Rates & Barrels - New Projections & Pitching Questions

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Rundown2:19 The BAT X vs. The BAT: Risers Among Hitters7:24 Expecting a Bounce Back From Andrew Benintendi?12:38 Rougned Odor, Nick Solak and Rangers in Flux17:37 Danny Santana In a 60-Game Season21:29 Are All Pitch Mixes Created Equal?28:55 More Value With Increased Velocity or New Pitches?33:33 The Evolution of Multi-Inning Relievers40:05 Increasing Defensive Versatile44:10 NL Pitchers Who Fared Best Against Other Pitchers49:38 Injured Players to Stash for the Future Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get a 30-day trial to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 112. It is Tuesday, July 14th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. On this episode, we're going to discuss differences in the hitting projections from the bat compared to Derek Carty's new system, the Bat X. It's a spinoff from a piece that Eno had that went up on The Athletic on Tuesday. We're also going to drill into some pitching questions that were sent our way recently, including are all pitch mixes created equal? How does an increase in velocity compare to a change in arsenal or adding a pitch?

And possibly a few other questions as well. So lots of great launching points for this episode. You know, how's it going for you on this Tuesday? It is going well. I'm about to head off to Half Moon Bay with a cooler full of beer and two large dogs and three cousins and the big old family. This house is bursting at the seams with energy. It woke up at 530 this morning screaming with energy.

I think that's awesome that you're getting a few days away. We are going to record our second episode this week on Friday. So just a heads up on that. But Fridays are going to be a part of our lives beyond this week, too. Some big show news. I'll pass that along now. I mean, why bury that until the end? We are going to be a part of a new podcast here.

This show will continue running on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So Rates and Barrels isn't going anywhere. But if you like Eno and I on this show, you should check out The Athletic Baseball Show. That will be launching one week from this past Monday. So six days from now, Eno and I will be recording a non-fantasy episode on Fridays each week. So really excited to be a part of that show, And hopefully you can follow along. I think the feeds for that will be up and running by the time we record on Thursday.

So we'll put out the reminder to go ahead and subscribe and follow that feed so you get those episodes delivered wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's talk about the piece that you wrote for Tuesday, the Bat-X versus the Bat. And the interesting thing here is that I thought the Bat was already a really good projection system that Derek Cardy had built and he made it better. So as you've looked into the different changes that Derek implemented for his, basically his updated version of his projection system, what do you like most about the changes it it just includes everything that people have been researching you know uh and it doesn't include it sort of wholesale you know the way that cardi works is he he says okay this person wrote this article about you know jeff

zimmerman's hard hit angle let me throw a hard hit angle into my projections and see and test them and see if the projections do better and he kind of does this piece by piece by piece to see how important it is um season to season and then also because a large part of his business is dfs how important it is in smaller samples. When does the noise enter? When does the noise exit? When does the stat become robust and how good it is? Is it at projecting what happens in the future? And so he does that. He did that, you know, piece by piece about like, you know, hard hit angle, top 5% of hard hit balls um you know max exit velocity all the stuff that we talk about here uh he threw that in and tested it and came up with the bat x and what i like on top of

that is that he didn't just turn out a stat cast projection system what he did is he can self-aggregate. So basically the bat will look at a player and if the bat X, the stat cast projection is better, it'll kind of come to an agreement somehow. And so, you know, the only other projection system that's done as well as the bat in the past has been ATC, which is an aggregator. And so it pulls, it looks at the bat and it says, that does really well. This type of player, I'm going to pull that part. I'm going to pull this from steamer. I'm going to pull this from here and here. And that does, that does, that does make ATC good, but it's now the bat can self-aggregate

because it has the bat, the regular one, which is based on sort of back of the baseball card type stats, and the bat X, which is the stat cast one. And it can kind of self-aggregate and look at those two, see how each one performs on different types of players and provide a projection based on that. So the bat X is the stat cast one. I wanted to see how different some of those players were from the bat projections, the regular, you know, sort of old school stat projections. And so for number one, for example, the bat X says Mookie Betts is going to have a 958 OPS this year. The bat regular says it's going to be a 9-0-1 difference. That's the biggest in baseball. And I think it has

to do with just how Betts makes contact, the type of contact he makes. So I went through and found some players. There's a lot of players on this list that we've talked about ad nauseum almost on this podcast. Yandy Diaz is the patron saint of this podcast, I feel like. Adesay Garcia is on that list. Vlad Guerrero we've talked about. Teoscar Hernandez we've talked about.

