Today on Rates and Barrels, we discuss a new pitch pairing tool available at Fangraphs and what we can learn from using it.

And we dig into a story by Ben Lindbergh wondering how much information on the field is too much.

Let's go.

Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Thursday, April 9th. Derek Van Riper, Enoceris, Trevor May here with you on this episode.

We've got a lot of ground to cover thanks to a new tool we've stumbled into over at Fangraphs. It's called a pitch pairing tool.

We'll dig into how we think that could be useful here in just a few minutes.

A little bit of baseball news we should talk about off the top. We saw Cole Reagan's get hit by a comebacker.

Caught him in the glove and then it caught him in the pitching hand thumb, Trevor.

The weird thing that happened here is he tried to stay in. The first pitch he threw after he got hit, kind of the test pitch,

he sailed over the catcher. And at that point, I thought, he's coming out. Nope, they left him in,

walked a guy on four pitches, then came out of the game, which is tough on the guy that replaced him because he had a lot less time to get ready. I guess the main question I have for you here is even though the royals are trying to

insist that Reagan is going to be good to go for his next start, that seems pretty

sketchy based on what we know right now, which is very little, right?

I mean, you get hit by a comebacker like that.

I imagine your thumb is going to be pretty swollen and pretty messed up for a little while. Yeah, it depends on what actually happened. I mean, I'm sure they got imaging done. And if there's no break, then there's nothing really to be super concerned about. But, oh, and also, like him thinking that it can continue, you know, especially if you, like, you're like, okay, I can grip the ball.

Like, there's not a lot more pain when I'm gripping. You're, like, assuming it's like you, when you get a raspberry or something or you slide in hard a second, you just need a second to, like, get your leg. Like, you're like, oh, this will just kind of level out. but it's grip related.

So like it's probably,

he just couldn't grip the ball

as strongly as he wanted to.

So I wouldn't,

like, level out, but it's grip related. So like it's probably he just couldn't grip the ball as strongly as he wanted to. So I wouldn't like amount of pressure that could go from painting a fast ball versus sailing one is really low. And so it could just be that it just the sting didn't go away very fast and he's going to be bruised up pretty good. And maybe there is some swelling.

And if that's the case, then the ball will feel different in your hand.

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