Rates & Barrels - Swing Changes, Overlooking Tools in the Face of Flaws & Searching for Cheap Power
Episode Date: April 25, 2023Eno and DVR discuss several players with significantly changed swing rates to begin 2023 before considering the possibility of some toolsy players getting overlooked due to a flaw. They also answer a ...few mailbag questions, including one in pursuit of cheap sources of power via trade or waivers. Rundown 1:08 Swing Rate Changes; Juan Soto Concern Level? 6:15 Jorge Mateo's Big Adjustments 9:23 ROS Would You Rather: Mateo or Gunnar Henderson? 12:43 Learning From Adolis García's Continued Success 18:07 Defense Buying Players Longer Opportunities to Adjust 21:53 Scouting + Stats: Finding Extreme Tools 24:56 A Look Into the Future of Will Benson 31:03 Making Sense of Josh Lowe's Changes 36:58 Hitters Going the Wrong Direction with Swing Rate Changes 41:47 Should Jazz Chisholm Jr. Be More Aggressive at the Plate? 44:58 Pitching Drops in 12-Team Leagues 56:08 The Early-Season Pursuit of Power Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: ratesandbarrels@theathletic.com Subscribe to The Athletic at $1/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp (paid ad), Visit betterhelp.com/rates today to get 10% off your first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Welcome to Rates and Barrels.
It is Monday, April 24th.
Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris.
On this episode, we dig into a recent piece that Eno wrote for The Athletic,
looking at some early swing rate changes.
We'll talk about some players who have adjusted their approach for better,
maybe a few that have even adjusted their approach for worse in the early going. Got a bunch of great
mailbag questions spanning a variety
of topics. How to decide on your drops
in a 12-team league with
pitching where there are so many seemingly
high-performing pitchers on the wire
and underperformers that you liked on your
roster. How do you make those calls
as you look at those decisions?
Early power.
Where could you find it on the waiver wire? If your team is imbalanced right now, where are you going to go to get power on the early power, where could you find it on the waiver wire?
If your team is imbalanced right now, where are you going to go to get power on the wire?
And where could you possibly go via trade and get power that isn't necessarily fully priced?
I think that's the other part of the conversation that we're going to dive into today.
But let's start with the swing rate changes.
This is always a good early season thing to look at because it's one of these things that actually means something this early.
Not many things actually do, but I think the most fascinating part of swing changes is that the adjustment isn't necessarily the same for everyone.
It's not just swinging less. It's not just swinging more.
It depends on who you are and where you were coming from.
What were your previous issues if you had issues and which of those paths actually fixes it yeah you have to think about somebody like trent grisham who's
swinging more and it's leading to more strikeouts but it's also leading to him tapping into his
power more and probably on some is a better idea than leading the league in watching strike three
go by and so there's some relationship between how good your hit tool is
to uh how good your actual sense of the zone is you know what you can like see um and if you don't
have a great hit tool and you don't have a great sense of the zone a lot of times you should swing
a lot right because then you just you you don't get to strike three
like you get to contact before strike three that was the josh hamilton way of thing doing things i
think but uh for everybody else i think generally and and this is it's a funny thing too when you
do like correlations across the whole league or you like look at big big trends and then you try to apply
that to single players is that if you look at the league as a whole swinging less is is good
teams that swing less win more players that swing less have better OPSs and so on a large part of
that is walks but it's not just that and we found some things where like if you swing
at pitches in the zone and don't swing pitches outside the zone there's a relationship there
to how good your batted ball quality is so generally like not so many pitches outside
zone still something i believe in yeah it's uh it's still something i believe in but then
you also have uh juan soto who's super, super stingy on pitches inside the zone.
I think he's down to a 30% swing rate.
Him and Alex Call are at like a 34% swing rate for the season.
And when you do that, you get tons of called strikes.
And so I've been watching Juan Soto all weekend, and's just called strike after call strike low in the zone. And I don't know if his swing has always been
this flat, but right now he has a very flat swing and it's not really designed to do damage on balls
low in the zone. So he's stuck with this conundrum of, do I start swinging at pitches low in the
zone? Do I figure out something I can do with those pitches? It's like the opposite of when Kyle Schwarber came up.
And I don't know.
Are you at all worried about Juan Soto?
I think the longer this goes, the more the little bit of worry I have grows.
But at the same time, if you look at it from just a pure numbers perspective,
it still looks really good.
Rest of season projections all still have Juan Soto hitting 25 home runs the
rest of the season.
We talked about the hard hit rate,
the barrel rate a little bit,
I think at the Wednesday episode last week,
those things are still good.
He's still making the quality of contact that he needs to make to be as
dangerous as he can be.
This seems more like a mental adjustment than anything else for him.
And if we look at his resume through six seasons now in the league, or parts of six seasons
in the league, he's on that short list of players that you would fully trust to make
the necessary adjustments on the fly. We talked about it, I think, with Freddie Freeman in the
past. You're like, he's just the kind of guy that's going to figure it out.
Soto's in that bucket.
Elite of the elite sort of hitter.
Full understanding of the zone.
What's really surprising is that he keeps getting burned as often as he does with those low strikes.
And what is he going to do with that pitch if he starts hunting it a little bit more?
What's the best case scenario if he's more aggressive with that? Is that a
way of neutralizing Soto's power
a little bit? Do we have to take
the under on the power projection?
He's not good at those pitches. You're right.
So this could be the thing that makes him more of a
20 home runs for the rest of the season guy
than a 25 plus, but it would probably
help him get the average and the
OBP and the run production all back, which
if you have
Soto on your teams, you might make that deal with the devil right now.
You might say, yeah, it's fine.
I'll get the extra power somewhere else.
Just give me 280, 290 with 20 bombs the rest of the way and a boatload of runs and RBIs.
That's fine.
I still think that's a reasonable sort of floor expectation for him. And that's an incredibly high floor for a player that looks pretty bad on the surface numbers right now.
gotta be more foreign but it's also um i think uh it's fun for me to see big swing rate changes in young players and i think um one of the players that really well two are really interesting one
we have to give ian khan his propers uh i never never foresaw this future for jorge mateo and
when you see in the box score you know or you check on
Jorge Mateo's page you say oh he's hitting 360 and and he's hitting for
power this must all be just a hot streak and I don't believe in it when you start
poking under the hood there's actually been a change in approach he's massively changed his swing percentages to the point now that he he
swings he still swings like he swings about league average now and he's and he chases pitches outside
the zone about league average and he and he swings the pitches inside the zone a little bit above the
league average that sounds uh like kind of not that much praise but
given where his plate skills were before uh it's a massive improvement and you take a guy who
obviously has the raw power as you can see from decent max evs has the the the speed and you give
him average plate plate skills in terms of you know walks and contact and
and uh and chase and all that you get i don't know a star i mean like i think he's could be
an all-star for them and i think he could put up a four-win season and uh i never thought he would
have a strikeout rate of you know he's right now it's
at 17 obviously the rest of season projections are like no no it's going to go back up to 27
and i get that but the swing strike rate has changed the chase rate has changed the swing
rates are changed i kind of feel like maybe he regresses to like a 20 strikeout rate for the rest of the season. And I'd put his over-under on seasonal strikeout rate
at like at 20% or 19 even.
