Rates & Barrels - Let's Start Using More Chisels

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Rundown4:44 Owners & Players Head to the Table13:36 Impact of the Five-Round First-Year Player Draft26:01 Fantasy Impact of Expanded Rosters29:54 Looking Back at Great Half-Seasons46:16 Jeff Zimmerman's Piece on Hard-Hit Angles54:08 Concerns with Low Exit Velocity at Young Ages Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiperE-Mail: [e-mail] Get a free 90-day trial to The Athletic: theathletic.com/free90days Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How's working from home been going for you? Remarkably Remote from GoToMeeting will help you succeed in today's new normal. In just three minutes or less, we'll share simple but helpful tips to keep you on track. From managing your motivation, workload, and relationships, to hosting and attending virtual events that keep you connected with your clients and colleagues. Check out Remarkably Remote on your favorite podcasting platform or head to gotomeeting.com slash tips. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 94. It is May 12th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we're going to talk about the beginning of a new round of negotiations between the owners and the players with the hopes of getting a 2020 season in place in the very near future. We'll talk about the changes that have already been made to the 2020 MLB draft, which is just a month away, a little less than a month at this point, but some major, major changes. We'll talk about the impact of that. Jeff Zimmerman, our good friend over at Fangraphs, wrote a great piece about hard hit angle. We'll take a look at

that and we'll take a look at some of the things that can happen over a shortened season with variants, looking back at some historical leaderboards and getting a better sense of what some of these individual half seasons could look like if we're able to get something close to an 81 game season here in 2020 how's it going for you today you know it's going all right it's going it's going okay i'm uh just managing to subsist i've i'm doing better than my friend my single friend in new y New York who's in a little apartment and has been for months and feels like he's never going to leave. So I reached out to him, and we're going to do some sort of little book club thing where we're both going to read the same book at the same time and kind of email each other about it just to keep him sane. each other about it just to keep them sane. Yeah, I can't imagine being in one of the worst hit places where that return to normalcy is going to take longer when you're isolating alone. That

would be a really challenging situation to be in. Just one of those things where I don't know when normal is going to happen even in a less impacted place. And you imagine New York to be one of the last places to really get back to anything that resembles life as it was. So hopefully your friend can hang in there. I know you sent him some beer mail a little while back, right? How's he doing with that? I think he just finished it up a little bit. right how's he how's he doing with that i think he just finished it up a little bit um yeah and uh yeah definitely doesn't drink as much beer as i did because i would have finished that in the first couple days i think he's a little bit more of a whiskey drinker but um yeah you know and

there's the sad news out here that the warriors just let go uh 1700 people, one of the largest employers in the region, and they let go 1,700 people. And of course, that has like kind of this same kind of end date on it where it's like, well, you know, hopefully a lot of those people will be rehired. And the Warriors did try to, you know, give them some sort of a soft a landing as they could with certain programs and certain things that they can do for them. But with the Chase Center being largely useless, that's not necessarily front office people. When you're talking about 1,700 people,

you're talking about running an enterprise like the Chase Center. And it's not just Warriors games. It's concerts and stuff like that. like the Chase Center. And, you know, it's not just Warriors games, it's, you know, concerts and stuff like that. But like, geez, that's, that's going to be one of the last things to come back, isn't it? And they're, and they're so much fun. Yeah, I love, I love live music, man. I had, I'm not, you know, it'd be sad for me, but I had like fish tickets and, you know, we work in a business where you get to go, you know, it's nice to feel the, the, the energy of the crowd. And oftentimes I would leave the press box and,

and, and just go out and, you know, say hi to friends or, or let people on Twitter, ping me and, and, and meet new people. Um, and, uh, yeah, that, that part's sad i mean we may get bars you know in the next couple months because they'll let us you know congregate 50 at a time or whatever but um it gets problematic when you get thousands of people together yeah it does and of course that's among the many questions that major league baseball is trying to work through right now. But in order to even play games without fans in attendance, the owners and the Players Association need to come up with an arrangement for compensation. So that's really picked up some steam. The owners put together a proposal on Monday.

It didn't even formally make it, I think, to the Tuesday phase of any sort of negotiation. It was kind of rejected by Tony Clark, and Scott Boris made a lot of comments about it. Once word of what the owners were looking for leaked out. I'm looking at some of the stories, and the weight of what teams are trying to figure out and the league is trying to figure out is incredible. I mean, there was the story that Molly Knight had just a couple days ago about the antibody study. And the findings there were that MLB employees at a rate of like 0.7% had the virus, which was a lot lower than the researchers anticipated. So you have that kind of lingering here as well. And a lot of players are obviously concerned for good reason

about the health and well-being of everybody involved in making baseball happen again. And it's one of those times, and we knew these stretches would come, where it's hard to feel optimistic about baseball in particular, even though for most of the last dozen episodes or so, it has felt like there is actually a light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, yeah. And in some ways, it's surprising. In some ways, it's not surprising. I mean, Sean Doolittle had a great thread about what he thinks about when he thinks about reopening, and it was mostly about

health and risk and not as much about the financial aspect. But maybe it's not surprising that when the owners and MLBPA get together to negotiate that economics comes first, because that's just the nature of their interactions in the past. They've had to negotiate some issues about sort of data ownership and, you know, what kind of health statistics teams could track and stuff like that. But, you know, in large part of their history, they've interacted with each other economically. You know, in some ways I'm disappointed, as I am usually, that so much of the public sentiment seems to be that the players should just shut up and take whatever deals on the table. And I understand where that comes from because the players' salaries are published and, you know, the ownership income is something you've got to sort of chase. You chase you gotta make a whole living chasing of it like uh like maury brown does um on forbes so uh you know there's that one thing about visibility the players are also more visible in terms of names there's lots of owners whose names we don't know even on this podcast probably and um so and then also on top of that we're all hurting um you know people have

