Opening Day Takeaways: What matters on a granular level?

Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball

The Athletic

Sports, Baseball, Fantasy Baseball, Mlb

4.7 • 875 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2021

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eno and DVR discuss a busy Opening Day and dig through the box scores while attempting to sift through the noise to find meaningful indicators as the 2021 season gets underway. How concerned should we be with batting orders, early velocity readings, and reliever usage from the jump?

Rundown

6:15 Gregory Soto’s Bumpy Save

10:29 Does Lineup Position Matter?

17:22 Making Sense of the Twins’ Bullpen

25:13 Keeping an Eye on David Bednar for Future Saves

31:07 Stashing Jose Alvarado over Archie Bradley

40:52 Regrets on Avoiding Jake Cronenworth?

43:14 Tyler Glasnow’s Slider Usage is Up!

48:13 Luis Castillo’s Velocity Drop

Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris

Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper

e-mail: ratesandbarrels@theathletic.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Rates and barrels. It is Friday, April 2nd, one day of the 2021 season in the books, and it was an eventful one.
0:24.6	Derek Van Riper here with Enosaris on this Friday, reacting to everything we saw and telling you to calm down.
0:32.2	Yeah, we're going to try and calm you down in many cases. Maybe we'll fire you up in a few cases,
0:37.3	but we're here to help just ease the tension going into the weekend. We don't want you to dump all your players and pick everybody up off the waiver wire. We want you to make the right moves, the right decisions. So we're going to fly around. We can do this a little bit different. We're going to go game by game, talk about some things that were interesting, some things that you should not
0:54.2	overreact to, and hopefully it's going to be a lot of fun along the way. It was great seeing
0:58.7	fans back in the stands because empty stadiums are weird, and even quarter capacity stadiums
1:05.2	look a lot more normal, especially this time of year, right? I mean, snow was falling in Detroit
1:09.8	yesterday, and you wouldn't
1:11.7	have that many fans there on a normal opening day with those weather conditions in that team
1:16.4	being in a rebuild, but it made for a lot of fun scenes around the league. Let's start with the
1:22.0	first game of the day. Jay's Yankees, it was a Cole Ryu pitching matchup. So it was a great one for everyone to
1:29.5	sort of break their teeth on to start the season. What stood out to you in that first game of the day?
1:37.2	Well, you know, it's funny. Gary Sanchez got so cheap in drafts over the course of draft season
1:43.9	that even though I was fading him at the
1:45.5	beginning of draft season at the end I got I think two or three shares and I think he might
1:51.3	hit 210 and that does make it a little bit tough on you in batting average leagues but
1:57.3	it looks like the power is back.
2:05.1	And I don't think, yes, you can overreact, but he hit the ball really hard.
2:06.6	It was like 110 or something.
2:11.3	And it also just reminds you. It's not necessarily like, oh, my God, you know, it's more like, oh, yeah, right.
2:16.3	You know, there was the other Gary Sanchez other than last year. So I don't know, I don't want to, I, it's not really useful information because either you bought in or you didn't. I guess you could, and now is not the time to like send an offer over. No, no, but I was more in on Sanchez than out at the price.
2:34.3	I felt like the batting average risk was fine.
	...

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