Blind spots, midseason FAB strategy, and rotation questions in Oakland and Houston
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2021
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Paul Sporer of Fangraphs joins Eno for this episode of Rates & Barrels. The guys discuss the blind spots in their player analysis, and how they attack FAB in the middle of the season.
From there, they get into discussions on José Urquidy, Ketel Marte, and Sporer's idea of a "kitchen sink" player. They also discuss organizations that regularly develop MLB talent, rotation questions in Oakland and Houston, and buy/sell/bench cases for Luis Castillo, Sonny Gray, Jameson Taillon and Eduardo Rodriguez.
Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris
Follow Sporer on Twitter: @sporer
e-mail: ratesandbarrels@theathletic.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Rates and barrels. This is Ben Osiris. It's very strange for me. This is presented by |
| 0:23.5 | Tops. Be sure to check out Tops Project 70. Thanks for sponsoring the podcast Tops. And thank you to |
| 0:30.0 | our guest today, Paul Sporer. My longtime homeboy, we first hung out, I think, at Arizona Fall League. And we were the idiots in the back of the |
| 0:44.6 | room who got in there late and tweeted everything that Ron Chandler was saying. |
| 0:51.8 | Late, we were cracking jokes, and we were tweeting too much. Because they didn't mind if you share some, but we were kind of giving the game away there. So we got a not-so-direct, direct message when Ron was like, okay, just so everyone knows if you're tweeting out stuff, let's not make sure it's the word for word of what's going on here. |
| 1:12.9 | And it was definitely directed at us. |
| 1:14.2 | Yeah, we learned. |
| 1:09.9 | We've learned and now we're on panels there. We went from being part of the audience to now being on panels at Folling. I bet we'll have Folling this year, hopefully. And that's what I'm saying, dude. I think that is maybe, you know, I've been trying to like, |
| 1:12.2 | I went to the park last night to cover a game, |
| 1:44.8 | and I've been covered in some games, but there has not been a return to normal moment in covering games or like going to baseball parks. We might get there this weekend, a lot more 100%, you know, park openings for fans at least. But in terms of like covering a game, |
| 1:46.4 | you're still not really allowed to interact to the players the same way. |
| 1:48.0 | For me, I think going to Arizona Fall League |
| 1:50.6 | might be my sort of return to normal. |
| 1:52.6 | So I'm really looking forward to it. |
| 1:54.6 | It's something that I look forward to every year. |
| 1:56.5 | I no longer tweet out everything everyone says. |
| 2:00.7 | Same. Same. But it was really cool. One of the things I did tweet out everything everyone says. Same. |
| 2:01.6 | Same. |
| 2:02.6 | But it was really cool. |
| 2:03.6 | One of the things I did tweet out was they have a few scouts that will come there and talk. |
| 2:09.6 | And one of them said that Freddie Freeman, you know, looks terrible, has the wrong body, his swing is terrible, and yet he can |
| 2:21.4 | hit. And so his point was sort of about how, you know, we don't always, we get value from places |
... |
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