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Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. This episode is brought to you by our good friends at NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV. I'm sure by now you've all got back into your Sunday routines, but they could be even better. With NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV, you get the most live NFL games all in one place every game every Sunday, and you can even watch up to four different games at once with MultiView, one of my favorite inventions of this decade. It's exactly what you need to catch all the action. Make your Sundays more magical and also YouTube TV is great. I got it this year. It's awesome. Sign up now at youtube.com/bs device and content restrictions apply. Local and national games on YouTube TV and a false Sunday Ticket for out-of-market games excludes digital-only games. Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Tuesday, July 16th. Derek and rapper Euniceres here with you on this episode. We will dig into a lot of all-star break-related topics. We have our Home Run Derby recap to ask her Hernandez, Bobby Whit Jr. among the players putting on a show on Monday night. We've got some interesting thoughts on batted ball spray angles. We'll take a look at some interesting information on that front. Got a bunch of mailbag questions we're going to answer as well. We're going to check in on the listener league at the break. See who's in the top 10. See where Eno's at. See where I'm at. Oh, it does not do that. Maybe we'll skip that part, but we'll talk about some of the players that have been great in that format so far and try to figure out if that will continue, because there have been some very big surprises that have carried some teams into the top 100. Cult Keith's turnaround has probably been a good dream, but I have not looked in a while because I didn't want to. Yeah, I got Cult Keith too, so it's not going to be a separator as we try to battle it out and try to find a place near the middle of the pack before the end of the season. We'll have a couple of our usual Monday segments today since we spoke with Melissa Lockard on Monday about day one of the draft. We'll have where the money went and some notable drops. So tons of ground to cover. It was Teoska Hernandez winning this year's Derby. It was an exciting finish because it came down really to the last swing. Bobby Wood Jr. sent one to the deepest part of the ballpark, hit the wall about halfway up. So I think we were all kind of sweating that one out, watching seeing if it was going to go to a swing off in the finals. Yeah, I mean, I had the the Nerdcast version on. Of course, I imagine you had the same just to just to see launching Alexa V-Lo popped up on there on the screen for everyone. That to me, that's appropriate usage because you need to know like what are the chances as balls getting out and you could kind of get a feel for it. I flipped between them a little bit and I almost felt like the regular cast was learning from the the the nerd cast because early on on the regular cast, they weren't showing the Nitro zones as much. And then people they were by Nitro zones, I'm talking about, they showed like the where the very best eggs of velocities, where that player was the best in terms of slugging in the strike zone. So you could see if the guy was throwing him the the pitcher was throwing the VP pitcher was throwing him the balls in the right place. If he's making the right swing decisions, you know, that sort of stuff. And I saw that more and more on the regular cast, you know, as the night went on. So that that kind of reminds me of the piece where Mike Petriola said like, you know, what we used to do on the nerd cast is now just regular Sunday night baseball. They took a water per as they took, you know, they took our producer. So I think there was some learning going on there. But also the the the changes in the rules was like a big conversation. It used to be more of a one you see one v one, which meant that you could hit 30 home runs and lose the guy who had 40, which definitely happened a couple times in the last couple of years. So they wanted to reward the best and get the best to the end. I like that part of it. They also I think wanted more better finishes because I think we saw people break records early in rounds. The 40 rounds were almost always first or second round rounds. They would want people to finish with the best. So they were limiting swings and limiting pitches. And, you know, so I thought in that way, they did succeed. The finale was the best round out of everything. What in the I think maybe the unintended consequences or what ended up being a consequence of it was that I think the earlier rounds were a little bit more boring because you didn't really have that one v one energy. So when Marcel Azunas at like 13 home runs, you're like, okay, all right, get him out of the way. Like on the next guy, right? Like he's not going to make it. You know, it's like there wasn't any of that like, you know, teammates coming out and kids, your kid coming out and be like, you could still beat them. You know what I mean? Like there was just kind of like the early was dragged on a little bit. I heard people talking about it was too long, three hours. It's pretty long. I think you could tweak it again because they tweak it all the time. I would agree with you in the sense that I like the idea of not having someone who was great in the first round get bounced because they went head to head with someone that was just a little better. If the two best home run hitters happen to match up in the first round or two of the three best match up against each other and the loser gets eliminated around one, that's not great. We kind of want it to be more balanced. Show Hey and in Colorado a little bit. Like you had it. Yeah, he had a really good round, but it wasn't good enough. And then it wasn't good enough. He's just out. Yeah. So I think maybe there's another way to try this. Maybe you add one more person. And you do groups of three. And it's like a triangle match. So three hitters all going in each other in a pod in the first round. Number one of that group gets through and you do the same thing with three other pods. And then instead of having a middle round, like the semi-finals that are going from eight to four to two right to the finals go from nine to three of three finalists. And then there might be a tie, but I think that might be the sweet spot for getting one more player out there, having a little more of the immediate competitive spirit, and then not having it run quite as long. And then the other idea we talked about with Trevor a couple weeks ago was having competition for pitchers. So if MLB is worried, if we shorten this up too much, we're going to lose ad money. You know, we need three hours of context. We're going to sell two hours of a different in the next hour. Yeah, give give us like 90 minutes of the Dingers or two hours of Dingers in one hour of pitchers doing crazy stuff, one hour of dunk tank. I think that's probably a sweet spot that would would work for a lot of people. I've also saw a lot of those complaints coming people who live somewhere on the Eastern time zone. It's getting late. Yeah. One another, just a really simple switch might be they had the finale was two minutes long and everything else was three minutes long. Just switch that. So all the early ones are two minutes long. The numbers aren't as big, you know, but they're over quicker. And and since there's more of them, you're you're you're gaining more time back, you know, and then give us more time in the finale with these guys, you know, I like that tweak as well. You know, that's a that's a kind of pretty simple one. But yeah, I it is also interesting and I hate to say something like this because it sounds like, oh, you had to be there. It sounds kind of lame. I fell in love with the home run derby live. You know, the first time I ever saw it live, it changed my opinion on it completely. And that has ported over to the part that it's actually still my favorite part of all star weekend still there. But some of that is like, you know, kind of a memory of that. I don't know. So I would recommend that if you go to an all star weekend