needs to be accounted for. And I mean, but walk rate is worth accounting for as well. I didn't put that specifically in there, but it's obviously reach rate highly correlated but walk rate is worth accounting for as well i didn't put that specifically in there but it's obviously reach rate highly correlated to walk rate yeah there's there's

enough of a component there where i think we're good now outside the zone contact i think this is a little more of a an open question i wouldn't use that one so much i would use outside the zone swing rate right oh swing i-swing, I like. And O-contact, I don't necessarily like because I think players are very different. Some players can cover a larger area. They can cover an area outside the strike zone effectively. They're not trying to hit home runs. That's where David Fletcher, yet again, thrives at 83.8% O-contact percentage.

But my argument would be that that doesn't necessarily age well. I think the prominent example that I always go back to is Pablo Sandoval. He was a good bad ball hitter for a long time, but you lose that flexibility. You lose that ability over time to get down and hit those low pitches or to get across the outside of the strike zone and slap the ball the other way. So I think that's a really tough way. If that's your best skill, that's a really tough way to go further into your career. Clearly, David Fletcher does a few other things really well too. But yeah, O's swing percentage I think is really interesting.

Who swings the most at pitches outside the zone? Again, we get this group of players who are very different. Henzer Alberto is first on that list. He's above 50% right now. Steven Piscotty, 48.7%. Luis Robert, who's going to be the Rubik's Cube of fantasy baseball players in 2021. Some people are going to have him figured out. Some people are going to be totally confused.

I guess Rubik's Cubes aren't that expensive unless they make them out of gold or something now. But I'm going to stand by it. Victor Reyes, Eddie Rosario, Eloy Jimenez, Kevin Pillar, Rafael Devers, Renato Nunez, Jonathan Scope, and Jeff McNeil. There's a lot of differences within that group of players, right? Alberto and McNeil are pretty similar. I could see those guys kind of being in the same bucket. Devers, I don't think he should be swinging at that many pitches outside the zone. I don't think that's the optimal use with his approach.

But Luis Robert, I mean, one of the more fascinating players in the league because with this aggressive approach, he's been very successful so far. You think about some of the things we were talking about in that the league often gets a book and figures a player out and the player has to adjust back i don't think 35 games is enough time for the league to solve him so we haven't necessarily gone into the adjustment phase just yet and we might not get there this

season we might get there at the beginning of 2021 i think that's going to make louise robert such an interesting player when we look ahead to next season. Yeah, it is interesting, too, that Jeff McNeil on pitch infos, play discipline is only around league average on O-swing. So I wonder if there's some sort of data adjustment that changes the way his strike zone is handled, depending on whether you use the sort of pitch FX unwashed version or the pitch info one. But generally, yes,

this is not a group that I want to have at 28 years old or so. And in fact, the high O contact that we were talking about, there was a name that popped out that I was kind of just looking at his player page a little bit. Jose Ramirez is second in baseball at 82% O contact. And I was looking at his swing rates and stuff. And Jose Ramirez actually is not the most disciplined player. It looks like it because he has a good strikeout rate and a good walk rate. But in terms of his reach rate, he's better than average, but he's at sort of like 27 or so where the league average is like 30. So he's like okay there.

And his outside zone contact rates are kind of insane. They're really, really good. His career is 80%. The league average is 60%. He's 27 years old. If you're rebuilding and you have Jose Ramirez on your team, it might be time to sell it. I could see this being the peak of his value or still near the peak of his value. That may have already happened two years ago i mean 39 homers 34 steals i don't know if he'll ever get back to that level but he's at eight homers and he's eight for eight as a base dealer right now hitting a 250 yet again hit 255 last year but

that was with that lumpy bad first half good second half combination of splits i think you're right to to see some of these flaws here. Average exit velocity is down. I know as a catch-all, that's not perfect, but there are some underlying flaws in the approach that might be overlooked. I think people are more likely to write him off because of him not being a stat cast darling. He might just be one of those guys that some people start veering away from in the first and second round. I didn't want him this year. I didn't like the way he put it together. I know he was awesome in the second half last year. Something about the way that went down just didn't sit right with me,

and I didn't have great underlying numbers to support it. I just said, hey, look, this is the first round. I don't want unnecessary risk here, so I'm going to go another direction. I've been wrong, right? Eight homers, eight steals, and more than 20 runs and 20 RBIs in the shortened season. He's been one of the more valuable hitters in the pool. Yeah, exactly. No doubt.

I missed out. That was a bad call. But in keeper in dynasty leagues, if you're not playing for a title now or next year, I think he would be pretty high on the list of players that you could put out there and get a lot that will make your team significantly better for the long haul. So it would be a good idea to move away from him. Back to that sort of O-swing thing you were talking about. With Robert, he's got the 48% O-swing,

and then he's got a 46% contact rate outside the zone. He is not Jose Ramirez in terms of making the contact outside the zone. Eddie Rosario is closer where he swings a lot outside the zone, but he's very whippy. You know what I'm saying? He's got good hands, I think. And he's not shouldery in his swing. So I could see him making good contact outside of the zone.