taken pay cuts been temporarily furloughed even lost their jobs so for for you know players it's very there's a bit of a thing that seems right and just to maybe the average fan that says okay yeah you guys should share revenue this year because it's a weird year it's not it's an outlier year uh you can go back to your business as usual in the future. Um, but I also think it's a little bit unfair because the whole idea of capital and labor and the way that it works is that, you know, capital makes more money. Um, you know, you know, ownership retains more than 50%, um, no matter how you kind of slice and dice it of of the revenue. And the reason they do that is because they assume the risk. And, you know, I know this is a risk that doesn't seem foreseeable,

but it is also a category of the risk of having a season with losses. There could have been another reason for massive unemployment across the U.S. and there could have been another reason for people not to come to games that wasn't COVID. And the ownership does assume that risk year to year. And I think that there's a little bit of the pushback from the player side being like, this is the risk that you assumed uh and we already made an agreement in in in march um that that basically said you were going to pay us our prorated salary so we're not asking for 100 of our salaries you know for the season but we are asking for 100 of our salaries for the games we play because we're also assuming the other risk we're assuming the health risk. And the owners may not even have to show up at

the stadium. So, you know, I support the players in pushing for an equitable solution. And I'm not sure that revenue sharing, which is exactly the basis for the salary cap in other leagues, and is so therefore very pre-salary cap if it's not actually a salary cap. I can see why they wouldn't like that. My suggestion would be to try and come to some percentage that's amenable to the players, some sort of haircut that is fixed and allows them to play. So everyone gets prorated salaries minus 10% or something. That reflects the fact that maybe this is a risk that it's unfair to expect the owners to foresee or assume. Maybe it reflects the fact that this is a terrible time for everyone.

It reflects the fact that this is a terrible time for everyone. And it reflects the fact that at least 30% to 40% of baseball's income is not going to come back probably at all this year, or at least for most of the season. So I hope that they find a way together, like you said. I think that things were looking good in terms of more and more of the states that they play in, cleaning up enough and opening up enough and starting to open up in a way that would lead the way and allow for teams to play in their own stadiums. So I really hope they figured it out. And all of this comes with the caveats of still making progress slowly. You still have to keep track of how things are trending with the virus all over the country

and monitor that and continue to move forward if it's safe to do so. I think that at this point should go without saying. But again, I think these two sides going back to the table it's always something that makes you hold your breath when you're a fan of the game and especially if you're a fan of the game and your employment hinges on those two sides getting along but like you i mean i i think the players because they're taking on so much of the health risk in this case, all of it, as you alluded to, the owners don't have to show up. The concession on their side should be minimal, if anything at all. I mean, I think you could also make an argument that they should get 100% of their prorated salary and hazard pay on top of that.

So if they even give 10% off of their prorated salary, I think that should be more than enough. And I would agree with their position. This is the little bit of downside, business speaking, business-wise, that comes up with owning a team. This is that rare occurrence that turns the franchise, which is usually just an automatic source of profit, into an actual temporary source of loss. But the people that own these teams and the families that own these teams will be making money decades into the future, long after the current group of players have retired and moved on from playing.

And I think sometimes that gets lost in the conversation for people. And, you know, the frustration with the players is just something I've never quite understood on the public side, even in the framework of what you brought up. I mean, with people losing their jobs, people being furloughed, to see people positioned to make a lot more money than most people would make

and turning that away, I can understand how that rubs people the wrong way. But then when you look at how much more money the owners have by comparison, that's the step that most people don't do. That's when you can pretty easily see that one of those sides should be making concession and it's really not the players. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues across the United States, more school districts are closing. For the millions of kids who normally eat free or reduced price meals at school,

this could mean no longer having breakfast or lunch. You can help make sure children get the meals they need by donating now at feedingamerica.org slash coronavirus. Brought to you by Feeding America and the Ad Council. One change that already has been implemented is a significantly shortened MLB draft. We're going to have a five-round draft this year. I don't think this was something, in reading about it, that the teams across the board, at least the front offices, were all necessarily on board with.

I think a lot of teams were hoping for at least 10 rounds. What's been the general vibe that you've had looking into this and gauging the reactions around the league? You know, I agree with a lot of what, you know, and Baseball America has a vested interest in the draft and so on. But I agree with a lot of what I've seen from Aaron Fitt and J.J. Cooper and some of the prospect writers, Keith Law, had a good piece on this. And, like, I really, the main thing that I hope is that it's temporary. I hope that they don't, you know, start doing this, start cutting the draft in the future.

But, you know, if there are fewer minor league teams after this, start cutting the draft in the future. But if there are fewer minor league teams after this, then it's going to be inevitable that they shorten the draft. But five rounds is drastic. I mean, we're talking cutting 25 rounds or something. It's a lot of rounds. And the message then to the remaining... And it's not even like a message, it's like a literal economics. The literal economics is if you're not part of the top five rounds, you get $20,000.

