Welcome to Rates and barrels. It is Wednesday, August 9th, Derekman

Riper here with Inoceraris on this episode. We discuss Ronald

O'Cunia Jr., who appears to be running away with the NL MVP award year in 2023. We'll talk

about some of the improvements he has made, most specifically, a lower K rate than ever. We'll

dig into some other hitters that have made similar improvements, try to figure out how exactly that can happen.

This was inspired by a great Twitter question we received from one of our listeners.

So we'll look at some other risers and fallers in that category and time permitting, maybe a few mailbag questions as well.

Let's begin, though, with Ronald Acuna Jr. himself.

You know, you don't usually see someone cut their

K rate down to 12.2%. I mean, its previous low was last season, 23.6%. And maintain the

amount of power that Acuna has shown us this year. There's usually some kind of tradeoff.

He struck out less, not going to hit as many barrels, making some weak contact. Nope, not the case here. So I started doing some digging.

Look to the O swing percentage. Is he chasing less? Nope. He wasn't a bad chaser to begin with.

Hasn't changed that. Is he swinging differently? The overall overall swing volume. Nope.

45.9% this year career, 45.4%. That's the same too.

But he's making a lot more contact and he's doing it everywhere, both inside and outside the

strike zone, which is just incredible improvement, which led me to a bunch of follow-up questions

that we're still sort of cobbling together answers to,

but is there a swing change? Is there an approach change? Is there a combination of those two things?

Is there a third factor, some sort of off-season training? Right. You've talked about

Donnie Ecker being a firm believer in training dirty, right? Is there something new that Acuna has

added in that's enabled

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