However, this might be one of the last years that I consider Eddie Rosario. Eddie Rosario is on almost all my teams for like the last four years. Like he's one of these guys that I don't tout, but the projections always say he's pretty good. And then he goes out and he's turned out seasons where the last four seasons he's had basically a two 80 average with like 25 to 30 homers. Like, you know, that's's three seasons in a row he's done that with a couple steals like he's uh oatmeal-ish in a weird way and he always goes

for less than than he needs to uh but i'm starting to see the flaws with him too and uh it's not just like the 239 batting average or something this year like i think that can come around, but it is something where once again, you take the age and he's 28 now. And then you add the age to the O swing and the zone contact. And you start to see like, okay, things are starting to slough off. He's doesn't, he does swing at stuff outside of his own a lot.

It's more worrisome to me that Eddie Rosario is on this list than actually Robert and Eloy because those guys and even Devers like I think those guys have peak years in front of them well they'll be fine it's more worrisome that scope is on this list even McNeil is a little bit older Jesus Aguilar for some reason is striking out 18 percent of the time and reaching at 40% of pitches outside of the zone. That doesn't work together. Something is wrong here. So definitely, I've talked myself into age happening to be in almost every special sauce.

Now, looking at low swing percentages is a lot more fun. The hitters that just don't swing at those pitches outside the zone. He is number one by a small margin. Max Muncy is number two. Wow. It's a pretty cool leaderboard. Top 10 in O swing percentage. Top 10 in a good way.

Biggio is one. Muncy is two. Carlos Santana. Mike Trout. Christian Jelic. Mark Kanha. Joey Gallo. Joey Votto, Trent Grisham, Juan Soto. You go to the back of the top 12, you get to Rendon and Matt Olson. You get to Brandon Nimmo and Mookie Betts within the top 15 as well. I mean, that's a group of almost all very good hitters, right? Winkers down there.

Yeah. And even with Votto, it's like, sure, he's not the guy he used to be. He doesn't have the same punch that he used to, but he still has that ridiculously good eye at the plate. Is there a bad – did we say the closest to a bad hitter is Brandon Nimmo, and he's not bad? There's not a bad hitter on this list. There's not a bad hitter on this list. That's a really good sign, right?

With every other list, we had to be like, oh, well, you have to think about age. You have to think about this. You have to think about this. Dude, there's not a bad hitter on this list. What is this, the sugar in the sauce? Yes. This is a really – you can keep going, dude.

Tommy LaStella, not the greatest hitter in the world, but way better than people thought. And there he is. Winker, Hicks, Diaz. Listen, Diaz has his flaws. Now we're getting to maybe some flawed players. But Matt Carpenter, maybe some flawed players. Back on track with Mike Yastrzemski, Brian Goodwin. Garrett Hampson's here.

You got to think more of Garrett Hampson now that he's here. You know? So, I don't know. There's no one stat to rule them all, but this is a really good one, and it's a really good one to pay attention to for Dynasty Leagues. Yeah, because this is a trait that I think does age very well.

If you're not chasing pitches outside the zone, you're going to be a good hitter for a long time. At least it gives you the foundation to have that ability. So I like the sauce that we've put together. It's all really good. We talk about stat cast a lot. So we'll get to the stat cast side of this here in just a second. Our sponsor today, Manscaped, is here to make sure you're well-groomed above and below the belt. Manscaped promotes clean hygiene when it comes to shaving with their Lawn Mower 3.0 personal trimmer. Manscaped is the only men's brand dedicated to below-the-waist grooming, and the Lawn Mower 3.0 is a waterproof, cordless body trimmer that makes it safe and easy. Subscribe to the perfect package and get a new replacement blade refill for your trimmer

delivered to your door every three months, making sure your trimmer always stays fresh and clean get 20 off and free shipping with the code the athletic 20 at manscape.com that's 20 off with free shipping at manscape.com and use code the athletic 20 and for a limited time subscribers get not one but two free gifts including a travel bag a 39 value and the patented high-performance Manscaped boxer briefs. So go to manscaped.com today and use code THEATHLETIC20. All right, so that question from Chandler kind of opened up our show. We had a question about Brendan Rodgers specifically that came in from Matt. It was about Max exit velocity.

And he wrote, seems the prospect world has soured on Brendan Rodgers over the past few years, but I'm curious to see. He's already hit a ball 112 miles per hour. It's good for 43rd among players this year. If you look at the StatCast leaderboard and drop it to one batted ball event, you want to include everybody who's been up for even just a brief time. Of course, just all the rest of his balls have been underwhelming, just about all of them. Is that one small sample outlier enough to call him a buy low in dynasty so it kind of relates to what we're talking about like looking for stack cast indicators that would lead you to be optimistic about a player and i

think you've said before this is one of the better things you can look at when you don't have a lot of information is that enough for Brendan Rogers? Because there's other things to like about him too. He's a Rocky. He's not playing a lot right now, but that park is going to go a long way toward masking some of his flaws if he gets more playing time to begin 2021.

