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Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball

Balancing barrels and plate discipline, finding late-season upgrades, and a few Stuff+ risers

Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball

The Athletic

Sports, Mlb, Fantasy Baseball, Baseball

4.7874 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2021

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eno and DVR discuss the balance between great barrel rates, and ample contact skills, and seek out difference-makers for redraft leagues and long-term formats. Plus, they look at a few pitchers with significantly improved Stuff+ numbers over the course of the season.


Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris

Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper

e-mail: ratesandbarrels@theathletic.com


Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels


Subscribe to The Athletic for just $3.99/mo: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:22.8

Van Riper here with Enoseres. It is Wednesday, August 11th. On this episode, we have some follow-up

0:29.2

questions from our topic on Monday. One of our first topics was looking at the value of hard hit

0:34.9

balls, particularly hard hit balls. We'll get to some of those follow-up questions

0:38.3

on this episode and talk about balancing the barrel rates of players with their play discipline

0:45.0

skills because at a certain point, yes, you can barrel the ball a lot, but if you strike out too much,

0:49.4

it is still problematic. It is a skills flaw that offsets the great skill that you show by barreling

0:55.8

the ball as often as you do. We're also going to get into a few late season additions

0:59.7

with potentially bright futures. And we'll talk about when you can buy a turnaround with

1:04.6

stuff plus numbers. A couple of players caught my eye recently. So I want to pick Eno's brain

1:08.8

what some of the changes we've seen from those players might mean going forward. But Eno, let's get right after it here. The camping chair tip that I shared on Monday, it's beginning to backfire now that it's Wednesday. Apparently, the human body is not meant to sit in a camping chair all day long and do work. It is meant to sit in a camping chair for a little while and go to the beach and drink beer and come back and sit by the fire. So we'll keep things

1:33.4

rolling just for the sake of my long-term health. Your spine. Yeah, I think my spine would benefit

1:39.7

from a tight 55-minute show today as opposed to a 90-minute longer marathon show.

1:47.0

We had a question come in about Jake Berger in particular,

1:49.6

and I think this sort of fits into something that a lot of people are thinking about anyway.

1:54.4

The question came from Frank on Twitter,

1:57.0

and he writes small sample, but Jake Berger and 23 bad ball events

2:00.3

has an average exit velocity of 98 miles per hour, which is number one for non-pitchers.

2:05.0

He also has a 4.3% soft contact rate per Fangraph's batted ball data, which is second only behind Andy Young, if you lower that to a minimum of 40 qualified events.

2:17.4

Two small samples to do anything with, or because those events have happened, does it show potential events? lower that to a minimum of 40 qualified events.

2:20.1

Too small samples to do anything with or because those events have happened,

2:24.4

does it show potential even within a small sample frame?

...

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