at some point and you're debating whether or not to go to the home run derby, I would say go. Even if you are ambivalent about it on TV. Yeah. And I and I think it's something worth tweaking because I think it has a tremendous upside and it's fun. And it's fun in a way that's not quite baseball. I get it. If you don't like it because it's not quite baseball, I get it. But we can have fun in things that are kind of baseball adjacent to. I would agree with that. Now, to ask Hernandez, winning this is pretty fun just because his backstory is actually cool. He's a position player who signed relatively late or little older than a lot of players, a typical Astros move. We've talked a lot about how they did that with pitching over the years and had a lot of success. But Tasker Hernandez, even though his big breakout didn't happen with the Astros, it eventually happened after the Blue Jays traded for him. He's part of that success, like just having a player like that, being able to trade him and get something back in the return. That's still an organizational skill. And Tasker Hernandez, people might forget, he ran a lot as a prospect. He had 31 steals in 96 games at high A back in 2014. He had 62 steals at double A over parts of two seasons, 190 games in 2014 and 2015. So he's just one of those players that I think has ended up being a really high outcome sort of guy that a lot of organizations may have just passed on completely. So just kind of a tip of the cap to the Astros for giving him that opportunity and then obviously the J's for being able to trade for him and kind of gives off a fringe five vibe for sure, though, as a guy that the J's sought out, fringe five, of course, being the old prospect posts from Carson's to Stuley, who now works for the Blue Jays. I have no idea if Carson was involved in that acquisition or not, I don't even know if the timing would have worked out. But nevertheless, a fun story and the first time a Dodger has won the home run derby, that was a kind of a surprising footnote that came up on the broadcast last night. I was like, wait, we've done this for more than 30 years and a Dodger has never won the home run derby before. Yeah, it would have been a first time, I think, for either team, had Bobby Whit won. One sort of win for predictive analytics. Tom Tango looked at what balls do the best in the home run derby and I've named those blasts and have used those. I know it sucks because there's now a blast metric on there, but I'll come up with something more in the future. But basically, it's 28 to 32 degrees over 105 miles an hour. It's like, it's like barrel plus. It's something even better than a barrel. And the winner of every derby in the stack cast era has come from the top half of the field when it comes to blast other than last year. But this year, using blasts, I looked at, I said that Gunner, Bobby Whit, and Tasker Hernandez should be the favorites. And having them both show up in the final seemed like a good feeling. But Tasker is a really interesting player because he represents to me a little bit of a blind spot I have where I just, you know, we've talked about this a lot on the show, but I just don't prefer guys who don't walk really at a lead, the average rate and then strike out 130% of the time. You know, I feel like it leads to really low batting averages. But one thing he's always had is like a really high max CV, you know, really high raw power, really good power, basically. And he's powered his way to a 329 batting average on balls and play over his career. But we were kind of going over this before the show. And you know, my comp for him was one of his competitors, Adoli Scarcea. And I was like, this is, you know, this is what we've been talking about forever. What's interesting is that they are great comps for each other in terms of walk rate, you know, 7% for both of them, you know, for career strikeout rate, just around 30% for both of them career ISO 220 for both of them. It really looks like a great comp. Defense aside, defense really favors Adoli. So you'd be like, okay, so Adoli is the better player. It hasn't worked out that way. And the projections don't feel that. And so we were kind of like combing through it, trying to be like, you know, you know, what what separates them. And you discovered something in the batted balls that I was sort of surprised by. Yeah, a lot of infield fly balls for Adoli Scarcea. And you know, there's a lot of things that can happen on a ball in play. But it's one thing that we tend to lose track of. It's not that even if you're hitting a lot of infield fly balls, the number is not necessarily off the charts high. But they're completely empty. They're very rarely going to be anything. Usually they're just outs, right? You're not going to get RBIs from them. You're not going to reach base. Like there's there's valuable roughly as strikeouts. You could count them almost the same way. But I think they can misguide us sometimes into thinking that a player has been more unfortunate than the bad that would tell us at a glance. I would say that infield fly balls are deserved bad, bad, bad, right? You're making a mistake. You're getting fooled as a hitter when those happen. So if you have that as a built in part of your batted ball profile year over year over year, that can be the big difference between, you know, a 240, 250 low OBP slugging player like Adoli Scarcea, and someone like Teoska Hernandez, who hits in the 260 to 290 range most years, right? There's just a lot more batting average there because he's not giving those those batted balls away. Of course, you can look at like being able to go Oppo and doing a few things like that as part of the package too. But I thought they would compare much more favorably than they actually do because those first few things you pointed out and barrel rate to they both are our high barrel percentage guys. We look at them and say, sure, why not? Why can't Adoli Scarcea have a year where he hits 270 or 280? And infield fly balls have been a big part of the reason why. And Teoska has done it for a while. So you might say, okay, well, this is could this be a buy on at least, you know, would be like, maybe we're writing his epitaph too early. But, you know, you, you noticed that, you know, by this time in his career, Teoska had already made this adjustment because Teoska did actually hit a few too many pop ups early in his career and then made some sort of adjustment and hasn't looked back. So, Adoli says not made that adjustment yet. Another thing I wanted to point out was, if you're looking at IFFB percentage on fan graphs, you might say, Oh, well, Adoli says a 10% Teoska and has 7.8. Are we making too much out of this little thing? Well, that's infield fly balls divided by fly balls, which is just a weird way to look at it. I don't, I never understood why that is the way it is. If you want pop up percentage, which is just the number of pop ups over batted balls, you have to multiply those two numbers together. And so, if you do that, you have Adoli Scarcea with a 43% fly ball rate times a 10% infield fly ball rate. And you have Teoska Hernandez with a 39% fly ball rate times a 7.8% infield fly ball rate. If you compare those two pop up numbers, Adoli Scarcea has a 40% higher pop up rate. It's almost half again of Teoska's. So, you know, that's a, that's a really important thing. That ends up being, I think the reason why Adoli Scarcea has a 288 career batting average in balls and play. And Teoska Hernandez is a 329. Teoska has figured out a spray that really works for his amount of raw power. And since he has so much raw power, he can go Oppo, you know, and since he can go Oppo, he can get Oppo line drives for a base hit on some pitches. He also becomes harder to pitch to, you know, if he's just trying to pull everything like Adoli says, then you know what you're doing when you're facing him. Well, when Teoska says, I can pull this for a homer or I can push this for a double, that makes him harder to pitch to, and he's shown this over time. It's been a skill and that's what the projections are picking up. And they might just be saying, well, he's had consistently high baba, the projections, and saying, oh, Teoska, I'm just going to project a higher baba for him. So, therefore, his projections