It's a Hard Game, Barrels Keep Losing Value!
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 875 Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Baseball is hard — just ask Nationals top prospect Dylan Crews and Twins slugger Royce Lewis, two players trending in very different directions. Eno, Jed, and DVR discuss Crews’ promotion to the Nationals and Lewis’ surprising demotion to Triple-A. Then, the guys dive into the diminishing value of “barrels” and whether baseball’s obsession with advanced stats has gone too far in 2026.
Rundown:
0:42 Dylan Crews Back with Nats: Will Adjustment Click?
10:41 Royce Lewis to Triple-A: Can He Reset at Triple-A?
21:39 How Barrels Have Lost Value
25:02 Heliot Ramos: A ‘Solved’ Player?
32:42 Bat Speed is Next: Is Goodhart’s Law Ready to Strike Again?
36:26 Miguel Vargas: Swing Decision Foundation, Power Added?
43:02 Cam Smith: Growing Pains a Cost of Rushing Player Development?
Follow DVR on Bluesky: @DVR.bsky.social
Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social
e-mail: ratesandbarrels@gmail.com
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Hosts: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris
With: Jed Lowrie
Editor: Jason Potere
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today on Rates and Burroughs, we discuss Dylan Cruz's return to the Nationals and Royce Lewis's demotion to AAA. |
| 0:06.1 | What does the future hold for those two players? |
| 0:08.3 | Relevant to those two guys of baseball in general, do we fetishize stats? |
| 0:13.7 | Can we say that word on this show? |
| 0:16.1 | Let's go. |
| 0:16.8 | Let's go. Go. Welcome to rates and barrels. It is Wednesday, May 20th. Derek Ben-Riper, |
| 0:30.6 | Enosarist, Jed Lowry here with you. Baseball is a hard game gentleman. Jed, you know |
| 0:37.0 | firsthand. You played it for a long time. |
| 0:39.6 | Eno and I have watched it for a long time. And that's where we start today's conversation. |
| 0:44.9 | Dylan Cruz is back for the nationals. And when we have top prospects that come up, don't have success right away. |
| 0:52.3 | Maybe they go back down, spend some time at AAA. |
| 0:54.9 | It always leaves us wondering, why? Why did that happen? What went wrong and did the reset actually pay off? |
| 1:02.1 | So let's start with Dylan Cruz. I know Spencer Nussbaum wrote about him for The Athletic on Wednesday. |
| 1:07.8 | There was a really interesting nugget in that story. |
| 1:15.6 | Apparently three weeks ago, the AAA hitting coach, Drew Fitta, said there was an aha moment. |
| 1:22.5 | The coaches showed Cruz a chart that showed the type of hitter he would be if he only swung at pitches inside the zone. |
| 1:28.1 | Then they showed him a chart of the hitter he would be if he only swung at pitches outside the zone. |
| 1:32.6 | And as the story goes, since that time, Dylan Cruz's performance and swing decisions at AAA have been a little bit better. And that has been a driving decision in getting him back |
| 1:39.0 | onto the big league roster. I'm just kind of curious. What do you think about that explanation, Jed, as far as maybe laying things out in a way |
| 1:47.9 | that someone hasn't thought about them before or just, you know, illustrating the same |
| 1:52.4 | point in just a different way? |
| 1:54.0 | Is that sometimes what it takes to get someone problem solving, hitting in the right way? |
... |
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