Rates & Barrels - Setting the Table for 2021 Pitcher Rankings

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Eno and DVR discuss how they're going to build 2021 pitcher rankings coming out of the shortened 2020 season, in an effort to balance risk with injuries, skills, stuff and command. Rundown5:25 Early 2021 Starting Pitcher Rankings Thoughts10:50 Age, Injuries & Decline18:10 The ‘Flawed’ Pop-Up Pitchers of 202023:46 Which Pitchers Don’t Have Any Flaws30:45 The Surprising Season From Dakota Hudson35:50 Avoiding Red Flags Early40:47 Are You More Comfortable Betting on Stuff or Command Improvement?49:25 How to Handle Prospect Pitchers with Poor Command53:14 Good Control without Good Command?58:33 Various Considerations in Defining Athleticism64:26 Matt Chapman’s Season-Ending Injury Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic for just $1/month: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, DVR here. Before we get started with this episode of Rates and Barrels, I wanted to let you know if you don't already have a subscription to The Athletic, we're running our best offer ever. Go to theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. Get a subscription for just $1 a month to start. That gets you access to everything. articles, all the fantasy baseball stuff we do, all the regular baseball coverage on the site. No matter what you're a fan of, whether it's fantasy, real baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, men's sports, women's sports, we have you covered. Theathletic.com slash rates and barrels. Sign up8 it is tuesday septemberth. On this episode, we are going to discuss early 2021 starting pitcher rankings. Some of the thoughts that are going to be bouncing around in our heads as we get ready for the earliest of early 2021 drafts. Yes, you know I'm in a draft that starts a week from Monday. So a week from yesterday for the 2021 season. It's the premature league.

I share a team with Todd Z yesterday, for the 2021 season. It's the Premature League. I share a team with Todd Zola in that league every season, and it's fun because there's no ADP, there are no projections, there are no consensus opinions. It's really just taking what we've seen in the season, trying to quickly come up with our own ranks and projections, and trying to make the best possible decisions based on that, while not getting completely overrun by recency bias because the things you just saw are weighing so heavily on your mind that you almost forget the things that happened prior to the shortened

season so we'll talk about what's weird about the pitcher leaderboards so far this season and why that creates a very unique challenge got a great series of mailbag questions to get to as well. Pretty big injury for the A's, losing Matt Chapman for the rest of the season. So we'll talk about his 2020 season and perhaps the impact of his absence on that team going forward. How's it going for you on this Tuesday? I have the ass. I have the ass. But I'll be okay. Just more vomiting puppies and 5 a.m. bad dreams

and just the stuff you thought parenting would be all about, the stuff you really wanted to get your teeth into when you thought, I'm going to be a parent. This is going to be fun. You're doing a good cell job here to a non-parent. I think you still have one of the all-time tweets that I think about all the time when the idea of being a dad comes into my head and my mind wanders a little bit. The first thing I think of is the time you were playing with one of your kids when they were really little. I think you

were on the floor or something and you were holding them over your head and they puked and it went into your mouth and you couldn't get the taste out of your mouth like you were drinking IPAs anything you could find and it was just like impossible to get rid of that and I'm like that is the best deterrent I've heard yet to not start a family uh yeah yeah the like parenting is is uh an onslaught of just disgusting things happening one after the other and just the death of sleep just just the end of sleep and i just a real uh you know that we've got a lot of people here listening don't have kids but just a little a little shout out to the people who do have kids. You're doing well. You're doing your best.

I love you. Your kids love you, even though they're screaming at you right now. And this has been a very difficult time for you. And I hear you, and I appreciate you. My 8-year-old burst into tears on the dog walk last night because of how boring and crappy his school Zooms are. I understand. That's got to be horrible.

If you remember back to when you were in early elementary school, the most fun thing about being there was recess, being able to play with your friends. It wasn't sitting there talking about some book that you read or learning math. I mean, those things are kind of cool, but if you take away the social aspect of elementary school, it's brutal. The large percentage of what's happening in elementary school

is just figuring out how to interact with other people. Yeah, critically important. I love all you parents out there too. And I can't even imagine how difficult this is because I get stir crazy being in a nice place with my wife and my dog. And I just can't imagine the extra stress of being a teacher, being a parent,

trying to help kids cope with this. Kids of all ages. I mean, different challenges, of course, for every age at this point. But yeah, you with the two puppies on top of that. That's just it. Little bundles of joy at times and little bundles of extra work at others. They're starting to sleep through the night and starting to poop outside. So things are getting a little better.

I don't know what they vomited at the last night, but we're just going to move on. Progress, at least. Let's get to our main topic today let's talk about some early 2021 starting pitcher rankings thoughts i mentioned not wanting to have a lot of recency bias as i put those together but you do have to account for things that are different about this season guys who have improved guys who have regressed although my co-manager for that league, as I mentioned, Todd Zola, I thought he made a really good point on the Athletic Fantasy Baseball podcast when he was a guest a couple of weeks ago saying that he's looking more at guys who improved and taking that as real and looking less at guys who have declined and confidently saying

that they are no longer the players they used to be. And I think when you're talking about a shortened season in a pandemic, that's a pretty logical approach. It's more nuanced than everything matters this amount and kind of like waiting it that way. I think if you do that, you're missing some things. And like every offseason, we're going to dig through every player's profile over time. We're going to look more closely for things. There will be some guys who took a step back, who showed some major skills loss, and we're going to have to lower our expectations going forward. It Bieber, not surprisingly, at the top based on how well he's pitched. That didn't surprise me. Wouldn't expect him to be there at the beginning of the season based on some of the things we talked about throughout draft season. But it goes Bieber, DeGrom, Corbin Burns at three, tied there with Yu Darvish.

Trevor Bauer inside the top five. Lucas Giolito tied with him just above two wins. Denelson Lumet is in there as a two-win pitcher now. Dylan Bundy, Kenta Maeda, and Max Fried rounding out the top ten so far. That's a very different top ten than we would have expected. If you and I had had a bunch of opportunities to put together combinations of players we expected to see in the top ten in war, I don't think Dylan Bundy would have been in any of them. I don't think Lamette would have been in more than like one of them if we'd made several. And Corbin Burns, even if I thought he was going

to get better this year, I didn't see this coming. I don't know if anybody saw a turnaround quite like this coming off of the disastrous 2019 that he had. Yeah. And so many thoughts in different directions for me on this. There is still Beaver and DeGrom at the top, and most of our rankings probably had those in the top five, at least. So two of the top five survived. And yet there seems to be, I don't know if it's an exaggerated or the beginning of more of a trend. But if you look at the baseball, at the hitting leaderboards, if you look at the hitting leaderboards and put age on it, you'll find very few 30-year-olds. Last year, I believe there was one person over 30 in the top 30 for position player war, and that was Josh Donaldson.