are going to look better than Adoli's. But there's a reason for it. And the reason is pop ups. And I think some of the better projection systems are drilling all the way down into that vatted ball distribution. But, you know, this fits right hand in hand with a story I just wrote about Stephen Kwan. And, you know, the good part of this is that Stephen Kwan is showing more power this year. And the Guardians are showing more power this year. And this is despite Stephen Kwan or and the Guardians, neither one of them showing more barrels or eggs of velocity or hitting the ball any harder. And they've just decided to pull more fly balls. And this led me into a rabbit hole that included looking at some research that Tom Tango has done. Alex Chamberlain, Alex Chamberlain has a piece called the pulled fly ball revolution was always underway. Ben Clemens has some pieces called further adventures and pull rate. I would recommend reading these. So the mistake that I made or the thing that I missed was that if you put pulled fly ball rate into your expected well, but into your projections, you're going to make it worse. This is hard for us, maybe on rates and barrels to swallow because we've been we've been the Esauk Parades champions for so long. Let's make it predictable, right? Well, the way it doesn't doesn't work that way. Yeah, and it doesn't work that way. I think because for the middle portion of baseball, pull rate is something that comes and goes is not very sticky and has a lot to do with your interaction with the pitcher. So one guy that we I was surprised to read because this pulled fly ball revolution piece by Alex Chamberlain shows that the league is pulling more fly balls every year. And then he said that, Oh, here are the teams that are pulling the most fly balls. And it's like, Oh, yeah, of course, the Dodgers, the Rangers, the twins. We always tell how the twins are on barrel leaderboards. They want to pull fly balls. I've been asking their hitters about pulling fly balls. And at the bottom, you got, you know, Cleveland, of course, because this is from last year, Miami, Chicago, White Sox, you know, you know, you're like, Oh, okay. Oh, okay, the progressive teams are pulling fly balls. The other ones are not. And and so there's something here. Well, Volpe. Volpe last year was a pulled fly ball leader. And he was doing it also against hard fastballs. He was he was in the top 10 for pulling fly balls against 95 on our fastballs. This year, if you look at the year to year season stat grid on fan graphs, and you do pull percentage, Anthony Volpe has lost 16.6% of his pull rate, number one in baseball. And it worked for him for a little bit. But then it didn't. And now it's not, you know, and I think the best hitters because Mookie Betz is on this. He's second and lost pull rate, but he's he's not having a bad year. The best hitters have a bag of tricks. And they're like, and like, think of Teoska. I think we're just talking about Teoska versus that. At least Teoska's like, I can pull it. I can push it. I'm looking at you. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. I'm looking at what you're going to pitch me. I'm thinking about what you're pitching me, thinking what to teach people have been pitching me the last couple of weeks, thinking about what you're thinking, what your strengths are. And I, and I've got people, my, my scouts for my team are telling me they're going to really try to do this to you. Okay. So you're going to try to go up, you're going to try to go fill up the outside with hard fastballs against me. Okay. It's oppo time. You know what I mean? Where Anthony Volpe is stuck between, I had a pull fly ball rate, full pull, full fly ball approach that helped me in the minors get to 20 home runs and 20 steals and made me a big prospect, but also tanked my batting average to 210. You know, so this year, you know, he's like, I'm, I've got a new approach, and it worked for a bit. What were you saying also about Stephen Kwan's, uh, Wilbur chart? I was just looking at his rolling, his rolling ex-woba is just down, down, down, down, down, like just it's like pitchers have quickly caught on to what he was doing differently as a hitter, and they're pitching him differently. And he's not crushing the ball quite the same way. He was earlier in the year. It doesn't mean he won't get back to it. I mean, I think you look at it and say, Kwan showing us this gives us reason to be more optimistic about his long term ceiling, but the adjustments can happen so fast. And we've always said this too. If as a, as a hitter, if pulling the ball costs you something, if it costs you five percentage points, it's strikeout rate, right? Using Volpe as the example, he's striking out less this year. He struck out almost 28% of time last year. He's down at 21% this year, but the barrel rate's been more than cut in half. The ground ball rate's gone up. I would argue that even though the WRC plus result last year was in 84, he's at a 91 right now, I think Volpe's best path forward was to continue doing what he was doing last year. If the approach is A versus B and not being able to blend them and take the best parts of what happened is rookie year and the best parts of striking out less and to Frankenstein that together, then the first approach to me would yield more fruit in the in the long run because hitting the ball hard, especially hitting high velocity and pulling high velocity, that to me seems like a more important skill to have in the long run than just tempering with. So you're just going to hit the ball on the ground anyway. Yeah, this is one of those sort of fascinating threads that has, you know, there's been on our podcast forever that we've been trying to pull out that you, you know, is there an ideal pull rate, ideal ground ball rate? Is there when you're looking at these, those pieces of information, we know that there's signal in there, there's something to tell you, but do you know exactly what it is? You know, it's not always good just to pull more or pull less. I had biases towards pulling more because there's more power over there, but it's not always good. The other thing I think of is when I look at Stephen Kwan's rolling, Woba, and then I look at his pull rate, his pull fly ball rate, and then I put overlay it with his rolling change-up percentage. I see that his change-up percentage kind of went through the roof right when he started trying to pull in the air a lot. So that's the picture is trying to be like, oh, you're trying to pull, you're trying, oh, you're going to take some big swings. I'm going to throw you an inside change. I'm going to throw you an OO change-up, you know, here we go. So that's part of the cat and mouse, but for Volpe, the sort of little light bulb that's going on in my head right now is we have a thousand plate appearances, and I might be tempting just to look at the thousand plate appearances and say, this is who he is. A thousand plate appearances, 87 WRC plus good defense. He's just a defensive guy. Put him in that bin. Buy him when he's cheap. Don't buy him when he's expensive. Not really a great target in Dynasty leagues. Not really going to be a star. That doesn't tell the story of what those two years was like, you know, it was almost like Anthony Volpe A and Anthony Volpe B. And I just wonder if there's a C that is that Frankenstein. I'm like, there's some part of me that wants to at least and onely go get Anthony Volpe just in case, because what if he sometimes goes Oppo and sometimes tries to pull the ball in the air and has like a 22% strikeout rate with an 8% walk rate and a 180 ISO, you know, then you're talking, well, that's actually pretty good. You know, that's somebody who could hit, you know, 260 with, you know, 20, 25 homers and 20, 25 steals. And you're like, Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, like, I want that on my team. That's like a, that's like a kind of a baby Lindor. Right. I think I would generally be optimistic about the ability to put everything together when you're talking about someone who made these adjustments in one off season. This didn't take three years for Volpe to do. Now it's just learning how to use these two approaches in concert with each other around being pitched maybe a different way. And you