Rates & Barrels - Swing Changes, Overlooking Tools in the Face of Flaws & Searching for Cheap Power

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Eno 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 Best Western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze. And it felt a little like... Come on kids, back to the hotel room. Good night kids. Good night mama. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at best western 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,
Starting point is 00:00:57 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
Starting point is 00:01:15 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.
Starting point is 00:01:37 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
Starting point is 00:02:20 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
Starting point is 00:03:12 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.
Starting point is 00:03:53 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.
Starting point is 00:04:37 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.
Starting point is 00:04:56 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.
Starting point is 00:05:28 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?
Starting point is 00:05:52 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.
Starting point is 00:06:09 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
Starting point is 00:07:07 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
Starting point is 00:08:02 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.
Starting point is 00:08:50 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,
Starting point is 00:09:11 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
Starting point is 00:09:39 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
Starting point is 00:10:00 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
Starting point is 00:10:42 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
Starting point is 00:11:32 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
Starting point is 00:11:59 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?
Starting point is 00:12:39 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.
Starting point is 00:13:17 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,
Starting point is 00:13:44 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.
Starting point is 00:14:08 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
Starting point is 00:14:23 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
Starting point is 00:15:00 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.
Starting point is 00:15:31 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.
Starting point is 00:15:57 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
Starting point is 00:16:34 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.
Starting point is 00:16:56 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,
Starting point is 00:17:09 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.
Starting point is 00:17:28 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
Starting point is 00:17:55 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
Starting point is 00:18:26 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
Starting point is 00:18:44 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.
Starting point is 00:19:22 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
Starting point is 00:20:08 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.
Starting point is 00:20:47 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
Starting point is 00:21:30 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.
Starting point is 00:21:46 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
Starting point is 00:22:10 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 you by peloton forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton bike or bike plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access membership separate. Terms apply. Whoa, what are you listening to this for?
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Starting point is 00:23:18 Plus, eligible Ford owners get a $1,000 bonus. For details, visit your local Ford store or Ford.ca. 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
Starting point is 00:23:55 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.
Starting point is 00:24:17 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
Starting point is 00:24:34 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,
Starting point is 00:24:52 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
Starting point is 00:25:26 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.
Starting point is 00:26:13 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.
Starting point is 00:26:26 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.
Starting point is 00:26:37 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.
Starting point is 00:27:02 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.
Starting point is 00:27:15 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
Starting point is 00:27:42 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
Starting point is 00:28:41 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
Starting point is 00:29:25 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
Starting point is 00:30:20 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.
Starting point is 00:30:48 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
Starting point is 00:31:19 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
Starting point is 00:32:07 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.
Starting point is 00:32:35 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
Starting point is 00:33:09 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
Starting point is 00:33:52 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
Starting point is 00:34:53 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,
Starting point is 00:35:14 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.
Starting point is 00:35:23 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.
Starting point is 00:35:47 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.
Starting point is 00:36:04 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.
Starting point is 00:36:20 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
Starting point is 00:36:56 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
Starting point is 00:37:20 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.
Starting point is 00:37:43 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
Starting point is 00:37:59 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?
Starting point is 00:38:15 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.
Starting point is 00:38:35 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.
Starting point is 00:39:00 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
Starting point is 00:39:30 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.
Starting point is 00:40:16 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
Starting point is 00:41:03 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.
Starting point is 00:41:47 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,
Starting point is 00:42:11 236 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
Starting point is 00:42:28 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.
Starting point is 00:42:44 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
Starting point is 00:43:07 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
Starting point is 00:43:47 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
Starting point is 00:44:49 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.
Starting point is 00:45:28 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.
Starting point is 00:45:53 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.
Starting point is 00:46:21 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
Starting point is 00:46:52 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
Starting point is 00:47:29 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.
Starting point is 00:47:57 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?
Starting point is 00:48:20 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?
Starting point is 00:48:53 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.
Starting point is 00:49:21 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
Starting point is 00:49:37 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.
Starting point is 00:49:51 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
Starting point is 00:49:59 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,
Starting point is 00:50:20 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.
Starting point is 00:51:05 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,
Starting point is 00:51:20 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
Starting point is 00:51:41 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.
Starting point is 00:52:02 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
Starting point is 00:52:28 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
Starting point is 00:53:03 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
Starting point is 00:53:58 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.
Starting point is 00:54:32 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?
Starting point is 00:54:51 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,
Starting point is 00:55:07 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.
Starting point is 00:55:24 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.
Starting point is 00:55:55 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.
Starting point is 00:56:08 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
Starting point is 00:56:24 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,
Starting point is 00:56:40 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
Starting point is 00:57:15 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.
Starting point is 00:57:38 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?
Starting point is 00:57:56 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
Starting point is 00:58:12 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,
Starting point is 00:58:30 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?
Starting point is 00:58:52 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.
Starting point is 00:59:33 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
Starting point is 00:59:58 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.
Starting point is 01:00:16 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.
Starting point is 01:00:32 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.
Starting point is 01:00:47 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
Starting point is 01:01:03 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.
Starting point is 01:01:32 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.
Starting point is 01:01:43 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,
Starting point is 01:02:00 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
Starting point is 01:02:16 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
Starting point is 01:02:32 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.
Starting point is 01:02:48 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
Starting point is 01:03:14 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.
Starting point is 01:03:29 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.
Starting point is 01:03:52 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.
Starting point is 01:04:06 We're back with you with a Project Prospect on Tuesday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

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