Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Monday, March 17.

Derek and Riper here with a special guest. We've got Enoceros flying home from Arizona after a long week of coverage covering Cactus

League teams. James Anderson of Rotowire is here, lead prospect analyst, one of the hosts on the great

Rotowire baseball podcast. James, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, DBR. It was great

seeing you in person not too long ago and good to be on the show again. That's right. We had a retirement party for a coworker, which I've made me feel really old because I've been to retirement parties for, you know, like my parents or their friends and people of that generation. But never anybody I'd actually worked with before. So shout out to Hermilk, the CTO, one of the founders of RotoWire,, big part of the Roto Wire story. Doesn't get talked about a lot because he likes it that way. He's retired now, so good for Herb. Lots of ground to cover with you today, though. We got some news and notes. We'll start the show off with. I actually gathered a lot of questions from our Discord, because I figured, hey, I can talk to James and ask James questions anytime I want, but what do the listeners want? What do people really want to know? And it's a lot of questions about under the radar hitters, a few specific guys, under the radar pitchers, so we're going to focus a lot on that over the course of this show. Quick reminder, we do have a live show, two live shows coming up next week in San Francisco at Bearbottle Brewing Company, the Burnell Heights location, March 27th and March 28th, 430 start time on both days. No tickets required. Just show up, have a good time. We'll be there on opening day watching games before we record. They've got beer, they've got coffee, they've got kombucha, there should be a food truck, lots of good stuff there. So we're really excited to see you live in just over one week in San Francisco. All right, James, let's get started with some news. Muki Betts will not play in the Japan series. Two games, of course, Dodgers and Cubs. That gets underway early Tuesday morning. He's been dealing with some fatigue ever since landing in Japan. Dave Roberts saying they might send him back home. I don't know if there's anything actionable here, given that there's still another week plus before the Dodgers will play after this two-game series. Just a little bit disappointing when we'll get to see him in the first couple of games of the season. But I started thinking about the Dodgers depth chart more because they previously sent

Heison Kim down to AAA.

And thinking about how the pieces all work here, I'm wondering if you look at this depth

chart and you see a better path for Andy Paix today than we may have seen two or three weeks ago when it looked

like Kim might have been a fixture for them at second base, especially after that Gavin Lux

trade.

I had been kind of buying the dip on Pahas after the Kim signing just because I think people initially

were maybe overrating what Kim's role was going to be with the Dodgers.

I don't think they were that shy about saying he was going to be kind of a utility player.

And the quality of Kim's defense, it made it clear to me when we kind of saw that, like what

the Dodgers saw on him, because I just really didn't see much to get excited about

offensively with Kim. He just seems like he's going to be more of kind of a bit player.

And what Pahas did last year, I thought, was really encouraging,

especially the fact that he's a value add defensively.

He just didn't seem like a piece or a potential value at defensively in right field.

He just didn't seem like a piece that they were going to risk stagnating the development

of.

And so you look at the power that Pahas was able to get to kind of throughout his minor

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