This year, you're adding Nelson Cruz and Jose Breu, and that's about it. And that's all you had for 30s. If you look at the same thing for pitching, if you look at the pitching leaderboards and you put age on it, here are the guys over 30. DeGrom, Lynn, Scherzer, Verlander, Morton, uh, Greinke. That's the top 10. So we had a ton of old guys and it made me think, oh, you know, once you get to a certain point, you prove you're not, uh, injury prone. Uh, once you're like a Zach Greinke and you figure out that you have these five pitches,

once you're like a Zach Greinke and you figure out that you have these five pitches you can age better than people expect you know I was trying to come up with all these reasons for why there were so many old starting pitchers that were doing so well well you know fast forward to this year and do the same top 10 here the guys over 30 Jacob deGrom, Hugh Darvish, Kenta Maeda. Like six to three, I don't know if it's like a full trend. There's still some top 30 guys that are over 30. It's still a very different leaderboard than the hitting leaderboard. There's still a lot more guys over 30 than you would find on the hitting leaderboard. But I do wonder if the sort of concentration on velocity and strikeout rates and the general trends in pitching are going to require more youth from pitchers in the future and that there want to find, like we did get Bieber and DeGrom out of our top five and we got them back again. I want a proven track record.

So when I'm looking at like Corbin Burns, I love that he's 25 years old or 26 years old. What I don't love is that he doesn't have the long track record. And Lucas Giolito had a good response to his breakout year. And I expected more walks than we've gotten given his command plus. And Denilson Lomet has a terrible command plus and has a good walk rate. So we can jump into some of these. But I'm trying to take some top-level analysis off of this.

And I don't know that – I don't know – like how much do you think age should matter? Like how much – is there an age where you're like, okay, Hugh Darvish is 33. This might be his last great season. Or Hugh Darvish is 33. He still has two or three more great seasons in him. I don't have a firm cutoff on this. This is going to be an answer that bothers a lot of people. I guess I'm trying to look at pitchers especially as more unique.

I think hitters can follow broader trends a little more easily. I think the rigors of being a position player, I think they're more predictable aging curves for groups players. I think because pitchers vary so much in terms of command, in terms of velocity, in terms of the mechanics and things that might make them more predisposed. If you have more pitches, then you can work around the velocity drop. If you don't have as many pitches,

then you can't necessarily get away with that. I think there might be more groups of pitchers or groups of pitchers that need to be defined more clearly if we're going to do that type of analysis. I think, again, that might frustrate a lot of people. It's not necessarily the answer that they were hoping for. I think part of what made this season so strange, though, you kind of touched on it in passing, the injuries, right?

I mean, Steven Strasburg barely pitched this year. He should be back the beginning of next year. Syndergaard got hurt. He was out all season. Chris Sale out all season. Luis Severino. Those are guys that would all be in that mix for top 10 spots. Those are all good pitchers.

And that's not even the entire group. We had a lot of other interesting pitchers on the rise who got hurt at various points this season as well. I mean, Mike Soroka with the Achilles injury, that was a big one. We didn't get to see if he could take a step forward this year over even a small number of innings, really. I don't think you could draw a whole lot of conclusions from the little bit we did see of him. I think Soroka is actually a really interesting name to bring up because i i think it you know i i do have a friendly ear to analysts that say you know this player has an injury history i'm out you know and um you the some of the first names that you mentioned and with regards to injury history

you could have said yo strasburg youburg, you know, he's always hurt. You know, Severino coming off a huge injury. Why did we think he'd be healthy this year? It's fair, I think. And I definitely encounter analysts that will reference something like forearm soreness last year and just be like, nope, I'm out. Like that's going to lead to something bigger. And they might've been right with Chris Sale. There was some forearm soreness last year and just be like nope I'm out like that's going to lead to something bigger and and they might have been right with Chris Sale there was some forearm soreness and then there was Tommy John right and that often is the way things go but Mike Soroka is a young strapping athletic dude without an injury history of any sort I mean he had like a shoulder whisper but like he hurt his Achilles and so there's definitely a lot of chaos that

comes with injury um but to some extent i i think i'm having a friendlier and friendlier ear to um how much i'm going to discount a guy based on injury so even though dylan bundy has changed the way he pitches in terms of his pitch mix, has got out of Baltimore, and has a manageable home run rate, and has had a great year. I think that his injury history will be part of why I won't put him in next year's top, definitely not in the next top 15 or 20. I think I would put him somewhere in the top 25, despite having, you know, the type of results that make him a top 10 pitcher. I've got Yahoo's player radar up and he's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10th. Yes, he was 10th this year, but there should be home run rate regression

and there's a fair amount of injury risk. So that's something specific to Bundy, but also something that's relevant to Andrew Haney, who ended up 11th in pitching war so far this year. It's relevant to some extent to Hugh Darvish I would say it's relevant to Max Scherzer now I think he's in that group because of the back it's relevant to Zach Wheeler people forget so I think there'll be a small minus sign on anybody who was healthy this year that wasn't healthy the year before because I just I kind of want to avoid injury you know you just kind of want to avoid

the injury risk if a guy falls really far and further than I think then I can still take an injury risk but my first two pitchers like I kind of want to feel like these guys are super healthy and they're going to be healthy this year and as far as i can do i've avoided injury risk yeah i think the thing that stands out to me too if you look at a guy like soroka the shoulder stuff in the past actually worries me more than the achilles injury in the long run because that's a potentially chronic arm problem that can become something else. The Achilles injury falls into the bucket of what I would describe as accident prone or freak injury. Some players are prone to more of those things. I don't think you can say that about Soroka at 23.

I think getting hit in the face with a pitch was something I'd always put in that accident prone sort of bucket. That doesn't mean you're a liability. Some guy missed with a pitch and hit you in the face. It's not your fault uh so i i do look at the the situations and kind of say okay yeah this is a problem this is elbow forearm shoulder maybe even lat is starting to creep into there too you know if you had a lat problem i think those can become pretty serious since you're still dealing with something that's pretty connected to the shoulder uh but I think Blake Snell is a guy that I'm kind of out on Blake Snell, even though I like what he does as a pitcher.