And that $20,000 bonus is supposed to help you get through seasons where you make $4,000, $6,000, $8,000, $10,000 a year. four, six, eight, $10,000 a year. Um, that's why it's important that there are a hundred thousand dollar bonuses because you have to use that to get through the minor league seasons to, to make it to the, to the, to the show, to make it even at all viable, uh, to, to play minor league baseball. And so what you're saying basically is that, that this will become a sport of people with means. And you're pushing it towards that sort of niche sport where you're not opening it up to the best athletes in the U.S. in particular, but across the world as well if you start cutting rounds of the draft

and cutting it down to $20,000 max bonus. So there's a question of what you're broadcasting in the present and what you're broadcasting in the future. And for what it's worth, it doesn't even look like the majority of owners agreed, thought this was a great idea. It sounds like it was a kind of vocal minority. So it's disappointing. It's going to put a hole in everybody's system. It's going to put a hole in everybody's player development plans. And it's going to possibly put a long-term hole in the future of baseball in terms of attracting athletes. Yeah, I think there was a 40-round draft last year.

1,217 players were selected. So you go from that to five, the impact is huge. And you mentioned that 20K bonus cap. I at first thought, hey, maybe the teams that pushed for this are actually going to try and leverage the uncertainty to load up a bunch of players onto their farm system who were going to go to college. But now don't even know what college is going to look like for the next year. And they're just going to take less than they would have received. And say I'd rather just start my baseball career now.

And figure out college later. But they lowered that bonus enough where I don't think that is viable. Because unless teams are going to actually pay a lot more. To the players who are in the lower levels of the minor leagues, it's just a flat-out bad offer. And there are plenty of kids who will not be able to afford to play baseball now. There are a lot of kids and young men who can't afford to play now. That is an ongoing problem that Emily Walden has written extensively about, right? This is a problem throughout most of minor league baseball. And now it's getting worse. And major league baseball already had a problem of haves and have nots as it pertained to being able to play this game at a competitive level in America and to be scouted and to be drafted. So this is only going to take an existing problem and make it worse, at least for the short

term and possibly for the long term. I've seen plenty of great examples of players who were drafted after the fifth round. You don't have to look far to find them. They're all over. I saw some research that basically suggested about a quarter of baseball

pro baseball players. I do think, though, this has a lot to do with the previous attempts that were just getting underway this offseason to shrink the minor leagues. This is definitely related to that. This helps reach that goal, if we'll call it that of ownership a lot faster i do think there is an interesting discussion to be had that is not being had in the sort of political polarity between sides which is you know would we rather have most minor leaguers paid a living wage and there'd be fewer minor leaguers you know yes pie in the sky we have as many minor leaguers as we want and they're all paid really well uh but you know the the realistic uh choice for some teams and if you like you go back to that like let's say baseball made 500

million dollars you split that by 30 now you you're talking about teams making $5 to $20 million per team. It's going to go up and down. They're going to have different ranges on that. But you're not talking about them bringing a lot. And so therefore, paying an entire minor league system, you could say, oh, it costs the same as sort of a reliever or something. It's like $3 to $5 million. If you're doing that, but also not getting the reliever and you're putting that on top of whatever different budget outlays you have, then you're going to be cutting into a profit that's not amazing and huge. Yes,

outlays you have, then you're going to be cutting into a profit that's not amazing and huge. Yes, it's still a great long-term idea to own a team because it's accruing money every year, and you can sell at the end for a fabulous profit. But in terms of year-to-year budget making, there's been more of a focus and an emphasis on making money every year as there are more ownership groups instead of single owners, as there are more uh ownership groups instead of single owners as there are more corporate owned uh teams um and those that pressure has been put on on teams to be money making in the prizes in their own in their own uh regards so you know uh there's so many different vectors on this i mean um like if you look at what it's like for a player to be in the pioneer league, um, like the, the, the bus trips are terrible and super long. Um, and you're going from

stadium to stadium in places where no one's showing up to the games, almost nobody. And, and you're being paid terribly. You know, but that serves as some sort of loss leader for loss leader marketing style for baseball, because it keeps baseball relevant in, you know, a four to five state region. Whereas if you get rid of the Pioneer League, there's no baseball, you's no baseball in these four or five states you can carve out a huge chunk of real estate where there'd be no baseball within miles and I think Meg Rowley I forget

she teamed up with somebody at Fangraphs to show that you're talking about 30, 40, 50 million people that won't have, uh, baseball within, um, you know, an hour's drive or something. So that means that there's all these different things, like as a loss leader marketing style, like you want to keep baseball relevant. So I think that a lot of times we make these like baseball is making these short-term decisions to be like, we want to be profitable. Now we want to bring profits to our, to our owners.

We want to, uh, we want to do this. We want to, we want to make the most money we can out of every spectator. So we're going to do variable seat pricing and we're going to, we're not worried about fewer people showing up to games. We just want the richer people showing up to games.

And, you know, like we, you know, all these like short term decisions, what they're adding up to is, uh, pushing for declining popularity of baseball in the long term. If you take it out, if you take it out of

the Pioneer League, there are people in those areas that just won't care about baseball, and they'll grow up not caring about baseball. And if you cut the minor league teams, you're generally cutting access to baseball. And if you cut the draft, you're cutting fewer players getting in, you're cutting access, you're cutting ability for athletes to choose baseball. And if you cut the draft, you're cutting fewer players getting in, you're cutting access, you're cutting ability for athletes to choose baseball. So all these decisions are going to lessen the impact of baseball on the national scale and lessen it in comparison to the other sports. And probably when TV deals come up, make it a lot less popular and a lot less lucrative for the owners in the future. So it is like taking extra money now and hurting the game in the long term

and possibly making it less profitable down the road. I mean, that's a legitimate risk they are taking on by alienating people or just making baseball disappear, potentially, in so many of those corners of the country where minor league baseball is currently played. You asked kind of an interesting question at the very beginning of that, though. Would we or would I, would everyone, would we rather have fewer minor league players, but all minor league players are paid a living wage or keep the current system, essentially? the that's the toss-up right

and i know you can say well no it's c like same size as currently and everything let's just pretend that's not going to happen because it probably not it just isn't going to happen then i think you you have to choose the option of minor leaguers who are at least paid a living wage for their work. That is the only viable option. And it's unfortunate. It's terrible because minor league baseball does employ a lot of people around the country. It is a pipeline for people who want to be broadcasters at the highest level to begin honing their craft. I mean, that's a big part of what minor league baseball is as well.

