Welcome to Rates and barrels. It is Monday, May 9th. Derek Van Riper here with

Enosaris. On this episode, we will dig into the debut of George Kirby that took place on Sunday.

A pretty heavy weekend of bidding and free agent pickups this weekend with a lot of prospects getting the call over the last week or so.

We'll talk about some expectations for those players as well as maybe a few

sneaky, interesting, boring players with a lot of playing time. We had a lot of email questions

trickling in covering a ton of different ground, including bat humidor technology, a new metric

called grit plus. I think I teased that question a few weeks ago, but that one drives it something

a little bit different than actual grit. So we'll get into that question among a few others as we move

along here on this Monday. But, you know, the George Kirby debut was excellent, really, about as

much as you can hope for from a pitcher making his big league debut, six scoreless, four hits,

seven strikeouts, no walks.

And if you were among the people who were excited about Matt Brash earlier this season,

yes, I was definitely among that group.

And you are also excited about George Kirby.

The one thing you should be really excited about is that zero in the walk column,

because George Kirby, as many people may know already has

very good command and it's nice to see a guy especially in his debut go without issuing a free pass

and a start where he pitches that deep yeah i mean if you could push uh if you could squeeze him and

matt brash into one person you'd'd have probably the best pitcher in baseball.

Corbin Burns, yeah.

But the debut as seen through the pitching plus model kind of agrees that it was good command.

I think the thing that might surprise people is that it was a 91 stuff plus debut.

...