I think it's impossible for him to ever be as good as he was in 2018 again, a 189 ERA and a.97 whip. I mean, even people who love Blake Snell aren't looking for that again. But now we've got a couple of years where he's dealt with different types of arm injuries. He also had the weird shower thing, which is whatever. I don't care about that from last year. But it's the arm injuries that bother me with Blake Snell. Even though those are really good skills, it kind of has that Strasburg sort of feel where you ask yourself, how often are we going to get a full workload? Is it going to happen one in every three seasons, one in every four, one in every five?

Even if it's only one in every three seasons, that's not enough for what he's often going to cost in drafts. And last year was the first year in a long time that I'd finally given up on Strasburg. So I missed out on the payoff year. The key is to not buy into those injury years, right? I think I'm having a more veneer for that although i will say that i think that pitching injury is fairly hard to predict i mean de grom's had to tommy john do we put him in there i mean he and he's also throwing like he's sitting 98 like like there just seemed to be some risk there. Although it just looks good, it looks fluid, and he seems rock solid.

There might be a year where we miss him. The other class that's interesting to me are the pop-ups, the flawed pop-ups. So Corbin Burns, Demilson Lemaitre. It's funny, switching between Yahoo and a pitching war leaderboard like they're they're pretty similar but let's see who's who are flawed pop-ups I think Gordon Burns is a flawed pop-up Dylan Bundy to some extent is a flawed pop-up this year and I'm gonna put Yu Darvish on a flawed pop-up. Even though we saw it coming to some extent, I would say that he's got some flaws. I think that's not that controversial of a statement.

We've seen worse years and we've seen better years and we know his command's not good. So Corbin Burns, Yu Darvish, and Nilsson Mett average around a 90 command plus, which is good enough to be a starter but i think speaks to some extent to their up and downness from year to year um and uh stuff matters so like lamette's stuff is through the roof and i and i did a little query that I was talking to you before the show. You know, if you look at sliders middle-middle, because right now, Denilson LeMet, he has an 86 command plus on his slider.

So he does not have great command of a slider. However, he's throwing a slider 53% of the time compared to 46 for the four seam and sinker combined. So he obviously is throwing the slider to get strikes in certain counts. So I wanted to look at like what happens to a middle middle slider normally. So normally a middle middle slider still has like a 650 slugging, which is, you know, way above league average for all sliders, for all sliders and for all pitches but a middle middle fastball is only like 680 slugging so it's not like you can tell everybody oh just throw your slider if

it goes middle middle you'll still get better outcomes than if you do on your fastball that's not guaranteed however here's denilson lamette's slugging percentage on sliders middle middle this year 0.083 and unbelievable it's unbelievable it's like it's not a huge sample but it's 32 times he's thrown a middle middle slider and there's one hit and so i wanted to put this in context the rest of his career and in 2017 he threw 48 sliders middle middle and only only gave up three hits with a 188 slugging. So, LeMet's slider has stuff. And though he has no command and no third pitch, he's an extreme case. However, I cannot, with good conscience, put LeMet in my top 10 or 15 because he has a flaw.

It's like the pitching injury risk question mark, you know, asterisk. If you have an asterisk next to your name, whether it be command plus around 90, injury risk, or just total lack of stuff, if you have one of those asterisks next to your name, you're just not in my top 15. So Corbin Burns, not in my top 15. Demilson Lemaitre, not in my top 15. So Corbin Burns, not in my top 15. Demilson Lemaitre, not in my top 15. Zach Davies, who is by Yahoo's player rater, in the top, he's like the 11th best starting pitcher this year,

not going to be in my top 15, 20, maybe not even in my top 30 next year. Because it was a good year, yes. But how often can you bet on a guy who throws 87, even if he has great command? Where do you put Kyle Hendricks in a given year? That's where you can put Zach Davies if you really want to push him. If you really think he's found something and he can be Kyle Hendricks, there's some similarities. found something and he can be Kyle Hendricks. There's some similarities. Okay. But you don't take Kyle Hendricks and put him in your top 15. Um, and so that's my little rant about, um, the top 15 is a place you put a player that you think will be healthy this year, does not have a question

mark when it comes to command and does not have a question mark when it comes to stuff so i have put snell in my top 15 and i think maybe even currently is probably too high for me yes fifth i'm an idiot i'm a noted idiot uh going next year i just don't think i'll put him in my top 10 or 15 because you have this big uh big question mark and it should be now i've said all this trevor bauer 90 command plus does he have a question mark for you going into next season i think he still does because of that exact problem right the command is not as good as you want it to be the arsenal's deep clearly this is a guy that studies his craft and has ways of tinkering and making adjustments, but I'm still a little bit skeptical of him.

But if you look at the leaderboards for K-BB percentage among starters this year, he's third. Only Bieber and DeGrom have been better, and I think the big knock on Bauer, the command is a concern, but the control hasn't been that bad so far this season. Can we say that Trevor

Bauer owns improved control, even though that command is still below average? Yeah, you just look at that home run rate, and it's been so much higher in the past, and you know that home run rate doesn't become meaningful even in a full 162-game season. So you have a question mark there but now that i'm looking at this um how many pitchers can you come up with that don't have one of those question marks that i just mentioned they don't have a command problem an arsenal problem or an injury problem yeah it's a short list yeah right i'm like i'm gonna talk about 10 15 like who's in it shane bieber i'm gonna put me with de grom like has the faintest of the injury but let's just give him that i think if we're if we're defining injury if we include past tommy johns for our injury criteria he's far

enough away i think he's even out of the honeymoon period as they call it i don't think he has elevated injury risk at this point i think you could say he's he's he has elevated injury risk at this point. I think you could say he's normal injury risk. Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, are we going to say a guy who sits close to his max has elevated injury risk? I guess, how are you going to define it, I think is a really important thing. I think you could say Aaron Nola probably fits that criteria, but

look at his range of outcomes in a full season. He can be a high 3's ERA, 120's whip guy. So you don't look at him and go, oh yeah, he's definitely a top 5 guy for next year. I think the guy that you mentioned in passing, who I think is actually maybe a top 5 pitcher at this point, is Darvish. Because that walk rate improvement started in the middle of last season. He's carried that over. He keeps tinkering.