Yeah, he does a lot of the stuff we just talked about poorly. His O-swing rate is 42%. That's double like a trent grisham's um and he's too aggressive when it comes to swing rate but some of that stuff also just calms down just look at kyle lewis right he just didn't get reps right and so every time brandon rogers comes to the plate he feels like it's the last time he's gonna get a chance in the major leagues i feel like you know yeah he's got to get a chance in the major leagues. I feel like, you know?

Yeah, he's got 102 career plate appearances. That's really not much. And they're split, too, so it's not like, you know, yeah, it's not 102 in a row. So I think that he's going to be, there have been some issues with him with walk rate. He had to get LASIK at some point to get, like, the best walk rate of his career.

And so there is a possibility he's not going to be that great at that part but if you look at sort of like average ev like oh he's hitting 83 this year then you miss this part which is he's hit the ball really damn hard and uh what did you say his max exit velocity was? 112. Yeah, 112. Let's find some comps. Slightly wild, but he can hit the ball 112. Louis Brinson is there as a cautionary tale. Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, it's one thing, right?

The max exit velocity goes into the overall profile, but I think the first thing I would say, you mentioned the problem swinging it pitches outside the zone the sample is very small how quickly how quickly can you trust oh swing percentage like we agree it's important but when you're getting random plate appearances scattered over parts of two summers every other day sometimes off the bench starting. That is not a good situation. The other cautionary tale, just from a playing time perspective, is Franklin Barreto. Look at that. The play discipline was brutal. It got a little better at AAA last year. I always worry

about that. You have this highly coveted prospect. He gets up. He gets up and down, up and down, up and down. Team doesn't give him playing time. You end up never really answering the question, can he figure it out? Because you didn't let yourself learn. You didn't give him the chance to go out there and make the adjustments. You kept pulling him away from more playing time every time there was a window to possibly do that. Have you noticed Sam Hilliard and Garrett Hampson are playing? Yeah, David Dahl got hurt.

So in ads and drops a couple of weeks ago, when Hilliard had sat, I think, seven consecutive games, I wrote that Sam Hilliard should be a drop because he wasn't playing. I mean, I think he's still barely a drop. With Kevin PR in camp, I think he's still kind of like, Pillar's going to play center,

so then you're kind of putting Kemp somewhere. You know what I mean? It gets a little crowded, and Hampson and McMahon are both playing, so you start running out of spots. So I think Hilliard's still pretty, and I did drop him in a 15-teamer. Maybe I'll go pick him up again,

but I did not drop him in my dynasty, and I'm pretty happy. Like, I think he's going to be in the lineup next week. So anyway, with regards to Brandon Rodgers, you know, the 112, Jacob B. Jones is there. Louis Brinson is there. Jock Peterson. You know, Anthony Rizzo, Christian Yelich,

Eric Hosmer. It's interesting, though, because those guys are later in their careers. So they did have better max exebitos before. So I wouldn't necessarily say that this is evidence that Brendan Rodgers... Like, for me, Rowdy Tellez is somebody that really sticks out if you if you drop the minimum barrel uh minimum bad ball event to 25

Rowdy Tellez has the second best max exit below in baseball he's young he's got the 117 max exit below and he's figuring stuff out in terms of strikeout rate in terms of how pitchers are pitching him in terms of reach rate like rowdy telez is a guy i would pick up in most leagues if i was rebuilding and i had like an extra roster spot to play with and he was out there like i thought that before the season i think that now so 112 is not quite elite in the same way that makes you be like like robert came up and hit the ball like 116 you know you're like wow uh but i do think it's enough for a gentle buy low i do think it's enough that to suggest that he should have a league average power

at least or maybe better um and i think that his sporadic usage plus his positional value makes him a really decent get right now. I wouldn't necessarily spend a lot, but I think there is a little bit of information there with that 112. Yeah, I got him as kind of a throw-in in a keeper league where he's a low salary guy. And I just thought this is a flyer worth taking. I know not walking in those limited chances is a little bit of a concern, but this is a guy that had a 55 hit tool grade from Fangraphs, future 60. So he's not a complete free swinger. I think there's a belief that even if he's not

walking a lot, he's going to put a lot of balls in play. If you put a lot of balls in play, good things can happen, especially with that power, especially if he's not walking a lot, he's going to put a lot of balls in play. If you put a lot of balls in play, good things can happen, especially with that power, especially if he stays in Colorado. But I don't think he's necessarily a guy who's without mixed league appeal if he gets traded because more stable playing time would make his development kind of smooth out a bit. You know, the 112 is also interesting because the 112 is at least 58. CJ Cronen had the 112. He was 58. That's 58 out of 371.