Like that's how much I believe he's actually changed things.
And as much as I want to give Ian Connors proper,
it's like he didn't do this last year.
Last year he was just about the best I thought he could be
given his flaws.
This year is, I think, what Ian dreamt up.
Yeah, I think this was in the ceiling range outcomes,
but even last year without the changes,
it was basically a boatload of power and speed
and minimal cost and defense for the Orioles' sake.
Good enough counting stats in deeper leagues.
I mean, if you were in a shallow league,
you were maybe lagging a little bit,
but you were still so happy with the 35 steals for next to nothing, and it came with
more than non-zero power. I think this points to a question. Can you spot adjustments, changes,
or flaws in players faster than the projection systems do? We talked about some of the changes
that had already taken place with Alec Manoa's projection, and everybody else's through three,
four starts. for hitters,
it's like 15 games when we last spoke about this,
but it's kind of like a,
another way to put it.
Would you rather for the rest of this season have Jorge Mateo or Gunnar
Henderson,
because it's two players where you could look at the rest of the season
projections and kind of argue your way up on Mateo and down on Henderson based on what you've seen in less than 20 games.
And I think that can be a really slippery slope, but I'm wondering if it's a necessary way to sort of maximize value.
If you're going to trade for players and make moves for players, you might be in a league where people still don't believe in Jorge Mateo, where he has found money, where he was drafted as a middle infielder.
So he's an extra guy.
And you might be in a league where people still think that Gunnar Henderson is easily
a top 100 player for the rest of the season because of his pedigree and what he did last
year and where he was drafted.
And if you can leverage that effectively because you see it differently and you have good reason
to believe that the projections might be wrong.
That's kind of how you win in season with big transactions.
Yeah, if your transactions allow it, I could totally see it. And one of the reasons is, and this is not getting at the quality of the player as much as it is how it fits into fantasy, that your your stolen base attempts are fairly sticky
so the fact that gunner henderson has only attempted one steal uh in three weeks does
not suggest as zips has uh that he will steal 12 bases on the year. And I think it just makes him much more likely that he ends up with
5-7 stolen bases on the season.
And
so if he has 5-7 stolen bases
and is really struggling with
contact, and contact rate is in the wrong
direction, now you're talking
about a guy who, even by projections,
is going to hit 240
with 15 homers, and you're going to give him
5 steals.
So even by projections it's getting close and then if you say okay what's going on here is yes the projections do have this in them right they do have they know that like swing rate changes
stabilize faster they'd have all that but they they regress it all anyway and even when you say
something is stabilized it means that going forward you only regress halfway to league average because
you still have you have half the information so they're gonna take uh you know jorge mateo's
uh 11 swinging strike rate um and then regress it halfway to uh 15, 16% he had in the past
and give him something like a 13% the rest of the way, right?
And they're going to do this because it's smart,
and that's what the numbers say you should do in the past.
But then there are breakouts where they just sustain the improvement, you know?
And in this case, you know, with the projections already saying it's kind of close,
and then all the needles being in the right direction on the small sample stats for Mateo,
yeah, I guess it's not a would-you-rather I would have ever expected to come down on this side.
Especially in late April.
This stuff happens so fast, and it's so jarring when you get to that point.
You're like, ooh, maybe I would actually take Mateo if I were drafting today
or if that trade were sitting on my screen.
I think there's something that Jorge Mateo has in common with Adeliz Garcia.
Garcia had a monster game over the weekend against the A's,
but he's off to a great start overall this season,
and he's continued to put up great numbers from a fantasy perspective.
He's been a better player for a longer period of time than I would have
expected.
And I think what they have in common is a ridiculous amount of tools along
with defense that keeps sort of keeps them on the field.
And I think the thing that I have tripped over in the past with these players,
I've, I had Garcia for a dollar in a keeper league the year he came up,
traded him as soon as I could because I just felt like it was going to be fool's gold.
And that was a mistake.
He's been a great keeper for our friend Baseball Pods, actually,
was on the other end of that trade.
I think when you look at game power, raw power, speed,
if you add those numbers up,
let's say raw power and speed.
If you add up the
scouting numbers, the 20 to 80 scale,
if the total of raw power
and speed is like a 130
or above, it's a good player
that you want. It doesn't matter if the hit tool is a
30 or a 35. It's kind of the
position player equivalent
we talk about with pitchers
when the arsenal, the individual pitches are great and the command stinks. And then we get
a little fixated on that. And a lot of times those guys become relievers. And a lot of times
these guys with no hit tool are part-time players and not everyday players. But when they become
everyday players, they are significant exceeds in terms of where they go in drafts, and they tend to do it for a long, long time
before the market fully catches up. We all tend to look at players in such similar ways.
This is where I feel like if you look at the pool the way that Ian does, I mean,
Adeliz Garcia is a huge Nando guy. Having some different perspectives, having some different
thoughts about what to do with players like this can pay off in a really big way.
And I just think with Garcia, we're actually seeing some of those changes because one thing that I've noticed for what feels like forever now, it's been at least five years.
This is really kind of stuck with me.
Even if you don't have the tools, you don't have the raw power and speed quite at that level.
I think about just the glove for shortstops.
Brandon Crawford may have been a glove for a shortstop when he broke into the league.
If you're good enough to play a lot,
playing a lot gives you a really good opportunity to get better.
And when you get better, you play some more.
And then you can extend your career from...
Crawford got to the big leagues just on the glove, you know?
And he would never have gotten the chance
to be the player that he was without that glove.
So I think that can open up the door Would never have gotten the chance to be the player that he was without that glove.
So I think that can open up the door for you to reach another level that the scouts, and this is 0% critique for scouts.
They see what they see.
They project off of that.
They can't know how long a team is going to stick with a player because of defense and then project on top of that.
