Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Friday, July 7th, Derek Van Riper, you're with Al Malkier on this episode.

We discuss the big news of the week as it impacts our plans for this weekend.

Of course, the All-Star break is upon us coming out of Sunday's games.

We have a layoff to begin the week.

Everybody resumes on Friday this year, Al, so it's nice that the schedule has some balance to it.

We all have this clean four days of watching the All-Star festivities and then taking a couple

days off Wednesday and Thursday before the second half or second part of the season begins

in earnest. And it's a totally different kind of week for waivers because we don't have

confirmation of the pitching schedule for the partial week

coming out of the break. No team has confirmed its three starters yet because you have some

guys pitching in the All-Star game. You have players dealing with injuries right now. You have

workload management as a factor where some guys that would be on regular rest certainly

get pushed back because

if we're trying to cap innings.

You have players who've been hurt for a long time, potentially coming off the IL.

So it's a chaos sort of week.

So we're going to focus a bit later on the episode on some players we think make sense as potential

trade targets, players that have underperformed to this point in the season who could deliver

in a big way in the second half because I think trades are something you're going to see a lot of

in leagues that allow them over the next week or so. But we begin with the big news of the week.

Mike Trout placed on the IL with a handmade injury. He has since had that handmate removed.

The timetable for a return is kind of brought on this one. It's four to eight weeks. So if it's the quick return, then we could see him early August. If it's the long end of the return, we're going to be pushing towards September. Of course, the middle ground is also possible there. We have to talk about the implications of this from a real-life perspective on the

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