These are small businesses that are a big part of the communities where they're present. Like that's something that's got a loss in a lot of different ways depending on where those teams are, right? So there's tons of downside that comes with that. are, right? So there's tons of downside that comes with that. But if you can't take care of people, you shouldn't be in the business. That's the saddest part of all of this. And again, option C, yes, they can do it and they're choosing not to is what makes it all so frustrating. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well that um even if they even if some of these decisions were made that um you know some of that that they wouldn't have been so stark you know if you were going to cut the the draft cut it in half yeah 40 to 20 would be maybe a little more reasonable, a little easier to accept.

And, you know, I guess, you know, there is a little bit of question, like where are these kids going to play, right? And so we can use that as a bit of a segue. Every segue is awkward when you're talking about life and death and subsistence level pay. But, you know, where are these kids going to play? And maybe they just didn't have a place to play them,

so they'd have to pay them and not play them, and they would have lost the year of development anyway. But there's a couple things coming out in the plan that are fantasy relevant and also have something to do with um this which is that you know the idea that we basically have 30 man rosters that's kind of where i've been circling and there's more and more news that that agrees with that uh stance and then uh a 20 man taxi squad that would a 20-man taxi squad that would basically inflate the

40-man roster to a 50-man roster so they'd be available to promote and demote without having consequences like DFAs and stuff. So I think that there'll be some sort

of designation like that and there's a fair amount of prospects that we've talked about on the show that will therefore get more playing time this year. And I think Wanda Franco is going to be on that list. I mean, they want to at least have him available in case something happens. Yeah, we've been wondering all along for teams that have near major league ready prospects or major league ready prospects. If you don't have double a or triple a affiliates to send players to what are you going to do? Are you going to keep them ready in this sort of taxi squad? Are you

going to have them on the roster on and off the roster and occasionally give them opportunities to play against top level competition and kind of feel out the situation for a stretch. I mean, in a shortened season, as we've said before, every game has a greater impact. So you don't have the luxury of letting players figure it out for a prolonged stretch. You have to make faster decisions, especially if you're trying to be competitive. Yes. Yeah. So there's that you're you're speaking from like a team perspective.

Right. But, you know, that's that's where fantasy comes in is not only are there, you know, 10 more players is a big deal. 10 more prospects that, you know, will be relevant this season because they'll be basically on the 40 man, on the 50 man. And that means that maybe Terry Scubal or Trevor Larnak or Nolan Jones. Even guys like Elliot Ramos for the Giants. Taylor Trammell for the Padres. These guys are probably going to go on.

If you have 10 extra slots, they're going to go on. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to play. There's that you have 10 extra slots, they're going to go on, right? That doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to play. There's that other class, the Alec Baum types that are, you know, more closer to being in, uh, in a high variance season are, are, are more likely, um, to play. Um, I guess maybe you could put Josh Lowe. I think Randy or as arena is ahead of josh low though um but uh you like there's we'll have an article on this i'm sure uh coming up soon uh but i'm focusing also on a little thing that you said about you know in a higher variance season they have to make these decisions quicker um that's what's fascinating to me is that uh the variance just

got upped we're gonna the the largest number we've heard now is 82 games. I've been talking about sort of an 81-game season starting July 4th this whole time, and I feel like that is going to put pressure on us in a lot of different ways. One is we have to make our decisions sooner. And I have a piece up called the In, um, that talks about small sample, uh, stats you can use in small samples to make decisions. Uh, but we know about, you know, max exit velocity and things like that. Uh, but we're going to have to make our decisions faster as fantasy owners. Um, and then on top of that, um, I wonder if there's any way we can get out in front of that variance and, um um and think about like is there anything that groups the um the the best half seasons of all time is there anything that like sticks out about the best half seasons of all

time because we're about to have a half season and there are some amazing half seasons in the history of baseball and even in the last 10 years uh we, we were looking them up, but one of my favorite things is that Andrew McCutcheon, um, has had, uh, two first halves with a one 79 WRC plus where in both of them, he hit better than, uh,

he hit better than combined a three 50 combined. Um, we're going to see someone hit like three 75 this year. Yeah. It's, I mean, the idea of a player hitting 400 for a season has been far-fetched to me for a while now, but... This could be the year, though.

It could happen in a half season. Yeah. If we start by average, the best half season so far was Yasiel Puig, but it was only 161 plate appearances, but a 391 average. But in a full half, we got Miguel Cabrera hitting 365 and Justin Turner hitting 377 in 2017. Those are some

sweet numbers right there. Look at the home run leaderboards too. So this is again, looking at the last 10 seasons, Chris Davis hit 37 home runs that's the orioles chris davis in 2013 he hit 315 while doing it it turns out when you hit that many home runs in you know 343 at bats that gives you a little extra batting juice of course too but uh you know there were a few players though there are seven players who have 30 or more home runs in the first half of a season in the last 10 years. Joey Batts did it once in 2011.

