Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Thursday, April 24th. Derek Van Riper, Eno Seris, Trevor May, here with you on this episode. We'll get to some baseball news you should know, but the main focus of today's show is a segment we're calling

Building a Breakout. We're looking at some fast starters in 2025, trying to determine if this is going to be a massive step forward or a small one.

So we've got a quartet of pitchers. We're going to break down for that. We've got to name that dude later on in the show. if you see Eno shaking on YouTube, that is why. He's nervous. He's been hearing us talk about it pre-show. It's been on the rundown since yesterday. So we've got that. We're also going to talk about how teams can try to slow down opposing base dealers in the current environment. Our friend Ben Clemens over at Fangraphs wrote a great piece about how aggressive teams continue to be under these new rules.

And we wondered, well, what can you do, given all the constraints on disengagement, having to work with the constraints of a pitch clock?

How do you stop opposing base dealers?

So we'll dig into that a little bit later on in the show as well. If you haven't joined the Discord yet, you can do that with the link in the show description. That's the best place to send us mailbag questions. And if you're watching us on YouTube, be sure to hit that like button. Let's get to some news. Corey Seeger on the IL with a hamstring strain. This is becoming an all too familiar story for Corey Seeger. Just has the worst injury luck, the nagging sorts of stuff, now plaguing him after some bigger

stuff earlier in his career. As far as the Rangers' depth goes, Eno, they seem like a team

that's pretty well constructed from a useful bench player's perspective. And the good news here

is it sounds like it's going to be a near

minimum IL stint for Seeger as well. So it may just be a couple of weeks before he's back in that

lineup. I get an excuse to talk about Joss Smith. I always want an excuse to talk about Joss Smith.

Joss Smith is one of my favorite players. It's just he is remarkably good at everything and nobody

knows who he is. I feel like like i would pick him up if he's

going to play every day he's this he's the kind of guy who if he was given a full year would hit

250 with a good on base percentage and have like 15 homers and 20 steals so that's probably

worth plugging in almost any lineup.

I guess 10 teamers.

That's a little boring.

But, you know, pick up Josh Smith.

He's a good player.

Yeah.

Stabilizing his playing time does make him a nice useful short-term ad in the absence of Seeger.

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