Vlad Jr.'s quiet second half, a 'better' reach rate, and late-season decision-making
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 874 Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2021
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eno and DVR discuss the quieter second-half version of Vlad Jr., Austin Riley’s recent power surge, improving reach rate (O-Swing%), late-season decision-making, John Means and potentially flawed location strategy, before Beer of the Month makes it’s triumphant return.
Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris
Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Rates and barrels presented by Tops. Check out Tops Project. |
| 0:19.2 | Seventy, celebrating 70 years of Tops baseball cards. Derek Van Riper here with Edosaris. It is Monday, August 30th on this episode. We will talk about Vlad Jr. and some potential adjustments that teams have made while trying to pitch to him over the course of the season. That kind of dovetails with some questions about regression overall. So we'll get into that. We will talk about an idea for improving reach rate or o-swing percentage, as we've talked about that stat quite a bit on this show over the course of the last year or so. We're getting into some late season decision-making now that we're approaching the final month of the fantasy baseball season. |
| 0:55.1 | And we're going to dust off beer of the month. |
| 0:57.4 | It's time, you know, it's the end of the month. |
| 0:58.9 | We've got to get a beer of the month selection in there. |
| 1:00.8 | So lots of ground to cover. |
| 1:02.6 | And I want to start just going right at it with the Vlad Jr. question. |
| 1:07.0 | This came from an email that Nick sent us. |
| 1:09.8 | And he writes, any insight on how a player starts |
| 1:12.6 | so hot for months and then becomes cold? Other than a player regresses, what can his slower |
| 1:18.4 | streak be attributed to? Ground ball rate for Vlad Jr. is higher, and he's been colder in |
| 1:23.0 | Toronto than in Florida and Buffalo, but why? Are pitchers pitching to him differently? Is the change of park that big of a deal? |
| 1:29.3 | Is a fatigue? |
| 1:30.5 | One of the chances he can have a bounce back September, and the same goes for Otani, |
| 1:34.2 | but he's pitching while hitting and still seems to be hitting for power and stealing bases. |
| 1:39.1 | So obviously a lot more appeal here than just Vlad Jr. and Otani, |
| 1:43.6 | but is this just your typical sort of |
| 1:46.7 | regression case? And within regression, we're always talking about this being a game of adjustments, |
| 1:51.9 | right? Pitchers are going to try and do different things to you if you're having a level of success |
| 1:55.9 | like what we saw from both Vlad Jr. and Otani throughout the first half. |
| 2:03.3 | Yeah, I mean, part of it was the park, I think. |
| 2:07.6 | It's interesting you mentioned that he's gone colder in Toronto. |
... |
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