Christian Jelic hit 31 home runs in the first half last year. You mentioned that Miggy365 back in 2013, he hit 30 home runs in that half. Bellinger hit 30 in the first half last year. So did Pete Alonso. So you can put up some crazy good numbers in a half season. And again, some people are listening and saying, well, sometimes the All-Star breaks a little later and it's more like 90 or 95 games. That's true. But that just gives you an idea of how much more of a – you can almost get stats that are 80% of a full season in a half season if everything goes right.

And that's just – it's wild yeah yeah and i think back to some research by bill petty on what was called volatility he made a metric called volatility and um it was basically a sort of measure of uh the peaks and valleys of a player's performance in any given any given period of time. And what was fun about it was that two things. One was that volatility goes down with age. So players get steadier, but their peaks aren't as high, but their troughs aren't as low.

I always find that as an interesting side note. But the other thing was that strikeout rate was related to volatility. And if your strikeout rate goes higher, then your volatility goes up. I think that makes sense if you think about just the mechanics of how that would work of a player going to the streets where he's just got a ton of strikeouts. And you think of some of the strikeout-prone players as being streaky. It makes sense kind of anecdotally, but here's the numbers saying that. But there's an interesting sort of flip to that. Okay, so volatility goes up as strikeout rate goes up.

You would think that, for example, when I'm looking at the best batting averages of all time, all the strikeout rates are great. Yasiel Puig is 22.4 and J.D. Martinez is 23.4 are the only ones in the top 30 that are over league average. Everybody else is striking out 10, 12, 13% of the time. That makes sense because you want a bunch of lottery tickets on the ground. And so, therefore, if you're chasing batting average, you could focus on strikeout rate this year.

However, the flip side of volatility being related to strikeout rate is that you could get the good parts, you could get a volatile player that gives you the half season of good parts with a high strikeout rate. So if you sort by WRC+, which is a more overall metric, you get Aaron Judge's season in the top 10 with a 29.8% strikeout rate.

That Chris Davis season you're talking about, he had a 28% strikeout rate. You start to see more guys with Mike Trout with 23, J.D. Martinez with 23. You're starting to see more guys with higher strikeout rates because even a guy with a high strikeout rate if you're talking about a half season can hit that higher end of his volatility and just have a Chris Davis half season

so I'm not sure that I'm going to come up with like a hey this is how you deal with volatility here's X, Y, and Z and I'm going to make it really easy for you I rarely do I know I apologize I just try to make it really easy for you. I rarely do. I know. I apologize. I just try to think things through, and you can come along or not.

But there are two sides to this sort of strikeout rate and volatility coin that are going to play out. Yeah, I'm looking at some of the other corners of the leaderboard. Stolen bases in a half season. Lots of Billy Hamilton first halves on there. He's got three of the five best first halves. Before he lost his job. Yeah, 38, 38, and 44.

He actually had 44 as the high. There's a Dee Gordon season in there in 2014. There's Jose Altuve's 2014. He was 41 for 44 as a base stealer in the first half that year. There's a Trey Turner 35 steal season sprinkled in there. How about a Jacoby Ellsbury 36 for 39 in 2013? I mean, it's wild. There I think injury is kind of an aspect that is interesting.

Two things, injury and the joke I made about losing the job. Some of these players, you mentioned Everett Cabrera. Did you mention him? He's the other just blast from the past name here. 34 for 42 in 79 games in 2013. Yeah, and yet very unrelevant the rest of the time. And Billy Hamilton's had some of these seasons where he had these big halves and then lost his job in the second half.

So I think about, like, obviously Malik Smith. We talk about him so much. I mean, it's weird how much I talk about Malik Smith. Maybe I shouldn't. But my point is maybe he keeps a job this year in 81 games. Maybe those are the 81 games where he hits 260 and doesn't look like trying to swat a fly out there in the outfield when he's running around balls. So maybe he just does just enough to keep his job, and then we have a season for Malik Smith where he steals 38 bases in half a season.

I mean, he definitely fits in with these names. I mean, he is another Dee Gordon. Yeah, 100%. I was not interested in rostering him at all in a full 162. You just figured he's going to lose his job. His chances of holding that spot are better in a shortened season. I just started pulling up the pitching leaderboard as well because pitchers can do some pretty fascinating things

over a first half as well. I've got to knock off these relievers. There's some pretty bad relievers who threw 40-plus innings with an ERA below 1 in recent years. You might have forgotten that Robbie Ross had a.95 ERA in the first half of 2012. Yeah, you may have chased that for wins or something, but there's a Brad Brock season in there. Oh, and if your reliever has one bad outing,

their final end-of-season numbers are going to be terrible. Yeah, it's going to be kind of strange with that. And I think that was one of the areas, relievers in particular, and pursuing saves and trying to figure out, are teams going to be, if there are fewer off days, are teams going to be more likely to use committees to finish out games because guys are going to need rest. If there's no off day built in between series,

or if there are fewer off days built in, you're going to have relievers who i think are more often unavailable for their usual roles which probably makes things a lot more flexible with how even previously rigid bullpen situations are handled yeah you almost wonder if like you don't want to win this year you just know like all the belly aching that'll come from people like if i if i win labor this year i'll be so annoyed i mean i'll be happy to finally have won it but it's still gonna somebody's gonna whisper about it somewhere but these are actually still pretty good names it's just that the their number is so low you know what i mean like it's it's grank, Kershaw, DeGrom.

