Hello and welcome to episode 1483 of The Sleeper in the Bust. It is Thursday, March 5th. I'm your host, Paul Sporer. Join this afternoon by both Justin Mason and Joe O'Riko. Gentlemen, hello.

How we doing? How are we doing, baby? Doing very well. We are now firmly into March, firmly into spring training. The WBC has started baseball season. I don't want to say in full gear, but like we've hit another gear. We're at least in second or third gear. I haven't driven a manual in forever, and I was bad at it when I did. So I don't know what the best way to say that. I know like fifth gear is the highest, right?

It depends on your car, but yeah.

I guess, yeah, most. For the fifth gear, yeah.

I still drive a stick shift. So, yeah, I would say we're in like second gear right now, right? Is that a good analogy? Always wanted to learn. Always wanted to learn. It's a good skill. I mean, it's probably a leading skill to know. That's the thing.

If you're going to be driving a manual,

it's going to be a car older than Joe.

It is a 2000 Honda Civic. And it's not old. I was a year old in 2000. Oh, look at that. Look at that. Joe says, stands up to it. It was probably made in 99. True, true. If we got the actual like dig into the parts there and check the date made on them.

It is on its last legs, but I've put like 280,000 miles on that thing.

Bro, you get a quarter cent shot of a car. That's, that's big time.

All right, we're talking pictures. It's part two of probably 30 and who cares because our audience likes it.

We got comments on, hey, love that you guys go deep on all the positions. I play in this sort of deep league. Other people talking about, hey, I love that you still cover a lot of the shallow stuff. We know you like deep league and NFBC stuff, but thank you for still giving the shallow. We run the gamut. And we're only in part two of starters. So we're still talking a lot of really, really good pitchers here. But as we talked about in just the last episode, which was kind of tough for

part one, we were already talking about flaws with, you know, basically every guy outside of the

top four or five, three or four, excuse me. We were debating, you know, is Yamamoto or Sanchez in there with

scoobileskin's crochet or are they on their own? But either way, the questions start fast and

furious. Now we go to a group of not quite aces. They got a lot of skill. They've had ace seasons,

but they're not being treated as unquestioned. You let them lead your rotation without a doubt. And that's got George Kirby, Dylan Sees, Jesus Lozardo, Yuri Perez, Joe Ryan, Frumber Valdez, Nick Povetta, Sunny Gray, and Kevin Gosman, a group that can go a lot of different ways and they have some different profiles here. But let's just take it in order and start with George Kirby, who for me and yeah, I like that he's up here. This is based on ADP. This is not

my ranking. But he is my favorite of this bunch. I do think George Kirby has the best chance

in this group here to be a really consistent ace. He's got that amazing command and control. He's

shown bat missing ability. I still think he can put it all together, Joe,

for what is truly a transcendent ace season. I am still all in on Kirby. He lost maybe a little bit

of development last year, or development is maybe the wrong word, just time because of his injury.

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