You know, I don't know. There's tons of names. One of the names that I profile that we've talked about a ton is Luke Voigt, who had the type of barrel rate when he was healthy in 2018 that it was like a top two type barrel rate. It dropped off a little bit last year, but he was also unhealthy and it was still a very good barrel rate. So that dude wakes up and rakes barrels. I love Luke Voigt this season. He's kind of one of your last truly good first baseman where you're not worried a lot about playing time. Love the lineup. Obviously

love the way he hits the ball and the system itself. Loves him for that too. So definitely kind of a target for me in that range, especially if I didn't already address first base, but I'm happy to use him as my corner guy as well to sort of backfill that spot. Interesting that Betts is the biggest improver though. This is a guy that has actually passed Mike Trout in July ADP, which is more the result of Trout sliding a little bit with concerns about how much time he's going to miss with the birth of his child during the season. But I think Betts sort of separating himself as a guy that belongs in that top tier, the first part of the first round, the position players who go before people start taking pictures. Garrett Cole's got an ADP of six right now.

So it's Yelich, Acuna, Bellinger, Betts, Trout now is kind of the normal order with some more variance on the downside with where Trout goes. Andrew Benintendi's a guy that I think we talked about him maybe back in the fall, definitely last summer because he was a big disappointment last year from a fantasy perspective. And he does everything so well. There's a lot of floor there. And I think that's the type of player that I'm less excited about in a shortened season. But I think the fact that he pops on this list makes me just a little bit more interested in him. There were some things that were probably a bit unlucky

about his production last year relative to how he hits the ball. At least that's the conclusion I would draw looking at how much this particular set of projections likes Andrew Benintendi. Yeah, he's the highest um taken the the most expensive player uh that i highlighted and um i highlighted him because yeah i was just surprised and i have i haven't put him on like a no draft list or anything but he hasn't i haven't ended up with any shares he ends up going in a fairly expensive neighborhood,

around 114 overall, 29th outfielder, being picked around Castellanos, Ozuna, before Conforto and Mercado. And I just see Mercado as a better speed threat. Ben Attendee's legs have really fallen off. I think he was 292nd in sprint speed last year. So you're going to get more speed from Mercado, and I would say you get more power from Conforto.

So that's two guys that get taken right around him that you kind of might prefer. But it is true that, um, you know, that his, uh, hard hit rate was the best of his career last year. Um, that his launch angle was the best of his career last year. His exit velocity was the best of his career. The barrel rate was the best of his career and, uh, that is expected slugging percentage was better than he put up. Uh, and that, uh, basically the bad X expects more of the same of that expected slugging percentage.

So more of a, uh, four 70 type slugging than a, than a four 30, four 40. Um, so what if he, uh,

does give you like kind of 20 Homer pace, uh, with five steel type pace. Um, then I think, you know know then he might be a better pick than the guy hit picked right above him which is nick castellanos yeah yeah it's true i mean i'm looking at the cluster of outfielders going in that same range oscar mercado is close he goes about 10 picks earlier overall kyle schwarber goes almost at the exact same point in drafts. I mean, Kyle Schwarber's power is just something that I don't doubt at all. I look at him as a guy that compares very favorably to Fran Mille Reyes, and Reyes goes 15 to 20 picks earlier than Schwarber

in most leagues. So if I'm looking at Schwarber versus Benintendi, I'm probably going Schwarber nine times out of 10, if not all 10 times. But I start looking at Benintendi compared to guys at other positions like Kevin Biggio. That sort of makes some sense to me. A little more of a categorical balance there. They do it in slightly different ways, I think, with Biggio being such an extreme fly baller. But I think the price is right for a rebound here from Andrew Benintendi.

And I always think he's one of those guys that a lot of his value comes from the hit tool and the floor he brings in batting average. So I do think this is an ADP overcorrection for his down season in 2019. I think you could justify him if you were going closer to where maybe like Eddie Rosario goes. It's great that you don't have to push him there. There's no reason to reach for him. He's just a good player to take at that discount, which is often available. And I think highlighting him is also useful in another way because there's, there are a fair amount of people that look at the sprint speed and say, there's no steals here.

He doesn't have the same power. I'm not taking a batting average at this point. So if he drops, it says here that there's a 155 max on him. Then I start to get really interested. I think if you see him after the 120th pick or after the 130th pick, like then you can jump on him, get value. And now you're picking him around the same place as Danny Santana or, you know, like Kyle Schwarber, like you said. And I think then he makes a lot more sense. So, you know, don't let him drop, I guess, is the action item on that one. I guess as I look through the names on this list and the piece, too, you mentioned a few of them already. Obviously, Garcia is another one we've talked about a few times.

I think even Matt Beatty, who's a little further down, is a guy that as a reserve pick in a deep league or in draft and holds, I just liked him as a guy who brings a pretty good mix of plate skills to the table. Just needs to find some playing time to become a lot more interesting in Los Angeles. It makes me think that all the time I spend staring at StatCast is worthwhile, that I'm at least coming up with a few useful conclusions, at least on some of these guys, prior to seeing the gap between their OPS projection from the Bat-X versus the original projection. There's one name near the bottom of this list who I still don't have anywhere,

and it's RootNetOdor. And I just don't know what to make of this list who I still don't have anywhere, and it's Rudnett Odor. And I just don't know what to make of this guy. I think he's one of the most difficult players in the entire pool to read at this point, because over a full season, even when things go mostly sideways, he still provides a lot for fantasy owners. This is a guy that hit 30 home runs last year and stole 11 bases. He's had double-digit steals in four straight is a guy that hit 30 home runs last year and stole 11 bases. He's had double-digit steals in four straight seasons. He's hit 30 or more home runs

in three of the last four seasons, but he's hit 205 and 204 in two of those years. And the OBP drain makes him a low batting order sort of player too, even if he's playing. So that's at least some risk that comes with him. But what do you do with a guy like Ruben Odor at this point? I mean, do you think there's anything left that he hasn't unlocked as a player?