Like, Granke had the best half season in the last 10 years with a 1.660 RA. It's all mostly good pitchers. It's just that their impact can be even bigger in a short season where they don't hit that stretch where, you know, a couple things go wrong and they have a couple bad outings and it gets closer to, you know, a 3 ERA or whatever. Yeah, there's some real interesting ones sprinkled in, though. I mean, Grinke's 2015 139 ERA in the first half. It's pretty good.

That'll work over 123 in third innings. Josh Johnson at the beginning of the decade had a 170 ERA in 12 third innings. Josh Johnson, at the beginning of the decade, had a 170 ERA in 122 innings. It's kind of a guy I forgot about, understandably. Let's see, what else? Jared Weaver, 186. Oh, Jair Juergens with a 187 ERA back in 2011. I thought he was going to be really good. Oh, man.

Jair Juergens. I definitely didn't say that one right i loved him dude i loved him because i remember being like this guy is not gonna keep doing this it was i think one of my earlier fancy calls where i was like don't believe in this one it was probably backed by like a 190 babbitt or something and that at the time was enough to just say hey yeah i'm the police and this is not going to be the police i mean it says you're a 229 average again so that's that might be the babbitt um yeah and and then Brandon Beachy. Actually, I probably came on the wrong side of Brandon Beachy.

I always thought Brandon Beachy had a lot of talent. I don't think you were alone in that. And I think he, you know, I'm not sure that that was the problem with his career. I mean, the problem with his career was mostly injury. Yeah. I don't think that was a bad call if you believed in Brandon Beach Yeah. I don't, I don't think that was a bad call. If you believed in Brandon Beachy,

I think his arm just didn't hold up. There's still a fair amount of good pitchers at the top of this list. It's still mostly good pitchers. I would say, uh, Greinke with the, like, as you mentioned, the top one, Josh Johnson, that's vintage Josh Johnson at the top there. Um, Dallas Keuchel, DeGrom, Johnson again. I mean, I think you have to get down to Jire at 13 or I guess Beachy. I mean, most of the list is there are good pitchers. So I think it's just that we're still going to have good pitchers and bad pitchers. There's just the spread is going to get pushed out. Because Zach Greinke in 2015 did not finish with a 139 ERA. He finished with a 166.

But still, he had a worse second half. Refreshing got him. The Babib Cression got him. The Babbitt Cods got him. Actually, Zach Granke had a 191 Babbitt that year in the first half. But I probably didn't say anything about his Babbitt that year. Probably not. The other side of this leaderboard, I just flipped it for a second. Who had the worst first halves?

Minimum 40 innings pitched. Friend of the pod, even though he doesn't know it, Dan Straley. 982 ERA in the first half of last season. There's a Charlie Morton, 935 ERA way back in 2010. There's a Shelby Miller sighting on that board.

It's ugly. I'm trying to find a good name. A pitcher who was actually still good when a very bad half season happened. Kyle Gibson, 2017, 6 ERA. Yeah. People had low expectations for him then. Anibal Sanchez, that was kind of when everyone thought he was toast in 2016, had a 675 over a half.

Main thing is... 75 over a half. You've got to scroll a little ways to get into the guys who are actually good, who really let people down over an entire half season. I think the main thing is you've got to jump ship earlier. I don't know how, obviously, here's Tim Lincecum, 2012, with a 6.42 ERA in the first half. I was wondering about that. That was his worst overall season with the Giants. He finished with a 5.18 on a 1.47 whip that year, 190 Ks.

That was coming off a 2.74 and a 1.21 whip in 2011. That was a hard turn where it just didn't work for him anymore. Here's something that I remember of the time too, and I think that this is something that is going to be huge for us. In 2011, Tim Lincecum sat 92.3. In 2012, he sat 90.2. If you use pitch info, he went from 93.1 to 91.5. If you see someone lose almost two ticks and has like a

60 RA after a week or two, I think in this season, you just got to jump ship way quicker. Because you can't hold a 60 RA on your team. And you can't just hope that they find it again. So if somebody comes out

blowing two ticks slower, I would just assume he's hurt and I think move on. I mean, maybe if it's like a top 10 player, I'll give him another week or a top 10 pitcher, I'll give him another week. But generally, you got to move faster this year. Yeah, I think really granular stuff, underlying skills like that, like velocity are going to be some of the things we have to rely on in order to to make those decisions and it's going to play a lot like a fantasy football season in terms of length i think for leagues that use fab you're going to have to spend double what you would normally spend early in the year to get a player you want if not

two and a half times just to outbid the other teams that are doubling up their bid it's going to be very strange, but fast decisions for everybody. We've talked about it for front offices. We've talked about it for fantasy owners alike. It's going to make things very tricky for us during the upcoming season. Top performers in business and sports often

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drinkhydrant.com, and enter promo code RATES. All right, you know, before we started recording today, you mentioned that you found a really interesting piece from our friend Jeff Zimmerman, taking a look at hard hit angles over at Fangraphs. I'm just digging into it now as we start to talk about it, but what were some of the things that stood out to you in Jeff's piece? You know, this is funny. He encountered this idea of a hard hit angle on a driveline post about one of their hitters but i remember talking to andrew perpetua about this idea that a batter's hardest hit balls group a cluster around a certain angle and that angle is different from player to player and i think you can use that angle to kind of talk technically about their approach angle or the steepness of their swing.