Projections are a little bit low on Rodgers in terms of power, saying he's going to only have sub-league average power. If you give him league average power better, 58 over

371 seems like maybe a lot better than the average power so if you have better than league average power uh that changes his entire line of projection from where it is now to maybe somebody who can hit 270 with like a 330 obp and like a 450 slugging yeah one other one other thing on Rowdy Tellez, by the way, I just noticed this too, looking at the leaderboard I was building. Zone contact percentage there is pretty good, 87.6%, doing a lot of damage on pitches inside the zone,

as you mentioned, the reach rate getting a little better, even though it's not good right now, showing those signs of progress. He's another guy where he hasn't had significant long runs as an everyday guy. He gets pulled in and out of the lineup occasionally. He kind of falls out of the rotation a little bit. In the past, demoted to AAA a little bit more aggressively

than maybe he would have been on a team that had a little more patience. But if he ends up either getting a spot to call his own in Toronto or ends up, because he's a type of player that doesn't get valued that much by big league clubs, ends up going elsewhere, there could be something still there with Rowdy. I mean, he's all bat.

That's the thing that will make or break him. There's just not much else there that drives his playing time. With a 113 WRC plus right now, he's playing. His projections range. The bat X likes him because of the things we talk about in terms of max exit lead though and stuff like that they give him a 110 wrc plus he'll play zips says he's a 101 wrc plus guy he won't play because basically first baseman dhs you expect at least 5% better than league average with the bat, or else why are you playing them? League average bat can play at shortstop and second and the outfield, but if they're not going to give you any defensive value, they're probably not going to play. buy lows as you're looking at stat cast numbers there's a lot of a lot of different ways to think about it but if you just want to stick to you know max exit velocity and players who might be overlooked you mentioned telez joe adele and redraft i think you could maybe trade for i don't

think you're going to get them and keep her in dynasty at a discount people that have had them for several years are still going to believe they're going to see something like this and say yeah i'm right he's got the power the speed's going to come play discipline's going to believe. They're going to see something like this and say, yeah, I'm right. He's got the power. The speed's going to come. Play discipline's going to be there. Just give him time. Maybe in a few cases, if someone's going all in for this year, you could pry him loose in a long-term league. Then you get to some other guys like Alex Dickerson, who had, I think, a three-homer game

earlier this week. He's always been interesting. He's just had some pretty significant injuries. I'm beginning to think that the Giants are really good at finding scrap heap players like this is a skill this front office owns and eventually they're going to be looking for other types of players and this is pretty interesting because if he stays healthy there's really not much that's going to prevent alex dickerson from at least being a big side

platoon guy so i'm kind of of in on Alex Dickerson in deeper leagues where you're looking for some outfield help. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Another way of sorting that I've done is I just did barrels per batted ball event. We know the barrels are a pretty good stat. They have a bunch of information in them in small samples even. And I like I'm doing it over batted ball event versus over plate appearance to maybe find some guys that if they made a little more contact could also improve. And Brad Miller is top 20 in barrels per batted ball event. And I had a thought watching him just go off the last couple of days.

He's got a very level swing. just go off the last couple of days. He's got a very level swing. And in some ways, you know, he's Brian Dozier-esque in how level that swing is. And that type of swing is actually going to become more in vogue the more that pitchers throw high in the zone. And pitchers are throwing high in the zone with every year. That's part of why Mark Carrick just had a piece today

about hit by pitches being up. I think the largest driver of that is that pitchers are throwing higher in the zone more. It's closer to things to hit. And it's also asking them to command pitches in a place that they didn't grow up commanding it, right? You know, in Little League and all these other places, they were told to command at low end zone. And now all of a sudden baseball saying, Hey, there's a ton of whiffs high end zone, please throw high end zone.

So now they hit batters and guys with level swings, you know, are able to hit those pitches. So I think I'm not saying that Brad Miller has a lot of keeper value. It's a little bit of a, of a redraft type situation, but I think the Brad Miller might be a good pickup in a lot of leagues where he's still available. Yeah, I think the 10-teamers are places where he's still out there.

Pick him up. He's playing a ton. He's hitting the ball hard. The 30 home run season we saw a few years ago doesn't look like a total outlier when you look at the underlying numbers and the way he's been hitting the ball. I think Jake Fraley is kind of interesting. If you're looking at the max exit velo leaderboard, I think he's finally up getting some time in Seattle, has a little speed to fall back on as well. So yet another young Mariner that might be worth a flyer in deeper formats, a keeper in dynasty leagues, especially you could get them as either a very low, like one or $2 bid, stash them away and just kind of see what happens.

low, like $1 or $2 bid, stash him away and just kind of see what happens. And then there's Colin Moran, who I have so low expectations for him that no matter what he does, I'm just not impressed, which is weird. That guy has never... Maybe he tipped over my tomato plant.