I feel like that's an absurd thing to expect someone to do, but maybe the lesson in all of this continues to be not neglecting the quality a player brings to the defensive side
because of all the opportunities that presents and not getting fixated on the one tool and
the pitcher side command, the hitter side, the actual hit tool,
if everything else is as good as it is for Mateo and Garcia
and other players like this.
They are certainly not the first players like this to come through
and later than expected sort of deliver on hype they may have had
when they signed as prospects.
Are there other players that we can learn about this on?
Is Joey Weimer's defense in center this good?
I mean, I've just got the UZR.
It's a terrible thing.
I should have outs above average up at least or something.
It's great by outs above average so far, too.
And I think, you know what?
Weimer is a really good, similar player
because he had 70 raw power, 70 speed,
current 50 in the field with 60 future.
I think he's showing that he is a 60 in the field.
He plays center.
He plays it.
Well,
he plays right.
Has a big arm.
I think it's going to be up and down with the bat for a little while.
The difference for me compared to the situation for Adelise,
when he broke in with the Rangers and the situation for Mateo in the Orioles
rebuild is the Brewers are trying to win right now.
So the playing time and their depth...
They need more offense out of that.
If they can get more offense out of that position, they need it.
Right. Their depth could make this a bit of a problem.
But Garrett Mitchell's injury is a big-time injury.
So now that Mitchell's hurt,
Weimer being able to play center field and play it well,
I think creates a much better
playing time floor than he had when he was the first guy up after Luis Urias got hurt.
So I think Joey Weimer is a great example of a guy that hasn't done it anywhere near this level
yet because he's only been in the big leagues for 21 games, but he has that same package of tools
that people have. And I think he's been underrated as a prospect relative to what he's shown in
little flashes so far. And I'm not saying that because I'm a Brewers fan. I'm saying that
because I've just happened to watch this guy a lot. And I think it was too easy to fixate on
his flaws and say, oh, he had a 30% carry at AA last year. I'm not interested. He had 15 steals
and he was 25 for 26 as a base stealer in 84 games. And he wasn't too old for the level.
Let's talk about that. That's probably more interesting if we're putting that on a package
of someone that can actually play
a very good center field.
I tend to really gravitate
toward those plate skills
and miss on this type of player.
So this is a fascinating discussion for me.
I think that on the defensive side,
a name that comes to mind is Yu Chang
or perhaps I think Zach Neto
is important to bring up here. If the defensive numbers are to be
believed, Michael Massey. These are three players that do have some interesting aspects to their
lines. I'm not saying that they're only defense, but if their early season defensive numbers are to
be believed, Yu Chang might get a really long look at shortstop. He might even be the Boston shortstop all year because
you're talking about putting him up against Kike Hernandez, Adalberto Mondesi
and a noodle-armed Trevor Story.
There's an opportunity there for him to just finally play
all the time.
The way he's been passed along from team to team
he's 27 he's been on a bunch of teams on four teams last year um and so people kind of think
oh this is utility guy strikes out too much doesn't walk enough this is not going to work
but let's say you give him he finally gets that everyday opportunity and he is playing
not quite there yet but if he did play every day like what if he got that strikeout rate down to 25 and he did finally show that power on a regular basis
now you could be talking about somebody that could be relevant in fantasy michael massey's
struggling but if he's i mean he's not going to be worse than nikki lopez with the bat
um and uh well right now he is i guess he's a minus 32 wrc plus I did not know
who's that bad uh but if the defense is actually decent enough that might buy him more time to
find what he had last year you know um and then if you're thinking about Netto and you're like oh
he's just gonna be up for a little bit and then you know they'll find something else that works
He's just going to be up for a little bit, and then they'll find something else that works.
If he struggles, I don't know, man.
I think it's a little bit like Volpe, where you're like, no, he's a great defensive shortstop, and we're going to start with that.
We're going to put him in the bottom of our lineup, and if he figures the rest out, bueno.
But otherwise, we just need him in there.
That just came from sort of an out-of- sort where i'm looking through here maybe is it gonna buy to rank sometime or is he already down um i think with
tart bryce terang i think did something that always throws people for a loop he had a amazing
first week and it included a big home run and everyone power power is it's it was like a
grand slam in the home opener it's like that's awesome great story and now he's striking out 30
of the time now he just looks like the player you would have expected him to look like it's so hard
when the first week is good or the first 10 games are good.
We want to believe it's real.
I think Terang could
be a little more up and down this year.
I think compared to Weimer, I think they can
mix and match at second base a little bit more.
They got guys like Mike Brasso and Owen Miller
at any point. They could just give those guys a little more
time against same-handed pitching.
Eventually, Luis Arias comes off the IL.
That's probably more like June at this point.
He's in the 60-day IL now.
But you're going to take some growing pains.
Terang looks like a pretty good defender at second for what it's worth, too.
So maybe that keeps his bat in the lineup, depending on how the rest of the
lineup is hitting.
I don't know if that answered your question.
I think we both agree that Milwaukeewaukee's a little bit more uh complicated
it's complicated because they're trying to win now and they need offense i mean and they can't
give away that many positions yeah and fishing in this pool i think is easier to do when you're
talking about a team that's not currently under pressure to win a lot this episode is brought to
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I'm looking at the, there's a great page over at Fangraphs.
Several great pages actually i highly recommend you support fan graphs with some money because it's good to
to keep that running but the board the prospect board which has scouting plus stats it has the
four columns down the middle with all the tools and you can just go down you can just eyeball it
do the mental math and look at that raw and that speed combo the number is probably more like 120 or more like a 60 and a 60 is good i have this
sorted for raw uh raw power and i'm looking at the the speed guys with it so uh uh here's a name for
you right off the top is james wood but everybody loves james wood right so you know what about What about Elijah Green? He has a 20 present, 40 future hit tool.
70 raw power, 70 speed.
Right.
So what's our cutoff here?
Do you think a 20 hit tool is where you say,
nope, nope, no thanks.
Like a 30 is the minimum?
I don't know.
And do these guys struggle to start their careers?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I don't know if 20s make it to the big leagues
unless you're talking about guys who are at the very, very beginning of their careers. I don't know if 20s make it to the big leagues unless you're talking about guys who are
at the very, very beginning of their career.
So if you're a rookie ball or A ball.
He's a 19 at least.
Elijah Green. But I also, does this
player type struggle when they first get to the big leagues?
Adulis Garcia had to be released?
Yeah, he had to be released.
Jorge Mateo is on his third team, right?
So this may
not be the type of player that you want to target
as a prospect coming up.
It may be the type of player that you just keep an eye on,
especially if they struggle at first.