Because we talked about, I think this might come into focus, let's talk about Fernando Tatis and how he hit his hardest hit balls in the air and he hit balls on the ground soft. And what does that mean for his future? It's good that he hit his hardest hit balls in the air. It's more good that he did that than it is bad that he hit some weak balls on the ground. And one of the reasons for that, too, is that, like, sort of the natural way to max out your exit velocity is to exactly match the incoming pitch plane

so that you're hitting it flush, completely flush. The problem is that the incoming pitch, the angles on that are sort of in the 5 to 15, 5 to 10 range. Negative because it's coming down, but that's the sort of angles you're dealing with um unless it's a very steep curveball and so um if you match that and you max out your ev what you can do is hit a lot of balls hard uh over the second baseman's head you can a lot of doubles uh and occasionally right at the second. Um, and so what hitters do is trade off some of that max EV, uh, you know, for, for power gains related to hitting the ball in the air. Uh, but the best hitters in the world are ones that hit the ball hard in the air already.

So they don't necessarily have to make that trade off. Uh, and they figured out an angle, uh, where they can hit the ball very flush, but also hit in the air. And so basically, the way that this is actionable, though, is on a year to year level, you can find some guys that didn't do as well last year as you think they should do. So there are some guys that should do better going forward. So one of the guys that stands out for me when I look at this list through that lens is somebody like Rowdy Tellez, who shows up as having a hard hit launch angle of 14.3 and a 113 max exit velocity. So he hits the ball in the air and he hits the ball really wicked hard.

And so Rowdy Roddy is a guy that underperformed. A guy like Ketel Marte changed his hard hit angle and his max EV and now belongs in this group. So I think there might be less regression than some people suggest. Josh Bell is on this list. You know, even though his average launch angle was pretty good, his hardhead launch angle was even better. And so you can kind of use this on a year to year level. But I think even in season, there'll be some chances to use it. Particularly the max EV thing is something that i will pay attention to early in the season

i just think that it speaks to the player's health um and uh and to some other aspects of it uh timing and so on um but some other interesting names that are on this list are pablo sandoval nick mark kakis nomar mazara um Brian Anderson, Eric Hosmer. That's okay. So I don't expect Eric Hosmer to be on any list that would get me excited ever. When he hits the ball hard, it's more often in the air than when he doesn't. But his hard hit angle is 4.7. Whereas Brian Anderson's is 12.6. Nomar Mazzara's is 4.7 whereas uh brian anderson's is 12.6 noam rozarez is 13 nick marquez's is 5.1

jd davis 11.5 and somebody like gary sanchez is 14.8 so it still matters that you hit the ball hard in the air um but uh understanding the max ev component means that you know there is still some some pop in eric osmer's bat um it's just a function of his this this the length of his swing and his timing that i think that causes too many ground balls i'm trying to go through and look for hitters who could be you know this year's dj lemay hugh or this year's howie kendrick right because guys like that have shown pretty consistent skills over time and yet they reached levels that really nobody expected them to reach in 2019 so a couple of things that stand out about both of those guys are low strikeout rates high average exit velocities and in kendrick's case what really surprises me is for a player who's

in the twilight of his career he's been getting that launch angle up each of the last two seasons like he would have stood out as a guy that just wasn't launching the ball at all. He was just not nearly in the air enough to do damage in the StatCast era prior to 2018, which was an injury-shortened season. And of course, last year, I mean, we saw things that, frankly, I don't think anybody could ever have really projected from him, but it's still fun to try. But marquecas did stand out to me recently for similar reasons because he has that high average exit velocity he has that low strikeout rate he's drawn walks for a long time too so he just he seems to have a really good sense of controlling the zone it's everything that you kind of need for that surprising late career power surge and the

question of whether or not he's going to put the ball up in the air enough to actually unlock it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, another name that, uh, leaves out for me is Austin Dean. Um, he, he has the over one 13 max CV, um, hits the ball harder, uh the air um and uh also is among that class of players that will get much more of a chance um especially with the dh and the added uh players he's a guy that has 311 uh plate appearances in the major leagues uh probably wouldn't be served that well by going back down to AAA, especially this year. And in AAA, the last couple of years, he's hit a combined 330

with plenty of home runs. So, you know, if he got full-time ABs as a DH, and if you add a little bit of upside based on his heart angle and everything, I think that he's a guy who could hit 270 with 25 homers. They also move the fences a little bit in Marlins Park. So Austin Dean is a name for your deep leaguers that could come out of this analysis, I think. Yeah, just a guy who could find playing time at a few different positions, I think, too. The other player who comes to mind a lot when I read anything that Jeff Zimmerman writes is Victor Robles, and he actually came up as one of the questions in the comments on the piece,

but I started thinking about Victor Robles again this week and thinking about exit velocities, and I think I got to Robles looking at Luis Urias because I was doing the Brewers podcast with Will Salmon and talking about acquisitions from the offseason. And anyway, I think the main thing that stands out to me when I look at Luis Urias is that his average exit velocity in parts of two seasons in the big leagues has been pretty mediocre, 86.7, a tick below league average. But Victor Robles, as we've talked about on this show before, is an extreme example on the low end. He was at 81 last year. We've talked about Bunce. He could take away the Bunce. I think he ends up at like 83 or 85, 83 or 83.5, which is still very low and quite a bit lower than luis urias but anyway the main reason i wanted to bring these two guys up