Yell at him. I don't get it. I thought he was going to lose his job to Brian Hayes to begin the season, I think, but the universal DH Hayes, who's up now, can coexist with Bell and Moran. They need offense. They're going to play all three of those guys since they're all up. But, man, Colin Moran just looks like a different player.

I mean, he's walking more than ever. His barrel rate per batted ball event is off the charts at 18.2%. Average exit VLO, deep red at 92.7 max exit velo in the top 60 i think now league wide even when you go down to that one bbe filter is this real like can you look at colin moran and say yeah actually he has put it together this is a pedigree guy this is kind of like the hunter dozer breakout of a year ago where at one point a major league team thought this guy would be a really good player he's been traded a few times and you know maybe it's just finally happening at age 27 it is just weird to see the jump in max

exit velocity like late in the career um just weird to see the barrel rate go. It's tripled from last year, basically. And it's kind of amazing, actually, to see the barrel rate triple while his average launch angle went down. So barrel is a really tricky stat, and it's a really interesting way to look at a player, I think. He has no positional value. He's not a good defender.

I think. He has no positional value. He's not a good defender. I think that matters. If the NL has a DH next year... This is Rowdy Tellez in a different body. That's the problem players face. The uphill battle of not being a good enough defender anywhere and then having to find playing time

scraps. Fortunately for Moran, he's in Pittsburgh. If he were in a more talented organization, he probably wouldn't have had enough time at the beginning of the season to show he could do this. Right. He may have just been a bench player all year. Yeah. I don't know what the source is too.

I maybe have to look at some of his mechanics, but, um, I, I'll throw some like dollar days type stuff at Moran next year and put him in a group of interesting bench players type situation but if you look at the projections they haven't really caught up even the bad x that's stat cast friendly says he's got a 163 iso league average is like 185 at this point he doesn't like really stand out in terms of

plate discipline or contact uh says he'll be eight percent worse than league average with the bat and below average on defense it's doesn't add up to be a great player but you know um dollar dollar guy for a third base uh and just like utility depth in auto new um and i'll only type player where you say hey the pirates are still going to be bad again next year worst case scenario i get you know 300 400 plate appearances of a util ci guy for a dollar or two you know what i mean i don't think he'll cost more than that. So definitely an interesting name. A slightly more expensive name that's also a lot older, or not a lot older, but is 28 himself and shows up on this list is Gregory Polanco. And he's a guy that I'm kind of just keep coming back to as someone I believe in, someone I like. I think that injuries have been a big part of why he's been so up and down.

I see an improving batted ball mix in terms of being able to lift the ball more over time. And I think that his barrel rate right now has just gone up. One thing I like that's different about Moran, Moran went from a 6% barrel rate to like an 18%. Polanco has gone from 9% to 9.5% to 10.6%. I don't know if it makes it better that it's gradual like that, but it does seem more believable.

His max exit below right now is second best to his uh season his uh his freshman year is his rookie season and um right now he's hitting more fly balls than ever before so i like a lot of that and yet on the other side uh you do see some issues when it comes to his plate discipline he's reaching more than ever before uh His O contact has totally cratered, and his zone contact rate is even down to 66%. But given an 88% career zone contact, I could see next year being one of the best of Gregory Polanco's career. I could see next year Polanco hits 260 if there's a full season with

like 28 home runs and five steals. I kind of like him too because the plate skills were getting better before that shoulder injury. He was kind of unlocking everything and I don't think he's been physically right maybe until now. He's still striking out a ton. So this is kind of

a by lowest based on these underlying numbers, much like Jake Lamb, actually, who's also had a couple injuries the last few years. If he can find playing time next year, I actually like him as just a cheap dollar days reserve type player. Could be the kind of guy that signs a low risk deal, gets a fresh start and becomes fantasy relevant again in 2021. I don't know if he turns it around quickly enough to make that happen in September. Strikeout rate is also elevated right now. It's at 32.6%. He's still drawing walks though, and he's got a 60% hard hit rate. So when he makes contact, Jake Lamb is hitting the ball very hard. Dude, this is going to be weird. Jake Lamb is going to sign with the Pirates.

He's going to bump Colin Moran out of a job. They're going to battle each other. Put a dollar on each and you get one good player. I mean, if you're a hole at third base and you're just going to go bargain bin, which Brewers were among the teams that did that going into this season, Jake Lamb's going to be where you think about going. I think there may have been some

interest in him via trade a summer ago, too. Moran and Lamb. Yeah, one of those guys. yeah one of those guys if one of those guys goes to brewers then the park also helps them uh more than the park is helping them now if you look at the bottom of the list by depth charts the brewers are there the rangers are there um i think kind of falafel profiles better as a utility guy, a secret third catcher type guy. And Solak's arm is not really good there. So the Rangers could do a short-term sign.

