Hello and welcome to the Keeper Cup podcast. Chad Young here, and this is usually where I'd say I'm joined by Pete Ball, but bad news for listeners. You're stuck with just me this week. Pete and I had some scheduling conflicts with the holiday weekend and all that, but we still wanted to get something out to you, so I'm out here doing a solo episode. We'll see just how long I can last going solo before I run out of steam. But we are here. We're about a week and a half into the season, and I'm going to get into our head-to-head heroes. I'm going to give you multiple head-to-head

heroes because Pete's not here to pick his, but that doesn't mean you should only get one.

And we're going to start off on the offensive side of things. And, man, there are some,

there are some choices here. I mean, Ben Rice is doing everything we thought he would do.

Yorda on Alvarez, three home runs this weekordon Alvarez, three home runs this week.

CJ Abrams, three home runs this week.

I probably could go with Abrams, three home runs, two stolen bases.

He hit 333 this week.

He's been fantastic, and there's a 294 backup there.

So not a lot to be super concerned about with Abrams.

I think it's worth digging in a little bit.

He's not going to maintain a 27.3% home run per fly ball rate, obviously.

But he is walking about twice as much as he did last year.

And that is a significant jump from where he's been at any other point in his career.

He's doing that without a big increase in strikeout rates.

It's not just being more patient.

He's actually swinging a little bit less, but it's mostly from chasing less.

He is swinging in the zone more.

And that's a good change for him.

Interesting what seems to you're driving up the walk rate is he's making a little bit less contact and pitchers are coming in the zone less off. So he's getting a lot more pitches out of the zone. Pitchers are trying to dare him to chase. He's not doing it. And then because he's making a little bit less contact, those pitches outside the zone are turning into walks. The concern there,

of course, with Abrams would be that as pitchers come in the zone more, and when I say they're out of zone a lot, he has a 36.2% zone rate. He's been at 44, 42, 43, 44 throughout his career.

That's going to shift. And pitchers are going to start coming around the zone more.

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