He's like a better version of Bauer to me. I see a little bit more to get excited about there i think the one area where he might fall short is the injury history because his tommy john's not quite as far in the past as de groms is and his command issues were related to injury like he said he couldn't he couldn't find it because he the release point because of because of injury so um but like i i i'm on you dollars. Here's the name I'm close on Luis Castillo. Um, it just seems like the stuff is there. The command is there by command plus, um, he suppresses home runs this year. He's had a bit of a Babbitt problem, but like a three 44 ERA with 11 plus K Ks per nine. Like I know that he's, you know, 13th on the war list and, you know, may show up,

uh, you know, somewhere else. He's not on the first page on the, on Yahoo. So, you know, I'm sure he has a terrible rank there. I think Luis Castillo might show up in my top five or seven next year. Like, uh, he just, uh, he, he still clicks a lot of those boxes and I'm, and I'm, uh, I think then next, the BABIP won't be that high. Yeah, I think Castillo over Bauer is a snap call for me right now. I'd rather have Castillo next season than Bauer. Because the year-to-year variation. I mean, just look at their careers.

And then Bauer has that sort of 90 command plus range thing. So Giolito is hard for me. Giolito is hard for me. Because he still has that me because he still has a complicated relationship with him yeah well i mean i i i thought i you know when he was a prospect and he came over i was like oh he's got everything i want out of a prospect and then when he came to the big leagues he did none of those things that he was supposed to have as a prospect like you know he was like throwing a sinker instead of a four seam and the curveball had lost half its spin or whatever it was.

And like everything was wrong. Then he got back to now he looks like the way he was supposed to be as a prospect. And though his command plus numbers are bad, his walk rates have been fine this year. And they're not as bad as someone like his teammate Dylan Cease, who's like in the bottom 10.

So, you know I think he's out stuffing his command right now when does that command become relevant maybe guys maybe I can have like a back end of the top 10 of guys that like Giolito and maybe Lamette that have bad command and so aren't going to get in my top five, but have seemingly found a way to outstuff their command. I don't know. So maybe it's because I'm looking at the leaderboard and this is how my brain works, but I see the underlying numbers for Giolito, Glassnow, and Corbin Burns,

and skills-wise, even though they get there in different ways, I see them all being kind of similar in value. I think the biggest concern I have with Burns is the crazy wide range of outcomes. I mean, he's got a walk rate, I think, just over 10% right now. Yeah, he's walked 11.1% of the batters he's faced. So he's not giving up homers, which was a major skills flaw last year. He completely changed his pitch mix. But still.

You can say that Corbin Burns is a different guy than he was a year ago, and you're not lying at all. He's a different pitcher, but you still have to look at that different pitcher and go, huh, a 2.7% home run to fly ball rate? That's probably not who the new Corbin Burns is in the long run either. So is he even the best pitcher on his own team? He's similar to Glass now where you're like,

oh, this is the range of outcomes when you have bad command right you have very good stuff burns has very very good stuff he is pretty bad command maybe he's got better command with his new pitch mix but you know in terms of command plus he still shows up uh near the bottom so here let me find him real quick i think he's got an 88 command plus based on your last commanded stuff report. Yeah, 88. So anything under 90 is a bit of a warning sign for me. And Glasnow is like 86. So that's what happens when you have bad command

is if something in your body goes off a little bit, then you're Tyler Glass now this year, who has a 4.5 ERA, even though he has a top six strikeout minus walk rate. And you would kind of put him in your top ten next year. But I still can't in a good conscience put him in the top five. So, like, Bieber, DeGrom, Nola, Cole is still there for me. There's nothing. Cole's still there.

Yeah, he's got to be there. There's nothing that stands out as being really worrisome about this year as long as you're not a Yankees fan. You know, Cole's still in the top seven in strikeouts minus walks. He's got league average command and really good stuff. So he's up there. He's got league average command and really good stuff. So he's up there.

Kershaw, I think the injury risk question mark puts him in the back end of the top 10, but I think maybe I missed by putting him like 12. I think he probably should be a little bit higher. I don't know. Is he just going to keep doing this forever? He's throwing harder than he's thrown in a long time. I think it's just the injury risk that's the only flag with him it's it's at least a yellow flag if not a red flag and i think it's easy to get tricked by someone staying healthy for 12 starts in a shortened season and come away thinking

okay yeah there's less injury risk here now than there was before making it through this shortened season is not a big marker of health unless you were coming back from an injury and you came back and you had more velo and your command kind of was better or at least back to where it was well you know i think he you said a long time ago he and kenley jansen went to driveline way back in the winter right yeah so you have at least a reasonable explanation for where those extra ticks might have come from. By the way, how does Zach Greinke have a 108 stuff number? What in the hell?

I mean, I know it's like the off-speed secondary stuff, but that's still higher than you'd expect. Apparently, this was the big surprise out of this newest version of stuff was with fastballs, I couldn't believe it, vertical movement was more important when he did feature selection, when he kind of looked at the different weights for things. Vertical movement was more important than velocity, not by much, and they were one and two, but that means a vertical movement is really big. And when I saw that vertical movement was also number two

when it came to breaking and off-speed pitches, I really felt that vertical movement is what people are looking for. And if you look at the Rays, there's plenty of teams that are looking for vertical movement. Even the Dodgers, they want it with Velo, but they'll take it without Velo too. So, you know, like a Jake McGee type, you know, they just pick him up because he's got the vertical movement.

And if you think about the size of the strike zone, the shape of the strike zone, being able to change from like a high riding pitch to even a 70-mile-an-hour slow curveball, there's just such a range of verticality that the batter has to protect against that. I guess I could believe that Granke has decent stuff still. The other player on this list who is better across the board than I expected is Dakota Hudson. 109 stuff number, 106 command plus. I mean, he's been really good.

I think he's probably been lost on some people because the Cardinals, of course, were shelled for a little while, but he's got his ERA under three again. FIP kind of says, no, this isn't who he is, but he's young enough where he can keep getting better. I think he's throwing more curve balls this year, so that's been the change to the arsenal.

He doesn't throw hard, but he's not below what you want for velocity. He's kind of right around that comfortable at 93 range. So he's just one of those guys that I had no interest in coming into the season who's been very good. One thing that changed for him over this year that I hadn't seen before was he now legitimately has three pitches. He's started throwing the curveball more. I think that was really important because he kind of could be a three breaking ball guy. He used to throw a 91 mile an hour cutter.