If Riley goes back in the tank, even just does what he's projected to do, he's the 28th best third baseman in baseball. The Orioles, I don't think think have found a long-term solution there uh and could maybe try a short-term solution just for even trade value uh the nationals keep signing short-term guys uh at third base um so moran and lamb could be in any one of those situations digging for bargain free agents in 2021 from two guys who don't have to sign any of them for their respective teams. Hey, look, deep, deep dynasty leagues, keeper leagues where rosters are huge.

It's worth finding those flyers and taking the right chances and just seeing if you can kind of guess right, get inside the heads of what a team that has that need might actually do. Try to think about things the way they would be thinking about things looking for those underlying skills that are actually really good

when some of the other flaws might be corrected dugout mugs is a company that was started in a college baseball dugout hence the name dugout mugs they take the barrel of a baseball bat and turn it into a 12 ounce mug dugout mugs are licensed by major league baseball so you can have your favorite team logo laser engraved onto a birchwood baseball bat barrel mug they're perfect for the big game to put on display or to be the life of the party and they make a great gift for any baseball fan go to dugoutmugs.com slash the athletic and use promo code mlb30 for 30 off your first purchase that's dugoutmugs.com slash the athletic and and code MLB30. We're going to discuss why some of the top prospects in the game, really all of them except for Taylor Trammell,

stayed put at the deadline in just a minute. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. All right, you know, so as we discussed on the trade deadline episode earlier this week, top prospects really weren't on the move. Taylor Trammell, the only top 100 prospect to be dealt second summer in a row that he was on the deadline. This has been a slowly progressing trend and I wonder if you could speculate on what changes around the league have led top prospects to be so untouchable in the last decade or so. Is it due to improved prospect evaluation, making top prospects less likely to fail and therefore

less risky? A better league-wide understanding of the economics of team control over young players? Improved understanding of aging curves, and that a player peaks much earlier than we used to think, and veterans decline rapidly at an earlier age, or something else. Perhaps the increase in coverage of prospects makes GMs hesitant to trade them for fear of being embarrassed by their future success.

Thanks for the continued excellent analysis, Dan. I think Dan actually hit on pretty much all the different reasons why this would be true. I don't know how much GMs are worried about looking bad in a trade in the long run, beyond the fact that it could cost them their job. They want to win trades and do well, but the humiliation factor might be a secondary effect. Now, I think the main thing that Dan hit on in the question, you know, is actually the money aspect. It's usually money. The answer is usually money to questions like this.

It's all about the money. It's a combination of money and not having to pay top players the salaries that they eventually command in free agency, right? Like a top prospect can give you $30 to $40 million a year worth of value for, you know, league minimum Like a top prospect can give you $30 to $40 million a year worth of value for league minimum for a few years, then $2 million, then $4 million, then $8 million, and then $16 million. And that's a huge bargain compared to paying up for Machado or Harper or Garrett Cole as $300 plus million free agents. Now, I do think there's an interesting part of this

that could be player development. Maybe teams are more confident they can develop these players. I think we could probably put together some kind of crazy historical study and see if the evaluations of young talent maybe have gotten better over time, if organizations are better at drafting players and signing international free agents than they used to be be and then turning those players into quality big leaguers. But if you had to rank the reasons why we didn't see Gavin Lux, who was an example that we talked about on Tuesday, if we didn't see a guy like that get traded, money's first,

and then there's a long break, and then you start to get to those other factors. Yeah, I think it's kind of simple. People talk about why the strikeouts and the home runs and stuff. And I think you just kind of look at the value of those events and you realize that for a batter, there's no more valuable event than a home run.

And for a pitcher, there's no more valuable event than a strikeout. So it's like if you learn a new board game you figure out what the most valuable thing is and you optimize your strategy to get those things it's just it's it's very simple and i think that when you think about the game economically there's no more valuable player than a player on the minimum contract yeah um almost regardless of their value of their quality, because you have a range of quality of players.

So you could have a guy who's just useful on minimum contract, or you could have a star on minimum contract, but all things being equal, you'd rather have the guy on the minimum contract. It's $500,000 versus somebody like Harper costing $33 million. So, you know, I think that's the biggest thing is that they've just gone towards that. But I think it's also instructive to see that the trade deadlines have actually only begun become more and more active. And that's something that came up in a piece that I wrote

this week. They've become more and more active in terms of bodies changing place, but they've become less active in terms of top 50 prospects being traded or 60 future value type prospects, which is even kind of like top 25 type prospects. And I think that's a basic understanding, like he said, in the thing about bust rates. I don't think it's necessarily they've gotten a huge amount better at saying who will succeed and who won't. I think they've just identified which ones succeed. And the ones that succeed are the consensus top prospects.

