Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Thursday, April 6th, Derek Benriper, Al Melchier here.

You know, Saris's vacation continues, and we've gotten a special guest joining us today. It is Mike Curlin, who's seen Mike's work on the athletic. You've probably seen him on his Patreon, gaining the edge, listen to the bases-loaded pod, or on Twitter at Mike underscore Curlin. Mike, how you doing? I'm fantastic. I appreciate the opportunity to come on here and hang out with you guys.

This seems like the best time of year to talk to you. I mean, there's always never a bad time to talk to you.

This seems like the absolute sweet spot time of year to discuss things with you because you focus a lot on playing time,

roles within batting orders and shares of playing time. And I think it's such a fun

time of year to watch baseball, but such a miserably challenging time of year to analyze it and have

meaningful takeaways. But playing time is one thing that I think you can watch on a micro level and

you can react to it and not necessarily be hurting yourself in the long run with your fantasy team.

So I think I wanted to talk to you about your process for what you're doing as you're

looking at every possible scenario around the league.

It seems like you turn over every single stone across the league on a day-to-day basis.

How do you do that from just a logistical perspective?

Like, how much time do you spend on that?

And like, what combination of tabs and screens and apps are you using to pull all this

information together and then to pass it back along in a more digestible format?

Man, that's a little bit question because it seems to evolve every year. First off, it starts

off in spring training where that's where I, you know, the coverage starts there. So I get a good

little head start and it gives me an idea of where things are headed. And a lot of times it does

carry over to the early part of the year, especially the first month, a month and a half or so. So seeing

that carryover is always nice, low a confirmation bias. And bias. We do get thrown for a loop because teams don't show their full hand all the time in spring. Some teams show more than others. But yeah, so it's really, it's a process of them. I like to use personally, not Rosser resource. I like to use resource resource for other things, but baseball reference is my go-to for the lineups like the way they

lay it out for me they have a little toggle screen for lefties righties and obviously i mind the news

in terms of like who's in who's out who's injured so who's getting playing time because of injury

...