I'm surprised to see just how much the K rate shot up on him last year, getting up over 30% after he'd never struck out even 25% of the time in a season prior to last year. Yeah, and it's such a weird combination of things to have this terrible strikeout rate along with the best walk rate of his career, the best expected slugging percentage of his career, the lowest expected batting average of his career.

It's just like, where are all these metrics going? Like, what's going on here? At 26, you know, he's kind of like it's funny the rangers have two players like this because i i said this in the no arm azara blurb like why can't i quit these guys you know um and i think it's uh it's a kind of a top you can see it as a top line thing three out of the last four years he's's hit 30 homers and stolen 11 to 15 bases. You know, it's just that, you know, two of those years he hit 204, 205. And in two of those years, he was basically a replacement level player. So I don't know. There's always the chance that, you know, when you have players like this, there's always a chance that like he finds that

fine link between aggression and passivity that will be the perfect one for him in one of these years like what if you take the nine percent walk rate from last year and add it to the 21 strikeout rate from 2016 then you've got a guy who's not going to be a drain necessarily on your batting average on your batting average or your on-base percentage and who will offer power and steal steals the one thing that's kept me away from a little bit is that i feel like there's a really capable replacement just staring at him and nick solok and i'm i'm a little bit worried almost about all the rangers players that play the various positions that nick solok could play. Even though that Nick Solak is kind of a butcher with the glove, it's not like Odor has lit the world on fire with his defense

either. So that just makes me nervous that a player who's been replacement or worse in the last two or the last three seasons has a capable replacement staring right at him. the last three seasons has a capable replacement staring right at him. Yeah, I mean, Solak's one of those guys. I just wish he had a place to call his own right now, and maybe he can just make it work because first base is unsettled, to say the least. I mean, Todd Frazier on the small side of the platoon with Ronald Guzman. I don't know if they want to play Todd Frazier every day, but Solak's also a righty, so they don't fit in a platoon. And Guzman's leash is probably running thin. I mean, he hasn't really done anything. I know that they seem to like him, but at 25 and two half seasons under his belt, he's been decidedly worse than league

average with the bat. I think they can make it work if they want to play him like at third base or something too, though, because Frazier can play third if he's not playing first. So first and third, one of those spots, first or third could work. They've been playing Solak in left field recently in inter-squad games. Because Willie Calhoun's hurt? Yeah, Calhoun has a hip flexor injury, and I think that came up just on Monday. Also, he broke his jaw. Yeah, but he was okay from that somehow. I was convinced

that was still going to be a problem for him when things started back up, and apparently he entered summer camp just good to go. He had no restrictions all the way back in April. He started taking BP in May, and I guess the jaw hasn't slowed him down at all,

which again, really surprising just given the extent of that injury. I saw something about him being worried about stepping in against inside pitches, which would be bad because he usually murders inside pitches. But I'm not out on Calhoun because of one little comment like that. It's interesting that Soank is playing left field. one little comment like that. It's interesting that Solak is playing left field. Danny Santana can't be the best center fielder if he was playing first base last year. And Joey Gallo could maybe step into center, and that would give Solak a place in the outfield.

Yeah, so Santana came up previously as a guy that you pointed out. Because of the limited real-life value, there was a high probability over 162 games that he was the kind of player that would lose his job despite the things that went right for him a year ago. And just thinking about him in a 60-game season, are you less concerned now about Santana, even though he doesn't really stand out as a good defender in center field? I mean, you're absolutely right. This guy was playing first base a lot last season, so the expectation that he's going to go play even an average center field is probably asking too much.

I don't know how that'll interact with a short season. I know that we're seeing weird things like Bryce Harper playing third base and Yohannes Cespedes taking grounders at first base and I don't know if that's just a function of the team scrimmage kind of mentality that we're going through right now that basically they're like ah we need a first baseman today yo step over it first or if these are real things that people are practicing because we never know what our teams will look like if the virus happens to hit one of our clubhouses, or if maybe they say in a short season there's fewer balls out there.

I mean, it is kind of impressive how we try to look at players and decide how good they are defensively when in a regular season, you know, 50 to 75 balls are basically the determining factor of whether they're good or bad because all their other defensive chances are either they had no chance or they had to get, they were going to get to it. So if you take that and then you chop it in third like now you're gonna say are we gonna take dan santana out of center field because we saw him drop two balls i don't think you can give players a hook quite that fast like if you're gonna try it you you have to stick with it a little bit longer

unless it's absolute butcher work out there i mean it has to be elite bad there was a pretty funny moment i like that on twitter yesterday you're mean mercedes oh i i like that he can hit i don't think he can play defense anywhere they played him in third and i wasn't even watching the game i was just watching twitter because i was working and it was just funny to watch all the white socks all, all of White Sox Twitter. Before the game started, there was literally somebody who tweeted out, here's my look into why you're mean Mercedes could maybe play third if Juan Mankata can't do it.