consider the park, the lineup. Could this be a situation where we look at Volpe right now and we end up fast forwarding two and a half months into the season. Is he this year's CJ Abrams, the guy that has everything just kind of click mid season, maybe these few days off will be the mental reset he needs to come back in the second half and do all of these things together. That wouldn't be that surprising of an outcome based on the various skills we've seen from Volpe at different levels up to this point. Yeah, and I think, you know, there's a little bit of a thing to watch, which is just, you know, you could, you don't have to watch pull fly ball rate, which because you have to kind of go and do it, you know, on the splits leaderboarding stuff. You can just watch this fly ball rate. You know, that's, that's been a big change this year. And what I see over the last, you know, 25 beta balls, it's it's creeping back up. So, you know, you can, you can, you can go to the rolling graphs and put pull on there too and kind of see that the pull is kind of creeping up. So what if he, what if he puts those two things together? I don't know, I kind of railed against cops here recently. But I guess that, am I saying that like there's still like the ceiling could be a Lindor? Who is, who is like, almost like Lindor, but not like a willy Adamus? Yeah, I think Volpe, willy Adamus hits the ball harder though, right? Yeah, Volpe has shown us more of a, I'm going to get bags profile, like the guarantee is always going to be the bags with the playing time. And whether he runs even more kind of hinges on getting on base more just by walking or finding ways to put the ball in play and get on base that way. Or unlocking more power, like those the ways he'll get a lot better. But I think I trust the bags already 15 for 19 again this season, he was 24 for 29 last season. He's done that with a 290 OBP over those two seasons combined. So if he gets into the 330 range with his OBP at some point, more green lights are possible. So maybe it's more like a 2040 guy, if it all comes together with all the pieces, right? Maybe there's not that much more raw power than what we saw in his age 22 season, his rookie season. But the best version of him is also hitting for average and stealing a ton of bases. Yeah, I'm not willing to ride them off as a potential breakout candidate next year or the second half because you see this kind of trying to find the ideal approach. But I think that pull percentage is one of these noisy but really interesting things. The way that they were putting it, that Kyle Bland from Pictureless put it is, pull percentage tells you a lot about the play, what would happen on the play if it was pulled or if it was pushed. It makes a big difference for how that ball ends up. But it tells you less about the player. And as part of what we're talking about is these different interactions between pitcher and hitter and their approach changing. Another thing that kind of reminds me of pitching is pull percentage seems to me like one of the things that a hitter can change on a dime because like Volpe, they can decide, I'm going to let the ball travel. I'm going to go get the ball. It's the timing issue. I'm going to swing earlier, I'm going to swing later. It's like, that's one of the one things that they could be like a pitcher, pitcher could be like, almost start throwing the cutter 30% of the time. So on that level, that's the one thing that the hitter can kind of really manipulate. So that's why it creates noise and projections. It doesn't make your projection system better because a hitter could be like, okay, I'm going to start pulling the ball now. But at the same time, it's tempting to me to be like, we can pick something out of there, like we can find some value in there. We can spot someone changing and we can spot potential maybe. So I think it's still worth looking at pull percentage, but it was eye-opening for me. I don't know that I just missed that somebody had tried to make a predictive ex-wobo using spray angle and it made it worse. So that's a piece of information too. Glad someone tried. Yeah, exactly. Thanks. Thanks, Alex Chamberlain. Thanks, Tom Tango for your work. It's I just, I can't let it go though. I feel like there's still something there. The debate will rage on even in light of this new information. Hello people. I am a Kim Malera here, host of the Athletic FC podcast. The new Premier League and European football seasons are here and the Athletic FC has you covered. Join me, David Ornstein, Phil Hay, and the most stacked footballing newsroom ever assembled every Monday to Thursday as we take a deep dive into the biggest football story of the day. Then every Friday, Adam Leventon and our club reporters will preview the potential tactics drama and jeopardy riding on the biggest game from that coming weekend. Check us out wherever you get your podcasts from for free. We hope you can join us for what is set to be another blockbuster season. We got some mailbag questions to get to. This first one came in from Discord from Johnny. What's up? The question is about Kevin Gossman. Is there anything in the model that suggests Gossman is starting to return to his past self or is this just him taking advantage of recent match? If Gossman has been pitching better, there's some stories about him tweaking mechanics and the last couple of starts have looked better, albeit against the Mariners and Giants and they were in good pitchers' parks. So is Kevin Gossman getting back to previous levels when he was flirting with the 30% K-rate? Stuff Plus doesn't like it. In fact, it says this fastball has gotten worse. And one thing I've noticed is that his vertical release point is trending downwards. It's about two inches lower than it was at the beginning of the season. His ride is down to the last two starts. The one thing that has been keeping him afloat is that this fastball velocity has been better the last couple of starts. All in all, none of this paints a picture of me of changing much or recovering what he'd lost or changing my outlook on him. I still like him as a pitcher. I think he's a good fancy number two now. And he's just going to have some bad starts and you want to be careful against throwing him in the Yankees stadium against the Yankees, even in their reduced state right now. However, they're playing right now. That'd be something I would probably avoid because, as you noticed, which rate is back up again. Gossman's home run rate is back to the problematic levels, right? 1.3 homers per 9 highest it's been since 2020. And from 2015 through 2020, that's where he lived. That was a problem. And it was a problem. So it's not like sometimes home run rates can be noisy in one season. But when they sort of are go back to where he used to be, you're kind of like, okay. Yeah. And we're seeing that kind of shift to the swinging strike rate kind of at his peak was in the 15% range three straight years. It's just a shade below that in 2019 would have made it four. He was getting hit less in the zone throughout that time is getting a little more in the zone now. So it just looks like gradual decline from Kevin Gossman. If he's a two or three even right now, that's still not bad. That's still a good pitcher. More of a word of the blue J is going to be after the all-star break is the team context still going to be as good for Gossman. That might also have a little bit of an impact on his value down the stretch to what they consider trading him. I mean, I think they wouldn't because I think if they do anything, it'll be Jimmy Garcia and like short-term guys. You say Kakuchi and reload for next year because it's Rogers, because it's Toronto, because that's what they've done recently. But if they did a full rebuild, if Boba Shet goes, then you should start, the vultures will start hovering around Kevin Gossman. He might go somewhere. I wonder if like, Traject is the new high-fangled kind of hitting machine that they can kind of replicate pitches really well. I wonder if Traject is going to put pressure on two-pitch pitchers because if you are a hitter facing Kevin Gossman, your team has a Traject. You could go in there and see Kevin Gossman shapes a bunch right before you go out there and see him. And maybe you can start