The Rates and Peralds, it is Tuesday, May 16th, Project Prospect Edition, Derek and Rper, Eusaris, Chris Welsh, all here with you on this episode.

We discussed the recently promoted shortstop in Cincinnati, Matt McLean, making his big league debut this week.

So another addition to this class of rookie shortstop.

We'll take a quick look at the latest stat cast feats of one Casey Schmidt, who is so much better than I estimated looking at his fan graphs page. So humble pie for me. We'll talk about the Yuri Perez debut and another Marlin starter that could be on the way later this summer. We got a few mailbag questions as well. So let's get to it. Let's begin with Matt McLean. Yet another rookie shortstop comes up.

Really impressive numbers at AAA. And really, when you look at what he's done so far,

level by level in the minor leagues, it was the most successful of his stops in the minor leagues.

If you want to just count high A, double A, and AAA.

Strikeout rate down compared to where it was last year.

Matt McLean has walked everywhere he's played.

He showed speed and a little bit of power everywhere he's played,

showing a lot of power this year with 12 homers in just 173 played appearances.

What do we make of this performance?

Is Matt McLean supposed to put up gross numbers like this Welsh? This seems like a really great start for him that helped him earn this promotion. And the fact that the Reds have a ton of other prospects means they should be a little more aggressive taking looks at some of these guys when they think they're ready because they have to figure how all these pieces are going to fit in the next couple of years. Yeah, I mean, is he supposed to?

I don't know, but he is. And that's the craziest part about it. Like, the AFL was kind of the start of this because there's this big hole in his swing. And he was just swinging through a lot of stuff. And I actually would have loved to have talked to him to see, like, what clicked through there. because he had like a really early

rough start in the AFL,

then it started to turn.

I've got some video out there of him, you know, just turning on some balls. But the thing I continuously saw were pitchers attacking him low in the zone, like you see a lot of guys. And it was like off-speed pitches. But when you made a mistake, he was just murdering them. And this year, you're seeing all of that come into play, double-digit homers and stolen bases in the minors. He cut his K percentage, which was like the biggest thing that I want to give him the extra benefit of the doubt. Because I will tell you, I haven't been the biggest in on Matt McLean for a while, because I know he can hit and I know he can run some, but I really question how much contact he's going to make

and what type of slumps he's going to get into. But man, dropping that K percentage was absolutely huge. And the mistake he made in his, or he took advantage of in his debut was like a high slider. You know, that was the thing. He was able to take advantage of a slider that was over the plate, crushed it to center, showed off his legs. Like, I think this is like a 1515 type of guy. Or maybe it turns into, best case is like a 2010 type of guy. So I'm a little bit apprehensive about like what he's done in the miners. But it's, you know, it's checked specific boxes. It's checked the K percentage box. It's been consistent and he's already made up. He made it up before CES, which was like shocking to me. So I think this is a great buy. They also trusted him to hit two. And that might be telling a new story about the type of quality of contact he's making, that they already threw him up at two on this team, which we usually don't see with these type of rookies. So he's a big buy right now, and I think he's got a lockdown position because in the minors, Ellie had been playing third base. You've got CES, who is probably going to play first, could DH for this team. And I think at some point in this offseason, or this season, you know, maybe into the summer, we are going to see Elliott at 3rd, Matt McLean at short, India at second, and CES Manning first base. I think we are going to see that sometime in the next couple months here. And that's how they're going to bring up all these guys, because this team does flexibility to move guys like Nick Senzel back to the outfield. And they've got Henry Ramos at

DH right now. Yeah, the weird thing is, Nick Senzel belongs on the dirt. He's not bad in the outfield,

but he's better on the dirt. And they're probably not going to keep him there because they have

so many other young players coming up to the system.

You know, how do you stack up McLean to some of the other rookie shortstops? We saw Casey Schmidt get promoted last week, but we had a bunch of rookie shortstops on opening day rosters, going back to, you know, Volpe and Tovar. We've, of course, seen other prospects promoted in between like Zach Netto. where does McLean sort of fit to the conversation for you?

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