And then they retweeted it literally 15 minutes later being like, or not. And it was like in between, there were all these tweets of people just being like, wow, this is terrible. Poor guy is just like trying to do it in an intra-squad like practice setting too. It's like it's not his fault. He's just doing what he's being asked to do.

Right, right. Yeah, but I mean like yes, if 50 or 70 balls is a big deal over the course of a season, now we have 20 balls to the side and you're dividing the 20 balls by you know by weeks yeah like if they take dan santana out of uh center uh after a week or two then it'll be based on like three balls so uh it'll be uh it'd be an interesting season i would tend to think that um teams will ignore defensive metrics for the most part. I mean, I think they should just because of the limitations in a season this small. Let's move on to some of the big pitching questions. Joseph sent us an email a few weeks ago.

We've been kind of pushing these down the outline for a couple of weeks now, not because they're not great questions, but because we've just had a few other things that we wanted to get to. And he sent us several questions. We'll focus on at least two in this episode. The first one I want to talk about pertains to pitch mixes. He asked, are all pitch mixes created equal? And what are the perfect two, three, and four combinations of pitches that a pitcher can throw the there's like a sort of

intuitive way to answer this and a research way to answer this and the intuitive way is that you know i just talked to bryce jarvis and trevor bauer about this about um they called it bryce jarvis called a banana peeling um so you kind of want to throw if you kind of saw an overlay of all your pitches you would want them to kind of all go toward the center of the plate and then all peel off basically to different corners of the plate um and that would mean you'd want like a hard cutter slider um for for one quadrant you'd want a big curveball for the other quadrant you'd want to change up for one quadrant and you'd want uh four seamer up the middle and a sinker uh in the last part so that would be like a kind of a perfect uh combination of pitches there are very few people that do that, though. Just trying to

throw a really good changeup and a really good breaking ball at the same time is something that doesn't happen a lot. To me, I think in some ways the ideal arsenal from this perspective is Steven Strasburg. Has a really good four seam, has a really good two seam, throws pretty good breaking balls, and has a really good changeup. Max Scherzer is actually right there, too. It's ironic that they're on the same team as Patrick Corbin, who is like a two-pitch pitcher. But that's what I would say from a sort of intuitive aspect. From a research aspect, it's more complicated because, for example, a big curveball can have reverse platoon splits. So you can do fairly well with a big curveball and then a hard breaking ball and two fastballs.

Like that is something that we've known for a while. I wrote a piece that not every pitcher needs a changeup. It was about Anthony Discofani a long time ago. And it's still possible to have pitches that work against both handedness. You can also do things like what Kyle Hendricks does with his changeup, what Luis Castillo do with their changeups,

which is throw your changeups in certain locations to batters that don't normally see pitches that way. So like Luis Castillo throws his change-up to righties, you know, low and inside. So then it looks like it's going to be a fastball and they swing over the top of it as it goes down. That's a risky pitch because if it doesn't break enough, it's in their wheelhouse. But Kyle Hendricks also kind of throws two different change-ups so that one kind of cuts, one kind of fades. But generally, yeah, there is a kind of ideal aspect.

If you look at, like, Frankie Montas, he had a good breaking ball and a good fastball, but he never had a change-up, and he couldn't get past even, like, the second time get past even the second time through the order. His numbers against lefties were terrible. Jason Collette really showed how Montas' numbers against lefties took off as soon as he added that split finger. That's why people have the changeups. That's why people have these broad ranges. They want pitches that move in certain directions. They want that banana peel. have the change-ups. That's why people have these broader ranges. They want pitches that move in certain directions. They want that banana peel. In the numbers, there are certain things that work together well. For example, how good a change-up is based by stuff is based on the change-up's interaction with the fastball.

So the change-up's movement is based off the fastball. The velocity gap is based off the fastball. So the change-ups movement is based off the fastball. The velocity gap is based off the fastball. So there is a bit of an interrelationship. There's some spin mirroring that if you have the same spin on your fastball and curveball, but in different directions, that's good. That's in driveline stuff number. So there are interactions between the pitches that are in stuff metrics. It's hard to say exactly what would be ideal because there's probably nobody that really nails every single aspect of these ideal pitch mixes. But I think Strasburg is actually fairly close. Yeah, it's interesting too because all players are changing over time. And I think the thing that really catches my eye when I look at year-over-year pitch usage for Steven Strasburg,

he does something that I imagine every organization wants its pitchers to do. It's to get away from the fastball as you lose velocity on the fastball. Back when he was averaging 95+, he threw the fastball a lot more than he does now. Looking at last season, he threw his fastball less than ever. It was a year in which he threw it at just 93.9 miles per hour. That was the lowest average fastball velocity of Strasburg's career. I think that's honing the craft and having those other weapons to fall back on. Some pitchers don't have it. They don't have secondary command that's good enough. We talk a lot about slider command on this podcast for guys.

