Welcome to Rates and Daryls, it's Thursday, August 8th.

Derek and Ribarino, Sarah's Trevor May here with you.

On this episode, we have a game plan segment.

How do you hit Blake Snell? It's been very

difficult since he came off the IL. Of course, through a no hitter two starts ago. Had a quality

start on Wednesday night against the Nats. Just looks like a different guy now that he had earlier

this year. Next matchup is going to be against Atlanta next week. So we'll talk about what the Braves

hitters might do to try to prepare for Snell in his current state. We're going to talk about some pleasant surprises among hitters, some guys that have had great seasons so far. Try to figure out where we're going from here. Eno noticed that sinker usage is up again around the leagues. We'll talk about why that might be the case. And we're going to take a look back at a new toy. We were excited about a few months ago. We have Statcast bat tracking. We're going to look at bat speed risers from the first two months of the season to the second two months and see if there's anything we can pull out of that that might be meaningful. Probably more questions than answers in that part of the show. but it's fun to look at those shiny new toys.

Get some news as we get started today, gentlemen.

The White Sox have dismissed manager Pedro Griefel.

I like in soccer, how the manager gets sacked.

I prefer that terminology.

I think I want to use that going forward.

It just seems like a great way to say someone was let go.

But Pedro Griefel, no longer the manager of this brutal White Sox team.

Simple question to start, Trevor, how do you evaluate a manager on any bad team?

Because the outside looking in perspective I have is always, they shouldn't be this bad.

So perhaps there is something the manager could be doing differently. But you've been on some teams that have been less than

great. So how do you evaluate a manager in those situations? A team like that going into the

season and I was in a very similar situation going in 2023 where a team we knew wasn't going to be great. It was always a question like how far is the fall going to be before with the turnaround? Is that going to happen this year? And I think that's kind of what they were hoping for. Like let's see if we can get some diamonds in the rough to kind of come out and be our core guys. Then we can start building on top of that again. And there's a lot of responsibility.

I think there's more responsibility on a manager in those situations than there is when the team

is pretty good or getting close because you measure it a little bit differently. I think that

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