And that's something we've known for a long time. So those guys don't get traded anymore. There are a lot of trades. The average trade right now is Trevor Rosenthal for Edward Olivares. That's the average trade. Veteran reliever who actually was unrosterable about a year ago for a guy that played up to AA last year, wasn't a top 100 overall prospect on anybody's list,

and has flaws that need to be corrected if he's going to be more than like a fourth outfielder that's the average trade i mean almost every even tramell fits into that because there are no matter what you what prospect person you follow and the ranks kind of go from like 43 to like 120 on taylor tramell They all in the write-ups have a lot of positive things to say. And then they all get to a point where they say, these are the things that have to change. And the ones that rank them higher

just think he can do it. And the ones that rank them lower think he can't. So yes, yeah, I would say flawed, flawed but useful now for flawed but useful later. That's the average trade. So I think that answers kind of all the questions at once.

And it's sad, but I think it's also kind of interesting. As much as the Cub fans will take the World Series win, as much as the Cub fans will take the World Series win, they're probably in their hearts annoyed by Gleyber Torres and Eloy Jimenez. You know what I mean?

Right, because they might have been able to win multiple World Series if they kept those guys. That's the risk they took. Yeah, they'd rather have won with those guys on the roster um and so uh maybe it's okay that those trades aren't happening anymore it's also kind of cool um to have a guy kind of come up through the minor league system be excited about him and then they play well for you you know what i mean for sure, I kind of wonder too at the next CBA,

so after the 2021 season, are we going to see shorter paths to free agency? I mean, teams obviously value players with years of control more than ever, and we talked about just how valuable it is to have a guy on the league minimum who could be $30 to $40 million in actual on-field value but i would assume that all these things we're talking about hitting peak age sooner and players being under paid at their peak that's something that the players association is going to want to address i'm just wondering how much teams are going to be willing to actually concede on that as the the

owners and players try to work out that new CBA? It's the number one thing that players will want. They will do everything they can. They will give it the expanded playoffs. I don't know what else they can give, really, and they'll do it. Maybe they'll get rid of pre-agency compensation. They'll get rid of the qualifying offer

and pre-agency compensation. They'll get rid of the qualifying offer and pre-agency compensation. They'll give the expanded playoffs and all they want back is, you know, make everyone super too and double the minimum salary. Those sound like modest things, but they would help. You know, if nobody gets to seven years

of team control, that's great. And if everybody makes $750 to $1 million right off the bat, that's great. That'll be really useful for the players in terms of how much they make and in terms of how much the young players make. The ones that are now playing mostly,

40% of baseball's on the minimum contract so if you doubled that from 500 to a million 40 of your of the players will be happier also i think how how these trades will work and how people think about things because all of a sudden now you have to pay that reliever or that backup infielder or whatever that you job you're going to give to the guy with no experience you you have to pay him a million dollars. Or you can go sign Colin Moran for a million dollars, right? You're going to close the gap between the controlled young player versus the 28- to 30-year-old veteran who's kind of falling by the wayside.

Now Moran and Lamb at a $3 million deal versus the non-prospect guy that you think will do it for a million, you're kind of like, wow, okay, I think we can shell out that extra two or three million. So that might help the middle class. That's my plan for the players. And I think they would likely do something along that.

I don't know if they can achieve it. It's all about whether the owners value those things that the players can give them. Yeah. One of the main storylines of the upcoming CBA negotiation. I had one more question here that came in from Cam. It's a question about change-ups. He writes, hi guys, big fan of the show. I don't even play fantasy. I just listen for the cool nuggets you drop, which is awesome. If you're listening to the show and you don't play fantasy baseball, hit us up on Twitter. He's at Eno Saris. I'm at Derek Van Ryper. I'm always just

curious to know how many people out there don't even play fantasy but still enjoy our podcast anyway. Eno once mentioned a piece that either power change-ups with big movement profiles or straight change-ups with large velocity gaps are ideal. I was wondering if you could go into that more

and explain why those are ideal and who now represents those two buckets. Yeah. So the, I think the idea is just that you have a power change that has a ton of movement and separates itself by movement, or you have a straight change that separates itself by velocity. I think in the, in the past we thought it was just velocity and the movement was also important, we thought it was just velocity and the movement was also important, but you had to have the 10 mile an hour gap. That was kind of the way to go. But I think that Felix Hernandez just put that on its head a little bit and said, I don't have that velocity gap, but I have this movement gap that makes it really hard. And

basically pitching is about disrupting timing. So you're either going to disrupt the timing with velocity, but you can also disrupt timing with movement because um you know to get to a pitch that's here versus to get to a pitch that's six inches further down you know requires different movement patterns so it's still disrupting the hitter it's just a slightly different way of thinking about things are you thinking about things in terms of verticality and getting off the bat that way or are you thinking about things sort of front to back and getting off the bat that way? Or are you thinking about things sort of front to back and getting off the bat that way? And just something I've heard,

Harry Pavlidis' research said that you could have two pathways to success for a changeup and that one could be the power change or one could be the straight change. He didn't necessarily say that you had to be one or the other. That's been something I've heard from people who do analysis within the game. And I thought it might be instructive to kind of look at the guys who do both. Let me just first hear the straight change guys.