If you don't have good slider command and your fastball velocity starts to go away and those are two of your three pitches or even two of your four, you're kind of done. It's going to be a rapid decline because you just don't have enough there to get swings and misses and even just put yourself in a position to get ahead in the count.

Yeah, and another way to look at this is to try and forecast that moment and say who has these pitches. Garrett Cole is, I think, number one or two in stuff, so maybe he's the ideal pitch mix. The reason I didn't bring him up necessarily is that he's uses the fastball a lot uh right now because it's so great um and so dominant but his other pitches are shaped really well um you know in terms of spin mirroring in terms of having uh you know a high force seam and then the drop dropping the curveball on the ground. He can do that. Good slider, really good changeup.

So maybe Cole is that. I didn't think of him because he still throws a fastball so much and he doesn't feature the changeup very much. But that's why maybe he's such a good bet to throw all that money at because not only is he so dominant now, but you can look at the shape of his pitches and forecast a future where he throws the fastball less at a lower velocity, but starts really bringing in the change up in the slider more often. And so other notable top stuff, guys, just to get a picture of what stuff likes best.

Glass now is actually number one. I think that has to do a lot with effective velocity, how close to the plate he releases the pitch, and the interaction between his fastball and his curveball because his other pitches he doesn't throw that often. But Glass now, Cole, Garrett Richards is up there. Velocity is a huge component of this. Dustin May, Walker Buehler, Josh James, Sonny Gray, Frankie Montas, Luis Castillo, Jesus Lizardo, Jacob deGrom. That's your kind of top ten when it comes to stuff from driveline.

Yeah, and one of the follow-up questions from Joseph was, how does an increase in velocity compare to a change in arsenal or adding a pitch more often than that? We've talked about sometimes it's better arsenal or adding a pitch more often than that. We've talked about sometimes it's better to just scrap a pitch. If you're throwing something 10% of the time and hitters are doing a ton of damage with it, you have to kind of make that call. Is it better to have this extra weapon for them to think about or is it doing more harm than good because either it doesn't move enough,

it's not commanded well enough, it's just thrown only in obvious situations. That's a fine line to walk in some ways too. But does a velocity increase make as much of an impact on the stuff number as adding another pitch? I think it's possibly the biggest one. I mean, it's a huge driver. If you just listen to the names I just mentioned, almost all of them throw really hard. And I guess it's complicated a little bit by the fact that we've talked about that it's not necessarily linear.

Throwing 91 on your fastball is not that much more amazing than throwing 90. But throwing, you know, sitting 96 or 95 is way better than sitting 94. So that, that part of it matters. There is a type of change up. Like John means does not need to throw his change up harder because he throws a straight change up and the velocity gap is really big. Lucas G Alito throws a straight change up.

So he has a 13 mile an hour gap between his fastball and his changeup. He does not need to throw that changeup harder. Almost every other type of pitch and especially the movement type of changeup, like the cranky power change, all of those pitches, almost every single type of pitch does better when it's harder. I was just talking to a pitching coach about a pitcher he's got, and we were talking about the slider. And I was like, whoa, he's throwing the slider 88. You know, is that good? Is that something you guys worked on?

And he's like, well, you know me. I generally throw everything harder. So, yes, velocity matters. But, you know, he started started this question was really excellent too because the talk about the interaction um of like arsenal changes and how that might change a stuff number and yes that will happen that's why it's because stuff is really measured on a per pitch level um and so you'll see me write pieces over the course of the season where I say, this pitcher has these different pitches and is throwing this pitch more often. That's good because it has the best stuff number of his pitches.

Or he's throwing the slider more often. That's good because he has great command of the slider. So the per pitch matter, it doesn't matter. So what you do is you look at stuff per pitch, and then you kind of aggregate it up, uh, to the overall stuff number. So theoretically, if they threw, you know, one of their better stuff number, uh, pitches more often, um, it could lead to, to better results. So that is, uh, that is a truth. There were more complicated questions though, when it came to that interaction.

Yeah. There was an example question that he put out there too and it was if pitcher a has a two pitch mix and throws both of those pitches at exactly league average stuff ratings while pitcher b has a three pitch mix with the first two pitches being identical to pitcher a how does having that third pitch depending on its effectiveness impact both the stuff and command rating so you would just aggregate that up into it right so depending on what if it was also a league average pitch you'd aggregate it all up to league average if it was better or worse it would aggregate up uh depending on how you use it but the reason I like that question is because just the existence of that pitch alone does have an effect on the pitcher. Three is better than two, and the place that three is

better than two, or any number of pitches is better than one less, is when it comes to turning the lineup over again. Mitchell Lickman found that if you add one pitch that you throw over 10% of the time, you reduce your third time through the order penalty by a certain percentage. So more pitches is always better, even if that pitch number may reduce your overall stuff number. But it's not necessarily better. You're not necessarily a better pitcher in terms of, can he get this out?

