Welcome to Rates and Barrels. It's Friday, March 29th. It is another live one. Derek and Reimper, Enosaris, Trevor May, all here with you on the day after opening day, or at least opening day here in the States, which I count as real opening day. We need more than one game for it to be opening day. Even when we used to do the Sunday night baseball opener back in the day, I never liked that standalone first game. I like the

full slate. I like to just dive right in. That's the best way to start the season. So I feel like

now we are off and running. It was a fantastic opening day. We're going to dig into some takeaways

from that. We've got award predictions and world series predictions. So we're going to go through

those. And we've got our deep dive pitching series focusing on changeups today.

So we're going to get to that a little bit later on in the show as well.

Gentlemen, let's get right after it.

Takeaways from opening day in 2024, mostly highs.

I think the biggest surprise of all for me is Garrett Crochet. A guy that's had

injury trouble, never really had a full run, even back in his University of Tennessee days as a

starter over a full season, comes out on opening day for the White Sox and pitches extremely well

against the Tigers. And it leads to a million different questions of, well,

okay, what do we expect from him for these next couple of months?

And then what does the shape of the season look like for a guy like Garrett Crochet,

who's never had anything close to that full starter's workload over a full year before?

Trevor, the latter part of that question, like, how do you even plan out what the season looks like for a guy like this who's had so many setbacks and up and downs to get to this point? Short answer is you don't, really. You kind of have to take it. They're going to probably take it like two weeks by two weeks at the beginning and then just kind of go from there just see try to get him to

whatever his max has been are close to and then start tapering which you know if he's his starter the

whole time it could be in may it's just kind of how you have to do it the guy's electric I think

watching him and scoble next to each other you can see a lot of similarities and you can see what

his potential is and so he's exciting but again like if you're not on the field, it just doesn't matter. And taking a step by step for him is going to be the biggest, the biggest thing. But fortunately, he's on a team that is not going to compete. They're not interested in competing. And he's going to get just, he's going to get the opportunities to get his starts in. Like like it's not like they're going to need to move him out of the spot for someone doing a better job or he can like they can be patient with him and that's a really really good situation for crochet to be in in my opinion they don't have to wait till the end yeah they can just like run the innings now and when he runs out if that's j, they can throw him in short relief for a few months

at the end of the season. Like, whatever their plan is, front-loading the bulk of the innings is always the best plan because injuries could derail your plan if you try to structure it perfectly. And for contending teams, that's that line they have to walk. It's like the anti-Buehler, right you know, Bueller's coming back, but they want him for the post seasons.

They're going to, you know, they don't even know what they're going to do.

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