I could see him shaping the slider into a cutter and a slider, and then having this 82-mile-an-hour curveball. And though the strikeout rate is fairly steady, and his strikeout minus walk rate is around 13%, league average is 12%, so it's not like he's going to make his bones when it comes to strikeouts and walks. I think then throwing the sinker on top and seeing very reasonable home run rates throughout his career and a possible sign of depressed Babbitz, I think projections could be missing on him a little bit, especially with that home park always in his back pocket.

I think I'll have to move him a fair amount in the next year's leaderboards here's another tricky one too is thinking about guys who didn't immediately pop into our conversation for top 10 top 15 type status uh justin verlander who's not coming off of a major major injury like some of the guys we talked about a little earlier in the injury group he hasn't hasn't been able to go out there and take the ball yet since suffering that injury. And he had two injuries this year, didn't he? Right. It was the forearm in season

and it was groin back in the original spring training. I kind of like, though, the way you're talking about flags because we have such a limited group of players that have no flags. Right? No yellow or red flags right so like it

might be interesting next time i do my rankings to kind of color code um command and stuff uh and maybe i have like a third you know i had strength of schedule in the last ranks maybe when i'm doing my year over year ranks, some sort of injury risk and do a yellow red flag coding on those so that you can see at the top of my top five or something, hopefully it's all green, right? And then you start getting some yellows where it's like, okay, I can bring this guy in.

I can bring Glass now into my top 10, even though maybe he has a red flag because everything else is green. Although I don't think his injury history would be green. So maybe he doesn't make it to the top 10. But maybe a guy like Jack Flaherty shows up with a yellow flag somewhere, although his stuff in command numbers are great. So he should be in my top five next year. Hugh Darvish has at least one yellow flag, either the injury history or the command, and he could still be in your top ten.

Hopefully it's nothing red. Something red might be, you know, cranky stuff, even though the number itself is good. Like, is there a red flag there in terms of year to year? And who were you just talking about? Verlander. Verlander. I would say the injury risk, the injury flag would be red on him.

Right. It's elevated and he's at an advanced age where I do think there's pretty good research from, wow, probably the last 10 or 15 years now that suggests it's much harder to recover from an injury as you age. That goes far beyond professional athletes. Your body just doesn't heal as quickly as you get older. His back is close to a red flag for that reason, given his age and the fact that it's chronic.

And like you say, the recovery is harder. Yeah. I mean, I think this is just a fun conversation because you have so many different ways you can try to build out your top 10, top 15, top 20. You can be a little more risk averse and say, hey, these older former aces, as great as they've been for as long as they've been great, I can pass on them. Or I can put them a little bit lower than most. And if they fall, I'm comfortable taking on the risk there, but I'm not paying that premium anymore.

And I think there's a philosophical question that's in the mailbag for this week that overlaps this concept a little bit, too. When you're looking at flaws you're willing to accept, and this question came in, I think it was from Levi, and it was the same person who wrote us about George Kirby. If you start looking at the stuff in command numbers and you don't see a good command number, but you're at pick 300 and you can get stuff late, that's a perfectly fine time to take the chance on that. You want to draft Corbin Burns where he was going in 2020 drafts. You don't necessarily want to draft Corbin Burns where he's going in 2021 drafts because if he's a top 50 overall pick or a top 75 overall pick, that's probably a little bit too pricey for the flaws but if you were going

outside the top 200 with that exact same profile not with the results from this year of course but just with the good stuff number shaky command you can take that chance there's a chance that the command gets a little better there's a chance that the stuff even gets better for some of these guys and and that's enough to get them through And you're not paying the premium for the glass now, the Giolito, or in this case, the Burns. And I think the flags actually help here too, because we're talking about at the beginning, you want no red flags, right? And then you start filtering in some yellows, and then maybe if it's green, green, red, you'll have Verlander, what, 15, 16, 19, somewhere in there, because you've run out of players that only have green, green, yellow. Then you add your green, green, red, right? Then you add your green, yellow, yellow reds right and so what happens is once you get down to and this is

how i this is legitimately how i do my rankings um and you'll always see around 70 to 70 to 580 there'll be a group of really interesting players and they're not all the same and even now in my in-season ones i have basically uh players that might be yellow, red, green, but they have a green flag. And that green flag, you can diversify on that, right? So Alec Mills, going into this season, I had Alec Mills and Austin Voth as my command green flags, right? Those were guys that had command, and I was hoping they had enough pitches and enough stuff to be relevant now it didn't work on Voth but the investment was low and since

I invested in both Voth and Mills I win on that I win on that level of a pick, that level of investment by getting one out of two and one of them being Alec Mills and being useful and then going into next year,

you could have stuff green flags that you bet on. So TJ Anton or Adbert Alzalea are guys that, that have a good stuff numbers for me in that sort of range and not really good command numbers. And in the case of Alzalea, not good health numbers either. So Alzalea would be kind of green, red, red. But at the same time, like if you invest really low level in them and then sprinkle in maybe

Luke Weaver, who has a really good command number and Ross Stripling. So you have that like that foursome at the back end foursome at the back end of your staff, and two of them pop and two of them drop off your team. I think that's a decent way to go about things. Yeah, you know when you're drafting pitchers that late, you're probably not drafting fixtures for your roster all season long. There's a reason why they're there. So it's just carefully picking

and choosing skills that you're most comfortable banking on improvement from. Here's the last follow-up question on the topic for today. We'll talk pitching for probably half of the episode for the next six months because that's what we usually do. When you're looking at the skills late, are you more comfortable banking on unforeseen stuff improvement or unforeseen command improvement? I mean, with a younger guy, I think it's a little more variable because you don't have as much of a track record. But with an older sort of pitcher late, like Matthew Boyd, who's buried in your rankings right now, command's still fine. Stuff hasn't been very good. You could look at him versus, say, I don't know, maybe you say Kikuchi,

who is the opposite problem, really bad command, but stuff's actually a little bit better than average. Like, do you have a preference? Do you mix and match? Like, do you, do you say, you know what? I want a little bit from each bucket because it's not necessarily clear that one of those things can improve more easily than the other. There's definitely not a consensus in the industry on which one is improvable, stuff for command, and there are definitely organizations that have taken wildly different approaches on the subject. And so I'm willing to

go into different buckets. The one thing I would say, though, is that I want to see multiple pitches from my command guy. So I think that one of the ways that Alec Mills has made it work is by having so many pitches. I think somebody like Zach Davies is more risky because he's cutter, sinker, change. Even if you give him the cutter as a slider, that's three pitches.