You're a better pitcher in terms of, can he stay in the game longer? And you think about usage, especially this season, but just in general, I think the game is starting to evolve to a point where the multi-inning reliever is going to become a lot more common in the next

few years like the guys we've been talking about this draft season i think i go to trevor richards literally every time yeah we talk about him a lot i must really like trevor richards um but i think that mindset like what the brewers do it too i watch the brewers all the time everyone's like stop talking about the brewers look that's the team I watch the most. Freddy Peralta or Corbin Burns or even Eric Lauer. If one of those guys or two of those guys aren't in the starting five, I would be pretty content to see them go six or seven outs at a time, finishing the fifth inning, pitching all of the six, and maybe starting the seventh.

That could easily be part of the script that the teams want to use. Let me tell you, you'd be content as a Milwaukee Brewer fan because that's what they do and that's how they squeeze every last drop out of their pitching staffs. Would you be content as a fantasy owner? I'm okay with being at odds with that. It creates a new challenge for us. As frustrating as it is, I think if more teams start to do it,

we can work around it. I think it's actually worse when only a couple teams do it. Because you can ignore it. You just sort of devalue all the Rays and say, okay, that's it. I bump every Ray down two, and that's it. Yeah. I think if the whole league were doing it,

while that would create more problems, I think it would also lead us to try some more interesting solutions. We can kind of sidestep it, as you said, since it's only a handful of teams. This year is really interesting because what we've seen in the past is there are things that happen in the postseason that are leading indicators. Some of the things that we've seen in the postseason before we saw them in the regular season was a velocity bump. We started seeing pitchers throw harder in the postseason.

And then they were like, hey, maybe I can try to do this all year. We saw the first time we saw some of the breaking ball usage numbers that we've seen in the regular season. We saw it in the postseason. And the other thing that we've seen in the postseason is super aggressive bullpenning. And the reason that people have said that we can't do that over the course of the season is because of rest and injury and all that stuff. Well, now we have this guinea pig season where it's 60 games and, you know, maybe teams will say, hey, you maybe can't do it for 162, but can you do it for 60? hey, you maybe can't do it for 162, but can you do it for 60?

And so maybe we'll see this hyper-aggressive bullpen management in the shorter season. And if we see it in this season, then I feel like we might see it going forward, especially expansion is a possibility. I wanted to just bring that up real quick. Expansion is a possibility because every time that baseball ownership has lost a lot of money, expansion has been on the table again in the next few years. And I would say that given our talent pool and the places we get our talent, that it makes sense to expand because we keep

expanding where we get talent. So we've got to be getting better and better talent. But without expansion, what you'll see is that there's so many relievers to come and replace the reliever that got injured or tired. And so I think you'll just see more and more teams do this really aggressive bullpen usage where they rely on their driveline-esque pitching factories to pump out more relievers. pitching factories to pump out more relievers. And maybe they're really aggressive when it comes to demoting guys and DLing guys. And just if you look at the Dodgers, that's what they've been doing. If you look at the Astros, you look at other teams, the Yankees, just create a bunch of relievers and then be really aggressive with them

and use them a lot and cycle through them. That's going to be what happens. Expansion might actually throw a little bit of a wrench in that because there'd be a lesser supply of arms. I believe Nashville was a city that was looking for an expansion group. And I just saw a story about Dave Dombrowski joining the group. Just talk to a player that wants to join up with the Portland crew and make Portland happen.

Those would be two great cities for Major League Baseball, by the way. I know Charlotte is probably on the list and Orlando is on the list, but I have to say, given the other two Florida teams, I would pump the brakes a little bit on Orlando. That presentation that we saw a while back. That presentation too was pretty funny.

Wow. I mean, look, I've had bad days giving presentations. I've had bad days on podcasts and radio shows. That was boom goes the dynamite, but with a very rich man

using clip art. Graphic design is my passion. Even the logo was bad. I don't care how much money you have. Pay someone else to make the art for you if you're going to try and pitch people on a major league team. Do not do it yourself. No matter how passionate you are about art and how much you like clip art, pay a professional to make a logo for you. It's really important.