to pick up, "Oh, that's splitter. That's forcing. If you can, that's 95% of what Kevin Gossman throws." So is this also some long-term concern about Spencer Strider once he comes back from his elbow injury? Well, I mean, the Strider was pushing the curve and changed more than ever. You're trying, yeah. I think Spencer knows this stuff. I mean, we'd had a long conversation about it. And he disagreed with me in the moment, but... The actions sort of suggest that maybe... Yeah. The percentage you're on is something. I mean, one of his biggest point was if the pitch doesn't have a goal that I like, if the pitch doesn't do something for me specifically, then I shouldn't throw it. Well, okay, then make the pitchers better, so that they can fit into a goal. And sometimes that goal is just... Show them something that isn't your fastball in cider. I don't know. That seems like a goal. Yeah. I think that's fair. Thanks a lot for that question, Johnny. We've got one here from Lolly Geiger about Clayton Kershaw's velocity in a AAA start on Saturday, looking much more like the Volos we've seen from him in recent years. So, are you having some growing confidence that Kershaw is actually going to make it back and be a quality piece of the reshaping Dodger's rotation down the stretch? This is much better than I expected. It's good. I'm glad I'm glad I want Kershaw to be healthy and basically sitting 90. The one caveat I would have, and this is on the discord, you can see the chart on Discord. The one caveat I have is that he starts to drop them below 90 after 10 or 12 fastballs. But with him, this is a stretching out process. He really only needs to get to sitting 90 for 30 or 40 fastballs to make it through five innings for Clayton Kershaw because he's still efficient. He's such a 50/50 guy with the slider that I think he's a lot close than I expected. I didn't think he would even come back this year to get him throwing 90 for 10 fastballs and then 88 plus for another five to 10. I mean, he's basically halfway there. If he does this and keeps that V-Lo past 20 fastballs in this next start, I'm going to have to change my tune. I think I do have a lot of trust in someone in this bucket. It seems Verlander, Scherzer, that when they're rehabbing, they're not necessarily maxing out every tick of V-Lo. We've talked about just the lack of adrenaline, but also the, I know I need to get my work in, but I'm not going to completely air it out until it matters again, right? So I think that's kind of baked in here as well for Clayton Kershaw. Got a question here from Luke about Louise Heale. How to handle Louise Heale in the second half. We, another analyst, have hinted that Heale is going to be on an innings limit this season and will eventually be moved to the bullpen, but how real is that? Is this something where someone who is dependent on him in multiple leagues should be looking for a trade or possibly just picking up a replacement as soon as they can? Or is there just a possibility that they let him keep going all season, even though he's coming off of Tommy John's surgery? Yeah, I mean, there's this idea that like, oh, we'll just monitor his release point on V-Lo and we don't have to look at innings anymore. We're in a post-ending society or whatever. And we have seen the Yankees to be fair, be push Clark Schmidt fairly hard in a similar situation. And maybe it was temporary, but I will note that Louise Heale had sort of a three-start stretch where his release point was down about two inches. And the ride on his fast ball completely, almost completely disappeared. It was really bad for like three starts. I mean, it was an inch plus below where he's been. And you've also seen just a general trend for a while where the V-Lo was going down. And the last two starts, though, he'll just totally reverse that. His release points back up, his V-Lo's back up, his ride is back. I don't know what to say, you know. His slider even has gained ticks and gained drop and looks maybe the best that it's looked. So I hate saying this, but I don't know, dude. I just don't know. I don't think there's like a preemptive move where I would want to drop Louise Heale even in a shallow league. I think you just play this out until you get another stretch, multiple starts where something's wrong. Like, you just let it happen. I think Clark Schmidt is relevant as far as being a similarly aged pitcher with major injuries and no previous anchor point for a workload that would give you off the cuff confidence because Clark Schmidt got to, what, 159 in the regular season last year. He had nothing close to that during his time in the Yankee system. He had 90 in 2022 and maybe a 90 in 2019, that's it. Yeah. And I think Heale had like a 108, 110, three different levels in 2021. So even that, Heale probably had a little more of a foundation to work off of. So I think they're going to do exactly what they said and just be mindful of how everything looks along the way. I also don't know that they have the luxury as they're currently built as far as how their roster is right now. I don't know if they have the luxury of pulling him out of that rotation. He's like kind of their best pitcher. I mean, like, I think Cole's kind of coming back, but like, at least in terms of on-field results so far, he's been the best pitcher. I guess what I would say is there's a bunch of pitchers like this who at some point in the second half, they would have to be less effective or they may shut down. Jones actually probably just got the injury that saved him from any of this conversation. He'll come back and just pitch. Yeah. Maybe people have questions like same, some questions about Alo Pez. I get it. But in almost any situation, in what league context, are you feeling so great about your pitching and your pitching depth through the second half that you're not already trying to find more of it? I just don't know if I'm correcting any more with any one or two of the guys that I just listed than I am if I don't have anybody like that, because pitchers break all the time. What if they just limit him to five innings and skip a couple starts and get to the end of the season with 150 innings and you traded them away, which means you still have 50 more innings of value to get. You traded them away sort of too aggressively. Your trading partner is looking to take advantage of you because they think, "Oh yeah, this guy's not going to get shut down." So you're not going to get full. The only place that I think is the most interesting place in this discussion is kind of you're a good team, headed towards any head-to-head finals or you're a dynasty team that's in the top three and you want to win now and you feel like every inning down stretch is going to be a big deal. Which one of these guys would you trade because you're kind of sitting pretty and you want to make sure you finish well either because it's head-to-head finals or because you want to make sure you win that flag. I still think heels and crochet are hard to trade in this situation just because they look so good as pitchers. Lopez, maybe I would trade. I don't know. He's just older. I just don't really trust him to keep up this level of quality. I think there's going to be some ramifications at some point in terms of fatigue or whatever. The team might be able to make him give him more rest or put him in the bullpen or whatever at some point. I don't know. Lopez and the age, the age factor is part of it. So if I was in a dynasty head-to-head league, I might consider shopping Lopez. I also think that people think that he'll just pitch all year because he's pitched 180 innings before. But that doesn't mean he's going to pitch this well all season. So there's like kind of a little bit more of a performance risk along with the innings risk, you know? I don't know. Lopez would be the one where I might consider it. Yeah. Lopez, I mean the projections have continued to improve because of how well he's pitched in the rotation to this point. I think you see a 348 and a 126 for the ratios from zips at this point. That's pretty good. The bat is at the pessimistic and 449 area, 130 whip. Do you get the PPERA projections for an Aldo Lopez? I want to guess maybe splitting the difference. Oh, I've shut down so far. Tabs crushed. But I do think we