How to Build an Elite Bullpen, the Pirates' Paul Skenes Plan & Another Jordan Walker Demotion
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2024
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eno, Trevor and DVR discuss Jordan Walker's demotion, the Pirates' plan for building up Paul Skenes' workload while trying to backload his innings, and the key ingredients to building an elite bullpen.
Rundown
0:43 Make It Make Sense: Jordan Walker's Demotion to Triple-A
6:31 Falling Between Organizational and Individual Coaching
15:34 Tracking Workloads: The Pirates' Plan for Paul Skenes
21:41 In-Game Monitoring Technology
29:51 Building an Elite Bullpen
30:17 What Traits Do You Want In a Closer?
35:03 How Many Defined Roles Do You Want?
46:13 Unintended Consequences with Limited Pitcher Availability?
56:19 Command Thresholds For Elite Relievers
Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris
Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper
Follow Trevor on Twitter: @IamTrevorMay
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Thursday, April 25th, Derek andayaparino-Saris, Trevor May here with you on this Thursday. |
| 0:22.7 | A little schedule flip, which is actually super relevant to one of the main topics today. We're going to talk about building an elite bullpen. and flexibility might be the key in that. |
| 0:18.9 | So we've got Trevor working the eighth with us today |
| 0:21.1 | instead of closing us out at the end of the week in the ninth. |
| 0:23.7 | I don't know. |
| 0:24.2 | Terrible, terrible analogy. |
| 0:25.9 | But I'm using it anyway. |
| 0:27.1 | It's cheesy. working the eighth with us today instead of closing us out at the end of the week in the ninth. |
| 0:42.3 | I don't know. Terrible. Terrible analogy. But I'm using it anyway. It's cheesy. It's lame. |
| 0:47.1 | It's fine. A lot of bullpen talk today, but we got a couple news items to get to first. |
| 0:57.2 | And I wanted to start with Jordan Walker. He's been demoted to AAA in April in each of his first two big league seasons. Last year was because of defense, he was learning a new position. You could see the struggles. It was easy |
| 1:01.8 | to just watch. Okay, yeah, he's not comfortable out there yet. Actually, was hitting okay, |
| 1:06.0 | I think his first month last year when he got demoted. And they had a log jam in the outfield. |
| 1:10.3 | This year, it's more of a specific struggle. Like, the swing mechanics are a little lot of whack. They're saying he's struggling with down and away pitches. And I just want this to make sense because some of the guys they're playing ahead of Jordan Walker are not the long-term solutions, but sometimes you have to do that as an organization. So, Trevor, I want to |
| 1:28.0 | ask you this, like, how much does it matter, like the specific problem and how much does it |
| 1:32.7 | matter the type of player and their mindset when you use a demotion like this to try and get |
| 1:38.6 | things right? Because in my head, getting sent down when you should be a fixture in a lineup |
| 1:43.8 | would be a potentially |
| 1:45.7 | confidence-shattering sort of event, right, to sort of deal with the, hey, I'm not on |
| 1:51.2 | the big league roster anymore. |
| 1:52.5 | That would have a different effect on different people. |
| 1:54.6 | So does this seem like the right situation with Walker? |
... |
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