was to kind of pose a question to you and i don't know if you have an answer for this question because i'm putting you on the spot uh how much do we look at young players and say hey you know the exit velocity is low right now, but there's room for improvement. Is there a certain type of player that we should look at and say, this is not necessarily who the player is quite yet? Because I think it's easy to look at Robles and say, the power's a fluke, he just doesn't hit the ball very hard, it's not going to happen again like he did last year

when he hit the 17 homers in 617 plate appearances. My counter to that would be, well, he's really young. And to think that he's not going to get stronger would probably be kind of a foolish approach to take with a player with that much raw talent, especially. Yeah, so it's an interesting thing. Two things occur to me so when i when i think about like victor robles in particular uh it's interesting to me to look at this and see that when he hits the ball hard his average angle is 15.5 i think that'd be a lot higher than people would expect so he still hits the ball hard in the air sometimes and that's what we've seen with like

i think surprising home run rates versus his average exit velocity, right? So I think that average exit velocity is something that is overrated as a stat. I would rather use max EV and this hard hit angle because that tells you a different story for Victor Rollers. He hits the ball over 109 sometimes, and when he hits the ball hard, he hits it 15.5. That's just enough to have 20, 25 homers, you know? It could be more. So that's one thing I would say is to, let's start using more chisels rather than hammers and get away from average exit velocity. But also, if you look at, Andrew Perpetua has a piece from 2018 called Quick and Dirty Aging Curves with Exit Velocity. And one thing that was interesting is that he split people into percentiles.

So if you look at just the mean, they have a green graph here, just the mean, most people's exit velocity just goes down. You know, it kind of goes down and then it kind of plateaus for a while and then it really goes down. So that's the regular thing. But what he found instead was that the 95th percentile went up. So there was there are some that on the extremes, the different percentiles on the extreme had slightly different stories. So the 95th percentile went up, uh, until 26 and then went down after that.

That's your sort of traditional aging curve that we've, that we've expected. So, uh, Jordan Alvarez, uh, could be expected to, uh, to maybe even improve his, uh, exit velocity, um, you know, for a couple of years before a decline because he's a leader in that standpoint. And then at the bottom, what he found was a later peak. He found people that would have a low exit velocity, 24, 25, 26, and then start improving on average sort of 31, 32, and 33. So there are some people that improve their exit velocity, especially at the bottom end, either from more reps,

cleaning out their mechanics, timing, maybe it's a plate discipline issue, they kept their exit velocity low because plate discipline improves over time uh so we don't know exactly why these curves look the way they do but there's a slightly later uh peak for low exit velocity people there's a there is a chance they could improve their exit velocity a little bit whereas the highest exit velocity people uh pretty much a peak at 26 like we've found with most stats with most players. really been trying to do because I think trends are extremely helpful and getting a feel for what players are likely to do is mostly, you know, the crux of what I was talking about on the last couple episodes of figuring out where strikeout rates generally go. But the more interesting players are the players who don't do what the trends would tell you they're going to do and

figuring out why. Because that's where you're going to find the outliers. That's where you're going to find profit potentially in the draft pool when you find something that everybody else doesn't see. But if we're finding that everybody's leaning on average exit velocity and not doing a good enough job of finding the ways in which it might be misleading, that's an opportunity for those of us who are looking for something a bit different to possibly get a leg up. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm remembering there's a second graph here and Perpetua does a good job summing it up. So he says that those with low exit velocity gained exit velocity through certain parts of the aging cycle early in their career. He cleaned it up into sort of a high and low, and the low exit velocity have some gains early on, and the late gains are survivorship bias. So basically the ones that do improve their exit velocity

in the low category early on stay in the league and therefore look better late in the league when the ones who didn't improve their exit velocity go out of the league. So that's a way to think about the late peak. So I would still expect, there's a bit of a moment on this graph here at around 24, 25. If you have, if you want it like a hard and fast rule, I'm not that good at these, but if you have one hard and fast rule, I would say that if you have a 25-year-old and they haven't improved their exit velocity out of the low category, then it's more worrisome than Urias, who's 22. So he still has time. 24, 25, if they haven't

done any improvement by then, then they're not likely to improve it. Yeah, I think the initial thought with Urias came from this idea that San Diego had grown tired of him. I don't know if that was necessarily a true sort of thing that has been reported or just a narrative that bubbled up somewhere in Padre's Twitter, but I just thought it'd be kind of strange to be sick of a guy at age 22, who's done some pretty impressive things in the minors, including getting into a lot more power last year. That to me went beyond just the fact that they were using the major league

ball at that level. So hopefully even though the, the labor talk early in the episode was a bit of a downer, some of the more fun advanced stats things at the end were a more pleasant way to move through the episode. I feel better, if that helps anybody at all. I feel better now than I did when the show started, so I think that's worth something. Just to be honest for a second, that's always my least favorite stuff to cover and write about. Just to be honest for a second, that's always my least favorite stuff to cover and write about.

Yeah, it's terrible, but it's necessary, and we need to be very aware of how things are progressing on that front. If you're enjoying this show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it, please take a moment to do that. Many of you have done that already. We really appreciate it. It goes a long way towards helping new people find the show. If you don't already have a subscription to The Athletic, you can get a free 90-day trial at theathletic.com slash free 90 days. If you'd like to

support the site with a paid subscription, you can get 40% off at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. And thanks to the many of you who have already been subscribers or have recently joined us as subscribers. We really appreciate your support. As always, you can reach us via email, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com. Just be sure to spell out the word and if you go that route, you can find us on Twitter. He's at Eno Saris.

I'm at Derek Van Ryper. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Thursday. Thanks for listening.