2026 Starting Pitcher Preview, Part 3

Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball

The Athletic

Baseball, Sports, Mlb, Fantasy Baseball

4.7 • 875 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2026

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eno and DVR continue their 2026 position preview series with the second installment of their Starting Pitcher preview. This episode focuses on pitchers often selected between Pick 175 and 250 overall of recent NFBC drafts.

Check out Eno's 2026 Starting Pitcher Rankings ($): https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7010771

Rundown

0:59 ADP Tier 4b -- Tanner Bibee, Trevor Rogers, Edward Cabrera & Shota Imanaga

19:43 ADP Tier 4b continued — Shane Baz, Shane Bieber & Aaron Nola

31:15 ADP Tier 5a -- Carlos Rodón, Zac Gallen & Cade Horton

42:04 ADP Tier 5a continued -- Andrew Abbott, Kris Bubic, Jack Flaherty & Merrill Kelly

1:00:34 ADP Tier 5b -- Matthew Boyd, Joe Musgrove, Shane McClanahan, Jack Leiter & Roki Sasaki

1:18:04 ADP Tier 5b continued -- Hurston Waldrep, Bryce Miller, Connelly Early & Shane Smith

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Hosts: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris

Editor: Jason Potere

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Rates and barrels.
0:14.6	It is Thursday, February 5th.
0:16.4	Derek, I'm right for here with Enosaris.
0:17.8	Moving through Pitcher Week.
0:19.6	It is part three of our starting pitcher preview, which will now run four full episodes.
0:25.1	We will take a break from this series on Friday to catch up on some news.
0:29.0	Completely predictable.
0:30.5	And to discuss how the sausage is made with projections.
0:33.1	We got Jordan Rosenblum, the creator of Oopsie, joining us on the Friday episode.
0:36.5	Jeff Zimmerman talking about injury grades and the process, the book he wrote with Tanner
0:40.2	Bell a few years back, digging into some of the things that he values going into
0:44.5	draft season two.
0:45.6	So a little break from the format on the next episode, but today we're picking up where we left
0:50.7	off from part two.
0:52.1	We got to about pick 175 overall based on where these
0:55.9	starting pitchers are being drafted in very early NFBC drafts, or just early NFBC drafts.
1:00.5	People have been drafting since October because it never actually stops. So we're going to call
1:05.7	this next group that we're digging into Tier 4B, which doesn't really mean much. This means means these are pictures that are going between pick 175 and pick 200, but if you're really charting these carefully and grouping them this way, that's where we're at. We're at 4B. Tanner Bibi, Trevor Rogers, Edward Cabrera, Shota, Imanaga, Shane Bause, Shane Bieber, and Aaron Nola, all in this group. We begin with Tanner Bybee. I was surprised the decay rate dipped as quickly as it did. Went down to 21.3% last year. That was part of the reason why that ERA ticked up just above four. I really thought what he did in 2024 was sustainable. There wasn't a massive Velo loss, lost to, like, 0.3 miles per hour on the fastball.
1:45.8	I think he's got four pitches he can throw to hitters on both sides.
1:48.8	It just seems like maybe four-seamer location is the biggest thing that Bybee needs to improve
1:53.8	in order to get back to his 2024 form.
1:56.5	I think there's a little bit of mix situation there with Tanner Bybee that I think he maybe figured
	...

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