I'd still want like a fourth really to kind of... Hyunjin Ryu is my patron saint of this type. If I don't have the velocity, then I really want to have four pitches with the command at least. And so Davis strikes me as like a possible regressor next year. May still be useful, but I think he'll be overdrafted. And I think that's just a caveat. So when you look at Ross Stripling, he definitely fits the bill.

Tajay Antone, he was my stuff guy. So with stuff, they could maybe lament, you know, like if, if the stuff is, is really out there. But who's my other command guy that I mentioned? Stripling and Weaver. I think Weaver's got enough pitches where I, where I'm like, yeah, he could, he could throw the curve, the cutter, the change, and the fastball, and just throw good command of all four and have a breakout next year or a re-breakout. I think I'm more willing to take below-average stuff in this season especially because of the weird shape, the limited access to different facilities, the ramp-up, the stop, the ramp-up again.

I feel like that could be a driving factor in someone like Weaver not having as good a stuff as we'd expect. And I think you're right to point out multiple pitches gives you a lot of paths to improve in that regard. I think the key here for Weaver, I mentioned earlier, you don't want to get fooled by guys staying healthy in a shortened season. But for someone who got hurt last year, came back late in the year, he's been able to take the ball for 10 starts. I know it's been an ugly, ugly year. But if you're looking for somebody who could maybe pull the Corbin Burns trick

of having some of the worst ratios in the league this year and coming back and surprising and having a really strong start to his 2021 season, I think Weaver has a chance to be that kind of guy. Yeah. What's funny is while we're on here, I just won him for $4 in an on-new auction on my rebuilding squad. There you go. Nice piece of the roster. Pod approved. Yes, pod approved indeed. If you've got pitching questions for us or any other type of question, of course, let us know. Ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com is the email address.

And again, we'll kind of break these down in greater detail and maybe fine tune our stoplight system. Or maybe it's a pepper scale because you could get orange in there, too. You could have red, orange, yellow and green. You know, there's probably other colors of peppers I don't even really know about, but I do think kind of finding different levels for each of the things we're talking about is really important and making sure you're not getting too much red in your profile as you're drafting pictures, especially early on going forward. Interest rates have hit record lows, which means it's a great time to refinance your student loans and see if you can lower your monthly payment. If you've been making the same monthly payment on your student loans for the last couple of years, odds are you could reduce your payment and save by refinancing with Earnest. Even if you've refinanced before, with today's low rate environment, most people could save by refinancing again. Want to change your monthly payment,

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that, Joe. It's for me, Joe at checkout. That's super easy to remember. You go to Indochino.com and the promo code is Joe. We'll be right back. Thank you. veterans, and active military. Liquid IV is available nationwide at Costco and Target, or you can get 25% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use code ATHLETIC at checkout. That's 25% off anything you order when you use promo code ATHLETIC at liquidiv.com. Get better hydration today at liquidiv.com, promo code ATHLETIC. All right, so this question came in from Alex. This is the one I was referencing earlier. He writes, I've been thinking about my strategy for dealing with prospect pitchers

in both dynasty and redraft leagues. Like Eno, I've been a stuffist in terms of prioritizing pitchers with stuff, but I'm wondering whether I should fade prospect pitchers that have poor command and rely mostly on stuff. I'm noticing a trend that pitchers with good command perform much better when they debut than pitchers with below average command. Examples of good command and good debuts include Gallin, Bieber, Sixto, and even LJ Newsome. On the flip side, it took some time for guys like Giolito, Glasnow, and even Scherzer to

get it going. In Dynasty Leagues, I'm wondering whether I should target the command-first guys prior to debuting and then target the stuff-first guys once the bottom drops out on their value like it did for Giolito and Glassnow. Apologies for the long email. Keep up the great work. Thanks, Alex. Well, thank you for the email, Alex. Actually, that wasn't that bad in terms of duration. Not that any email we received was bad, but that was probably a reasonably long email. What do you think here, Eno? I mean, is this the right way to go to take that step back in the long-term leagues? Because if you

think back to Tyler Glass now before the Rays traded for him, he was widely available on the waiver wire in dynasty leagues. And if he was rostered, it didn't take that much in a trade to get him because he was a reliever and it just looked like there were no signs he was going to figure it out when he was a pirate yeah um the the only word of caution i have is that uh command is uh the purview of the of the scout it's the scout so not um i'm not denigrating scouts in any way i'm just saying that uh it it then becomes a question of trusting the the scout that saw them and and again i have the most respect for ag long hanging and the fangraphs crew um and uh you know but i just wanted to point out here are some uh 60 at least 60 future value command guys that debuted this year. And this is going to sound pretty nice at the beginning, but it doesn't stay nice the whole way.

Tristan McKenzie, Dalton Jeffries, Dean Kramer, LeJay Newsome, doing so good. Brandon Belak, okay. Casey Mize seems to be struggling with command. Luis Patino seems to have poor command. Patino seems like he fits into the current example of a possible buy low or buy at a discount, though. Like thinking about Alex's question. Oh, for sure. But because his command wasn't so good when he first came off.

Yeah, but we're talking about 14 and two-thirds innings. Yeah. off you know what i mean yeah but we're talking about 14 and two-thirds innings yeah well you know the command guys tell me that about 200 pitches so he's not too far off for command plus at least but uh uh let's see here let me let me have an org here i want to i want to look at scooball uh scooball has um a terrible command plus And he had the lowest command grade from scouting grade of those Tigers prospects. He did. I have

an ear for this. Yes, I have a sympathetic ear to this idea. I sort of think of things in shelves. Zach Davies is not above the stuff shelf. That's why I think he's going to be erratic year to year.

Um, but, um, let's say there's a stuff shelf and there's a command shelf and you wouldn't take a guy that, uh, didn't have, uh, uh, like at least a 55 pitch, even if he had command, a future command value of 60, right? Like you still want them to have an out pitch. You still want them, uh, to be able to get people out. Like, um, there's this guy, uh, Michael Plassmeyer for the, the reds who has 70 future command. Um, he has a 45 present fastball, 50 curveball, 50 change, according to Fangraphs. Like, is he above the stuff shelf? How excited should you be, even though he has the 70 future command and has a 40 future value, according to Longhanging and Crew?

