Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Thursday, January 18th, Derek Van Riper,

Enosaris here rolling through our position preview series. Today, we are focusing on third base. We have a ton of players to cover on this episode, as we do for all of these. So we're going to get right into it in just a moment. A reminder, if you don't have a subscription to the Athletic, $2 a month gets you in the door at the athletic.com slash rates and barrels, tons of great content rolling out there. If you're watching us in YouTube, hit the like button. Be sure to subscribe to the channel. And if you listen to us on a podcast, wherever you listen, leave us a nice rating and review. We'd really appreciate that, especially this time of year. You know, we begin at third base where we always begin at third base with Jose

Ramirez because he just seems like a bit of an ageless wonder at this point. It's really a

Hall of Fame foundation for his career to this point. It doesn't really get discussed in that light

very often. There's power. There's still speed. There's good average, there are great plate skills.

Maybe the only knock is that we'd want a higher barrel rate from someone we're taking in the late part round one.

7% certainly isn't bad, but you always look for a little bit more than that.

But everything he does just points to extremely high floor, and really the only thing that I think holds him back from being an early first rounder

is that the Guardians lineup around him isn't very good.

Yeah, he never has.

I mean, he has at a couple of years, 2021.

He managed 100 runs and RBI both in both categories.

2018, he did that.

But that's twice in his career for the best hitter on a team that's a little bit weird.

If he'd been on the Yankees, you would have, I don't know, another 300 runs in RBI.

I don't know.

I mean, over the course of his career.

So again, that's a little side thing here.

But like when I vote for the Hall of Fame, you know, like runs an RBI are just not something

that I care too much about because you could have been on a Cleveland team instead of a Yankee team

all those years. What I do care about with Jose Ramirez is that how he fits into the conversation we've

been having about pulling fly balls and getting the most out of your barrels.

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