Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Friday, the 5th, Derek Ben-Rine from Mount Melchior, Erosis, all here.

Full House on a Friday.

It's rare.

We knew when we set out to do more pods this season

that we weren't going to have every single episode

with everybody available.

But this is one of those days, one of those special days.

I knew it was going to be a good day

because I'd DoorDash Donuts again this morning.

Let's get the Welsh. Dad life. Dad life, yes. You're like, you can't even go ahead and get his own donuts. Like, no. But I need them so bad. It takes a lot to get out of the house right now. It takes extraordinary efforts. If I get a haircut in the next six weeks, it'll be a miracle. But I'm hoping I'm hoping I have to resort to using the clippers on myself. That is not what you want. But a lot of ground to cover on this Friday. And we're going to start with our big news of the week. Tons of prospects coming up. A lot of pitchers earlier in the week. We're going to start today with Matt Mervis getting called up by the Cubs. And this is a player we were hoping we'd see on the opening day roster. Unfortunately, we had to wait until May 5th for that to actually happen. That probably made it very difficult to stash Mervis in a lot of redraft leagues. There's a good chance he was dropped, even in leagues where he was previously drafted as a reserve player.

I think the simple question is, what are we expecting Mervis to be?

Is he enough of an impact guy at first base to immediately start cracking lineups in 10 team leagues, 12 team leagues?

Al, where are you dropping the cutoff for Mervis as you think about picking up this weekend? I think he's borderline 12 team relevant. And I thought about this. And the way that I

broke it down was I looked at the projections, which I all thought were maybe slightly conservative,

having him around 245, 250 batting average. If you figure he is going to play close to every day here on out, maybe he can get the 20 homers.

And I figure that puts some kind of in Josh Bell territory.

And so to me, that's somebody who's kind of on the fringes of 12 teamers.

Yeah, he's hit every single stop since the start of last season.

It's really impressive. Bringing the K rate down, bringing the walk rate up, showing plenty of power. It doesn't offer any speed, but most first basemen don't. Eno, do you think the projections are a little light on Mervis, too? Because that was what I saw. When I ran the auction calculator for the rest of the season, the numbers for Mervis versus Nick Prado were actually surprisingly close than the calculator.

And for me, Prado is like a very borderline, maybe AL only sort of player,

whereas Mervis actually is going to help us in a lot of formats.

He doesn't have amazing hard hit rates in the minor leagues, does Matt Mis and that's I think the only kind of concerning bit is how does he get to that power and you know because otherwise you would say well here's a guy who's basically had a 300 ISO since 2022 began at three

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