So give me two top 100 pitching prospects because that's usually what we're talking about right in fantasy give me two top 100 prospects that are pitchers i will take the one with more command yes yeah and i think um something you hit on there did come in in the form of another email i keep twisting up the emails because we're getting a lot of really good ones this was the one that came from Levi. His question was on the scouting grades that come in on command. How is command determined within the context of control, which is not walking guys and then command throwing the pitch exactly where you want it? The subjective nature of scouting grades is a little problematic there

because every scout is going to be a little bit different in terms of what they're looking for. Broadly speaking, it's can you locate pitches inside and outside the zone? Can you locate above the strike zone with the fastball? There's going to be some things like that that everyone's looking for, but they're going to be a little bit different. And this is where my greatest beef with the scouting scale lies,

is in its subjectivity on something that I think we're finding better ways to measure. But it's going to be a while before there's public-facing command data from the minor leagues, right? Like, we can't reasonably expect that to be available anytime soon, can we? No, especially since the way that Command Plus is done is through stringers being at every ballpark, you know, watching every pitch and working on a sort of minute level that the size of the minor leagues would probably render prohibitive from a cost standpoint. Although, you know, BIS has stringers in a lot of parks, and they watch a lot of these things on TV

and do some sort of that sort of scouting um and so it's possible that someone will will um will ask that of their organization or pay another or pay a company to do that so it's possible we'll get something like that but there's also a question within there what what command how command and control uh relate to each other and i don't know if this is a scandalous thing to say but like i just think command is is more important it's more it's better than control control is like can you generally hit the strike zone and command is like can you do what you want with the pitch how is how there's no way that control superior command you know there's no way that they're even on the same level um so i and can

you can you dream up a pitcher that could, for some reason, place the ball wherever he wants and had bad control? I don't think it works that way. They might have bad stuff and not want to go in the zone a lot. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's, I was trying to think if there's a way to look at the relationship between a walk rate and a home run rate and see if that would lead to the guys that they have good control. They have the ability to get the ball in the zone but the problem is they they throw pitches in the zone that are extremely hittable like that that to me is not if you have a high home run rate and a low walk rate you probably don't have elite command you probably only have good command or very good command and maybe you have average command in some cases and then yeah then there's a subjectivity but we have to rely on on that subjectivity and in and with like command and hit tool um and uh another plucky

reader uh mentioned athleticism incorporates a lot of these things that are almost like command. Athleticism for the hitter is almost like command where it makes everything else better, makes them more likely to adapt to a new position or be able to make changes at the plate or be able to cover the plate better, that sort of deal.

Those three kind of things are very subjective, cannot be necessarily tracked in this way that we expect our metrics to be tracked. So you just have to kind of trust an evaluator, an evaluator, follow them and realize that command is indeed important. I think, you know, just look at all the Braves starters that have started this year. We talked about how Ian Anderson's low spin curveball might not be that much of an effective weapon. And yet we forgot that I'm saying we, I mean me. I forgot that his changeup is at least a future value 60, is basically his best pitch, and that his command scores were decent.

But here, even 45-55 on Fangraphs for command, where Command Plus likes him a lot more, and watching him, I think he's going to get a lot out of that curveball despite its low spin properties as a third pitch because he just puts it he places it real well in my opinion so um you know then you put him up against all the rest of the pitchers that have debuted for the braves recently and a lot of them like kyle wright has bottom shelf command. And Bryce Wilson had league average command, but didn't make it through. Who else? Tukey Toussaint has bottom shelf command.

Am I missing somebody? Oh, Sean Newcomb has... Sean Newcomb and Tukey Toussaint have literally bottom five command. So right there, maybe Ian Anderson's league average command was good enough to separate himself from the pack. So yes, I agree, but there are these other caveats that we provided, I guess. Yeah, I think about athleticism too from that email we received. And even defining that, I think you could have a pretty wide range of definitions.

If you ask 10 different people, what kinds of traits would lead you to refer to someone as having above average athleticism? And I think it would range from something like ease of velocity, right? If the delivery is smooth and easy and it doesn't look like there's a lot of effort being exerted, that's very athletic, and it doesn't look like there's a lot of effort being exerted. That's very athletic, right? That might be a sign of core strength and coordination and things that are like fine motor control in some ways too. But then there's also athleticism like the videos. I think it was Joe Adele had the Instagram video of doing a box jump

where he was jumping like 45 inches or 48 inches or something, right? That's obviously athleticism too. Sprint speed is something that we've tracked forever. People might kind of give too much credit to that, and that's straight ahead sprint speed, which we know already that times to first are better. But Scott's been doing times to first, so times to first, I guess, could be an athleticism.

But then I think of someone like Mike Soroka, who I got a text message from a pitcher who was in camp with him when he was young. I got as many shares as I could after I got this. He said, this kid is just super athletic, and he can do whatever he wants with the ball. Now he's blown out in the kill. He's fielding a ground ball. So, yeah, I think athletic think, I think athleticism,

hit tool, and command are the sort of the grayest areas in evaluating players. And I think that even goes to the major league level. You know, defining hit tool at the major league level

is not easy. And the funniest thing of all, one of the other corners of athleticism, maybe it falls under a different category, but I remember watching quarantine videos of Jed Jerko doing trick shots for cornhole, for beanbags. He'd throw no-look bags, sink them every time.

He'd throw them from the second level of his house down to the first level and sink them, he would do the requisite chug a beer afterwards too. It's like repeatability, like ability to repeat. Right. That's some function of athleticism, but it's a very different type of athleticism because we're talking about a guy who's in the second percentile for sprint speed. Yes, he does not run well, but he does have this other sort of athleticism maybe it's quick hands maybe it's elite hand-eye coordination that enables him to still be a guy that might hit 30 home runs in a full season after age 30 then there's the intersection of the nebulousness of hit tool and inner and athleticism which is represented in the

corporeal form of Pablo Sandoval. Right, the ultimate bad ball hitter. Pablo Sandoval as the ultimate bad ball hitter, I admit, he's probably, if you've made a Rates and Barrels bingo card of things that we've said more than once, I've said that on at least four episodes this year, and I apologize for that. But that's a form of athleticism, right?