Like if Elijah Green comes up in three or four years,
three years, and struggles at first,
remember that he had this 70 raw power, 70 speed combo, and that it may not
just happen right away for him. I think your best use cases generally for this group
end up being things like draft and hold leagues, model leagues, keeper and dynasty. You're not
necessarily taking these guys when they're 18, 19 years old. You're looking to scoop them up
after that second or third team claims them. When nobody wants them and they're 18, 19 years old, you're looking to scoop them up after that second or
third team claims them. When nobody wants them and they're on the wire and you can go pick them
up for nothing or for a buck if it's a fab situation because you see playing time and you
see tools and you say, what could go right? A current example, close to the big leagues too,
Travis Swaggerty. I still think based on the tools, Travis Swaggerty is really interesting.
Let me do, so this goes back to 20, how far back should I go? 2020? 2019? Let me do the 2019
report. We have fallen into a rabbit hole, but it's actually a great rabbit hole. Okay. I'm in 2019, and I'm doing the 130 rule, and I'm coming up with Joe Adele.
Yes, of course.
Of course, I was going to come up with Joe Adele.
Christian Robinson.
Well, okay.
Arizona.
That was a bit of a detour for some unusual reasons.
Yeah, but still, you know.
Could still be there.
Will Benson.
All right. Will Benson. All right.
Will Benson.
Okay.
Just getting his chance.
Second team right now.
Yeah.
Struggling to break through on the roster.
It might not be in Cincinnati.
It might be up and down with Cincinnati until he runs out of options.
And then age 27 Will Benson, who at that point will have taken up a full closet of Nando's house with rookie cards.
We'll be getting a chance with the then awful or still awful Colorado
Rockies.
And it'll click.
It'll just,
it'll be one of those things where it's just now,
now I actually won't be the Rockies because I think there's something about
these orgs that actually can occasionally bring something out of a player.
So bad,
bad fit,
but it could be one more. It could be now.
It doesn't have to follow the same pattern as Mateo.
Adelise Garcia, I think, was just one
org. He was St. Louis and then
Texas. It's not always this long
winding road.
Taylor Trammell has got interesting
skills. Taylor Trammell
I think controls the zone better than a lot
of these guys. A lot of these players
have a little more of an aggressive free-swinging approach. That's why Adelise Garcia, I believe,
was in the list, the table at the top of your piece from last week. Taylor Trammell, I've always
felt like when you look at his numbers, you see good walk rates, you see pretty manageable strikeout
rates. He's just blocked right now in Seattle. If you're a team that needed a young outfielder
and you want to take a chance on someone, Taylor Trammell seems like a great player to call Jerry DiPoto about.
This is his last year with options, by the way, so it might be a 2024 opportunity for Trammell somewhere outside of Seattle.
Yeah, it's an interesting type of player that we're just watching two of them happen right now.
of them happen right now. You know, back to back to the swing rate changes. You know, I generally the way that I try to think of it is it's change. Right. And we you don't always know if it's for
the positive or negative because things like slugging percentage or isolated slugging, even
strikeout rate are not stable, quote unquote, right now. Right. so you can't you can look to those for hints but sometimes just
change and change alone is good and so i have spencer's torkelson in there and in terms of
you know like wrc plus or slugging percentage or ops or batting average any results that
it doesn't look like he's changed you know or at least it doesn't look
like he's changed for the better you know um and so it's no one would point to this and be like
oh spencer torquason might be figuring it out however if you look under the hood he's absolutely
more aggressive than he's ever been and i was talking to a friend that watches the tigers more
often and said yes he's got he's
trying to get the ball out front and he's trying to to slug the fastball and it's made him uh it's
made him more um susceptible to the breaking ball away right um and that's that's gonna happen
however i would say in response a if he's more susceptible to breaking ball alone
away and he's making more contact and striking out less maybe maybe this is a better way for him to
go you know his barrel rate is up his max ev is up just a little bit and then number one is it's
change because what he was doing last year wasn't working.
So, you know, we've got a former 1-1 here who's changing.
I think that that means it's good.
It's good because he was terrible and change needed to happen. So you're never going to get, like, especially in these dynasty leagues where they're all on Fangraphss with you you know and they're all listening to
your damn podcast you know you're never gonna get a buy low where you know it's you're sure of it
right like if you're sure it's a buy low the other guy's sure too and he's not gonna trade the guy to
you you know um and i think there's enough doubt here with spencer torkelson where i'm like
you know i think there's a lot of people who are like this is okay we're getting to the point where
this is just not i don't have anything to hang my hat on you know i don't i don't have anything
where i'm like oh he's at least doing this and the thing is that i have to hang on my hat on is
he's changing and that's about all i have i can't even tell you if it's for the good or the
worst but he's changing and it couldn't be worse than before, right?
Right.
He's trying.
So if you want a reason to buy,
it's that he's not doing the same thing over and over and over again,
expecting a different result.
He's not following the definition of insanity right back to Toledo.
And if he is moving the contact point out in front and not striking out more
and making the same amount of contact it could just click
you know that that's what he's trying to do he's trying to there's more power out in front of the
play he's trying to get to that and bless his heart because he still has a 60 wrc plus and
they even move the fences in for him i feel like but i i i mean i i don't want to put the like grade a you know
by the whole thing on there because obviously there's a lot of doubt even in my own mind but
there's change here and uh and you know there is some pedigree to put your hat on one one
you know uh the max ev is not bad 112 you know that's not bad and the the strikeout rate combined
with max ev is not uh something that a lot of people uh have in common you know what i mean
yeah all right so you're you're in you're in on spencer torkelson as someone to trade for right
now i think based on the piece you're still in on nathaniel low right that seems like more of the
same yeah yeah i mean he's changing some but um yeah i don't
know i i i think that he doesn't need to change that much i think that you can just be like you
know worst case scenario i get i get 275 with 20 homers like what's so bad about that you know
i just i think the thing i like right now the k rate is actually down a little bit
ground ball rates down again i like that as an adjustment for him.
If he keeps hitting the ball in the air, good things are going to happen.
That power should come back around.
We had a question from Manny about Josh Lowe.
I thought Josh Lowe was going to be in your piece.
I was a little surprised looking at the table.
I'm like, Josh Lowe's got to be in here.
I think he just narrowly, narrowly missed it for the criteria you used.
But here's what's going on with Josh Lowe.
He is swinging more. He was swinging 46.1% of the time last season with the Rays is up to 50.4 percent
he's swinging more in the zone up from 64.7 to 67.7 and he's swinging more outside the zone
25.6 percent to 29.1 he's just attacking more and I think it makes me wonder if with Josh Lowe, we've always looked at his profile
and said he strikes out a little bit too much, but he draws walks. So it works. And he gets on
base enough and he's, he's got some speed. He's got power. All those things are all good things.