talked about this a little bit before. Ronaldo Lopez is the guy that a lot of fantasy managers are trying to trade all at once and the move might actually be to trade for him or to just simply hold because you're not getting good value back. The consensus view of him is slightly misaligned with his actual value and therefore you just have to write it out. He'll more directions. This could go. I was looking at the Clark James thing kind of in between but a little bit pessimistic. Ronaldo Lopez 393 URI with 25% strikeout rate. That's playable in most leagues. And if you were talking about 10 team league, maybe you're not as excited about that. But mostly, you're still pretty happy to get that from Lopez. Clark Schmidt didn't fade completely in terms of workload. He's still going five plus for starts in September. I think he made five starts that month. Three of them went five innings or more. Two of them were only four inning starts. Those were the last two at the very end of the season. They were pretty good. I mean, the September six, six and a third three earned. Technically, that was a quality start. Five and a third, three earned, three K's. K rate kind of came down. It wasn't missing as many bats at the end of the year. Walk rate ticked up a little bit. He looked a little fatigued by these results. I didn't get to see a lot of those starts at the end of last year from Schmidt, but it was a little bit of a fade. So you do have to worry about that as something that's looming. He'll has pretty poor command. I mean, if you if you had stones, you could you could get probably a lot for at least healing a dynasty. I would do it now, like right now, as opposed to two months from now, though. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks a lot for that question, Luke. M.J. Melendez pulling us back in with some recent success. That's a question from Barry Manalode. Has it come time to revisit the enigma of M.J. Melendez? He's on fire doing everything but stealing again. Do we believe Barry has his doubts? Lightning in the bottle or time to buy in? I do have M.J. Melendez in a few lineups because of recent outfield needs. The overall picture, though, still isn't great. And M.J. Melendez is in the hitting a lot of pop-ups club right now. I think he's already matched his career high. He's got 11 so far this year. If you kind of those as strikeouts and bring his k-rate from 26%, which isn't that bad to 29.8%, which should be a little more concerning for a guy who's also walking less than ever and hitting the ball in the ground more than ever. So where are we at? Are we still getting pulled in on M.J. Melendez? M.J. Melendez's rolling chase rate is higher than it's ever been in his career right now. His rolling pop-up rate is higher than it's ever been in his career. I hesitate to do rolling pop-ups because they don't happen as often. And the pop-up rate is way up this year and it hasn't always been a problem for him. It's very strange. I don't know why he's not better, but I think I've seen enough. This is not like the Volpe situation where I'm taking the best parts and saying we still have a really bright possible outcome here. I think it's more of needs a change of scenery if it's all going to click. 15 team leagues only and just playing them as a volume schedule play. I wonder if the approach- Yeah, that's exactly how I'm playing them. Like he's been on and off my roster. He's like a bat streamer for me right now. Yeah, that's sort of the usage for me in deeper leagues. I wonder if he's pressing now because players know the royals are in contention. Jobs are online. Upgrades could be coming. Maybe that's part of it for MJ Melinda is trying to make things happen, being a little more aggressive and just still not getting a great overall result, even though things in the last like 30 days or so have been a little bit better for him. Yeah, I mean, the projections still say that if the Babip normalized every projection has a move above average bat. Yeah, since June 1st, 225, 295, 461, 108 WRC plus six homers. So I mean, if your expectations are in that realm, then that's probably fine. It's kind of amazing. These lines are above average. It's very power driven because no, I mean, the bad X is the high man on batting hours 240. And everybody's got basically a 200 ISO for him, which is I think also interesting because he has never had a 200 ISO for a season. I guess they're all jumping into his barrel rate and his max TV and his bad boss stats at this point. Is it kind of funny to when I think this is always funny when I see somebody projected to do something he's never done? Yeah, especially when they've been in the league for a little while, too. I mean, he's 25 to like it. This is like, remember the Vlad Guerrero projections are always like, so good. I wonder if they just missed the fact that that best year that he had was in Dunedin and Buffalo. We're going to go back down this road again. No, we're not. No, we'll save that. But I'm just saying, I don't, I don't quite believe. I mean, I just, the one thing that's so hard in fantasy is like, when you've been burned by somebody, and then you're like, they're almost on like a do not fly list for you. You're just like, sorry, man, been down that road, not doing it. You know, and I try really hard not to do that. I try really hard to say, you know, even players I haven't liked, players that have burned me in the past, if I like something about them, or the price gets cheap enough. So I will say Melinda's has been on my roster's often on this year, but mostly just when like he's away from home, or he's got seven games on schedule or something. Right. I've not been clinging to that rest of season projection the way I might have in the past. Yeah. That's where I'm at with MJ Melinda's. It's 1,400 played appearances. And unlike Volpe, we do not have large differences in approach. He's been the same guy. So if at the worst case scenario, you're missing last year's 235, 16, six, that's what I think. Thanks a lot for that question, Barry. I'm sure MJ Melinda has with one more hot month comes up again at some point before the end of the season. It pulls it off, but I wouldn't be surprised if two weeks from now we're talking about another outfielder being in the mix for this royals team if they're trying to make a push for 2024. Got a couple of updates here on the rates and barrels listener league. We haven't like checked in on this one in a while. Thanks to J. Rosé 33. We have overall standings. The top 10 right now is looking pretty good. D. D. Bold, we got Willg, Beagle, 001, Divan Rowell, Flying Tigers, B.R. Reed Miller, Coldmitch 22, Coralike, Dervish Nick, and A.J.S. 10 currently in the top 10. Oh, Derek Cardi is a god fell out. Derek Cardi is a god. We still have we didn't connect confirm nor deny that if it is or is not the party or just a big fan of Derek Cardi's. We think it's a fan, but haven't ruled out the possibility just outside the top 10. So still time to make up some ground. You know, when I probably aren't going to get in the top 10, he knows ahead of me right now. He knows at 619th overall. I'm at 981st because I took the bait as a low guppy. Jeff Good pointed out in the discord, Christian and Carnacion Strand was the most popular player in our contest this year. And I ate the chalk and it hasn't obviously gone well because it's been a lost season for him due to injury, wasn't very productive before it happened either. But you look at some of the players that have popped in the contest this year. This list is not that surprising when you start to think about like relatively low usage, but also super inexpensive players. Cutter Crawford, said Lugo, Alec Bohm. I think I have Lugo. Dansby Swanson pops up on here as being on a lot of a decent number of good teams, but I'm surprised because he's been an underperformer. Jared Duran is on here as a really valuable, high performing player. Tanner Hauck made the top 20 Willie Adamases in here. I'm looking at this list. I'm like, yeah, I don't really have any of these players. Chris Sal. I had a bunch of money in Ronald Acunya. Yeah. Yeah, that sucks. I've got Melendez on this damn team. Sedan Rafael is helping me. Jordan Westbrook, Colt Keith turned it around. Some of my guys are having better second halves, but