You got to get that right. That's your brand. Those two pitch pitchers like Trevor Richards, another guy that I think of is Randy Dobnak. They're limited in terms of how many times they can turn over the lineup, but they become really interesting when you talk about pitching them for two innings, like the fourth and the fifth innings or the fifth and the sixth. Fifth and

the sixth is where the game turns. If you've got a fresh arm that's starter-esque quality that you can bring in there to make a bridge to the back of the bullpen, you might find something there. It's just so strange to think that the roles in baseball for a long time were face 20 or more hitters or face five or fewer hitters yeah why not numbers between you know six and 19 like there's some other ways to to get there that was the exact thinking that caused me to uh try and use command plus and stuff to predict number of innings pitched by the pitcher. Because I thought, why not think of pitchers as two, three, four, five, all of those, and look at their number of pitches, their command, and their stuff, and use those three metrics to decide how many times they can turn the lineup

over. I mean, it's just solving a puzzle. It's just taking different combinations of skills. You're increasing skills. You're increasing versatility. And I think if there's one word that I hear all the time when front office people speak to the media, it's versatility. It's the word they say more than anything or or flexibility, I guess. It's a synonym. The Giants are making every prospect they have play multiple positions, right? And they're not the only organization doing it. Yeah, you're going to shift more anyway. The game's totally different. There's no reason to think that your guy that plays third base can't also learn how to play left field.

Yeah, and so why? I understand that when you talk to an older pitcher like a jeff samarzo type or something they'll tell you they hate the opener they have their routines they like to do this and this that's fine it's a little old school the future is we hand you the ball and you pitch and i'm not trying to say this in an anti-labor way no no i'm not trying to say in the anti-labor i would i would be would be very pro coming up with ways to better. Like I've talked about assigning the win better. And we could find better arbitration measures to reward pitchers for bulk along with excellence.

There's some combination of those two that should produce your salary if we're in this weird arbitration structure. So I'm not just saying like take the ball and shut up. I'm not saying that. I'm saying in the way that we say, hey, Moose, you're at third today. You're at second today. We're shifting you into the short outfield. We're making you a fifth outfielder. Whatever it is that we're going to, whatever crazy thing we're doing today, you should also be able to say, hey, I know you started your last game, but we need three innings out of you now. I know you're normally the closer, but can you throw in the six? This seems like a big inning, that sort of deal. I think you just get that buy

in by selling that to players early on, explaining to them, hey, we want to win. We want to maximize your talent. And ultimately, if the system also rewards players for being utilized that way and does not reward them for arcane usage that's going to help with the buy-in also like making an incentive structure that aligns with how the game is actually played would go a very long way i think toward getting more players to buy in. But I do think young players, more broadly, are buying into non-traditional usage. Well, they want to get to the major leagues. They think that might offer them an opportunity

to get there faster. And then a lot of times they're on teams that are implementing the stuff in the minors. So it's sort of indoctrination or buy-in on an earlier level, just like you're saying. So the Rays piggyback, tandem, do all that sort of stuff in the minors. So by the time they get to the majors, they're like, yeah, whenever, whenever, whenever, I'll do it. Getting that buy-in is important. And smelling good is important. Thanks to Hawthorne, smelling good is easier than ever.

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Smell my armpits. I'm going to pass, but I appreciate the offer. We've got a couple other mailbag questions that I wanted to get to on this episode. The first one comes from Dan. He writes, I was listening to Tyler Glasnow's appearance on a podcast the other day, the R2C2 show. It's the CC Sabathia Ryan Rocco pod. Among the topics they discussed was the Universal DH.

Dan wants to know, if we look at NL pitchers who fared best against opposing pitchers relative to their overall stats, will that give us a list of guys who might be hurt the worst by the arrival

of the Universal DH? I know prior to recording, recording you know you were putting together a list and i'm curious to see what you turned up we had uh the nerdiest battle of sorts where you were trying to google and find it and i was trying to do uh an excel vlookup uh figure figure it out and i beat you so haha um greatest greatest win of your life i'm sure well excel was not helping it was definitely going really slowly but what i just did was um i took a pitcher's number of pitcher k's and i put it up against their overall k's and looked for the pitchers that had the largest and smallest percentage of their Ks from striking out the pitcher. So number one is actually kind of interesting. Mitch Keller

struck out 13 batters last year, which doesn't seem that many, except he only struck out 65 overall. So he stuck out 13 pitchers. That's 20% of his overall total came from pitchers. That's not so exciting. But I am still excited about his stuff. Alex Young, on the other hand, was second place with the same sort of ratio, and I'm not very excited about Alex Young or Merrill Kelly. That's third on the list. Tyler Molle was fourth. We wonder if he has an out pitch. So, you know, the fact that he has enough to get starting pitchers out, but that's 20% of his overall strikeout total, that might be worrisome. Steven Matz always worries me for various reasons. Luke Weaver, Antonio Sensatella, Jordan Lyles, Mike Soroka, that's the top of the list.

Those are all 17% or more of their strikeouts came from striking out pitchers. percent or more of their strikeouts came from striking out pitchers. I think there's a general, other than Soroka, like, and even Soroka himself, none of these guys, for example, has, Keller's the only one that has a stuff number above 100. So I wouldn't say that these are, you know, that's a list of the best stuff in the big leagues. But it's not clear that the correlation is sort of one-to-one because if you look at the bottom of the list, you will also see, um, some pitchers that, you know, there's up and down stuff. So for example, Kyle Hendricks struck out 11 of 150 batters, uh, struck out 11 pitchers out of 150. And that's super low. Um, you know, that's the lowest among the lowest among people who have 10+.