Being able to take a ball. I make jokes about balls in your nipples. He took a ball at his neck and hit it out the other day. And this is like old Pablo Sandoval. This isn't even like three homers in the World Series Pablo Sandoval. Right. And that's probably the ability to read a pitch really well and to have the bat speed necessary to get where you need to go

in time to hit a terrible pitch. It's a combination of a few different things. But you wouldn't normally associate that with someone who would not appear to move well. But Pablo Sandoval, I think, would probably deceive the average person moving around the same way that if you saw an NFL left tackle sprint down your sidewalk. You see people jogging around your neighborhood all the time and they don't look that fast because most people are not that fast. But if you saw a left tackle running down your sidewalk in a sprint,

you'd have that, holy, that's the fastest person I've ever seen running down my sidewalk before. Fastest big person. Right, then you go, wait a minute, that person was 6'6 and 330 pounds. What the hell did I just see? I heard some story about Tony Siragusa caught someone robbing his house and they ran away thinking, oh, this guy's big and fat. And he just chased them down and sat on them and waited until the cops got there. Right. So there's definitely a freak component to some of the players we see in sport.

And that applies to baseball, too, where you just you see guys and you look at them and you just go, this guy doesn't look like you'd have any sort of above average physical trait. And then you see them swing a bat or throw the ball or do something. You're like, whoa, yep. No, this guy actually is really athletic. illustrates that athleticism comes in a lot of different bundles from for hitters for pitchers for players and other sports like there are so many different ways to to measure that or to to see that i keep thinking about the bags the repeatability of something like that but that's like the mechanics for a pitcher and like repeating mechanics motor skills that's athleticism to me like that's that's what that is and there's a functional component to that like core strength but i i do think the coordination is athleticism

yeah yeah i had a weird uh comp pop into my head pablo sandoval is denilson lamette all all stuff no command right didn't ever have like this amazingly high walk rate or things that you would you'd want no no even worse than that i'd had no like would swing at everything right he couldn't walk because he could hit everything like why would you walk if you could hit everything that's that's a good point i could hit this ball at my ankles so i'm gonna do that because i'm gonna do that i might rip it down the line for a double instead of just taking a walk and getting to first base. So fun stuff there. One more thing to get to, Matt Chapman,

not a fun topic necessarily since he has a season-ending hip injury. We had a question that came in from Cam, and Cam wanted to know, his ex-Wobicon was way up this year compared to last, but his overall line wasn't great because of strikeouts and walks going in the wrong direction. He looked at his swing rates. Things look pretty similar to last year. So how does one explain the increase in whiffs and the decrease in walks? The whiff

rate jumped about 12 percentage points. Chase rate was only up about two percentage points. What do you make of Matt Chapman's 2020 now that it's come to an early end? 20 now that it's come to an early end? I think it was the hip. And my way in on this one is the out-of-zone contact rate, which plummeted. Although, to be fair, his freshman year, his rookie year, he had a 47% O contact. Let me place that in some context, the average O contact is usually around 60%, 62%. So he had poor O contact in 2018. He had 56%. 2019 was the first year he went over average with 65%. And then 2020 was 45%. So I don't think that he has natural great contact skills. So there's a little bit, I would say, combine regression with injury, and you've got your answer. I think that with a healthy hip, he can get to more balls

and have better contact rates inside the zone and out. And he also probably, I think maybe he had a peak year last year 2019 he's 26 years old hits 36 homers uh 25 better than league average awesome defense best walk rate and strikeout rate of like even his minor league career i think with chapman in the hip injury i feel really bad saying this now that he's hurt but i think chapman's actually one of the more overrated long-term players in the league from a fantasy perspective. I think he's an awesome real player because he plays elite defense. He does have that power, but you do look at some of the shortcomings in the overall profile. I think the strikeout rate's pretty high.

The OBP seems like it's going to max out in that 340, 350 range. Again, a very good player, but probably not quite an elite one, where I think you might see some people look at that red ink on the StatCast page and maybe trick themselves into thinking he's easily a top 50 Dynasty League player, when he's probably going to be a 50 to 100 range guy for the next three to five years with relative ease because of the playing time and because of the ability to hit the ball really hard. I just, I don't, I don't think there's another level there with him. And previously I might've thought there was. Yeah. I don't know where the other level would come from necessarily. Right. Like, I mean, he already cut like last year he cut his strikeout rate, like I said, to better than he ever done in the minors or majors.

So it's like he's not going to cut that strikeout rate more. He was definitely going to go the other direction. And yeah, I guess in the minors he's shown some better walk rates. So maybe he could have had another 11% walk rate this year along with the big strikeout rate. But that doesn't necessarily help you, in like a batting average league um and i think you know 36 homers seems like a fairly big max and he's not going to steal you any bases so you're talking about you know maybe his best year he hit 250 or 36 homers um that's very good it's very good. It's very good. And in real life, with maybe top three defense in baseball.

Yeah. It's a great profile. He's a cornerstone player. I mean, unfortunately, he's a really important player for the A's. I think this is a big blow for them. I know he hasn't been great this season, as we've been talking about,

but not having him, even just for the defense at third base, I think is a big hit for them in the postseason yeah i mean it's it's going to put a lot of pressure on matt olsen who despite a 193 average still does have 10 better than league average overall package with a lot of walks and and the powers there but um you know olsen and loriano and simeon need to kind of put this team on their back because Robbie Grossman's probably going to regress. Sean Murphy can progress but as a catcher is not in the lineup every day. And Mark Canna just seems like a very decent player

that may be over his skis a little bit still too. So with Piscotty going on the DL, they used to have like a kind of a no holes lineup, but now they've got Machine and Pinder probably in most lineups almost every day. That probably is enough to limp to the postseason, but they want to have Piscotty come back and probably two out of the three of Simeon, Laureano, and Olsen taking a step forward.

Yeah, I think they're going to need some surprising performances to make that deep run that a few of us thought they could make just a few weeks ago. Thanks a lot for the great mailbag questions this week. Again, if you want to send us a question, you can do that, ratesandbarrelsattheathletic.com. If you're enjoying the show on a platform that allows you to rate and review this podcast, please take a moment to do that. We'd greatly appreciate it. If you don't already have a subscription to The Athletic,

you can get one for $1 a month at TheAthletic.com slash Rates and Barrels. Get all of Eno's articles, all of our baseball coverage, fantasy and beyond. If you're playing fantasy football, we get you covered there as well. On Twitter, he's at EnoSarius. I am at Derekrick van riper that is going to wrap things up for this episode of rates and barrels we are back with you thursday thanks for listening