Welcome to Rates and barrels presented by Tops. Check out Tops Project. 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards.

Derek Van Riper here with Enosarius. It is Wednesday, June 16th, second half of June already here.

On this episode, yes, the sticky substance saga rages on. Of course we have to begin there. The crackdown process has begun.

And of course, as it could only be done, it is being done in a very unusual and problematic sort of way.

So we'll dig into that. A lot of player reaction there. We have a follow up on some of the

park factors things we discussed on Monday's show,

so I want to make sure we pass those along in this episode as well. And then we will attempt to

answer the age-old question, why do teams play the players they do? This was inspired by an email

from one of our listeners, McCabe, that came in when Albert Poole's debuted with the Dodgers,

but it dives into a bunch of

players that play a lot more than you think. And we'll try to unpack why that might be.

A few other interesting questions to get to as well. So, you know, let's begin with the sticky

stuff. It's where all the shows have started for like four episodes running now.

And as you can see if you're watching us on YouTube, smash that like button if you're watching us there.

Tyler Glass now came out after news broke that he has suffered a UCL injury and linked the fact that he was no longer using a more tacky substance to suffering that injury.

And the way he explained it made some sense to me because if you have to change the way you grip something,

if you feel the muscles around your elbow as you squeeze your hand,

you feel different things in your arm tightening up, right?

So you can kind of go through this process and say, okay, if I gripped the ball here and had

to squeeze it a little tighter, maybe that would cause some little muscles or even some big

muscles or ligaments to react differently, be tighter.

I can sort of get on board with that.

...