So he's going to play eventually. He's going to be a big type of tune outfielder for the race,
and it's all going to fall into place. It's falling into place so far in terms of the
improved results. He's cut his strikeout rate more than in half. I don't know if we can look at what he's doing with the more aggressive approach and say,
that's the end point. That's where he's going. He's going to keep this K rate in the 15% range,
and this is an incredible development. This seems like a small step forward that's been
accompanied by a much greater change in result than expected. it's it's like a a good adjustment for him but i'm not
buying that as the new normal for him barrel rates up right now too so that's a good sign too making
more damaging contact when he connects so lots to like with josh low but where do we go from here
given all that we've seen in the upper levels of the minor leagues from him. The reason I'm buying is that he was a low ball hitter that could not make contact on pitches
high in the zone last year. And yet he swung at them because he knew he had to do something
or else he'd be out of the league. You know what I mean? Like this, he knew that they had a hole
they were attacking and he swung at them this year he's swinging them more but he's making contact at the top of zone if i could show you this heat map it'd be it's it's amazing he's
making contact in the 90s high in the zone um you know he's got a 97 up middle middle straight 86
even at the very top of the zone uh you know and he's he hits the ball better in uh up and down so he's still got a
hole uh kind of high in a way but the small the hole is so much smaller i mean the heat maps are
are amazing maybe we can uh find a way to put them on the show notes maybe put a link in there but uh
you know the it's night and day and uh that to me suggests that he's figured, he's figured something out big time.
And again,
you're taking the heat maps,
you're taking the,
the,
the numbers that are good in small samples.
And you're saying,
okay,
the numbers that are good in small samples tell me there's a change.
And then when I go to the heat maps,
they look good.
And then the results are good.
I mean,
I think he's,
this is a guy who's putting it all together.
I think he's a good reminder of what we were talking about earlier, though,
that you can see these tools and you can like these tools.
You can see good enough results to where you believe in the player
and you can be wrong and you can be wrong and you can be wrong again
and then you can be right because I've been wrong.
I've got the Josh Lowe, I've been wrong hat trick
and it didn't come with a t-shirt or a hat or anything,
but you're trying to get him in 21.
Thought he was ready.
And then I thought he was ready.
Yeah.
How it coming off 2021 when he had the,
the 22 homers and the 26 for 26 season as a base dealer,
how could I have Josh low everywhere last year?
How would he not play a lot?
And he was great in the minor leagues in 2022 and horror.
Well,
not horror. It was, they see, he wasn't horrible. No, he was, he was great in the minor leagues in 2022. And he wasn't horrible.
No, he was adjusting.
He was just getting by.
And I think this is where, if the team is contending,
the threshold for you to keep getting those opportunities
to not be a piece of the machine,
which is the case for contending teams.
Like, how do you fit our roster right now?
How is our best path forward with
you in the lineup sometimes that's the issue that makes you a little bit of an up and down guy when
some more else he would have played to buy race prospects honestly you just think of jonathan
aranda vidal brujan yes they have ones that have worked out i'm not saying that race prospects
don't work out it's just that everyone's on a up and down cycle you know and
you and you don't know when they're going to break through a lot of times they do eventually break
through but they kind of yo-yo around until they get there yeah and i think you just sent me the
screenshot that you wanted for josh low so let me pop that up on the screen bam look at that this
is his new contact rate it doesn't even matter what pitch type.
This is a guy who used to have a whole high on the zone.
Yes, that 78 middle high is not amazing,
but it's not blue.
This is a different guy, it looks like.
I've learned blue is bad in yet another
facet of life in the last
two months.
Oh no.
It's an indicator on more than just beer cans.
I guess it's helpful, but it's an indicator nonetheless.
But I'd love to see changes like this from a player
that has had these tools, and not surprisingly,
60 raw power, 60 speed.
I was in on low for a long time.
35 hit, future 40, according to Fangraphs.
Oh, he struggled his way until he
made it. And I
just think that struggle can be further complicated
by team situation
and how patient they can afford to be.
It's not that the Rays didn't want to play
Josh Lowe more. It's that they had a
plan for winning as many games as possible
and that included him not playing
nearly every day.
We have to live with that.
That's part of our analysis,
part of what makes the game so fun and so difficult.
Is there anybody else in this piece
that you wanted to bring up on the pod?
I know people can read it, of course.
A dollar a month to get in the door
at theathletic.com slash rates and barrels.
I did want to highlight the other side.
The downside, yes.
And I did want to say that it's kind of interesting. So the way that I did want to highlight the other side. The downside, yes. And I did want to say that it's kind of interesting.
So the way that I did this was I just looked at people who had improved their strikeout rate.
Not their strikeout rate, who improved their swing strike rate.
Because that and swing rate are the two most powerful small sample numbers for position players.
So I looked among the people who improved their swing strike rate,
and then I sorted by the absolute value
of swing change, right?
And so what you found was
of the top 20
that had improved their swing strike rate,
like 18 were swinging less.
You know?
And somebody came to me
about denominators and stuff,
and I did not
explain myself well swing strike rate is uh swings and misses over pitches and yes if you swing less
it can there is a toggle there right you swing less that's part of swing strike rate
however i i'm just going to take a step back and be like these guys are swinging less and they're
making more contact you know in fact you could have you would make more sense if the swings were
higher for your swing strike rate to go down in some ways so i know there's a relationship
but just looking at this you're like oh look at the people who improved oh look they're all
swinging less right now look at the people whose swing strike rate has gotten
worse and they're all swinging more so uh in the top 10 of uh of people who have have worse swing
strike rates now sorted by absolute value in their swing change these are the guys who are swinging
more brandon drury yasmani grandal Jake Cronenworth, Trent Grisham,
Isak Paredes, Christian Walker, Jerickson Profar,
Brendan Donovan, Jonathan Daza, and Austin Hayes.
So all those guys are swinging more, and they're missing more.
