Rebound Starting Pitchers, Past Big Contracts & 'The Year of the Splitter' in 2026?
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 874 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rebound Starting Pitchers, Past Big Contracts & 'The Year of the Splitter' in 2026? Eno, DVR, and Trevor discuss several rebound candidates in the starting pitcher pool for 2026 including a potential Cy Young Award candidate in the American League who was limited by injuries in 2025. Plus, they look back at how big deals for starting pitchers have worked out throughout the past decade, and wonder if 2026 will become 'The Year of the Splitter' after the uptick in splitters we saw in the playoffs.
Rundown
4:54 Cole Ragans as a Bounce Back Ace with Health?
16:58 Aaron Nola's Unusual 2025 Absence
24:28 Zebby Matthews: Rebounding From Rough Start to Big League Career?44:13 Recent Big Contracts for Free Agent Pitchers
1:03:56 Will 2026 Be the 'Year of the Splitter?'
Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social
Follow DVR on Bluesky: @DVR.bsky.social
Follow Trevor on Bluesky: @iamtrevormay.bsky.social
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Hosts: Derek VanRiper, Eno Sarris & Trevor May
Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to rates and barrels. It is Monday, November 24th. We're recording this on Thursday, November 20th. So if some ridiculous |
| 0:22.5 | baseball stuff happened during the long weekend between our recordings, I apologize for that. |
| 0:28.7 | Derek Van Riper, Unisaris, Trevor, how's it going? It's been a little while. |
| 0:33.7 | Good. Good. Just taking the one day at a time trying to get to Thanksgiving. |
| 0:38.3 | What are you been up to? What have you been doing? |
| 0:41.3 | You know, just the normal stuff, making tons of videos and writing a bunch of stuff and then trying to fight the fact that it gets dark at 4.30 at night is the big one. |
| 0:51.3 | But no, everything's good. My son's sleeping a little bit too. That helps. He is getting big so fast, though. Everyone says that, but you just, there's no way to get prepared for it when you wake up and his hair is like an inch longer. You're like, what just happened? Why, how are you walking almost right now? Like yesterday you were, you couldn't even see me. |
| 1:11.3 | What's going up? |
| 1:12.9 | Yeah, that's a fun show to watch play out on a day-to-day basis. |
| 1:16.3 | I think you now have more experience also with daylight savings time being just the best |
| 1:22.3 | prank the world has ever played on parents. |
| 1:25.3 | Like, I had no idea until I was a parent how goofy daylight savings time actually is. |
| 1:31.5 | You know, what are you up to? |
| 1:32.7 | Yeah, nothing much. |
| 1:33.8 | Just trying to get all my ducks in line. |
| 1:36.3 | I've got, I took the boys to a Stanford basketball game. |
| 1:39.9 | That was fun. |
| 1:41.4 | The tickets were cheap and we got to sit out pretty close and we had a good time. |
| 1:47.4 | It's kind of fun to have that at our disposal. |
| 1:49.8 | Though I did wonder, I was like watching it and it was like, |
| 1:52.4 | okay, so we were watching Louisiana, like the Raging Cajuns, right, against Stanford. |
| 1:57.8 | And I was like, so they flew out 15 people 20 people to this thing |
... |
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