Next lowest is Anibal Sanchez, Hunjin Ryu, Julio Teran. I think that this is mostly noise. I would say so as well and I think the point that I would hone in on is just that this list was not made up of people with great stuff who were targeting anyway. So I don't want to go too far into it and adjust a lot based on it. It's also a pretty small number of batters faced. I mean, the pitcher is going to be less

than probably 10% for NL pitchers because by the time you get to the late innings, if you get there, you're going to be seeing a pinch hitter. i don't want to read too much into that there was a look at the strategy of the dh and it basically said that um you know first through fourth inning you the pitcher pitches the pitcher bats for himself uh or first through fifth actually i think the pitcher bats for himself like 80 of the time or more uh the sixth inning, it's closer to a 50-50 toss-up. And then after that, the pitcher never bats for himself. So you're talking about seeing the pitcher twice in a game, most likely, and sometimes three times.

And, you know, it does add up. Over the course of the season, we're seeing something like maybe an average of 15 strikeouts for a full-time starting pitcher. But I think that's baked into the projections, obviously, are baking that in. tried to drop NL pitchers, especially in the middle where I just felt like, you know, they were going to get hurt the most. It's sort of a 5% drop is what I put for adding the DH to the NL. I don't think that we're necessarily going to learn a lot more past that overall 5% drop by looking at... Because just think of Mitch Keller versus Merrill Kelly. Their names are very similar, but nothing else is.

Yeah, same initials. It's nice. They can get the same monogram towels if they want. They could split an order. It's a good way to save some money. Find someone with the same initials and order some custom stuff that you could split up. It's a horrible idea.

Thanks for the question, though, Dan. I think it's important to think about these types of things and to make sure that what you're accounting for are things that you really believe are worth accounting for and the things that you're not worried about, even if everybody else is worried about them, you're not going overboard there. I got a good question here from Elliot. It's about IL stashes, and he's got an unlimited DL in his league. It's a 12-team league, 12 keepers, six minor league spots. There is a salary cap.

And the question is, I have a rebuilding team. I'm not competing this year. Is it worth buying Sale or Cinderguard at a discount and stashing them for a competitive 2021 season? And who are some other injured players that would be worth stashing for 2021 so just to broaden this up a little bit if you're in a keeper or a dynasty league and there's a lot of il spots even just a few il spots you do want to use those i mean there's definitely an opportunity to try to keep them full get a lot of talent back in the long run sale and cinder guard are probably close to the top of the list i would say louis severino is right in that same conversation in terms of being a possible top 10 starter once he comes back at

least on a per inning basis so he's definitely worth stashing even in a 12 team league i think jordan hicks if you got unlimited dl spots i think he's interesting too technically he's on he's on the IL right now. He opted out for this season, and he's coming back from Tommy John surgery. But if you think about 2021 for Jordan Hicks, he shouldn't have any restrictions at all. And this is a team that I think really wants him to be their closer. So ordinarily, I'm not waiting on relievers, but I think he's good enough where in the right circumstances, he's absolutely worth considering for one of those stash spots.

somebody like Buster Posey is actually so close to the near the end of his career that I'm I mean I would pick him up if I had the open roster slot maybe but I don't know that I would if those spots got scarce I would you know those aisle spots got scarce but if you have unlimited I mean why not put Buster Posey on there maybe he comes next next year and his legs are healthy and he's a he's a viable sort of top 12 top 15 type catcher yeah I think the other name on the position player side who I you know want to have on teams in the future is Trey Mancini this is a guy that obviously is undergoing treatment for colon cancer right now all the best to him as he goes through that you know assuming that everything goes as planned with his treatment, he'll come back next year, and he's extremely talented.

We saw it last year, 291, 35 homers, great run production, has a clear spot in a very hitter-friendly park as well. So I think he's another player that long-term absolutely should be rostered because he can do a lot. Jamison Tyon is also a name that I hadn't really thought about in a while. I think he's a little more complicated because it's a much lengthier injury history, but he has been working through his rehab at the Pirates summer camp, so he should enter 2021 pretty much back to full strength as well.

A little bit of an asterisk there with the second tommy john is uh the recovery percentages are way lower than they are after a first one the things that tyon has gone through in his career are just ridiculous and uh really hoping to see him back yeah me too and one thing that i heard is that he's shortening up his arm action in the back so you know for some people that's an important aspect of mechanics as it relates to injury. Yeah, it's a really good point. Hopefully that works out for him. Lots of great questions, though.

Keep them coming. Rates and barrels at theathletic.com if you want to reach us via email. As I mentioned earlier, the big show news. We're going to be a part of the new athletic baseball show that launches next week. We're on that every single Friday, so more details will be available on our next episode at the end of the week. We'll tell you how to go ahead and

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slash ratesandbarrels. Can't beat that 30-day free trial. Find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris. You can find me at Derek Van Ryper. That is going to wrap things up for this episode of Rates and Barrels we are back with you on Thursday thanks for listening