And it hasn't been a good choice for most of them but not all of them some of these guys
are trying to unlock some power right and so trent grisham now is striking out 28 of the time
uh because of this new approach but he's also finally hitting for power uh again you know and
uh you know isak paredes is trying to take a kind of a hit tool
friendly approach and add power to it a lot of these guys are trying to add power right a lot
of these guys are trying to get out in front brandon donovan trying to add power so it's not
an unqualified negative for all these guys but i do say if you already were a power hitter and now
you're swinging more and making less contact like
brandon drury i'm kind of out on brandon drury yeah brandon drury was a tightrope player for me
anyway and and i think it was reflected in his path to become an everyday player last year i
think there was a little bit of a warning sign after he was traded out of Cincinnati. We saw the production slip a little bit. It's a very risky profile. I think it was easy to see
why, even though there were some flashes. Last year was a career best barrel rate,
10.4% barrel rate. We know when we have an outlier like that, it's almost certainly coming
down. If you split the difference between last year and his career rate, you're coming down to
the 8% range.
He's lower than that even right now.
The K rate being through the roof, I don't think this is who he is.
I don't think he's crashed and this is where he stays, but I think it makes it even less
likely that the level he had over the course of last season, just in the combined slash
line, it makes it so much less likely you're going to get that.
The projections on Drury,
238,
240 average it looks like. Actually,
236 to 240.
Pretty much everything under 300 for
OBP, ATC's got him at 302.
So just a shade over.
Low 400s versus lefties only.
Lefties only
with the, we'll play you against righties when someone's hurt.
Yeah. Because he can play
all over even if he doesn't play anything particularly well.
When he comes back, I think it's
going to significantly affect his playing time.
Right.
So this Brandon Drury signing,
2 for 17, I feel like it's
another version of the
Eduardo Escobar signing.
You look at the way he functions on the Mets now, Drury's not quite as the Eduardo Escobar signing. You look at the way he functions on the Mets now,
Drew, he's not quite as old as Escobar.
It's not a signing that would ever kill a team.
No, absolutely not.
But it is, like both of those deals,
the Eduardo Escobar deal I liked less than the Drury one.
Drury one I liked because I thought they needed depth.
And maybe that's how you can sell it. The Mets are okay with it because
now Escobar represents depth rather than a starter.
I think it's also interesting, one name that I didn't mention who has
his swing strike rate has gotten worse, but he's done it by swinging less
is Jazz Chisholm Jr. And I wonder
if Jazz Chisholm Jr should should actually be a free swinger
because i don't think he has good natural ball to the ball to bat and he doesn't have i don't
think the greatest sense of the zone so i think i'd want him just swinging until he hits made
contact you know rather than really waiting forever so there's there's again like we said
from the beginning it's always um it's not as easy as oh this pitcher got a new pitch or oh
his stuff plus is this you know it's like you're feeling your way through the dark a little bit
with hitters i feel like i think jazz has also a more unique background for a prospect having come from the Bahamas, right? I think the quality of the competition he saw at the very youngest ages was different than what prospects from the Dominican Republic or Venezuela or other countries would have seen, just given the state of baseball in the Bahamas, comparatively speaking, right? So that would give me a little bit more long-term patience with Jazz to make some adjustments.
So if you think he's capable of doing it, if the long-term better outcome is being more patient,
then see it through because the payoff could be massive.
It could be an age 26, 27, big leap forward.
He's already a good player,
but maybe that absolute peak season
where everything comes together for Jazz
comes a little bit later
just because of all those other factors.
And for what it's worth,
he's in our Adoles Garcia grouping.
Sure, yeah. Loud tools raw power and you know he's a 60 60 60
power and speed guy with a 40 hit tool so um you know i think we're watching a little bit of
what it takes to succeed and the kind of like steps forward and steps backwards that he's already taken a few steps forward and backward in his career.
And this right now looks like a step backward,
but it may just be a bit of the learning cycle for him.
I still kind of believe in those tools long term.
And so he's not on the greatest list,
but I'm going to give him a bit of a pass here.
I think you'd find that most people who drafted Jazz
where he was going back in February and March,
they're still riding this out.
Yeah, you're probably not getting that person to move him
until June or July.
It's going to take a lot more of this
before you can actually do something with it.
But I'm in like a 20-team OBP league dynasty where his owner is looking at that 271 OBP
and the plate skills and wondering if he actually is an asset.
Yeah, it gives you a chance to, in longer-term leagues, maybe make some kind of offer that
previously would have been a flat-out rejection.
Let's move on to a few of the mailbag questions.
We had a question here from Clayton
about 12-team pitching drops. And Clayton's problem is that he's got Dustin May, Jack Flaherty,
Reid Detmers, Garrett Whitlock, Anthony Sclafani, Dre Jameson. And then he takes a look at the
waiver wire, and there are guys like Johan Oviedo and Drew Smiley and Mitch Keller. And players
with just better results so far. And I think this is one of the hardest formats to play in
because it's not really a deep league,
but it's not really a shallow league where it's just easy to go out
and get something whenever a player gets hurt or when someone underperforms.
So you do have to manage the margins well.
You're going to make some mistakes.
I think the first bit of advice I have about a 12-team league drop question is
you will make mistakes over the course of the season.
You will rue one of these choices.
The best players, even the best players playing 12-team leagues are making mistakes in their drops.
They're letting someone go when the playing time is a little light or the skills look a little off and then a few weeks pass and that player is a must-roster sort of player and someone else scoops them up and it happens if you're not making mistakes i think this is something scott pianowski has said for
years it applies to all fantasy sports but if you're not making mistakes with your moves you're
not making enough moves because it's just part of the process you're right they think about batting
average right are you gonna bat are you gonna bat a thousand on the waiver wire and in trades
of course not but you're gonna get better the more you do this.
So I guess the broader question is when you have a situation like this,
we both play in some 12-team leagues,
how do you make that decision?
Because for me, May is just safe.
Dustin May is kind of a notch better than the rest of these guys.
But Flaherty is not the Flaherty that he was a few years ago.
I think that's pretty clear.
Detmers was someone who unlocked a lot more with the old slider that came back midseason last year.
Maybe he's more of a on-again, off-again sort of player in a 12-team format.
Descalfani, for sure, is more of a streamer for me in a 12-team league.
How do you break him down?
Do you look at schedule?
Do you look...
It goes beyond the model, I think, too.
But obviously, that's part of your analysis all the time.
How do you sift through which guys are on and off the roster and which ones meet that threshold?
Is it rest of season projections? Is it model? Is it schedule? A combination of those things?
Yeah, I think that schedule would factor in highly here because to some extent,
you've got a grouping of some guys in there that have kind of 97 to 101 stuff plus, right?
And what's the real difference of one or two points of stuff plus?
Probably not enough to overcome the schedule.
So to me, the schedule is your answer there.
You identify which ones are schedule dependent, and then you just move through them.
I don't like Disclifani's schedule coming up.
And I've got him in my main, but in my main,
that's such a deep league that I keep him on my bench,
and I'm hoping for better times.