I'm thinking that maybe James MacArthur has run his, it won't be giving to me too many more saves in the second half with the acquisition of Hunter Harvey. That was a little bit of where the money went this past week. I'm a little pessimistic about MacArthur. I would say, given where he was drafted, getting 16 saves out of him and not destroying your metrics otherwise, I think was a good outcome for MacArthur. Actually, it might be all I needed because my whole point in this was to have one closer to get off the bottom from everybody who punted closers. Maybe 14 will be enough, but Trevor Rogers is not helping me, but Lidolo is back in. Actually, if I go somewhere, it's because the rest of my staff are the only picture I've lost, and this is kind of amazing. The only picture I've lost is Shane Beaver. Yeah, that's pretty remarkable. You need positive health outcomes for sure to do well in a contest. Look, that is set and forget like this. Yeah, exactly. What do you think about Hunter Harvey for the Royals? It was not an insignificant trade, and they give the 39th overall pick from the draft as part of this deal, and Caden Wallace. Player and a pick, but 39th overall pick has a good bit of value, so I would assume the Royals have some intentions on Harvey being obviously part of their A bullpen, but could he actually be their closer given some of the instability they've had in that ninth inning role? Yeah, Caden Wallace was below average his first attempt at double A, but is 17% bad on league average with a stick in double A right now as a third baseman 5-11, so not a big dude, has not shown big power, but makes good contact, could make it as a sort of averages regular. I don't see a superstar in there. Hunter Harvey, I do think this was a significant investment in him. They like the fact that they get him for another year after this, and that he has the stuff of a closer. MacArthur had the curve ball of a closer, but never had the fastball, and Harvey comes in here with the fastball of a closer. I think they go to him right away, and he is their closer. MacArthur's better set up, better profiles as a set up guy, I think. Yeah, not surprisingly, the bids on Hunter Harvey were significant even in 12 team leagues, the Rotowire Online Championship. Usually the contest we're looking at to see who's jumping on to rosters and who's being moved off. Reese Hines, who just continues to mash, was the, by far, like, biggest target in weekly fab. Reese Hines now has played seven big league games. He's homered five times, stolen a couple bases. He's 11 for 26, so that's a 423, 464, 1192 slash lines so far through seven games. We described him going to the weekend as a what could go right sort of player where, sure, this amazing heater he's on to start his career is everything that we like to see in a debut. It's fun, but you're just hoping that the floor isn't so low that he gets kind of jumbled up in the crowded outfield picture. There's a reasonable path for Hines just keep hitting and to be an everyday fixture for the Reds because some of their secondary options in that outfield have underperformed all year. So he's done everything in his power. Reese Hines has done everything possible to keep that door open for these next few weeks and to continue getting more opportunities. And I think the other number that we're keeping an eye on is that strikeout rate, right? 28 played appearances so far, seven Ks, you can live with that. If that's where he settles in, we're going to be just fine. Yeah, but I don't think that is where he's going to settle in. He's had 38s and 40s in the minors. He just came up from AAA where he was 24% worse than league average overall as a 23 year old with a 38% strikeout rate. So I think we're going to see a lot of strikeouts. One thing that is annoying to me, because I decided not to take part. I just didn't take part. I was like, he went for 130, 150 out of 1,000. He went for 13-15% of FAB free agency money. Reese Hines did. And I didn't really have that to spend in most cases. I didn't want to spend it on this player with this profile. We just talked about how I don't love players with this profile. One thing that's annoying to me, though, is if you start this hot, even as you're striking out, your batting average, even as it's going down, we'll have had this like nice foundation to start that like, you know, you could add a week of 210 to this 423 and he'll still have like a 300 batting average, right? And then you add another week of 210, he'll still be at like 250 and it'll still seem passable for two weeks. And I wonder if that'll keep him in the lineup longer than I wanted to just look at one of the other guys that kind of that just that went in for money this year. And I did put money down on Lawrence Butler. He did have a three home run game in a sort of coming out party there. He's doing the opposite where his numbers were so bad to begin that they're being artificially almost depressed by how bad he was the first time he came up. I mean, if you look at just what he's done in June, you're talking about a 317 average 349 OBP 854. That's that's July. But you know, you're you're he's on a heater. He is started off badly and that's depressing his numbers. What I like about Butler is he strikes out less than Reese Hines. He doesn't quite have the same 90 raw power on the 20 to 80 scouting scale, but he's he's got really good raw power. He's getting to that raw power more. And I think some of these adjustments are behind it. Like I think he started to figure out how he's being pitched and how to get the most out of his his skill set. He also steals bases. So Butler was somebody I was in on. I did not win him, but I wanted him. The patience from the A's might be a little greater with Lawrence Butler, just given where they're at right now and the Reds kind of scrambling trying to find their way back into the wild card picture. They might be quicker to make an adjustment if Reese Hines hits a stretch of 10, 15 games for that strikeout rate balloons back up. And you know, we see it with prospects that were much more highly regarded than Lawrence Butler to the adjustment seems to be a few months right now. So he had that taste, the AAA got the strikeout rate back down showing a good eye, even though he wasn't just mashing. The line isn't like jump off the page good for the PCL either, but the combination of power and speed, I think the safer opportunity for Lawrence Butler made him pretty appealing even in 12 team leagues, because you start five in those road of wire online championship leagues. So I think that makes a lot of sense. But a three homer game will always do it. You hit three homers in the game. You're getting picked up in 12 team leagues. It's just the, just the way that it goes. I got a, I got a baby, uh, resigns, uh, package, uh, for three dollars. Yeah. Out of a thousand. Who's that? Adam Duvall. Oh, okay. Basically same guy. No, Adam Duvall is only striking out 28% of the time. So no, but I mean, he's, he's, uh, kind of your raw power, low batting average guy. Um, I, I needed that in, in main event. I also needed to buy players on the very cheap, because we just got Edwin Diaz last week. So we are dollar days, almost the rest of the season. So we got Adam Duvall for three, Kerry Carpenter for two, Zach McKinstry for one and Casey Mise for one. If you want to know what it was, what it's like to live on the, on the fringes, but my big acquisition, uh, in two leagues, uh, was Juan Yepes, which I think I told people I was going to do. And I went and did it and I didn't spend that much money. Uh, got him for basically 25 bucks in both leagues out of a thousand. Juan Yepes is not a guy who hits the ball super, super hard. So you might be surprised why I like him. Here's why I like him. He's playing every day in Washington, which is a nice park. And he has a good k-rate. So he's like, uh, he's a, my co-bander said, Thai France starter package in a better stadium. Oh, okay. I was thinking maybe like, uh, Masatake Yoshida roto profile where it's like average and run production first and then power, maybe it's like a secondary contribution with very little speed, maybe the occasional bag, then that's do run a lot. So maybe he'll get a few green lights, but you're not, yeah, pick, you didn't