It's not fun to be a hitter right now, a no-hitter draft, and accounting for the unquantifiable
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 874 Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2021
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eno, Britt & DVR discuss the current league-wide edge to pitching and the likely related six(!) no-hitters that we've seen in the first two months of 2021 before drafting pitchers in an effort to predict who will throw the seventh no-hitter of the year. Plus, the return of Stephen Strasburg, another unwritten rules violation, projections and different run environments, and an inquiry about the unquantifiable.
Rundown
1:14 Hitters Are Not Having Much Fun
11:50 The Sixth No-Hitter of 2021(!)
17:51 The Bottom End Offenses
23:01 The No-Hitter Draft!
34:25 Expectations for Stephen Strasburg
43:23 That Rule is Written Somewhere
53:14 The Weight of the Unquantifiable
Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris
Follow Britt on Twitter: @Britt_Ghiroli
Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Rates and barrels presented by Tops. Check out Tops Project 70, celebrating 70 years of Topps baseball cards. |
| 0:22.4 | Derek Van Riper, Britt Roli, Enosaris here with you on this Friday. It turns out |
| 0:27.0 | hitters are no longer having fun, so we will explore why that is the case. Britt had a great |
| 0:32.5 | piece with Ken Rosenthal breaking down some of the problems with the current landscape of baseball. |
| 0:39.8 | That includes another no-hitter. |
| 0:41.5 | Yes, Corey Klobber threw one this week. |
| 0:43.6 | So we're up to six for the season, and that it would be seven if we counted Madison |
| 0:47.8 | Bumgarner seven-in-one against Atlanta, but apparently that doesn't count. |
| 0:51.5 | So let's say we're at 6.78 no-hitters for the season, to be more precise. We'll try and predict who throws the next no hitter in Major League Baseball. And as we started to hone in on it on Wednesday, we've got a few suspects that we're going to pick on. Plus, Stephen Strasberg comes back. So we'll talk about what we might see from him as he gets back on the mound for the |
| 1:12.1 | first time in more than a month. But let's begin with that piece that I referenced, Brit. |
| 1:17.9 | Great collaboration with Ken. Hitters are not having fun anymore. And we're starting to get |
| 1:23.0 | some comparisons to the steroid era just in reverse with pitchers having complete control over everything. |
| 1:31.0 | Yeah, well, Eno kind of stole the show. I want to give him a big shout out on that as well. Ken said, |
| 1:35.4 | hey, can you come up with a graph to kind of show spin rate? What's been happening? |
| 1:40.1 | And, you know, I think that graph was basically worth the price of admission showing how crazy it is that all the fastballs basically have doubled, right? |
| 1:49.7 | And spin rate that's over 2400 RPMs has doubled since the Stackast era started. |
| 1:55.2 | Now, here's something Ken and I were talking about a little bit. |
| 1:58.3 | You know, the, there's no way to naturally create this kind of |
| 2:01.9 | junk, right? It's kind of like velocity. You're either born with it or you're not, and you can make some minor adjustments along the way. But what we're seeing right now, there's no way it's natural, right? Yeah, I mean, some people might quibble with you about the velocity thing. I mean, like, drive line would be like, hey, no, we can |
| 1:58.2 | coach Velocity, but I mean, I think |
| 2:00.7 | you're right, though, Drive Line would be like, hey, no, we can coach velocity. |
| 2:35.0 | But I mean, I think you're right, though, because you have a maximum velocity. And basically what DriveLand does is get you to be able to, like, throw closer to your maximum more often, I think. But DriveLine did the studies on this, and they were public with it. and they said that we can't find any way to increase your spin rate other than you know these substances um i've had some pushback from pitching coordinators |
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