The biggest change of velocity difference in baseball is Mike Morin with the Marlins and Julian Merriweather with the Blue Jays. They have a 17,mile-an-hour gap, so just a tremendous amount of gap. Dylan Cease, Spencer Howard, Roberto Asuna, Lucas Giolito. Giolito, I think, has the kind of – that's what I think of as a straight change. But other straight changers are Matthew Boyd. Mike Sirocco has a 13-mile-an-hour gap. Joey Lucchese has a 12-mile-an-hour gap.

Devin Williams has the 12-mile-an-hour gap. Terry Skubals is a straight change, 12 miles an hour. Brad Boxberger had that thing forever. Michael Givens. Those are the guys who have straight change uh type velocity gap um but if you look at that group a lot of them don't have much velocity difference uh no don't have much movement difference off of the the fastball and um I think it makes sense it's just it's different mechanics and stuff means John Means has more of a straight change and doesn't have that much vertical difference. Devin Williams has both.

And traditionally, I've seen other players fail at this. So let's look at guys who have plus 10 velocity differential and plus 10 vertical differential. There's not going to be a lot of them. So one is Devin Williams. Another is Michael Gibbons. If we soften it a little bit we'll get uh box burger coon rod uh and lucchese uh those are kind of nine inch guys all right like two of those were successful right yeah right? Yeah. And I put a third column down change up command plus Devin Williams change

up command plus is one Oh eight. Brad Boxburgers is 96. Joey Lucchese is 77. Um, I think if you have a pitch that has a ton of wheel differential and a ton of vertical differential it's easier for hitters to see it somehow and if you can't command it and put it in the zone they'll just not swing at it yeah Yeah. It's the Jarrell Cotton problem. Yeah. Williams doesn't have that, though. And I think this is one of those situations where when you watch him, I think he's got good fastball command, too. He locates everything really well.

So the fact that he's ticking all these boxes, it sort of answers a question. Is Devin Williams this good, which is something that you're seeing all over the place? I think there was just a piece today on savant about him I think I've seen him pop up on twitter questions and pitching ninja was all over him like from the jump this season he's becoming one of the most popular non-closer relievers in the league in the last couple of weeks and now he's just a josh hater injury or an off-season josh hater trade away from maybe being the brewers closer like that's within reach for him with these skills. Or even, you know, a co-closer as the Brewers have done before.

I think he totally is this. I think he's basically Chris Paddock as a reliever. If you took Chris Paddock and you made him a reliever, he'd probably have a 96, 97-mile-an-hour fastball. I saw Devin Williams literally throw a front door change up where he's throwing a change up that the left-handed batter thinks is going to hit him flinches and then it comes over the middle of the plate for a called strike and that's what the high command plus does for you it basically says he can do things with this to get called strikes and he

can do things with this to get swinging strikes if and he can do things with this to get swinging strikes. If you can't do the called strike portion, no one's going to swing at it. That's why Joey Lucchese, like literally almost out of baseball, but now at least a reliever, I think. I don't think of him as a fifth starter. I don't think any team in baseball is lining up to trade for him. So I think that it is better. Let's now look at, just really quickly at the end, let's now sort this for vertical differential

and look at the power changeups. Here we go. Vertical differential leaders, Devin Williams, number one. Noe Ramirez, Michael Givens with that kind of Williams-esque change, but not the same command. Givens has a 93 command plus on his crazy straight change.

Let's see here. Matt Andrees has been throwing the change up a lot more and it's working to some extent. He's got a 107 command plus on it. Daniel Norris has one of these. Zach Gallen has the Granke power change, like extent he's got a 107 command plus on it daniel norris has one of these uh zach gallon um has the granky power change like i said um where's granky show up granky shows up with an eight inch um and he's in the top 20 along with other guys like peter fairbanks sam Coonrod has both Velo Differential

and Vertical Differential and a 79 changeup command plus. I'm not betting on him. Logan Webb has a power change and a 105 changeup command plus. I do actually like Logan Webb. There's some names for you.

Some guys who throw the power change. Some guys who throw. LeJay Newsome throws the power change and has a 128 command plus in a small sample. So LeJay Newsome is someone I've always liked better than the prospecting community. Yeah, it makes sense when you look at the underlying numbers. The command is good for Newsome. I think it would almost have to be for his arsenal to work

as well as it does. But that was a great question. Thanks for writing in, Cam. Lots of great questions. And if you want to weigh in, get some ideas, things you'd like us to talk about in a future episode, hit us up via email, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com. Just spell out the word and if you go that route. If you're enjoying our show and listen on a platform where you can leave us rating and

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