pick him up for the speed. Any speed, he gets the random bonus. I'd like, I think the batting average is gonna be good. I think Washington will help him, uh, you know, aid him into some homers. Um, and then lastly, he's first base and outfield eligible. And so you've got a little C I O F one for one B. You've got some places you can play him. I think he's what, um, you know, Paul Sport calls a team streamer for pitchers where it's like a player that's too good to drop. I think he'll be a guy who'll be my first guy in the bench or in my lineup and he'll kind of help me massage some other players around. The Thai France starter kit comp is probably the right comp though, as far as your, your best case scenario expectations as well for one. Yep is on the drop side, three names stood out to me. Edward Cabrera, Colton Cowser and David Fry. That's all star David Fry. It's been a, a tougher stretch for Fry kind of heading into the all star break, right? So I get it. I understand why people would be tempering expectations slightly. If you want to roll back from like June 1st through the end of the half, 202, 266, 293, no homers in 33 games, six RBIs, two runs scored climbing K, right? The rolling K rate got back up to 30%, which is kind of what his problem was before. And the appeal, of course, with catcher eligibility to catcher leagues, the floor for a second catcher is pretty low. But even that recent run of playing time was enough for some people to say, okay, I've seen enough. Do you think this is just the beginning of the downturn for what was a really fun story or do you think it's just typical adjustments for a guy that doesn't have that much big league experience yet, right? It doesn't matter how old you are. The league starts to figure you out and pitch you differently and you've got to make some counter adjustments back. I mean, David Fry's only had 359 big league played appearances between this season and last season for the Guardians. Yeah, I mean, there's some evidence that he's a huge bullfly ball guy. The K rate climbing up makes me think that people found a way to use that against him. I think this is a little bit of an adjustment phase, but I also think their depth chart is so crowded that part of the appeal that was there in the first two months could be whittled away if it's not an everyday role while he figures it out. Yeah, I am a little bit less worried that Cleveland is going to acquire a bat of the deadline than I am usually. I think that if they're looking anywhere, Cleveland is going to be looking to acquire an arm. Yeah, that's the unusual, but you are, though, represents a little bit of a threat, which is, you know, if he comes back up and takes a regular job that pushes Fry into a little bit more of a marginal situation. They could even make that switch one for one. Yeah, yeah, they could. What do you make a Colton Kauzer and how he's been playing, kind of going back to May 1st, even had a great March, April, but six homers in his last 205 played appearance is a 74 WRC plus since May 1st. 183, 278, 328, it's not going to cut it out of team where there are a lot of viable options. And I know Heston Cursed Dad suffered the concussion after getting hit by a pitch just prior to the break. And there was the fallout from that between the Orioles and Yankees, but Kauzer looks like a guy who might be in danger of losing his share of playing time in the immediate future, barring a quick turnaround. Yeah, he's, you know, kind of been chasing more. You know, I'm a little surprised that the rolling strikeout rate graph has not been terrible. You know, it's actually sort of generally trending downwards, but overall, he is a swing and miss guy alongside really good patients. And so I really like his outcomes long term. I don't know what that means for the short term. I would just caution all of us for fiddling the dials on the Orioles too much because I think we all wrote Cedric Mullen's epitaph already. And he seems to be back in good graces. So, Kauzer may just be a guy that they let go through some stuff like Mullen's did. It's possible. I mean, they're winning. He fills a role. He plays center field against lefties. I'm not sure they have a great person to do that otherwise. Yeah, no, I think I think that was the saving grace for Mullen's all along was how they use him defensively. Kauzer doesn't quite have that to fall back on. Edward Cabrera was the most notable pitching drop. I get it. Four homers allowed and three and a third innings. That was a rough start. Made two turns coming off the aisle before the all-star break. We haven't seen Edward Cabrera pitch five or more innings in a big league start since April 21st, but 42 Ks against 15 walks in 28 and a third innings. So, he is eligible for the air quotes next Hunter Brown. If you want to put him into that contest, I don't think I want to go there, but I'm curious if you still do as someone who has been consistently intrigued by the potential of Edward Cabrera. There are some dials to fiddle with in his pitching mix. He has a sinker that he does not throw very often and the slider has been devalued over time for him. With a command problem like he has, maybe he finds that he can actually command one of those better. Maybe he shifts something on the slider, makes it more of a cutter, and that's how he comes back. I will bet on stuff like this, but I will be cautious, as all heck, because obviously it's been blowing up on him. I wonder, would you have played? I have him in some places. I think I got burned by one of these. Yes, I played him against the White Sox. It wasn't terrible, terrible. The White Sox game was three and two-thirds, four strikeouts, one walk, two earned. Not really terrible. I was not going to start him against Cincinnati and Cincinnati or the LA Dodgers. He's still in that. I'm intrigued. The K-Miles BB is actually really good. The stuff is pretty good. I might pick him up. If he's out there, if I have a place on my roster where I can play with a pitcher, I might pick him up. If they use him for the first game out of the break or the first series out of the break, at least, would be a home start against the Mets and then he would catch the Orioles at home for his second start. I don't think I'd throw him in that spot. If we go a little further down the road, I think he would get the raise, probably the raise on the road to be his third start after the break, depending on when they let him go. I might do a wait and see on the Mets, not starting against the Orioles, so you could maybe leave him out there if you want, but if he does okay against those Mets, then I would feel better about starting against the Rays. If the schedule breaks a little bit differently, Edward Cabrera could be pitching in Milwaukee, I might actually get to see it, because Yacht Rock Knight is coming up at the yard. July 26th, they have Yacht Rock Knight on Friday night, and then they have Hawaiian shirt giveaway night on Saturday right after that. Wow, it's for the Marlin series. So it's like they know you. It's like they know what I'm looking for. I'm going to be in Seattle next week, all trips and around, so I'll be off the airways for a little bit after Friday, but I'm going to have some fun out there in Seattle. Mount Rainier, Olympic, going up to the islands. It's going to be fun. Nice. We've got some subs lined up for next week as well, so we're looking forward to that. So much deserved time off for you here, as we cross over that midway point of the season. If you'd like to check out all the great content we have at the athletic, you can do that. The athletic.com/rates and barrels. If you get ready for football season, we just launched a new football podcast, not Eno and I, but it was Diana Rossini and Chase Daniel, former quarterback. They've got a show called Scoop City, just launched on Tuesday, so be sure to check that out. Keep up with all the news and rumors and all the good chatter from around the league anywhere you listen to your podcast. You can find Eno on Twitter at Enosaris. You can find me at Derek and Ryper find the pod at rates and barrels. It's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you live at one o'clock Eastern on YouTube on Thursday. Thanks for listening. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