But he's home against St. Louis, and I'm not starting him.
So in your 12 team, if he's going to be home
and you're not starting him at home, you I'm not starting him. So in your 12 team, if he's going to be home and you're not starting him
at home, you got to let him go.
You know? And so
I think that's
where I stand with sort of
Flaherty. So
Keller and Oviedo, I do like
them. I didn't start
Keller in Cincinnati.
Interesting. I mean, tough part. I really
like him, but like, you know. It's a soggy lineup though, dude. I mean, tough par. I really like him, but like,
you know.
It's a soggy lineup though, dude.
It is.
It is.
And he did pretty well,
I think,
if I remember correctly.
So,
I would rather have Keller and Oviedo
on my roster.
And I think Oviedo
is a little bit more
in that Discofani.
Keller is a little bit more like,
I'm going to pick him up
over Flaherty.
Because Flaherty because
Flaherty's fastball is not there and he's not striking guys out. And I think it's going to
be worse than it's been. So if I want somebody that I can maybe pick up and keep for a while,
or I have limits on moves or whatever, Keller is the name in the second group that I want,
you know? Um, but Oviedo to me is like a Disophony where it's like oh i love oviedo at home
and i'm a little bit more nervous about oviedo on the road and so if you need a rule of thumb like
there are useful starters that have stuff plus between 95 and 100 there are lots of them i'm
not gonna have a hard and fast rule there but I would say that you're more likely to be schedule
dependent when you're 95 to 100. And that's unfortunately where Detmers is. It's kind of
where Oviedo is. And Keller is free of that. I think it can be very helpful also to quantify
this with the rest of season projections in the Fangraphs auction calculator. And it's interesting
that I'm running the bat right now.
Just look at the rest of the season numbers.
The bat does not like Mitch Keller.
I don't know why.
Oviedo and Smiley are kind of similar.
Drew Jamison is similar.
Flaherty is similar to those guys.
It did sort of break down
similar to the way I expected,
but it just gives you,
I think it gives you a better sense
of relative value.
Is it perfect?
Is it going to give you absolute clarity on every decision? Of course not. You're still
going to have to look at other factors. And another way you could do that is just the way
that you kind of did it right there, where if you throw in the auction calculator and they're all
like, there's like five of them in a group and half of them are free agents, you found your
streamers. That answers your question. Yeah, that's the streaming level for you. Don't keep one of them
or throw them in LA
or whatever.
Don't throw one of those guys in Colorado
because there's somebody else
on the waiver wire that's exactly
the same that's going to be in Pittsburgh
or in Miami or wherever.
Hopefully that helps a few folks out there
even beyond Clayton. It's a common problem, and it gets even more complicated
when you're dealing with some injuries and you're kind of squeezed on the roster
because then you have to either start someone in a spot you don't like,
cut them, and run the risk of someone else picking them up
because your ninth pitcher is your only healthy option.
Those are always, always very tricky decisions.
We had a heck of a time making decisions this week in Maine
because we have on our team Spencer Turnbull,
Kenta Maeda, and Anthony Discafani.
And Anthony Discafani will have days where we'll be very excited to pitch him.
You know, either just a home game against not a great team in San Francisco
or maybe a two-step where maybe
a two-step in San Francisco would be amazing you know like there are times we'd be like oh yeah we
want Disco um Turnbull this week has a double in at Milwaukee and home against Baltimore where
you're like but the home against Baltimore is not on the schedule yet so you're like oh I think he
gets home at Baltimore which is the one I want and to get home in baltimore i also am going to throw the dice on this at milwaukee which i was
like i don't know i know the model says i should like him but you know there's obviously been some
early season foibles with him and then you have kenta maeda who uh is throwing 89 and his stuff plus numbers are good on the splitter and the
breaking ball but he throws 89 and he still throws the fastball enough where someone's going to get
that 80 poo and rock it and so you know sometimes i do actually then and this not to complicate the
answer that last question any further but sometimes i do go into the per pitch and and
start making decisions that way we almost dropped maeda this week based on the fact that he has a
67 fastball stuff plus even though his overall stuff plus it's pretty good so uh what we ended
up doing was uh some conservative bids uh for some players and with the idea that if we didn't get
anybody we would
just end up with maeda still and that's that's what ended up happening for us but um
the uh the uh the but but uh in the end you know yeah there are some comparable pictures where it
does make it hard to make decisions like that yeah Yeah, I think complicating it for Maeda, too.
He took that comebacker to the foot, so I think he was throwing a bullpen today,
and that kind of put the whole weekend question.
It wasn't a great matchup.
I had Maeda as a sit for this week, so if he comes out and deals, I'm going to miss out.
And we will be sitting him, but dropping him was another level where it's like,
some weeks we might want to have my head on this roster.
So I understand that,
that feeling of being like,
is he,
is he too good to drop?
You know?
And then,
then there's the,
you add the complication.
Like one of the bids that we had down was for Clark Schmidt over my ADA.
The model pulls you back in one great start against a really good lineup.
It looked good with the eye test too. I mean, he had, he had the knuckle curve working. It was locating. Well, the model pulls you back in one great start against a really good lineup at home.
It looked good with the eye test too.
I mean,
he had,
he had the knuckle curve working.
It was locating.
Well,
I thought he was really important because he was throwing the sweeper to lefties and that's why he got demolished.
And so he needs to throw the curve and the force seam and the cutter to,
to lefties.
And I think he has the pitch mix to figure it out.
He has a really
interesting so you watched him he has a he doesn't have a funny way about him yeah he's like prancing
he like prances into his it's like this weird it's like yeah just you know he's like this the the
whole like it's very interesting i i i i i i can't give him the 100% seal of approval, but I'm hanging on.
I am hanging on.
And we ended up not getting him because we had Maeda,
and we didn't feel like going super aggressive,
so we bid a 17 on him.
He went for 57 in our main.
One start.
One good start.
One good start.
Model support.
5% of your budget.
Plus Eno's in my – Although I don't know if the
guy knows that I'm in his league.
Because my name's
not on it.
That helps. I think that helps.
But I think if he bid 57,
he saw my name somewhere.
If you see me stare out
the window, which is to this side,
they're
re-roofing the building I used to
live in, which is right outside my window.
I'm grateful every day that I decided to make that
little move to the other building.
I just watched a man climb scaffolding
three floors with no harness
or anything.
Some people,
whatever that man gets paid, it's not enough.
We went to the top of the Empire State Building
and they were showing, and I think a fair amount of people died but oh yeah they were just showing
like the riveters how they were working and they were they what they did was they got these like
hot rivets and then they would throw them in the air and they'd be on like the 55th floor or
whatever and on the 54th floor they'd be like making the rivets they'd throw it up to the 55th floor
the guy who was just standing on a beam would catch it in a in a thing and then he pounded
into the thing and none of them were wearing harnesses they're just standing 55 floors up
on this thing i wouldn't have made it through the previous eras of humanity i would not have
survived evolution would have just taken me out.
One last question to get to before
we go. Tony is on the early
season power hunt. After
having kind of the opposite
problem last year, he's just looking for some power because he's got
plenty of speed and average right now.
So what he's looking for is to
basically offset some high average
safe floor guys with some power ceiling.
He's got guys like Brandon Nimmo, Brandon Marsh, Josh Rojas, DJ LeMayhew,
Rodolfo Castro, and Mauricio Dubon.
So a lot of average in that group.
So he was wondering, is something like Nimmo for Taylor Ward,
is that doable value-wise?
I don't know if I'd actually do that.
Some stuff with Taylor Ward that looks a little off at the moment.
Nimmo for Tellez.
He's looking at trades like that.
And I was basically saying,
let's just broaden this part of the show up to
relatively
inexpensive sources of power that
you believe in. One of the names that came to
mind for me was Hunter Renfro.
Here's how I got there. All I did was take a look at the
rest of season projections from the Bat-X
over at Fangraphs, sorted by home runs,
started scrolling through the list.
It's a bunch of guys that are super expensive in trades at the top.
Once you get to the high 20s, you start to find some guys that still play every day,
that are solid, that their current managers are probably not glued to,
that as long as the underlying skills are still intact,
I think you're going to get there.
They're good oatmeal accumulators,
and I think those are the kinds of players you can more easily trade
from this sort of average high floor group to go get.
DJ LeMayhew might actually get you Anthony Santander in a trade.
Or DJ LeMayhew plus something might get you there, right?
You can kind of talk yourself into getting these deals done because it's not trading for early round talent.
It's trading for those mid-round guys that are outfielder threes or outfielder fours or corner infielders.
So a renfro
sort of pop santander pop for me like eugenio suarez has been this kind of player for a long
time um is there anybody that you really like as sort of like a mid-tier player but a big power
sort of high on like a trent grisham i mean it's interesting to me that trent grisham and
eloy jimenez have the same max EV this year and similar barrel rates.
It's like, well, I mean, yes, I could tell you to buy low on Eloy, but I think nobody's going to let you do that.
Why don't you just go buy high on Trent Grisham, who his owner thinks, you know, oh, this is just a flash in the pan and I need to get out of here as soon as I can.
Maybe a buy low on Oscar Colas who actually has
a nice Maxi V but
hasn't been tapping into it and
maybe his owner is nervous
that it's
never going to come.
What I've done is sort by Maxi
V and just I'm looking
through slugging to
find the guys who are
in trouble slugging wise. Jake Fraley has a good Maxi V and poor slugging to find the guys who are in trouble slugging wise.
Jake Fraley has a good max CV and poor slugging.
Spencer Torkelson.
Look, he's back.
He's there again.
Love you, Spencer.
Manny Machado.
This is what I don't know if I believe in.
Oscar Gonzalez.
What do you think?
The Max TV is good, but there's something about him.
He's hit too many grounders.
He doesn't barrel it.
I'm not convinced.
I think they got a couple prospects that could end up taking some time from him
if they don't like what they see.
Rowdy actually fits.
Rowdy was part of the question.
Nimmo for Rowdy is pretty fair, I think,
as far as an average
and runs guy for a powered RBI guy.
To be fair, the names I'm saying are not
trade Nimmo for. I'm trying to find his names
that would be pickups or cheaper names.
That's what I'm trying to find then.
Guys you could get for Rodolfo Castro.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so I don't know.
David Peralta
should be doing better than he's doing
david peralta though i is yeah there's the the dodgers believed in him and maybe we should
believe in him because a smart team at age 35 wanted to have him on their team but i don't i
don't know man he's it's like bounce back to what i think's a, he's like a low double digit home run guy over a full season.
If it's 10,
the rest of the way,
10 homers with a good average,
that'd be probably the best case scenario.
Even the projections are down at an average.
I guess he's had max EVs like this forever and barrel rates like this forever.
So he's not,
you know,
you're not,
he's not a young player where you're like,
Oh look,
he's going to tap into that raw power.
No man,
he's given us a whole career of not quite tapping into his raw power.
Yeah.
Hopefully these methods, the methods are the key here.
Looking at the auction calculator,
trying to find similar value that way,
looking for the rest of the season projections
and looking at the slugging numbers and max EVs,
that's kind of what you're looking for to find some comps
and to find that early power.
This is a good time to do it I think
we're far enough into the season where everybody's a little antsy
it's not just keeper leagues I've already got
the itched keeper and dynasty leagues to choose a direction
and start making moves but I think
in redraft people are starting to say okay
we're almost a month in these are my
flaws I want to do something about it now because
I don't want to be terrible in a category I don't want to
have to punt a category later because
I failed to address it early.
I think you're absolutely right if you're starting to
look at other rosters a bit more and start to try to figure out
how yours might line up with someone else's
to get a deal done. I got one more name.
Fronmil.
That's waiver wire material.
I know. I'm just saying.
I sorted by barrel rate instead
of max EV and he popped.
Top 30 in barrel rate.
20% barrel rate, man.
38% K rate, man.
That's a good point.
Zero defensive value, so playing time could go bye-bye.
He's just keeping his head above water right now, though.
By projections, it is actually
sort of a fringy, deep league
maneuver that you should consider if you're light on power.
In a 12, I don't think that's going to
be the solution.
Was that the context in the beginning? Was it a 12-teamer?
This particular league for Tony is a 12.
Well, I missed that. I'm sorry, Tony.
Most of what I said was useless.
Congratulations.
It's the process.
It's all about the journey.
My biases are laid there.
Yeah, I think they're out there for everyone to see.
I was just doing my 15-team thing there.
20-team Dynasty League power sources.
Well, if you have a question for a future episode,
we might answer a version of it.
You can send those our way.
Ratesandbarrels at gmail.com is the preferred email address.
You can find Ido on Twitter at Ido Saris.
You can find me at Derek Van Ryper.
If you want to check out the piece we were describing earlier,
you can get that on The Athletic.
Theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels gets you a subscription for $1 a month
for the first year.
So jump in and get that if you haven't done so already.
That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels.
We're back with you with a Project Prospect on Tuesday.
Thanks for listening. Thank you.